OOH Media offers Flexicast to advertisers

What - Flexicasting as “the ability or flexibility to telecast brand communication on Out Of Home Media’s LCD and plasma screens as per the advertisers’ choice of city, location, target audience, frequency of exposures, creative and language”.

Why - “The need for a tool like Flexicast was felt due to heavy media fragmentation, less time spent on traditional media, and more opportunities and time spent out of home,”

Advantages - Flexicast are that it maximises exposure and media value to the advertiser’s target group, minimises media spillage, adds frequency to a TV campaign, adds audiovisual to a print campaign and the visual element to a radio campaign, and adds dynamism to an outdoor campaign.

“In a nutshell, Flexicast will make OOH TV media planning simple and maximise advertisers’ returns on investment.”

How does Flexicasting work?

OOH Media has a huge network from which the advertiser can slice and dice his communication according to his choice.

With Flexicast, advertisers can also practise proximity or vicinity marketing, where a client can advertise his brand or service in the area of his location for a multiplier effect.

Web 2 and why?

Tim O'Reilly, who is credited with coining the term way back in 2004 says: "Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the Internet as platform".

Examples. Sites like eBay, Wikipedia and Google Adsense derive their effectiveness from the inter-human connections.

Bart Decrem, founder of Flock, calls Web 2.0 the "participatory Web".

The technologies encompassed by Web 2.0 include blogs, tags, RSS, social bookmarking and wikis. With Web 2.0 type-sites, it is possible to combine data from various sources, even sources that you don't own control or even exist, and turn that into data that people can use.

Web 2.0 is not just about technology. It's really about the users, the people.

Corporate Benefits:

Web 2.0 lets you share and incorporate multiple voices— your customers, your service reps, your employees—who quickly take the product, service, or idea in a direction that you could not alone.

Web 2.0 can help build your brands, reach out to the users, engage them with your brand, and help establish loyalty.

EXAMPLE - Infogain, says: "We expect to leverage the power of collaboration by getting innovative ideas from individuals, who are free to send theirtechnology/business ideas to the our CTO office directly."

Risks - Data privacy, application security, information integrity and information silos. There is a chance that inaccurate, or occasionally even offensive, information may get out.

How viable would it be to make the newspaper free in India?

Hormusji N Cama, director, Bombay Samachar,

In that scenario, the costs of a newspaper would have to be covered by the advertiser. He said that newspapers will have to ask themselves what they are selling – an advertorial or news. “A free newspaper is nothing more than an advertorial,” he said.

Sunil Mutreja, president, Amar Ujala,

For any business house to come up with a free newspaper, it had to start with free newsprint. “Will anybody give me that?” However, he added that free newspapers could work if they were also niche targeted. For example, there could be a paper catering to the youth and backed by advertisers from youth brands, which could be distributed free at places such as McDonald's, Barista and Cafe Coffee Day.

Mutreja raised the issue of advertisers’ perceptions of a free newspaper. “Advertisers felt that a Re 1 daily would be read only by rickshawalas. Just imagine what the perception of a free newspaper would be!”

Rajiv Jaitley, president, marketing and ad sales, Dainik Bhaskar -

Stressed that there are no free lunches. The real question, he said, was whether the free newspaper would be going to the right segment and whether the advertiser would be getting the right value. “If you are going mass, it will be just wasted.”

Paulomi Dhawan, vice-president, media and corporate communication, Raymonds - dispelled the myth that a free newspaper is funded by the advertiser and said, “The advertiser is not paying for the editorial. The advertiser is paying for the value he gets. He is paying for segmentation and the response he gets.”

HOW WAS IT DONE IN SINGAPORE?

PN Balji, editorial director of MediaCorp, which runs the free daily, Today, in Singapore, disagreed with Dhawan. The eight year old Today, which has a print run of 300,000 copies, has been making a profit for the last four years.

Balji gave five reasons for the success of Today’s business model.

The first, was that it was competing with The Straits Times, which had been in existence for more than 160 years and which controlled the entire vendor market.

The second reason, he said, was to provide quality content that “had the look and feel of paid content”.

The third reason, he said, was to put up a double agent model at the top level. “A person who is the editor should be the publisher/chief executive officer as well, so that one knows where to draw the line in the marketing and editorial pull.”

