B2B will accelerate growth of digital, mobile, social media in India: Experts

Digitas Global Chief Creative Officer Mark Beeching and Chief Marketing Officer Seth Solomons feel that the biggest space for growth of digital, mobile or social media in India is in the B2B space.

Digitas is the digital arm of the world’s fourth largest communications group, The Publicis Groupe.

In an exclusive interview with Preethi Chamikutty of The Economic Times, Beeching and Solomons say, “Businesses today are adopting digital much faster than customers…

“India would have to leap frog some of the bad marketing that the West has done and go directly to the ones that give results to the brand. For example, in the West, financial institutions were attracting customer by giving them low rates of interest, which put them in a soup in the long run.

“So, today Indian companies should help the customer in the decision-making process and give them offers that they would value. A 30-second spot cannot alone connect with the customer. There have to be activities before and after the TVC to connect with the customers. Digital and traditional media are like Siamese twins, you cannot separate the two.”

Online banner ad spend growth slows down as clients switch to search marketing, mobile ads

The growth in online banner ad spend is expected to slow down this financial year as clients have been switching to search marketing and mobile advertising.

In 2008-09, the online banner ad spend grew by 38 per cent to Rs 325 crore. In contrast, the growth rate is expected to drop to 32 per cent (Rs 430 crore) in 2009-10, according to a study by Internet and Mobile Association of India-IMRB.

Search marketing and mobile advertising are expected to reach Rs 325 crore and Rs 50 crore respectively in this financial year, according to afaqs!

Prasanth Mohanachandran, Executive Director, Digital Services, OgilvyOne India, has told afaqs!, “Advertisers have started to experiment, and must have increased their spending on other formats such as search marketing and social media marketing.”

The IAMAI-IMRB study revealed that the growth in banner ad spends in 2009-10 would be driven by sectors such as education (expected to grew by 76 per cent to Rs 34 crore), IT/telecom (41 per cent to Rs 68 crore), FMCG (46 per cent to Rs 47 crore) and auto (40 per cent Rs 39 crore).

The study indicated that the traditional online advertisers - banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) and online publishers - have not increased spends on banner advertisements significantly.

Banner ad spends in the BFSI sector is projected to increase by 17 per cent to Rs 64.5 crore in 2009-10. Online publishers' banner spend is anticipated to reach Rs 107 crore in 2009-10, compared to Rs 84.5 crore in 2008-09.

Surge ahead with digital communications

Kapil Ohri reports in afaqs.com

The Fifth Digital Marketing Conference, organised by the Internet and Mobile Association of India in New Delhi, focused on 'Transformation of digital agencies from technology enablers to brand champions'.

Shantanu Sirohi, Co-Founder and Vice-President, Interactive Avenues, talked about the role of digital agencies. He pointed out that brand champions are media agnostic. To prove this, he gave examples of some of the ad campaigns that Interactive Avenues did for ICICI Prudential, Travelguru.com and Travelocity.com, wherein the core idea was conceptualised for the Internet and then taken forward, either as a print ad, a television commercial or an outdoor campaign.

Mahesh Murthy, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Pinstorm said, "Brands have to become technology savvy in order to derive the benefits of the digital medium." Citing the example of live Twitter posts updated by some of the conference participants, he said, "Technology enables you to carry out live researches, listen to consumers and track performance of your efforts and allows you to react quickly."

Pushkar Sane, Chief Digital Officer, North and South Asia, Global Head of Social Marketing, Starcom MediaVest Group, pointed out that in order to derive better return on investment (RoI), marketers need to become closer to consumers and understand their online behaviour.

Kushal Sanghvi, Managing Director, Media Contacts, said, "The definition of digital agency has changed." He explained that agencies have moved from buying exposure to extracting response from consumers.”

Prasad Shejale, Managing Director, Logicserve, said, "The basics of brand building do not change from one medium to another. It is the same for print, TV and digital medium as well."

Ruchira Raina, Managing Director, Dentsu Communications, and National Business Head, Dentsu Media, said, "Marketers should use the internet to connect, share and discuss with their target audience." She added that marketers should move beyond investing in the digital medium for experimentation only; instead, they should invest in the Internet with more seriousness and conviction.

