There were some very interesting discussions on the panels at the 3rd Digital Marketing conference organized by IAMAI in Bangalore today. On the panels were marketers, media agencies, ad networks, media tools providers and publishers. Income from Advertising is a cornerstone of many a consumer product business plan in India now a days and I thought it would be interesting to know where and why marketers actually spend their money.
The Reach of Digital marketing
Lets start with the statistics : 40 million internet users in India or 3% of India’s population represent around 55% of household buying budgets. However, compared to the $100 million (Rs 400 crore) of digital marketing spend in India, print and TV ad spends are way higher at Rs 17,000 crores, which is 40 times that of digital ad spends. The scope for reaching a consumer using digital media can be best guaged by the following Google trends where the maximum searches for products such as mobile phones and laptops are originating from India !
Engaging the Consumer
There were a few points and counterpoints made on this topic. Engaging the user is important but is performance of digital ads a point that is over stressed by marketers ? Digital media seems to be selling on performance more than print and TV campaigns. Almost all the panelists agreed that this is perhaps a wrong way to sell digital media to advertisers. I guess this has evolved due the inherent nature of the digital mediums which lends themselves favourably to measurements and metrics.
The probability of engaging with the consumer is one thing that most agencies seem to have worked out methodologies for, which includes parameters such as number of ad units running simultaneously on a page at a point in time, the size of ads, the nature of the publishing property itself and many more.
One point that came out strongly is that marketers and agencies need to understand and act on the complementary nature of offline and online campaigns. A good example was given for the K.I.L.B (Kam Insurance lene ki bimari) outdoor campaign. Intriguing as it is, viewers were even more surprised when google searches on K.I.L.B yielded rather misleading google ads on the search results page (since then, they seem to have disappeared since my most recent Google searches show related ads on the results page).
Making an Impact
An observation made by a media agency is that 16% of all Google ads served were clicked through. But does clicking through an ad suggest that it had an impact on a consumer’s purchase decision ? Making an impact on the consumer could require empowering a user to have unfettered communication with his contacts about the brand, enabling viewers to interact with the brand’s promoter and promoting the brand in a contextually relevant publishing environment. Interactive widgets and gadget ads with integration to a user’s social networks was being pointed out as a tool that holds promise.
So, what is the take away from all this for an advertisement centric business plan for a new product ? These seem to be points that are valid across consumer services segments
– Digital media is a fast growing but is still fledgling space for marketers. Most digital spends end up on portals.
– The nature of your web based property will decide what kind of advertising works the best on it.
– The greater consumer engagement your property or product can help produce and the greater the impact it has, the more are chances that advertisers will use your product to reach out to consumers.
I have always believed that there is no harm in perceiving digital media as a performance oriented media. But there is a problem in believing that digital media is good ONLY for performance related campaigns.
Largely this perception gets built up due to 3 factors:
1. Ignorance of Marketing Heads about digital media-
2. Inability of the Marketing Heads to innovate and experiment
2. Pressure to perform
Many large corporations still do not invest in creating a digital marketing department. Many large corporations are still headed by Marketing Managers who are not willing to unlearn and invest their time in learning the nuances of digital marketing.
This will change once the digital marketing spend reaches a threshold,thanks to new startups, and a burgeoning community of Marketing Managers who are wiling to experiment.
2009 and 2010 are two years to watch out for exciting new breakthroughs. More on this @ http://www.atomthought.com
The power of digital marketing emerges when it is considered in the context of the power of digital platform an organisation has and considers it as a seamless integration of marketing communications as well as customer information flows. Unfortunately most organisations in India see it largely in the context of digital technology and not ‘marketing based on digital value net for the digital market place’.