Category: Advertising

Blippar was developed in 2011, and has been continuously evolving. It has reached around 150 countries. There are close to 50 million downloads of the app. It is expanding. It has reached India towards the end of 2014. It is a reality ad platform. It is an advertising platform that brings products to life. It has revolutionized the way the consumers interact with the brands. It is backed up by the power of image recognition and augmented reality technologies. They keep on improving the image recognition technologies. That brings the consumer to interact with literally any object. Let the consumer point the phone at a food item, a chocolate or a ball.  They get engaged in an activity. They are likely to tweet about it. They like the brand page, participate in a contest and then consumer the product.

In India, they have 30 clients. Blippar is a content discovery app. Every time you blip a Pepsi can, different content will show up, ranging from interactive games to contests.

In the last five years, the growth of the base of advertisers is  remarkable — there were around 10 thousand advertisers in 2010, whereas in 2015, there are about 12,500 advertisers. Much of this growth is led by the new economy companies — e-commerce entities, start ups and internet-enabled services. There is good growth in regional advertising too.

The ratio of India’s advertising expenditure to GDP continues to be small — at 0.35 per cent. Other emerging countries like China (0.50 per cent), Russia (0.57 per cent) and Brazil (0.77 per cent) are better. The enhanced advertising activity may increase its share in GDP in future.

It is a fact that online advertising industry is expected to a fraud that costs it several billion dollars. There are efforts to regulate this by announcing of certification of legitimate publishers and advertisers. This certification programme is called TAG or Trustworthy Accountability  Group. TAG will basically certify companies who create ads and web sites which display them.

You may wonder why an advertiser himself is not able to judge the quality of the web site. In practice, ads are sold often in automated auctions in vast networks. These networks have a huge scale  and are opaque. They can serve as traffic laundering operations for criminals. An advertiser may get ripped off on business alone on one of these networks. It is difficult to say whether the network was in the know of things or should have known them.

It is an effort to make the middlemen accountable. Whether this succeeds or not depends how TAG wards off companies that violate the basic standards from getting the certification. They have fixed a fee of $ 10000 which will be waived for smaller firms.

Advertising in digital format has spiraled out of control.Users resent this proliferation. Users are also concerned about the privacy issues. Ads in print and TV are not so unwelcome. Even if they are, people put up with them. People have have opted for ad blockers. But then how the online publishers could survive without the ads? And who decides which ads are to be blocked? When ads are blocked publishers will have to find alternative way to reach the people and monetise their inventory. There may be a return to affliate-links and revenue share models. There may be increase in native advertising. As more content on mobiles is seen on apps, ad blockers may not be effective. They are not effective on social net-works too. One valid reason for ad blocking is the use of personal data to customise ads. However, millennials have issues with the quantity of the ads. Some softwares block ads that violate the privacy.

Comedians do command a reach that is important for advertisers. A comedian as such takes anti-establishment stance. He is away from mainstream. Does his coming closer to brand dilutes his artristic capability ?  Could they be as acerbic and edgy? Comedians have not ventured into advertising. It is advertising that is coming closer to comedians. Comedy’s freedom cannot be had in advertising. Still comedians have realised that one way to make money is to be involved with the brands. Brands could sponsor comedy too. It all depends on the content. It should be  engaging enough . A corporate show takes you beyond the obscenity and insulting people. A person has to learn how to keep the integrity intact in different spaces. AIB has launched an advertising division — Vigyapati.

Advertising Standards Council of India ( ASCI ) completed 30 years of its existence in October 2015. It is a self-regulatory body. It has a contract with TAM for monitoring print and TV ads. It scans around 10,000 print ads and 350 TV ads each week. It enables ASCI to spot errant advertisers in small towns and cities, taking action against them on its own. It is looking for a digital agency to monitor online ads. It will soon sign agreements with Union Health Ministry,  the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India and the Food Safety & Standards Authority of India to process complaints on misleading advertisements.

Wearable technology is here to stay. It has yet to achieve mass market adoption. It is partnering with fashion houses to broaden its visual appeal.