The fourth reason, he said, was “while other newspapers gave the ‘what’ of news, Today decided to give the ‘why’ of news”.

The fifth reason, he said, was the distribution, which went beyond the underground train system. “We decided to go to universities, offices and homes.” Today created its own distribution network.

Asked how they prevented people from taking copies in bulk -

They had their own men giving away copies at strategic points. These men worked on a salary basis, rather than on a commission basis.

Summary : “paid model going free would not work. Business houses would have to find niches.”

An Idea

Advertisementindia.com - Through this portal, one can book ads in Indian dailies from anywhere in the world.

A unique web portal tries to bridge this geographical distance through a virtual gateway, offering a dedicated platform to those seeking to book their ads in Indian national and regional dailies from anywhere in the world.

Advertisementindia.com has collaboration with almost all the leading Indian dailies and vernacular newspapers to offer customised advertisement solutions to people across the continents.

"Our portal books all kinds of ads viz matrimonial, display, appointment, tenders/notices, financial etc and offers all options to pay over Internet, including credit/debit cards, net banking, PayPal and offline payment modes for booking ads online in regional and national newspapers," Agarwal added. It takes about five days for the ad to get published in the selected newspaper(s) after the payment is received by the company in Lucknow.

The portal also has the option for the user to create his ad on the website after the client has registered himself with the portal, he informed.

Whether there is still an audience for newspapers?? .

“As per Madison’s study last year, print improved its ad revenue share by 0.4 per cent, whereas television lost by more than 1.4 per cent”.

With more brands coming in, the advertiser can reach his target audience by going with two papers, say, DNA and Mid-Day (In Mumbai), at half the cost. The literacy wave had just begun and, in rural areas, newspapers are a good medium for advertisers “to look beyond wall paintings”.

Also raised the point that while in the 1970s, a litre of petrol cost Rs 1.30, a newspaper cost Rs 1.50. While the prices of petrol have gone up beyond Rs 45, the cost of the newspaper has remained static. The consumers were not ready to pay more, & newspapers had to depend on advertising to survive.

“No newspaper today will pull a story on a corporate as it runs on corporate advertising.... The core value of the newspaper is not to carry an ad. We need not lament the death of the newspaper. Instead, we need to lament the death of the ethics of a newspaper,”

Taking strong objection - The newspaper houses were themselves to be blamed for the situation, and not the readers or the advertisers. “For a long time, all had an unwritten rule to have 50-50 revenue from circulation and advertising. It’s newspapers who decided to price the paper at Rs 2 – the advertiser has not told you to change the equation. As for ad pricing, it has to be based on the value the advertiser gets and not on the basis of printing costs.”

Rajdeep Sardesai, editor, CNN-IBN, and Vinay Chhajlani, CEO, NaiDunia, agreed with Tejpal that at times, they had to work in tandem with the marketing team. Chhajlani even revealed that often, he received calls from the marketing team to stop a story or else he would lose an advertiser.

At the same time, quoting figures from the Indian Readership Survey (IRS), readership had dropped by 20 per cent and “the biggest fall seems to be in the 15-34 years’ age group. The group has lost more than two crore readers.”

Taking strong exception to the IRS figures - “Is the survey being done in the smaller towns? How are these surveys quantifying readership in these towns? Are the marketers looking at these towns?”

“Your first entry into literacy is not the e-paper. It is the written word. So, the newspaper is not dead as yet. It’s just the beginning,”
.

Class divide in BRANDS too in India?

Karisma Kapur’s story from low-grade flicks to big time tells us that a ‘mass’ brand can go ‘class’ if the right changes are made to all the elements of the mix. Viewers – who are celebrity consumers – are willing to make the change. Can it happen in the product or service brand world?

The Deccan saga shows clearly that it is critical for a product to be continuously upgraded and delivered to consumers if one wants to sustain it, even at the lower end of the pyramid. The market is ruthless – there are no sympathy purchases available.

But one question, albeit academic, is worth pondering: Could branding have saved Deccan? Given that Deccan as a brand has high awareness and created enough emotional equity, could rejigging of the price-value equation have helped its business viability? Could the brand equity built by Deccan have broken the shackles of its discount imagery and been used to provide an alternative to the mass class airline travellers in the Indian market? These are questions worth pondering.

