Category: Promotion

1. Nimble : Digital medium is content hungry. It requires snackable content. Digital can be guided by big ideas, but the voluminous content in digital wholly cannot be big-idea-driven. Big idea is replaced by hundreds of small ideas — those micro moments which engage the  audience. Digital agencies must be able to pick up snackable content by being nimble.
2. Content : Per se, the consumer is not intrested in the brand. He requires engagig content. Some content may not serve the marketing objectives. The content must be targeted to an audience. It should be valuable, relevant and consistent.
3. Eco-system : Multiple apps clutter a phone. There are integrating apps where one app enables bill payments, cab booking, food ordering and playing games. It is necessary to create a digital eco-system.
4. Bots : Bots are digital assistants. They are for cusomer service as well as for prompting purchases. They do entertain.
5. AI will make thins better.It will revolutionise e-coomerce, gaming, product design and health care.
6. Technology will generate ideas. There will be technology-based execution. It will be a new experience.
7. Chronological Facebook and Instagram changed completely with the advent of algorithm in 2016. It regulated free-flowing content. Businesses were made to pay for the ads. There will be more influencer marketing. Consumers trust less known influencers than celebrities. Micro-influencers will become more important.
8. Collaboration between social media and e-commerce will increase. Commerce gets to know consumer preferences and experiences. It helps marketers to improve their offerings. Users provide feedback of their experience on social media.
9. Big data has become a reality. It provides rich insights. Dataanalytics extract these insights. The core of the agency is likely to shift from creativity to data.

Advertising keeps the media alive. In an earlier era, print and TV survived on advertising. Of late, web sites and mobile apps survive on it.

Vance Packard’s book Hidden Persuaders in 1957 painted advertising in sinister light. He contended that psychology and sociology are used by advertising industry to persuade the average citizen to buy and get addicted to products that she did not really need. Some later books wondered whether advertising works at all. The End of Advertising as We Know It by Sergio Zyman in 2002 made a case that in this millennium advertising have become self-indulgent, and consequently the art and entertainment aspects have been overemphasised, rather than the ability to sell a product. Al Ries and Laura Ries wrote in 2002 The Fall of Advertising and The Rise of PR. Here they question the power of print ads and TVCs. They cite the examples Starbucks, The Body Shop, Walmart, Red Bull and Zara which have built up their brands without advertising. They conclude that marketers should relax on unpaid PR which persuade journalists to write favourably about their products and the values they stand for.

Advertising emerged in the US in the 1950s owing to a need for differentiation among  several commodity type of products. In the 1970s, as the colour printing presses became cheap, there was a magazine boom, which capitvated both the readers and advertisers. Satelite TV through cable at our homes led to another stimulation to advertising and boosted regional advertising too. The earlier formats struggled to survive, as new formats replaced them during this journey, e.g. early magazine ads looked like newspaper ads and early TV commercials looked like cinema ads. When Internet came on the scene, it adopted the outdoor ad format for the first five years, and called it banner ads. Later search engines thought of putting up ads corresponding to those subjects which we were searching. The innovation brought in was the offer that pay only when someone clicks the ad. It copied the format of direct marketing ads of 1950s i.e. action-proneness. Advertising adopted the maxim that it has to be performance-driven. It is now time to seek a suitable format for mobile ads, which finds that some videos are too loud and intrusive for the privacy of this user, and for offering him personalisation.

India is an intresting market. There are 400 million people online of which 300 million are on smartphones. By 2020, this is expected to go up to 650 million.

The in-thing in 2016 was the native advertising. Advertisers would like to be where the consumers are. Native advertising is doppleganger — the ads blend into the editorial matter. In 2017, the in-app advertisirs replaced the native advertising. The online time is spent on 11 apps. That led to appvertising. In-app ads offer immersive experiences, and has become a mass medium of 2017. It ranges from a six-second video to an augmented reality game. It targets the users based on first party data. Predictive analysis enables to customise the audiences and deliver compelling in-feed content. There is an element of location specific messages. It increases engagement and develops an on-the-go and organic audience. In-app ads target the audience at the right moment. The users are in the frame of mind to explore, engage and discover. It can nurture conversions and leads. It promotes repeat engagement. Many ads are interactive, and appear durig relevant moments.

The challenge is a lack of rich media inventory. It is harder to discover which users have already seen the ad in the absence of cookies. There should be additional efforts for retargeting.

In-app ads are relatively more expensive to develop than those for the mobile web. However, the net return is always higher as it avoids the waste on generalised and untargeted audience.

OTT is driven by the viewer. Should there be advertising? Advertising in the middle of a show or movie is considered a disruption. Having said this , this is the most difficult dilemma. India has 319 million internet users and 170 million smart phone users which allow them to watch video. At last count, 100 million did watch video. The videos watched are 1/4th of the total digital ad spend. The M & E industry is growing and ad spend and ad revenues too are growing. The Indian online services market will ride piggy back on advertising, although online video advertising is only a fifth of TV advertising today.