Apple Watch can have apps developed by hotels. The watch offers connectivity. It can be used as the key to enter the room. It can be used as a tool to order food. A brand has to engage with the wearable technology without any banner or content videos. That model of advertising would not work here. Here the brand strategy should be recommendatory. It should not be intrusive. Advertising should be so precisely targeted that it does not look like advertising. It just follows ‘ recommended for you’ strategy. The time spent on a watch may not exceed two seconds. The user ignores the banner ads. He is not interested in responding to the SMSs. Yes, the watches are useful in promoting proximity marketing.

This technology will bring about a change in consumer behavior and preferences. As a tracker of consumer behaviour, it may enable targeted advertising. However, here it competes with the whole ad tech industry that embraces all your behaviour on the web and what you want. Advertising must be responsive to your behavior or else it just becomes like telemarketing.

In online advertising, Facebook and Google are giants. Facebook in the US is projected to collect $ 7.7 billion in retail digital ad revenue, and Google $ 23.3 billion (  eMarketer report ). Though the US advertising nerve centre is Madison Avenue, Silicon Valley too is becoming more and more influential.

Facebook introduced a rating metric just like the TRPs for TV commercials. This rating matrix will facilitate ad buying across television and Facebook. Nielsen Digital Ad Ratings from Nielsen will give the combined performance of the TV and Facebook ads. Media planners now could buy the digital ads with as much ease as they had while buying the TV ads. Facebook and TV are complementary. Facebook is attempting to woo TV advertisers who are eager to reach mobile devices such as Tablets and smart phones. TV advertisers know that these mobile devices are increasingly being used to watch television programmes. Google wants to target ad campaigns to consumers using their email addresses. This programme is called Customer Match. For instance, companies can upload a list of customers’ email addresses gleaned for its loyalty membership. These customers can be shown specific ads when they are signed into Google. This programme will allow the companies to show their customers ad campaigns if they have not recently shopped for its products.

Young millennials watch less TV and do not read print media. They skip the online commercials and block the ads on their web browsers and phones. It is time for the marketers to start from scratch, since every theory that they used have come to naught. It is a different world and a different game. Advertisers now know that there should be fewer 30-second commercials. Instead, there should be more emoijs and apps. The audience is young and with discretionary income. They buy houses and cars. They decide their brand loyalty from a young age. Millennials watch more TV shows on demand, and stream them. Their attention span happens to be short. They move from device to device. They lack the tolerance for traditional advertising. They feel it is sheer wastage of time.

Millennials thus have unique media consumption habits. They require a new way to connect on media like smart phones and tablets. Brands have to design emojis. Domino’s pizza customers can order pizzaz by texting or tweeting emojis. Traditional banner ads do not appear impressive on small devices. Brands woo them by arranging events. Apps are tried too. Brands arrange festivals too.

The physical world’s environment is modified by computer-generated sensory inputs. It alters the current perception of reality. It is distinguished from virtual reality which replaces the real world with a simulated one. Augmentation is in real time. AR enriches the real world with digital information and media such as 3D models and videos, overlaying in real-time the camera view of your smart phone, tablet, PC or connected glasses. In Indian market, augmented reality was introduced in the mid-2000s. A fair amount of algorithm development and computing was required. At the same time, some tertiary technologies were needed. If open source innovations which enables many customers to interact with the brand happen, the cost of technology would reduce. Malls and theatres were targeted for different brands, e.g. a person sitting in chair, could experience a Ferrari forming around him. Augmented reality can let you experience the day or night settings. Augmented reality can create a sensation of you driving a vehicle. All this is live augmented reality. There is a single active user, and there are multiple passive participators. Despite the initial enthusiasm from brand marketers, the technology has not picked up. Ad agencies just do the QR codes which leave the brand marketers unexcited. There are no real eye ball catching AR campaigns in India. In future there could be an alliance between the ad agencies and technology firms to practice such innovations. It could be the next big thing in India.