Category: Advertising

This concept is the brain child of Rosser Reeves who popularised it in the 1950s, and codified it if a 1961 Random House book Reality in Advertising.

Reeves defined USP as a proposition to the consumers which is so strong that it can move the mass of millions, i.e. pull  them over to our product. He contends that the consumer tends to remember just one thing from an ad — one strong claim or concept. Each ad must make a proposition to the consumer.

A crucial part of Reeves’ theory is that the proposition or promise made by the ad must be one which the competition has not so far made. It is unique He also expected the marketer to give reasons  for the effectiveness of the unique proposition. At its face value, this concept is alright . Technological capability was so unique in his days that others took years to catch up with it. But these days benefits and capabilities no longer remain unique for a long time. In his days, Reeves strategy of product diffentiation was viable, but is no longer valid today. A technological or functional advantage cannot sustain a product/brand for long. We are in an age of parity.

Revees doctrine suggests that consumer behaves rationally. Research and common sense suggest that this is not so.

To a media planner, two indices are important –BDI and CDI. BDI indicates sales of a brand as a percentage of population.

BDI= Percentage of brand’s total all India sales/ Percentage of total population x 100

This index enables a media planner to allocate the media budget by setting his priorities.

CDI measures the sales potential of a product category. It takes into account the potential of all competitors selling the same category.

CDI= Percentage of product category total all India sales / Percentage of total population x 100

When both the BDI and CDI are high, we have to spend more on media to maintain them. If there is low BDI and CDI, we have to see why our brand fares poor and devise competitive strategies.If BDI is high, but CDI is low, we have to examine advertising initially, and question whether it will do any good.

Advertising industry no longer casts just pretty faces who exist only between ‘ action ‘ and ‘ cut ‘ , but are now relying more on real faces with character, with whom the audience can relate. That enhances the appeal of the story. In a sense, the story telling becomes democratic by such casting. Maybe, these real people are less than perfect, but they are appealing. Gone are the days when people were cast just on the basis of looks, irrespective of the fact whether they fit in or not. Theatre artists are in demand in performance-based roles in such films. The closer the characters are to reality, the better the people relate. A mother being shown on screen must be a reflection of the real life mother. SBI’s – ‘ heere ko kya pata tumhari umar ‘ had shown an ordinary couple celebrating love in a novel way. To do such casting, you have to source from streets, railway platforms, schools. You have to assign roles to ordinary folks such as dabbawallas and tattoo artists. A person cast must not be too addy. Only those ads become memorable whose characters touch an emotional cord, and make us either smile or cry. It should be a great story well-told by good actors. This is true for a full-length feature film, or a 10-second TV commercial.

E-tailing sites attract traffic in very large numbers of the shoppers. These shoppers are either in the purchase mode or the search mode. This traffic could be monetised. Brands can be promoted by properly targeted and relevant ads on these sites. App-based taxi operators put ads on e-commerce sites. Apart from Facebook and Google, this is another medium to reach out to people. The brand advertiser and the site both gain in terms of awareness and business. In future, the e-tailing sites will form an important component of the media mix for the brand marketers.This media will grow bigger. It is akin to point-of-sale advertising in a modern retail outlet. Flipkart and Snapdeal have already started accepting online ads, and others may follow suit.

Internationally, organisations spend around $140 billion on digital advertising ( 2014 ). Ad tech firms contribute a great deal to generate these dollars. Ad tech firms basically help the targeting — targeting the ads to the right consumers. It is a major shift — marketing is becoming personal once more. Facebook and Google are the lead players who are known to do the targeting with precision and metrics to measure. The other ad tech firms compete with theses two lead firms. However, there are opportunities to collaborate with them too.

Ad tech firms, whether small or big, have started changing the rules of the advertising profession. The online canpaigns are created and priced differently. The goals set are precise. To illustrate, an advertiser may want to target a Japanese youth between the ages 15 –35 with a taste for Indian food. The budget can be specified, say $ 50,000. Once the campaign is run, the ad tech firm submits the measurable results and any remaining dollars.

Search targeting is the simplest, say track what a customer searches. The ads correspond to the searches being made. However, a person searching hamburgers in Pune may not be interested in the hamburgers being delivered in Chicago. Here the geographical targeting comes in. Demographic targeting is based on demographic data such as your age, sex, education etc. These are conventional methods of targeting. But today a combined multi-level targeting is possible — all possible data signals are factored in.

If against ad spending of Rs. 5000, you want 50 pizza to be delivered, these results can be obtained by ad tech firm by targeting the ads to the suitable audience.

Ad buyers such as eBay put several million of such ad bids, and all these cannot be handled manually. They use a bid management system. The ad impression and the appropriate ad are dynamically put together, and it takes 100-150 milliseconds. The tools enabling this are provided by the ad tech firm.