The challange are:

• differentiation
• strong regional content
• interesting and varying content.

The future is digital.

ASCI recently announced a set of guidelines that will help celebrities to perform due diligence on a product or brand they wish to endrose.

They should do due diligence to ensure that all description, claims and comparisons made in the advertisement they appear in or endorse are capable of being objectively ascertained and capable of substantiation and should not mislead or appear deceptive.

The veracity of the claims can be ascertained two ways. One is to do the background checks and research on their own. The claims in the past and futuristic claims are factored in.

Another way is approaching ASCI for assessing the claims. The query raised by the celebrity will be checked within ASCI and the veracity of claims will be tested. In order to have a deeper understanding, an expert can be called in. The findings will be presented to the celebrity. ASCI can make recommendations to relook at the claim in the light of the findings.

The findings can be used as a part of due diligence by the celebrity It builds up the case. It will allow to gauge the kind of  information the celebrity had access to with respect to the product or brand being endorsed.

A brand has to generate trust and loyalty and this is facilitated by the user generated content (UGC) in native advertising. There can be polls on the social media or contests. Native ads should be kept short and sweet. It does not mean that the brands cannot put the message across. They do by using strong headlines and relevant content. Native advertising is designed specially for mobile traffic, say for Instagram and Snapchat. Even if the content cannot be read on the small screen, they are likely to click on it and get the full message. As far as possible, native advertising should be designed for the platform it is used on. Social media are great platforms for native ads but they are cluttered. Publishers make available live video, 360-degree videos and virtual reality (VR). Consumers can now experience the content. The content becomes more engaging. Display advertising is being replaced by native advertising. The New York Times and BuzzFeed are monetising exclusively through native advertising. There are FTC guidelines for native advertising. The IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) is working for the standardisation of native advertising practices. Standardisation is the foundation of programmatic buying and selling.

Advertisers are now concerned about their ads appearing alongside offensive content on YouTube. The Times, a London-based newspaper ran a story in mid-March, 2017 about YouTube hate preachers sharing screens with household brand names. Ads are bought programmatically, that is automatically using algorithms. This technique allows brands to follow internet users wherever they spend time and direct ads specifically at them. Such targeted ads are okay, but should not neglect what content the ads appear next to. So far there is no filtering or blocking of inappropriate content on behalf of advertisers, though the technology to do so is available with third party firms such as Integral Ad Science. Advertisers can monitor ad placement, and there are tools for it. Organisations can choose key words so that they can stay away from certain contents. However, very few advertisers use such tools. In future, more advertisers may resort to such solutions.

The viewership of display ads is shrinking. Ad revenues are shifting to mobile friendly non-intrusive content ads. Widgets recommend content, and are used by the publishers. They are links such as You Might Like, Recommended for You, Sponsored Content or Around the Web. They appear below the stories so as to look an organic part of the story. These enable publishers to maximise the benefits of space available to them and make additional revenues.

The content recommendation networks in India are Taboola, Revcontent, Outbrain and Columbia. In fact, all major publishers in India use some kind of content recommendation widget. It is a clickbait.

Widgets improve the traffic and widgets are used to rent the real estate to other publishers and get paid when a reader clicks on one of these external links.

NDTV receives 80 percent revenues from the banner ads, while the remaining 20 per cent comes from Taboola. The publisher is not required to make any investment. Though the traffic is taken away from the site, still money is made when these links are clicked. ScoopWhoop receives 5-7 per cent of the total revenues from Taboola. Another 15 per cent comes from display ads. And 80 per cent from the branded content.

Content recommendation platforms work best for publishers who work on scale and reach a large number of people. These platforms are working closely with the publishers to enable contextualized and personalised content discovery.

EY conducted a study on social media marketing. Despite the presence of channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube, brands still prefer a website to engage with the customers. They already consider mobile as the primary screen of choice. Most brands have mobile app and mobile friendly website. Digital ad spend is growing fastest. It grew by 47.5 per cent in 2016. Most brands prefer a 360 degree approach to communication, In digital space, content creation, sustaining engagement and measuring effectiveness are the three challenges. Brands may take a beating on social media, but they do not have plans to respond to such flogging. Instagram is becoming popular. Video viewing is the most preferred engagement. Brands have adopted programmatic. Instead of downloads, the metrics that could be applied to apps are measuring transactions and positive reviews. The same could be extended to content. Aggregated apps such as Chat bots may complement or substitute company apps in future.

In digital classifieds, there are players like JustDial, OLX and Quikr. The revenues in digital classifieds are likely to reach Rs. 7700 — 7900 crore by 2020 as per KPMG India and Google report. At present, the revenue stands at Rs. 2900 crore ( FY 15 ). The growth will be driven by e-services, real estate and automobiles.

At present, classifieds  sites earn either through advertising or through premium listings.

In business-to-consumer classifieds site, each listing has to pay Rs. 5000-Rs. 7000 per month. In consumer-to-consumer site more than 70 per cent revenue comes from advertising. An advertiser pays Rs. 200-Rs. 500 based on display of an ad.