A logo should satisfy the following points :
A logo remains just a design on paper but becomes effective only when an organisation backs it up and supports it. A truly effective logo is associated with many positive qualities such as warmth, care, sophistication, naturalness, power and so on.
A lot of talented manpower from the traditional ad agencies have formed start ups, mainly in the digital and mobile area. What motivates them to do so is the freedom from the organisational structures and office politics. Until recently, the ad business was dominated by the three main players — WPP, Omnicom and Publicis, which are the agency-networks. This dominance is likely to end very soon in this fast changing environment. What is necessary is a marketing process that is faster, better and economical. That happens when technology is exploited to facilitate the marketing process. In marketing process, we include creating communications, producing them, distributing them. We also consider targeting the consumers and measuring the effects. There is no full satisfaction of the clients in the traditional agency system. A start up called Mob is mobile first agency. It proposes to do braver and more experimental work. Another start up called Brave New World promoted Pocketman jeans with 13 pockets for online brand Myntra. They did not do the traditional promotion, but instead kept a man with a 13-pocket jean, with a 13-pocket jean, all stuffed with survival items, in captivity for 48-hours. This was the longest continuous livestream in the history of YouTube India. Zero Zero, a start up, creates offering around brand communication and design. Tango Media focuses on its patented inventions, e.g. an app where a consumer calls a brand over feature phone or smartphone.
There are so many writers and blogs on Internet. Brand marketers can choose from these. There could be one firm which is content marketer. It partners with the content writers and bloggers. A soap maker will choose the relevant content and will put its advertisement there. Scatter is such tool. It charges advertisers for content, either on cost per word or articles purchased. The revenus earned from advertisers is shared by the content marketer with the publishers. To begin with, this was restricted to social media. Content marketers provide a platform to content owners and brands to come together. Video is the future of content marketing.Videos carry SEO titles.
Brands have become publishers. They publish targeted campaign from time to time. It could lead to direct conversions into sale, but a lot of content cannot achieve this. Every piece of content is not for conversion. A lot of content builds up a reputation for the brand among the target audience. The end objective is to build an emotional connect with the target audience. This will lead to conversions over a period of time. It is difficult to measure this. Though content marketing is used by the brands, the traditional channels of marketing continue to co-exist with it. Brand identity is the fulcrum around which all marketing efforts are directed. There should not be content marketing for the sake of doing it. Marketers must identify the essence of the brand first. This then should reflect in all forms of marketing.
Consumers resent anything that is not relevant to them, or which they find intrusive. They welcome messages that add value. Permission marketing is put in this context. Permission marketing is to be executed properly. There should not be sporadic or yes-no type messaging. The idea is to build a two-way engagement between the brands and the consumer.
Apple’s latest software for the iPhone and iPad is inimical to advertising. i0s9 operating system will allow the owners to download web browser extensions that can block advertising from being shown while they surf the web. This is not very encouraging. Apple has extended an olive branch — an app called News which will allow publishers to bypass blockers so that they can offer ads. Alternatively, they can let Apple sell ads and share the revenue. Publishers may think of new business models to make up for the lost advertising revenue. They can sell more sponsored content. It is a new form advertising popularized by Internet publishers called Buzzfeed. Here the advertisers pay for the articles.
The ultimate aim of advertising is to reach the right consumer at the right time, and ads are, therefore, targeted and segmented on this basis.This philosophy is incorporated in buying an inventory of ads.. This is facilitated by studying behavioural patterns of the consumers and using analytical tools. Thus there is no mad chase of the consumer by being present on all media. It is about being present with an offer exactly when the consumer is in need of it.
This is called programmatic advertising. It targets specific users at the right time with the right message. It leverages some of the information about their past online behaviour such as search pages visited and transactions done. It constantly follows the user. It is virtual stalking.
At times, this may lead to the appearance of the same ad on the sites he visits for a couple of days. It could be annoying. Of course, this raises the issue of the privacy of the consumer. Care is taken to make the data anonymous. Personally identifiable information (PII) is never shared.
