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?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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 worksâ€) 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.