Category: Promotion

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.

Advertising should become mobile friendly. Carousal ads have been introduced in 2014. Such ads carry multiple images and links which a user can swipe through. It gives a viewer a panoramic picture. It is incredibly useful for the brands. The innovation has ‘ scroll ‘ functionality. It enhances the click through rate. It reduces the advertiser’s cost per install.

In India, there are 140 million-plus smart phones, likely to grow to 500 million by 2020. There are 300 million Internet users, estimated to grow to 600 million by 2020. Digital advertising conversion rates are 40 per cent higher than non-digitally influenced shoppers. All this augurs well for geo-targeted mobile advertising. It influences the customers on the go. There are online buyers, who can also buy offline. Such omni-channel customers have redefined digital buyer journey. A retailer can track nearby consumers through geo-tracking and these customers can be directed to the closest retail location. Marketers can create brand awareness by associating their messages with physical locations nearby, say, by geo-fencing the gyms, parks and basket-ball courts. A luggage brand can geo-fence airports. Here display units are used. Coupons sent on mobile motivate buyers to visit  a nearby store. Location-based marketing is pursued either independently or through co-marketing with the partners to connect with the consumers. Location tools also facilitate marketing research. Location specific advertising works best in spontaneous categories, e.g. coffee shops. Retailers can provides real time offers, to customers when they are in the shop’s proximity. Some ads allow customers to play a video. Here, you are taking the store to the customer. The whole ideal of location-based marketing is to attract footfalls to the stores. The offers are contextual. Social media have integrated location-based services. The precondition is a data-enabled set, which is not switched off . Thus offering a free WiFi at a store can be useful for the marketers.

Advertising sustains the content you enjoy on the web. At the same time these ads have to depend on tracking and profiling you routinely. Web users avoid ads by installing an ad blocker. It makes your browser faster. No bandwidth is lost in downloading ads. It becomes less irritating. Though ad blocking was available since long, its adoption is now rising. There are murmurs that by using ad blocker you are harming free Internet which presupposes an array of ads. Ad blockers in the long run may benefit. The ads of future could be simpler, less intrusive and transparent about the way the personal data is handled. Ads must be acceptable to users.

Ad blocking is now possible for desk tops, but will soon extend to mobile operating systems. There is an attempt to overcome ad blockers by developing a suitable software. In spite of the ad blocker, if you see ads, it is expected that the ads thus seen will simpler, better and more transparent. It will be a return of sanity in the ad business.

There is a plug in that lets online users block the tracking tools. These trackers delay the loading of a page too.

As Internet these days is full of overly intrusive ads that often make web pages take  far longer to load, users are increasingly turning to ad blockers. But this may be attract punishment by a site like YouTube. If the Google-owned video site detects that a Google Chrome web browser is using also AdBlock Plus or any other ad blocking software, it removes the option to skip the pre-roll ads preceding some YouTube videos. While normal viewers get to skip a pre-roll ad after a few seconds, Chrome users with ad blockers are forced to sit through the entire thing. Ad blocking software poses a threat to the tech community. Vast swathes of the Internet are supported at least in part by ad revenue. Ad blockers are a real threat to companies that create sites and apps, and the people they employ.

Indian advertising too is embracing branded content. To some, online videos over three minutes long are branded content. The rest is plain vanilla content. To many, branded content is advertiser funded programming. To some, the official content on social media pages qualify for being called branded content.

Branded content does not tell the product stories. It should tell people stories. Products are cleverly integrated into them. But this may not be liked by the consumers who prefer a strong brand presence in the narrative. There should human stories which can bring the brand out. It should be a win-win both for the advertiser and consumer.

It is important to understand the significance of branded content in these times of ad ad avoidance. Branded content fosters connections between brands and consumers. Content plays an immense role for emotional connections and loyalty. Content should be rooted in the brand’s values. An agency can tie up with channels or production houses with significant downtime. It will reduce content cost.

Indian advertising professionals have started relying heavily on image banks. Image banks are a collection of stock photographs and videos which are on offer, after research and study of the society and its changing patterns. Image banks act as barometers to the society’s changing attitudes and predict trends and needs. All this is captured on film. Image banks encourage photographers by throwing open a global gateway to them to showcase their work and receive royalty.

The Hutch Pink puppy, the floating dias in the Deusche Bank ad are stock photographs taken from Getty Images, an international photography image bank. Getty has set up office in India, and is represented by Visage Media Services. Dell, Vipro, SBI have all used Getty images for their campaigns. Image banks are more than just still photos. The shot in Hindi film Rang De Basanti of the three MIGs flying over-head as the actors jump is a stock photograph altered for the film by adding the actors into the frame.

Imagine you wanted Albert Einstein in your ad film or ad commercial. Where would you go shoot him? Go back in time? There is a simpler solution — visage image.com. They have clips of Eiffel Tower, the Buckingham Palace, the San Francisco Bridge, historical events, planets. One can take one’s pick. Another organization that supplies creative images with Indian faces is www.imagesbazar.com. It is set up by Sandeep Maheshwari. It has seven lac plus images in stock. The web-site is fully e-searchable and e-commerce website. The search takes less than two seconds. Another web-site ShotIndia.com has been launched by Sandeep in 2009. Here anybody can upload pictures, and when it is sold, the person receives 50 per cent of the amount. It has more than 3000 registered members who load thousands of images everyday. At present over 6,000 customers in more than 42 countries are using images from Images Bazaar.com and ShotIndia.com for advertising, marketing and publishing. Their all-India toll free number is 1800-11-6869.

Big data ultimately means lots of information. Let it not seduce you to believe that by itself it will solve all your problems. You use this data and come at an original conclusion, or a new application or action from that data. Data catalyses creativity. Creativity transforms data into ideas. However, it is not a substitute for creativity. Big data is to be applied imaginatively. We have to yoke together the power of big data and ideas.