Power of digital marketing

More and more Indian entities have been leveraging digital media for business gains. This week, the Indian media featured two reports on the power of new media or digital communications. The reports are:

afaqs.com: Online ads generate 1,800 test drive requests for Honda Jazz in 2 days

According to a report by Kapil Ohri in afaqs.com, Honda Siel Cars has relied on banner ads and search engine marketing on major websites such as yahoo.co.in, rediff.com, in.com, ibnlive.com, moneycontrol.com, ndtv.com, zigwheels.com, gaadi.com and carwale.com.

The company has also employed the services of a few ad networks such as Komli Media, Ad Magnet and Tribal fusion to boost the reach of its banner ads. “Honda Jazz banner ads are already being placed across 150-200 websites in our network,” Akshay Garg, Business Head, Komli Media, told afaqs.com

Anita Sharma, General Manager, Marketing Communications, Honda Siel Cars India, has said, “Honda Siel received 10,000 test drive requests during the pre-launch phase as well, through SEM activity and the buzz, which was already there, directed consumers to HondaCarIndia.com/Jazz website, where test drive requests can be registered.”

Mint: Theatre goes to the Net to bring in younger audiences

“When a marketing glitch left Rahul da Cunha with a stage play ready to go but no audience to fill the theatre with, he posted fliers on social networking sites on the Internet,” according to a report by Neelam Verjee in Mint. “The message spread like wildfire, and when Chaos Theory opened five days later, it was to a full house.”
“I filled the house purely based on Facebook,” says da Cunha, one of the founders of Rage Productions. “Facebook is the killer one. Kids are coming in droves now because they are looking for new activities.”

Apart from Facebook, blogs and mobile phones, theatre producers are also relying on hoardings.

The two media above-mentioned reports on Honda Jazz and da Cunha’s Chaos Theory indicate the effectiveness of digital communications, though the Internet penetration is still in low in India. According to a study conducted by study conducted by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and IMRB International in September 2008, India had an estimated 45.3 million ‘active’ Internet users. Of this, 42 million were from urban areas.

This week, Media Research Users’ Council and Hansa Research’s the India Outdoor Survey (IOS) in Mumbai revealed the overall media reach in Mumbai was 94 per cent, reports Robin Thomas in exchange4media.com
“Of which, television (one week) has 86 per cent reach, cable & satellite (viewed week) has 80 per cent. Print (total readership) has 67 per cent of the reach while outdoor (IOS stretch) 66 per cent,” according to the IOS report. “Radio (one week), internet (one month) and cinema (past six months) have 31, 10 and 8 per cent reach respectively.”

The IOS survey had covered over 4500 sites of nearly 1000 stretches. Over 70 site parameters, for these 4500 sites in Mumbai, were collected and collated in nine months, with over 50 field executives. Range finder for measuring distances, binoculars for site dimensions, GPS meters for latitude and longitude, digital, still and video cameras were some of the technologies behind IOS.

PR pros should ‘monitor and engage’ bloggers

Asit Ranjan Mishra reports in exchange4media

What should consumer brands and PR agencies do in an environment where they don’t have control over discussions happening on the Internet about their brands and clients? “Monitor and engage,” feel the experts.

On the last day of the ICCO global PR conference in New Delhi, speakers called on PR professionals to carefully monitor the user-generated content of online users.

Christopher Graves, President, Asia Pacific, Ogilvy PR, said that consumers now put their reviews on products online and shared it through social networking sites like MySpace, blogs, photo-sharing sites like Flickr, tagging sites like del.icio.us, video sharing sites like YouTube and podcasting.

“We not only need to monitor them but also explore how best we can engage with them,” Graves observed.

Describing a common Indian Internet user, Ajit Balakrishnan, Founder & CEO, Rediff.com, said, “It is wrong to assume that only IT professionals are active on the social networking sites. The common Internet user is young within the age category of 15-35 years.”

“Tracking sites like Technorati and Flickr could be of great help to PR professionals,” Esther Dyson, Editor, Release 1.0, for CNET Networks said.

Gear up for the New Media explosion

“Watch out! The New Media is seeing a spectacular rise!” That message has been loud and clear in several posts of this blog.

The New Media explosion is round the corner, if the NRS findings are any indication.

”NRS revealed that the number of homes taking up cable and satellite connections is on the rise,” agencyfaqs reports. “For instance, the number of C&S households has increased to 6.8 crore from 6.1 crore last year. The connectivity in homes are also on the rise, be it in the form of computers, laptops, mobile phones or Internet. In fact, today there are more than 2.62 crore homes with mobile owners, which is a huge number compared to 0.66 crore last year.