The Karisma Kapur example shows that brands can be moved up, if managed well. However, the history of Indian branding in the product space reveals that what happens with people brands is not true about product brands. Products have successfully managed to move from class to mass. Yet, there are few examples of product brands that began by playing the ‘mass discount’ (or price warrior) game and later managed to climb up and become ‘premium and aspirational’.

Let’s look across product categories.
While brands have managed to upgrade their image and evolve together with their consumers – Lifebuoy is a great example, having moved from a carbolic, sweaty association to a desirable health imagery.

Brands in consumer durables have acted similarly. The discount segment has been often left to local and regional players who offer basic price driven products that give the lower income segment ‘category’ status rather than ‘brand’ status. LG and Samsung, two late entrants in the market, used pretty much the P&G principle – came in at the top and then expanded their footprint by offering lower priced products or by dropping prices to become more accessible.

Titan, which falls somewhere between FMCG and durables, has always been premium in imagery to the mass market. To keep its integrity intact, it has tapped into the lower income segment by introducing a new brand, Sonata.

So, what does this say about branding in India...

– Brands have historically addressed the middle class market because that is the group which has the spending power and yet offers great volumes.

– New entrants into categories have come in from the top, offering strong value propositions, and then extended into the middle market.

– While there have been cases of brands upgrading their image, a shift from the bottom to the top has not happened.

...and about Indian consumers?

– There is a strong price-quality equation in the consumer’s mind. Higher price means high quality and if the product delivers, brands can create desirability – and then extend down. Consumers buy into the brand values even if the product is not as good. The bottom market is always handled separately.

– In categories that drive status through label value, consumers like to leave behind their past as they move up. And the middle-lower class divide is quite well defined. Even FMCG marketers have subliminally recognised this. There is an unconscious yet clear caste divide in brand purchases and associations, too!

Branding in services, especially airlines, is distinct from the product branding of the 20th century. In the manufacturing world, brands are product plus advertising. In the service world, it’s the sum of product, advertising and experience.
India is a class-conscious society. And interestingly, this is acceptable to the classes. Observe the reaction of a middle class Indian tourist in London or Paris, if his tourist bus driver were to come and sit with him at his table: He would become uncomfortable. Yet, ask your driver in India to come and share a table with you in a restaurant and he would be reluctant.

Till then, the verdict remains that in a class-conscious India, there is a caste divide in brands too and upgrading has its limits. We remain a brand unequal society. Sounds hard, but seems true.

Cultural movement as a tool...

What - These are strategies designed for clients, where, instead of developing a brand idea and then communication and then taking it outside to the consumer, you first identify or look outside for a big social change and use that to develop an idea.

These are strategies designed for clients, where, instead of developing a brand idea and then communication and then taking it outside to the consumer, you first identify or look outside for a big social change and use that to develop an idea.

Example : Brand Toyota’s Scion cars, which targeted Generation Y. They asked Scion owners to play with the basic Scion logo and create their own logos to represent their lifestyles. The Scion owners could get a sticker of the logo they had created, or paint it onto their cars.

How to do cultural movements – by aligning with a powerful idea on the rise to define a culture, then by creating actions/ events/ communication to draw people into the idea. “Now this idea already exists, historically advertising has fabricated something. This is something that is true, it is something people already believe in. It is something that is already out there in the world, we are not creating it. It is an authentic experience.” You then use mass media to amplify this and also activate it through word of mouth, brand PR and content placement.

Convergance - Bane for the media professionals ??

Telecom companies in India will soon start buying over media companies. Convergence is a reality. Two things that are important in the media business to get the audience that ‘matters’ are brand and content. The line between telecom and media companies will blur and the former, with their soaring valuations, will try and buy into and buy over media and content companies.
We live in a digital convergence age and India is fast catching up with the world in digital social availability. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has proposed a hike in the foreign investment limit for cable networks from 49 per cent to 74 per cent. The TRAI estimates that Rs15,000 crore will be needed to upgrade cable networks to a basic digital format and an investment up to Rs64,000 crore would be needed to shift to the high-tech platform prevalent in developed countries.
The stage is set for major players to roll out triple play carpet.
As increasing bandwidth allows richer technology outlays, more and more content will find its way over the ubiquitous copper line into the smart phone, handheld or portable Internet device. But with wires horribly crossed, the auction of the 3G spectrum and the future of mobile telephony hang in the balance.

