Loading ...Kamla Bhatt sent me a link to this post, and it sparked off a few thoughts. What has worked well on the internet so far is performance advertising/ lead generation. Most people who are looking to building a business around enhancing brand presence on the web seem to be taking a PR oriented route to it. Unfortunately, PR budgets are not large. I think there is an opportunity to take another route.
Someone needs to figure out how to dip into the brand advertising pocket of companies for the internet. Few interesting observations:
- When we talk to using blogs or videos or other social media for enhancing the image, its not just PR - PR often tends to promote people at expense of brands - “Boss’ day out”, “What am I reading” - these are personal profiling tools and seldom help the company/brand. Social media promotions (i promise i will stop using a new term very soon) cuts away from this, and actually helps project the brand
- Conventional PR is about influencing a medium on which one has very little control, and hence very little promise of delivery. On the internet, the understanding and control of medium is far higher, where agencies can take ownership of deliverables such as reach
- Given the large spends on brand advertising, metrics obviously play a big role - be it reach/frequency, share of voice, top of mind recall, etc. PR has relatively fewer (column centimeter of coverage!) Internet has the power to support brand-relevant metrics - again, the trick is not to get lost in clicks and impressions, but to have metrics that are relevant to brand salience, positioning, competitiveness, etc.
Most entrepreneurs looking to do the above are taking a PR approach (retainer fee, best effort basis, tap PR budgets). The opportunity is far bigger, and requires an approach to build a system that enables large scale execution and measurement. Bringing brand advertising on the net in significant magnitude can be a big business. Any takers?
Emergence of any new media will have to begin by acknowledging the pre-eminence of 10 second TVC in advertising. So I think the hunt for that *other route* (or “what works”) should begin where the power of TVC ends. Despite its ubiquity, TVC’s popularity is on the wane because of (a) diversity of choice (b) emergence of new media (c) dimming content creativity. Any rude interruption is scotched by a flick of the remote.
Cricket is already fading. People can watch only so much cricket. Broadcasters can’t bet big time/money if Team India is not sure of making it to the finals. Ask Kunal Dasgupta of SET Max. Has got hishands full already.
SM can begin by addressing that gap. Let’s map a trait outline. Interactivity is the biggest upside. Thank you. Now what other traits? Non interruptive, opt-in / opt-out features? Pop-up blockers already do that. Fine.
Personalized content? Guess it does a world of good to your ego. Go feel like a celebrity. What if you have the power to replace Shah Rukh Khan with yourself in that jazzy video? Or how about a jam with Maria Sharapova? Fire up the aspirations of your wife/girl friend/sister/mother trying out Nakshatra Jewellery/Christian Dior accessories replacing Aishwarya Rai? Won’t you be tempted to try out every snazzy video, there is? It could drive mass adoption for that very feature. You can build a lot on that later.
Who doesn’t want to play a celebrity? Brands, for their part, get your complete attention. What more do they want?
I am sure you don’t need a rocket scientist to do this.
The Internet is just another media delivery platform. Once that sinks it, it essentially becomes much more simpler to see and gain perspective as to why certain things work and certain things don’t work.
Now, if the Internet is a media delivery platform, then its also one that has the furthest reach (beyond the reach of print media, and far beyond the reach of television channels) and for a price point that can only be dreamt of.
If the world indeed is flattening, then the above statement is absolute good news.
There are also a host of features that the internet as a medium offers, which no other medium offers. The ability to track, offer analytics and do conversion ratio. Imagine being able to do what folks who are obcessed with their personal sites and set all those conversion goals in google analytics could do if instead of a “personal brand” it was a product or corporate brand to be built.
The possibilities seem endless and like Alok says, quite untapped, but you are not going to bite that cake yet unless you offer to jump through some hurdles.
The internet advertising model, because its based on a per Impression/Per click (read transaction) model - and the case of the latter being the higher - is going to dampen the entire symphony notes that we just composed.
Building a brand is about creating awareness and making that connection. Its a lot of intangibles, which with a little help from analytics can help focus and drive very effectively. I’d give an example, that if I want to build Proto.in as a brand among Indian startups, I just need to run a campaign that focuses on those in India, and maybe in the zone that i’d target rest and ignore away all the others. That focus, and context will be worth killing for.
It will require a wee bit of loosening up from the side of Media Campaigners, but I think that will happen as quickly as a fortnight if one of the bigger agencies picks this up and runs with it.
Two Indian sites come to mind. Contests2Win - which did product placement so much that the ad was all inside the games themselves.
Mouthshut is another underused place - it’s become a place to bash products, but it could so easily have become a branding asset. Can still do, I think.
And then there are the attempts at branding by individual companies - like sunsilk-gang-of-girls and some others whose names I can’t recall.
