Category: Promotion

In the total advertising pie, cinema advertising accounts for 1 percent. It is showing signs of growth — a growth rate of 25 per cent year on year.As multiplexes mushroom all over, the industry has become more organised. It attracts the advertisers now. The chains of theatres and digital networks understand the  needs and wants of advertisers better. Even single screen theatres are getting digitised. Movies too are promoted heavily these days. It augurs well for the advertisers. The biggest hindrance to the spread of cinema advertising is the lack of credible measuring system. There should be a system of assessing the demographics and consumption patterns of the audience. It is a difficult proposition to capture the audience data in single screen theaters in smaller markets. Rentrak has appreared in the field to plug this gap. Cinema Audit and Monitoring ( CAM ) has been launched to track 200 most important screens in India. Rentrak and Interactive have collaborated in this measurement effort. Advertisers would like to have viewership profiles and the success of certain actors in particular geographies.

Cinema halls can offer branding solutions — on screen advertising options and off-screen advertising options at the food counter, in the lobby, at parking etc. An auto company can show on-screen advertising supported by placement of vehicle in the lobby with test driving facilities for patrons in the parking lot.

InMobi, a Banglore-based start up, is Indian advertising technology firm. It has launched its new advertising delivery platform, Miip in Silicon Valley, US in July, 2015. The platform, delivers content-rich ads to mobile app users, thus guaranteeing higher returns to the advertisers. InMobi is thus competing with Facebook and Google. It has tied up with 10 partners. Some 5000 different applications are using it. It has been piloted around the world with 100 partners. These partners are e-commerce companies, home services, entertainment and booking services. The revenue split is in the ratio of 40:60, 40 percent of advertiser’s money is retained by them and 60 percent given to the publisher.

Advertising is a $700-$800 bilion industry worldwide. There is a growing angst against the ads, with more and more users showing dislike towards ads. The response should not be that we show them more ads. Instead, the response should be to make the ads more likeable. The user must discover the content. This could be done through a story. This could be done by engaging the users. Facebook and Pinterest are full of ads. However, users do not look only at ads, to say that they dislike them. Yes, they could say, ‘ I hate Facebook’. This is a different way of looking at advertising. It is being presented as Miip.

Advertising has to be one-on-one. And mobile phones are one-on-one device, unlike TV or print medium. Therefore, a message on mobile phone must be dumbed down to the lowest common denominator. We do not know who is reading it.

Miip has been launched in India in August, 2015. It is user-first discovery platform. It has tied up with Amazon and Paytm. It is an animated monkey. It tracks mobile activities based on which it shows rated and personalized products to users. It facilitates seamless payment and check outs within these discovery sessions.

The discovery of relevant products is a huge problem for consumers. Advertisements become intrusive for consumers, and they start hating them. InMobi worked on ways to solve this. With Miip, the company shows relevant advertisements to the users, ads that interest them. This is a new medium which enables discovery-led platform called d-commerce.

It brings window shopping network to the mobile platform. Marketers have a tough time getting users to discover and explore their products. Miip creates personalised shopping experiences to enable discovery of products from more marketers.

Miip creates discovery zones within the app. They can buy the product on the go by just tapping the ‘Buy’ button. Paytm helps the users seamless payment transactions.

Facebook and Twitter provide walked-garden experiences, and users commit 25-30 per cent of their time to this. Ola and Uber provide wild-garden experiences and users commit 70 per cent of their time to this. InMobi fits in here where users spend 70 per cent of time.

Miip is disruptive for mobile app developers. It helps monetization by creating contextualised product and app discovery experiences. This complements the app they are developing.

Miip is the newly introduced product. It targets user of shopping apps by sending them personalized information about products or experiences they might like. It seeks to target advertising better, allowing a smart phone user to discover, say where the stylish casual shirt stores in the city are.

Native advertising is a new way of engaging with consumers on the web. Here the brand decides to produce exclusive content for the digital medium, e.g. energy drink Red Bull making a video of a sky diver falling from a high altitude, at a mind-boggling velocity. It is called native advertising because the content does not ham the product the way the traditional advertising does. The content is interesting and engaging. Content could be in the form of a video, blog posts or articles which resemble editorial content. There are rebel non-traditional news companies which generate Buzzfeed. The spends on native advertising are increasing globally and in India. The content should be interesting and relevant, and the brand must be prepared to take a backseat. Native advertising believes in transparency. A food blog created as native advertising is in sync with the product. Here if there is no disclosure that it is paid content, and later if the truth comes out the influencer loses credibility. A cosmetic company can educate you about how to be a likeable girl. It need not concentrate on marketing its products. The quality of native advertising content should be consistent with the editorial matter. A cricketer may go to a school to interact with the students, and share tips with them. A sports company can use such content Native ads work best when they are accompanied by immersive content. In India, native has yet to catch up, because TV is still a robust medium here. A cosmetic company can run a series of tutorials on make up. Such content is helpful to the social media. Native advertising is used by real estate developers, banking, finance and insurance companies and equipment manufacturers. Bharati AXA ran a series of fresh perspectives videos. A banker quits a job to become a tiffin supplier — a dabbawalla. He realises a genuine need of wholesome lunch. E-commerce companies selling apparel can show latest fashion trends and rope in celebrities. Brands tend to write copious content about them.Native is more focused on telling a story, a story that engages consumers, content that interests them, or is relevant to their life.

As we know, digital inventory is traded by programmatic, but we do require a personal selling approach to sell native advertising. The story is conceived by the brand team. The agency and brand work in collaboration to create specialised content. These contents must be designed for various formats and different placements. The agency has to bring specialised resources to give concrete shape to the content. Brands have to track the native content, and collect data to know the results.

Mobile apps may not be genuinely helping the marketers. There are thousands of apps which run ads which cannot be seen by the users both on Apple and Android devices. Advertisers pay for these ads, and these are fake ads. This is a kind of fraud. The ads are called up at such a high frequency that the target audience cannot possibly see them. Ads in such rapid succession cannot not be seen by humans. They hit the numbers by showing as many as five ads in the background for every visible ad to users. Some applications scroll through the ads even after the app had been closed. At times, the phone takes a consumer to app store even when the consumer has not touched the screen. Pop up ads appear even when there is no accidental clicking. There are complaints of the phones getting slow or phones crashing. They run a code that produces a steady stream of unseen ads. To monitor this , it is necessary to assess the bandwidth usage over time. Google and Apple may no have the ability to do this. In online ad world,  fraud is endemic. The brands pay for the adds, and lose track of where the ads end up. There are many layers of automated intermediaries.The write-up is based on a report by Forensiq, a firm that tracks fraud in online advertising.

A logo should satisfy the following points :

1. It should be simple, and yet rich.
2. It should be recognisable, and yet unusual.
3. It should be memorable, and yet apt.
4. It should be contemporary, and yet timeless.

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
• real time bidding ( RTB )
• programmatic PMP

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.