All this is fine but here are some implications for our media, entertainment and telecom industry in India:
• English and Indian language newspapers in the next 10 years will grow tremendously. The Indian language ones will grow faster. The twin reasons are increase in literacy and rise in affluence levels.
• Free newspapers will be launched next year and become a dominant player in the next five years.
• Media rates or advertisement yields will go up, as they are almost one-third of what they are in the world. Yes, the larger players will benefit.
• Indian media organisations will become multi-media and survive.
• There will be mergers and consolidation, and players who embrace and infuse capital and international best practices will survive.
• The professionals in this sector will cross from content platforms to digital distribution platforms.
• The industry will move away from dependence on advertising revenues to subscription fee-based revenues.
• Newer entrants such as Moser Baer, which is neither a media nor a telecom company, will emerge as large players in the domain of content and entertainment.
Telecom companies in India are likely to become bigger than media companies and then the following maxim for media companies would be true: “I started at the top and worked my way down”. I hope and pray for my media baron friends.

COURTESY: Anurag Batra , co-founder and editor- in-chief of the exchange4media group.

The art of tailor-made in-store commercials

Future Advertisement

What - “Just as radio jingles cannot be adapted to TV, TV ads also cannot be adapted to in-store TV. There is a need to create spots specifically for in-store TV for better effectiveness.”

How - You have to build interactivity; the more the interaction, the more the conversion. You have to create ideas which attract attention.” He added, “You have to understand the sensitivities of the medium and what it can and cannot do.”

Why - “It is a marketer’s delight since it is closest to the moment of truth,”

Challenges - It is an audio-less medium and can arrest the attention of passers by for only a short span.
“It is more consumer entrapment or consumer enticement because the consumer is already in the store and ready to make a purchase. So, no lengthy commercials.”

Examples –

Using multiple screens put up alongside an escalator where the same loop was played at different timings across the screens so that it looked as if Stallone was running up the escalator in the movie.

Mobile dealer in Canada, Fido, which put up digital billboards that interacted with each other across the street. To celebrate the holiday season and promote wireless video calling on Fido’s 3G High Speed Experience, the billboards featured a man and a woman each projected onto separate buildings or side by side on a single building. The two interact, throwing snowballs and making faces at each other.

How to adapt existing campaigns for in-store TV.

Plan A to turn an ad into retail branding is to cut out all the conventional elements of an ad like the opening, plot, product window, pack reveal, comeback and parent company logo. Instead use iconic messages, use arresting images, forget sound and dialogues as the only language in-store is ‘noise’, keep to a minimum length for the ad and make the brand visible early on, but again, sublime branding, because if there’s a big logo, people will know it’s an ad and they’ll walk away.”

Plan B was to “create a poster that moves”. If one has an interesting print campaign, they have the option of bringing it to life. One can create a moving poster as opposed to TV communication being adapted. Example - Cox & Kings print campaign created by Saatchi & Saatchi, where parts of the ad were zoomed into, nuances were brought out and a moving poster effect was created.

Good activation is “content in context”.

Advertising 1.0 was a one way push, ‘I talk you listen’, while Advertising 2.0 was the element of interaction, the digital revolution. But Advertising 3.0 enables consumers to play a role in the creation of content. “Interaction is about giving people the cues to find and engage with your brand with the tools they prefer to use.”

Example - Sony Bravia’s Color Tokyo Live Color Wall project, in which a live cam was set up to display the Sony building in Tokyo and Internet users could pick up colour from live feeds and commercials on screen using the dropper cursor and drop it on the building. The whole building would turn into the colour chosen by the user and this could be enjoyed live via the live cam.

SUMMARY

POP or point of purchase advertising is very important. This is the point wherein the consumer is nearest to the point of making a purchase decision and therefore, if the brand is present in the retail atmosphere and communicates to the consumer, it influences his/her decision making process. For e.g. in case of a new product launch, huge display banners inside a retail store helps people in noticing this new product and may generate inquiries.