Category: Promotion

Salman Khan’s Prem Ratan Dhan Payo was promoted by adopting the digital first strategy. Actually they wantd to addresses the young audience. All creative were launched on the web first, and later on TV. They used social media extensively to communicate with the audience about the film. All this was facilitated by the popularity of Salman which cuts across all age groups and social strata. People associated with the film  —  Salman, Sonam and Sooraj Barjatya spoke extensively to the digital media. The lead pair is active on the social media. They shared the content of the film.

Audience gives the feedback on the social media. It is possible to course correct on digital based on that audience is telling you.

Rajashri works with YouTube, and close to 100 digital video platforms. They have close to 20,000 hours of content in their digital library.

India is a mobile first market. The youth is a digital first audience. They are in talk with a number of brands who ant to sponsor their digital content. Of course, they can integrate their products and brands to the content. Brands warm up to digital very fast. This is just a beginning.

Advertising is a major source of revenue for the digital media. Paid subscriptions will evolve very soon as payment gateways and cellular infrastructure evolve too.

Yash Raj Film’s Bang Raja Baraat has crossed a lac views in less than 24 hours. Lakme BBB video depicting to families have gone viral. Man’s World of YRF has crossed 1 million views.

Branded content is for subtle advertising of the brand. It is a short film which professionals make. It trends on social media.

Brands such as Myntra Emami and many others have taken to such short films to promote the brand offerings. There are cameos in such films. It can do cross-promotion too.

These short films are made with a tight budget of Rs. 5 lac, but the costs can go up to Rs. 1-Rs. 2 crore.

The target audience of these films is generally between 18 and 30.

Start ups too take advantage of the branded content.

According to the FICCI KPMG 2015 report, the digital advertising industry in India grew from Rs. 3010 crore in 2013 to Rs. 4350 crore in 2014 and recorded a growth of around 45 per cent. In 2015, the report predicts that the size of digital advertising industry will be approximately Rs. 6250 crore.

Siri is the Apple’s digital assistant. Cortana is  Microsoft’s digital assistant. M is being tested by Facebook as digital assistant. Basically these are Artificial Intellegence (AI) platforms. The technology companies collect valuable data about the users when they use the digital assistants. This information serves as input for digital advertising, and keep a user tied up to their system.

Some tech companies give a personality to their digital assistants, e.g. Siri and Cortana. Some build their assistants with no personality, gender or voice, e.g. M and Google’s assistant.

Digital assistants can order flowers or make restaurant. As such, these can be used to guide users to particular products and advertisers.

There is always a possibility — what charms one may become annoying for another.

The Google app makes use of predictive technology known as Google Now. It responds to questions in a female voice.

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.