I think if one has to go beyond the basic branding exercises of creating awareness, the web needs to get more transactional for Indian users. If I see a brand, I should also be able to get to a place where I can buy a product. The loop is almost never closed into a sale, in my experience, other than a “fill in all the following fields and a sales executive will get back to you” form.
Vijay,
You say “It will require a wee bit of loosening up from the side of Media Campaigners, but I think that will happen as quickly as a fortnight if one of the bigger agencies picks this up and runs with it.”
Online ad budgets remain skimpy because of weak WWW penetration into the masses or even target audience. For that to happen, we have to drive adoption first, let WWW be as widely accessed as TV and make it deliver something that TV commercials don’t. Everyone will have to pitch in here -low cost hardware (read innovation), high speed connectivity, personalized content, quality analytics, customer engagement metrics - all this won’t happen soon. It’s not in the hands of media planner or brand manager alone to drive brands towards online initiatives.
Krish, I dont think we need wide adoption as the TV. That’s the point. This is a seperate medium targetted at a seperate segment. And that’s the beauty of it. Focus.
And that Focus is what makes it attractive. Brands are built among people who have that extra cash floating around and thats essentially the segment which makes it very attractive for brand building.
Those are the guys who need to know about the Nikes, the BMW, and all the luxury products which require a “brand” to start off with.
Thanks Alok for the mention and the chain of thoughts it triggered in your mind.
Here are som reandom thoughts that went through my mind when I read your post. Some of the thoughts here have not been fleshed out and are kind of flabby…
It is funny you should mention branding and the role of PR in harvesting new ways of branding since that is a topic that I have been exploring for a while and actually spoke to Rohit Bhargava (digital strategist at Ogilvy and a well-known blogger) who has a book out on branding and personality. In fact, I did a video interview yesterday about branding and personality and how sometimes personalities can infuse branding. I will have a longer interview with him in a bit on the same topic.
I wish there was a way to share what the Kodak head of marketing had to say about branding in this new, new world and metrics and measuring the success of an ad campaign in surprisingly new ways. In his keybnote address at AdTech in SF he spoke at length on this subject and mentioned how they are looking to segment their community of 70 million users to better reach them. But, he is probably an exception (as an CMO) who recognizes the changing paradigm and how to take advantage of it.
I see a shift in strategy esp among US PR firms where they are actively trying to educate and help their customers embrace new media tools to help enhance their brand. In fact quite a few big companies have slowly started to embrace corporate blogging and looking for ways to explore other avenues….but how do you measure the efficacy of the campaign seems to be a sticky issue. One Silicon Valley PR company that is a pioneer in this field pointed out that there is a lot of hand-holding and education that is required and quite a few of their clients are willing to embrace this new, new thing. But guess what most of them happen to be IT companies. The same is not true of traditional companies as the firm pointed out.
Thanks!
Kamla Bhatt
Some great thoughts here! Couple of points
- Krish - I think this has relatively little to do with penetration. Even in US, where the penetration of internet is highest amongst all media, I dont see “brand building” offerings in a systemic sense - including performance metrics that are relevant for brand managers.
- The reason why I posted this in “Ideas & Companies” section is because I think there might be a business to be built here. Its not just about whether individual companies have recognized this or not - there will always be early adopters and laggards. I think a smart entrepreneur who understands brand marketing can create a systemic offering here (”brand marketing on digital media”) with all the related aspects of media planning, execution, monitoring etc, and that could be a large business. I have either seen entrepreneurs trying to tap into performance advertising pockets (very competitive), or into PR budgets (very small),
Cheers
Vijay,
Your accent on “focus” is well received. It indeed is a strength that will offset shortcomings in internet adoption front up to a point. But not entirely because that still leaves out discerning audience (BMW aspiring villager) that could be many a valued customer for a brand.
Alok,
I feel incentive for innovation will be sub-optimal if the medium has limited latitude. Novelty factors may propel marketers towards a new media early on, but if substantial part of target audience elude it, media plans will get revisited.
“Branding” is what gives a vendor the spunk to charge a premium. You pay $200 for a pair of NIKE shoes not for just what goes into its making. There is a Michael Jordan aspiration attached to it. I feel innovative business models that support brand building over the Net will materialise rapidly if adoption rates improve - all over the world.
Lets effectively target the BMW aspiring Urban Indian first. As for rural India, not many people have the answers - even the government - as to how to get to them
*is reminded too much of work, as it is*
There is no doubt that this is definitely a significant opportunity and i really like a term that Vijay used, Focus. I think that is a key aspect on the Internet as a branding mechanism as against other traditional media. I think the ability to be able to perform targeted,localized brand building and metrics measurements is definitely not possible in other mediums at the same level today. If you factor that in, even though the market size may not be at the same level the impact could be considerably more.