In digital advertising, the publishers still sell about 80 percent of their digital inventory through manual deals. It allows them to command better ad rates. Only 20 per cent inventory is sold through programmatic
Inventory sold through manual deals is sold on the basis of cost per impression ( CPM ) . Established publishers get Rs.200-250 cost per impression. Newbies and second rung apps and sites get Rs 70-150 cost per impression. Cost of running ads during a video ranges from Rs 3-4 per view in case of popular sites.
A month’s fixed presence on websites/ m-sites/apps command Rs.5-6 lac. A roadblock dedicated to one advertiser costs Rs. 6-7 lac per day. This shows why the publishers prefer manual deals, rather than programmatic.
Let us see the break-up of digital advertising. It is a market worth Rs. 4800 crore. Of this, 35 per cent is accounted for by Search Engine Optimisation ( SEO ) and Search Engine Marketing ( SEM ). Display and Social media account for 42 per cent. Rest includes e-mail marketing, mobile advertising among others. Programmatic advertising is 10-15 per cent of display advertising. It currently stands at about Rs.300 crore.
Programmatic Buying Formats
There are basically three formats
Programmatic Direct: A buyer and a seller negotiate a fixed price. Thereafter, the inventory is traded on programmatic platforms. In this method, there is no auction.
RTB: Advertisers bid for inventories in an exchange environment and win impressions. In real time bidding, each impression is auctioned off. Each impression is priced individually.
Programmatic PMP: Within the real time bidding, there exists the private market places ( PMP ) option. Here the publisher opens the inventory to only a select group of buyers
In India, PMP and programmatic direct work better.
There are a number of agencies who provide programmatic services — Group M’s Xaxis, Komli Media, Appenexus, Chocolate. Some of these are pure demand side platforms ( DSPs ). Others are trading desks ( or ad exchanges ). Each has their own programmatic tools. Facebook has its own platform called Facebook Exchange ( FBX ) which allows real time bidding. Google has two different kind of platforms — one for advertisers, and the other for publishers. Digital agencies so far relied on third party tools but now aim at creating their own tools.
Which advertisers use programmatic? Many online e-commerce companies who have the ability to mine user consumption data. FMCG companies, beverage makers, automakers are catching up.
So far programmatic was restricted to digital advertising only. In the US, it has taken a leap from digital to television. A marketing and analytic software Turn has launched programmatic TV. It is a new tool to spot target audiences online and offline, across every device and channel.
Tata Safari has been used in the film Road. In Yaadein ( 2001 ), brands like Coca Cola, Hero Cycles and Paas Pass were placed. Some film makers do not welcome such placements, as they feel that such placements might take away the emotions in a story-line. The brand’s presence may distract the viewers from the dramatic tension. Hollywood has used brand placements successfully in Bond movies with BMWs, Omegas and Smirnoff Vodka as preferred brands of Bond.In , a Bond movie, Aston Martin car and Finlandia have replaced BMW and Smirnoff respectively. In What Women Want, Nike’s new range Presto was launched. Spielberg’s Minority Report had an array of brands from a futuristic Lexus to Nokia, GAP, Aquafina and Pepsi.In Top Gun, Tom Cruiser uses RayBan glasses. Subhash Ghai’s Karz promoted music company HMV. Gardish placed Goodknight insect repellents. Taal ( 1999 ) placed brands like Coca Cola, BPL and Kenstar. Akshay Khanna, the hero sips Coke from the bottle tasted by the heroine. A brand is made a part of a story-line. Bobby ( 1970 ) had Escort’s smaller version of Raajdoot. The risk in placement is that the central idla of the film does not match what the brand stands for. The cost of placing a brand in a film could be anywhere from Rs. 10 lakh to Rs 2 crore. It has become an alternative revenue stream. Even news channels of TV have been placed in the movies, e.g. Aaj Tak has been used as a news-channel in Khakhee for its credibility and Star News has been used in Ek Hasina Thi.