Ad tech firms are evolving in sophistication. Some of them are targeting the ads on cell phones and desk top.They are doing proprietary data work. There are so many different types of ad tech firms. The key is optimisation of the various parts of the business.

E – commerce sites have the data of the shopping behaviour of millions of people. They have billions of page views. They require the context of some level such as Facebook and Google.They also need teams to build their own ad propositions to the customers.

In the final analysis, there are two types of ad tech firms — those which capture the intent of the user, e.g. Google and those who can present ads after knowing the users e.g. Facebook. There are many possibilites in-between. Smaller firms build capabilities in which these larger firms are interested. The cell phone is the next avenue of advertising, since the user location and behaviour can be predicted. The prediction could identify the anatomical position of the consumer — whether siting or standing. It is a complex thing, but full of opportunities. Wearable technology could take ad tech firms to an altogther now level.

InMobi connects the space sellers such as content sites, apps and game developers with the advertisers wishing to use the mobile platform. Technologically they serve the right ad to the right people. InMobi can do apprographic targeting — targeting based on users’ app preferences.

When the user engages with the ad by clicking on it, InMobi gets paid. There are metrics such as cost per click (CTC) or cost per mille (CPM). The other payment metrics are — number of downloas for a game, queries of test drive for a car.

InMobi improves engagement by innovating on how the ad is delivered. The ad could just look like the content.It is an example of one such innovation.

Komli Media and Media.net are the other ad tech firms operating here.

The largest marketers in the US are cutting their ad bugets as they shift a larger portion of their spending to digital platforms. In digital, there are cost efficiencies and one can buy more for less.A large portion goes to segments such as video and mobile.Online display ads had the same flat spending. TV and cable TV ad spend increased, and has suffered on the margins.In print the ad expenditure continued to plunge. Radio ad spending declined.

I wrote Advertising, Sales and Promotion Management book for the first time in 2001.Since then it has been revised five times and has seen eleven reprints.I am revising it for the 6th time. It cocers the entire communication mix a company uses — advertising, sales promotion, direct marketing, PR. It also details the various media used in advertising. It covers face-to-face personal selling and sales management. It is a popular book and is available on all e coomerce sites in India and abroad and is available at all important book stores.

Media first unbundled from the agency almost a decade ago. We now have separate firms for interactive, direct marketing and PR. All these functions unbundled from the agency compete with each other . There are conflicts among them. There is scope for pull in different directions. There is, however, one brand and brand communication must converge at the delivery end. There is absence of a single brand custodian, a role performed by client service director in a full-service agency. Marketers, therefore, have to perform the role of a brand communicator. There is a need for re-integration and different mechanisms for this are being tried. There should be some central team leader focussing on consumer and brand planning. Instead of direct reporting there should be a matrix covering horizontal and vertical functions. What we should ensure is that the consumer should have one voice instead of separate voices.

All of us have heard about Maggie’s 2-minute noodles, and Ujala, char boondoh wala. Numbers are being used as USP for a wide variety of products. There is a tea with paanch ayurvedic tatva, and a fridge with a ‘sixth sense’. There are pastes which can fight a certain number of problems, and pain balm that can act a certain number of ways. Numbers put forward a quantitative claim and lend credibility to advertising. All fairness creams make a difference in a week or a fortnight. Numbers communicate the strength of a product. Cosmetics stress a certain number of ingredients, each contributing to its overall efficacy. Though claims are made, these should be delivered too. There should not be too short or too long a duration for fairness cream to act. Too short, and it becomes miraculous and too long, and consumers tend to lose interest. Numbers should be put in context so as to make them symbolic and evocative. Britannia cheese says its one slice is equal to two glasses of milk. Personal care products become credible if numbers are used. However,as we have already observed, if product fails to deliver, you lose all the credibility. Using numbers is thus a double-edged sword.

Prop shops supply  the wherewithal for every creative idea. They offer everything from forks and spoons to antique furniture. They can make available mangoes in winter. The big three prop shops in Mumbai and Propability,  It Ads — a prop shop and Propaganda Co. Production houses prefer a small fee to rent props to buying them and later arrange for their storage. Props can be rented for as little as their cost price. Formerly, production houses carried an inventory of the usually required props, but later they were forced to dispose of the stock in the face of rising real estate costs. The ads shot today require a whole lot of contemporary props, very different from props used in the 1970s when ads carried only product-pack shots and demos. The props today should look realistic as well as aspirational. High-end props are requred these days in life-style ads and ads which use celebrity brand ambassadors. here the suppliers charge a high fee, and consider the item as sold if it is damaged.