“An important inference, therefore, is that consumers today access content from whichever medium that is available to them in the depth they need and at the time, manner and place they want. Media consumption habits have also changed over time. Readership of dailies, viewership of television, listenership of radio and mobile usage are all on the rise, whereas cinema viewing and magazine readership have declined across India over the last year.

“Looking at the overall mass media reach, it appears that the reach of conventional media such as press and television is narrowing down and other media (mobile, Internet, and radio) reach is on the surge.

”Another interesting aspect was NSRC and AC Nielsen’s finding on media reach in various age groups in SEC AB: the most active media consumers are individuals in the 20-24 age group. They have identified five segments within SEC AB 20-24 individuals based on their varied media habits and affluence – Hi flying Metrosexual, Effervescent Info seeker, Me Too Cult, New Age Woman and Small Town Conservative. And among this segment of consumers, it is seen that the reach of other media is almost close to 90 per cent.”

Professionals in the media and communications sectors should watch these developments closely and gear up for the challenges before it is too late. As for public relations, the focus will be on New PR.

Power of new PR

From the West to the East to the Middle East…, the prophecies are getting bolder. The New Media will rule the roost, several experts have been predicting.

“People are talking about New PR,” says Alexander McNabb in CampaignME. “And no, it's not a reaffirmation of PR with added truth or something daft like that. New PR is about using the new communications techniques of today's world, the web and mail, RSS, blogs and wikis.”

Make no mistake. As we have been discussing in this blog, technology is bringing about radical changes in message delivery and reception. Unless we wake up now, our message will have no medium.

Mobile offices set to take off

The Hindu Business Line reports:

Mobile devices have become more than mere voice and data enablers.
With enterprises encouraging workforce on the move to access information anywhere, anytime, several industry segments are taking to mobile devices that have turned them to extended office sites.

The President of Enterprise and HNI Business Unit, Tata Teleservices Ltd, Vinayak Despande, said the company has partnered with the likes of Qualcomm and MobileOne, to offer a host of enterprise mobility.

Citing a Gartner report, Mr Deshpande said about 60 per cent of people would not be coming to office to do their work as work flexibility is gaining importance.

Addressing an interactive session to familiarise the corporates on how mobility solutions could potentially transform and streamline their businesses, Deshpande said sales executives are demanding customer relation management features on handheld devices and logistics and supply chain areas are witness to rapid adoption of these solutions.

Describing workforce on the move as Road Warriors, the telecom solutions provider sought to offer mobility solutions that could provide competitive advantage.
Be it through a data card that can convert the laptop into a mobile office, or a smart phone that can handle most of the work that a desktop could potentially offer, the demand is increasing.

The Vice-President of Tata Teleservices, Mr Uttam Kumar Soni, said enterprise mobility solutions have the capability to improve efficiencies and empower people on the move. In areas such as logistics, courier companies, airlines, banks and media companies, these solutions will have wide range of applications.

Pharma major Ranbaxy uses it for its field staff and Tata Teleservices has had enquiries from a leading coffee company for an online application that can track overall daily consumption.

Who killed the newspaper?

The Economist reports:

“A GOOD newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself,” mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species. The business of selling words to readers and selling readers to advertisers, which has sustained their role in society, is falling apart.

Of all the “old” media, newspapers have the most to lose from the internet. Circulation has been falling in America, western Europe, Latin America, Australia and New Zealand for decades (elsewhere, sales are rising). But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline. In his book “The Vanishing Newspaper”, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in America as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition. That sort of extrapolation would have produced a harrumph from a Beaverbrook or a Hearst, but even the most cynical news baron could not dismiss the way that ever more young people are getting their news online. Britons aged between 15 and 24 say they spend almost 30% less time reading national newspapers once they start using the web.

Advertising is following readers out of the door. The rush is almost unseemly, largely because the internet is a seductive medium that supposedly matches buyers with sellers and proves to advertisers that their money is well spent. Classified ads, in particular, are quickly shifting online. Rupert Murdoch, the Beaverbrook of our age, once described them as the industry's rivers of gold—but, as he said last year, “Sometimes rivers dry up.” In Switzerland and the Netherlands newspapers have lost half their classified advertising to the internet.

Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world's general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004. Tumbling shares of listed newspaper firms have prompted fury from investors. In 2005 a group of shareholders in Knight Ridder, the owner of several big American dailies, got the firm to sell its papers and thus end a 114-year history. This year Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, attacked the New York Times Company, the most august journalistic institution of all, because its share price had fallen by nearly half in four years.