Ads do influence the behaviour and thinking. However, as action comes at the end, they just make us more favourable to the brands. Instead, why not to emphasise the direct action? The maxim should be ‘ acts ‘ rather than ‘ads ‘. Digital advertising has changed advertising as a whole drastically. There are more changes in the last 5 years than there were in the last 50 years. The main themes of contemporary advertising are : digital is life giving, story is to be shown rather than told on difficult screens, 24×7 media platforms require accelerated marketing, learn to manage risk, and good ideas can be delivered quick and cheap. There are different relationships people have with the four screens. TV screen is friendly. Computer screen is saintly. A tablet shows wizardry. Mobile is an intimate lover. Yes, the mobile screen’s intimacy is to be protected. Brands should not focus on ads but apps. Those brands which do this will be loved.
The emphasis is now not on scale, but scalability. Scalability requires collaborative partnerships which share our view of multi-polar world and culture. Scalability keeps the agency rooted to its vision.
Ad agencies considered death to be a taboo and avoided using themes of death and mortality in their campaigns. But slowly the veil is being lifted from this taboo, and dying is being used to get the message across. Benetton uses AID’s patient on death-bed in its campaign. Nike exhorts us to play hard since life is short. Dead celebrities are used to sell several products like Diet Coke. Posthumous promotion has been attempted for several products.
A sign stands for something else other than itself. It can take the form of sounds, colours, images, words, odours, gestures, flavours, objects. Semiotics studies the meaning of these signs and symbols within our culture. Though signs themselves are studied, they are further arranged into organised codes and are given cultural context.
A sign links the concept and the meaning. Flowers offered to a girl are a sign of love. Flowers offered in a graveyard are a tribute to the departed soul. The concept is the signifier and the meaning is the signified. The relationship between these two gives it a meaning. The relationship between the two can be arbitrary, e.g. a rose is a pink flower, but it could have been given any other name but would have smelled as sweet. When the signifier resembles the signified, it is called iconic. A picture, for instance, is a representation of the real thing. When the signifier and the signified are directly connected, it is called indentical, e.g. passage of time is shown by the growth of the anatomy of the hero in a movie.
Signs are organised into codes of social behaviour, fashion, rituals, mass media and fine arts. Signs are put in a cultural context, a managalsutra is a sign of a married woman. This is its interpretation in Indian culture. A mangalsutra-like necelace would have just remained an accessory in some other culture. We are not surprised to find white bridal trousseau among Catholics, but Hindus consider white as a colour of mourning.
Advertising is a system of distinct signs . Semiotics seeks to explore the working of advertising.
Advertising agencies have a natural tendency to turn what is topical into ads. They turn a morning’s headlines into a hook for an ad. Topical touch does have an impact. But can they exploit tragedy, death, terror and epidemics ? Is it not being too opportunistic ? Maybe, if the organisation has the products that could help in the crisis, they can use these themes. For example, anti-bacterial products may be advertised taking the epidemic as its platform. Telcom companies can advertise their non-contact benefits. Cosmetic companies cannot possibly exploit the epidemic theme. Who needs lip-sticks when the mouth is behind a mask ? Still, some companies advertise their non-stick lip-sticks. But advertising using crisis may turn out to be repugnant if not carefully handled. It is not good to take advantage of death. Gumboot companies should not relate their products to the Kargil crisis, but could do so tastefully once the crisis is over by highlighting the role of the product played during the crisis. It is best to stay away at the time of crisis. Lowe created an ad for Garware’s sun protection film at the time of Mumbai bomb blast, because the executives had experienced its effectiveness in an office facing Air India. It is a difficult case. Sometimes ads are made to get awards rather than to promote social causes. This of course is avoidable.
A Bangalore-based start up has launched in Silicon Valley a new ad delivery platform Miip to deliver content rich ads to mobile app users. It will create delivery zones for consumers within their favourite apps. It will present a curated collection of product feeds, apps and related content with visuals.It aims to charge higher premium for ads delivered from advertisers and share revenue with mobile commerce companies on business transactions. They are pitted against Google and Facebook who have their own ad delivery engine. Google dominates the web search market, and struggles to get a foothold in the mobile ad market, despite owning Android platform. InMobi has tied up with customers in the US.