Blogs, communications and corporations

Stephen Armstrong reports in the New Statesman

Towards the end of last month a posting appeared on a web site called "Blog Republic - By the Bloggers. For the Bloggers". "Blog Republic is looking for bloggers who are interested in being paid per post," it said. "We're looking for motivated bloggers in the following areas: cellphones, broadband, travel, gadgets, health, stocks and blogging. We're looking for quality bloggers who can make insightful posts. The more you post, the more you earn."

This plea caused quite a flurry in the online world. After all, if blog culture has been about anything, it has been about sticking it to large corporations rather than taking their advertising dollars. Last year, for instance, Dell would not replace a faulty computer owned by the influential blogger Jeff Jarvis. He started chronicling the company's poor service on his blog buzzmachine.com under the heading "Dell Hell". His postings hit such a nerve that Jarvis was soon receiving 10,000 visits a day.

Sites attacking McDonald's, Starbucks, Nestlé, Nike and just about every oil company proliferate around the net. With a successful legal action against these vociferous individuals costing more in legal fees and bad publicity than the victory would be worth, blogs have been seen as an extension of consumer activism.

A poll conducted by NOP World Consumer in March last year found that 50 per cent of bloggers express opinions about a company or product at least once a week, while another survey, for Hostway, showed that 77 per cent of online consumers viewed blogs as a useful way to get insights into the products they were looking to buy. With all these opinions reaching their customers, companies felt like a boxer attacked by thousands of children -- staggering from tiny blow to tiny blow, unable to hit back but sure that, at some point, damage was being done.

This summer, however, something changed. In June, a disgruntled Land Rover customer called Adrian Melrose set up a site called haveyoursay.com to track the company's lack of progress in dealing with a complaint about his new Discovery. Melrose was soon attracting 700 visitors a day, which placed him at the top of a Google search if you typed in "Land-Rover Discovery". In July, the company caved in and sorted out his problem but then struck a deal to turn haveyoursay.com into a Land-Rover customer feedback forum.

Suddenly corporations are all over the blogosphere. Last year, BusinessWeek ran a feature, "Six tips for corporate bloggers", which highlighted a deal between the web services company Marqui and 20 bloggers who were offered $2,400 each to write about the company once a week for three months. At the end of June this year, the idea went pro with payperpost.com, a site set up by Ted Murphy, chief executive of the advertising firm MindComet….

Until now, the founders of the blogosphere have protected their online world. This was easy when blogging was a difficult and complicated business, requiring at least some working knowledge of computer code. Early blogs tended to be written by the highly motivated and technologically literate. They often argued that this was a new paradigm - "citizen-generated media", free from the restrictions of top-down "old media".

With the expansion in open-source software over the past 18 months, however, anyone can get involved. Many new bloggers are school or college kids just trying to get laid. For them, the purity of the blogosphere is irrelevant. The idea of getting paid to chat about a soft drink seems absolutely fine. Nicole Discon, a high-school senior from New Orleans, was paid by 7-Up to plug a new milk drink called Raging Cow on her blog Sparkley.net. She said the commercial connection didn't bother her and "now that I've delved into the whole advertising thing, it's something I really love doing". For youth brands, this teenage ambivalence is great news. After all, online is where their customers are.

Steve Henry, executive creative director at TBWA and the adman behind the "You've been Tangoed" and Pot Noodle campaigns, believes that in the next four to five years the accepted model of advertising will change completely. "You're only going to be able to sell in an opt-in environment like a shop or web site, somewhere people choose to be," he believes. "To get a customer there, you need to surround them - PR, stunts, ambient media, the works. Blogs allow your brand to become part of the culture, to become something that's talked about."

In June, the ad agency Starcom MediaVest recommended that its clients use conversation as an advertising medium. "Traditional advertising is not as effective as it used to be," says Starcom's research director, Jim Kite. "Word of mouth becomes more important, but we didn't realise how important it is. We are telling our clients that they should make word of mouth the focus of their ad campaigns."

Companies such as Procter & Gamble have started recruiting "brand ambassadors" - key social figures in a neighbourhood or community who will get paid to drop brand references into conversations or hold barbecues where they pepper the talk with praise for dusters or aftershave….

This month, the fledgling industry created its own trade body - the Word of Mouth Marketing Association. Now the hidden persuaders could be anywhere. You may not want to read ILikeCokeBlogger's views on soft drinks, but it's hard to turn away if your best friend recommends a soap powder. What's the price of free speech when opinions are suddenly for sale?