MxMIndia

Category: THE ANCHOR

  • Networking and meeting people in different areas of expertise can help you when you need information, says Yogesh Bansal

    The Anchor: 8 reasons why professional networking sites are important

    By Yogesh Bansal

     

    In today’s competitive scenario “Who you know” is as important as “What you know”. Meeting people and making positive connections can benefit you in different phases of your professional life, as you climb up the ladder. Networking and meeting people in different areas of expertise can help you when you need information on something or may even land you into job in the future.

     

    Professional networking sites enable you to:

    1) Control your online identity

     

    2) Educate yourself about the current market scenario which is of utmost importance, besides your qualification

     

    3) Gather a good understanding about the market as it is important to inculcate or polish the skills required

     

    4)  It lets you collect information about your prospective employers and build the right industry contacts

     

    5) It helps you understand the practical aspects of a profession and prepare your behaviour and mind for the forthcoming challenges

     

    6) Let’s you have an opportunity to interact with the professionals in the market

     

    7) Encourages you to broaden your horizons, think beyond your limits and explore more career opportunities to understand where your skills could be best utilized

     

    8)  Increases your online visibility and makes you easily searchable.

     

    Yogesh Bansal is Founder and CEO, ApnaCircle.com

     

     

  • When bigger agencies win, their folks celebrate. And when we win, the world celebrates. Enjoy being small yet lethal, and let your work score BIG, says Viral Pandya

    The Anchor: Viral Pandya on 5 ways how a small ad agency can beat the biggies

    By Viral Pandya

     

    1. Shut up and work!

    Believe me, it really helps. While in bigger agencies, people spend more time in excruciatingly painful meetings, churning out bigger strategies and smallest of ideas, you can sneak your way through by working on insights and simplicity.

     

    2. More is less!

    Remember it is never about how many pieces of work you bring to the table. And how many bucks you spend. Rather it is about coming up with a single piece of work that can do wonders for a brand, and of course for you too.

     

    3. All it takes is an idea!

    People will only remember you for your last work. So it does not matter whether you are small or big. Come up with ideas that excite the hell out of people. A great work will never get unnoticed. The same way, a bad piece of work will never get unnoticed, especially when coming from the bigger agencies. Isn’t it a win-win situation for tiny little us!

     

    4. Love your clients!

    As if they are the most important people in your life. Never forget that they have taken a great risk in you. They have given you an opportunity to prove your mettle. Don’t break their trust. Thrill them with great work. Take our instance; we share a great camaraderie with our client. We have enough and more freedom to work ingeniously. And together we believe in creating work that works. It is absolutely no surprise seeing our clients grow multifold. And that’s the reason we are winning international awards on our regular brand work, year after year. We always take our clients to each and every award show, and let them receive the awards. For us, looking at their faces glowing with pride is actually far bigger than the award itself.

     

    5. Let’s win!

    For us, it is nothing but Guerrilla warfare. When you are small you work as a tribe. A strong combative unit. You are not afraid to lose. You are like Spartans taking on the might of big. Lead from the front. Take your team forward, and the glory shall be yours. People love to support the underdogs. Nobody expects anything from you. When bigger agencies win, their folks celebrate. And when we win, the world celebrates. Enjoy being small yet lethal, and let your work score BIG.

     

    Viral Pandya is Chief Creative Officer at Out of the Box.

     

  • Mitrajit Bhattacharya talks of ways of measuring a magazine's performance

    The Anchor: Mitrajit Bhattacharya on 5 areas where print (& mags in particular) need to upgrade their knowledge

    By Mitrajit Bhattacharya

     

    1. Use of econometric modelling to measure advertising impact on sales

    Econometrics can be used to reveal the effects of diminishing returns, ad memory decay and optimisation of media strategies.

     

    2. Measurement of magazines’ social media engagement and building overall engagement indices

    How can social media provide competitive advantage in an undifferentiated market? How tone and themes of conversation can help guide social media strategy? How does social media engagement compare with more traditional measures of engagement?

     

    3. Research into branded content and do’s and don’ts about how to create great advertorials

    Advertorials, whether in print or web, are valued, appealing, well-read if strategised well.

     

    4. Usage and attitude towards iPads and how users experience advertising and content on the device

    How is the consumer engagement with digital devices? How does an iPad user use the device? How many apps do they download? Free apps vs paid apps and usage and attitude towards them.

     

    5. How tablet in-app advertising works

    Learnings to increase the marketing efficiency of in-app ads on tablets.

     

    Mitrajit Bhattacharya is President and Publisher, Chitralekha and Vice-President, Association of Indian Magazines

     

  • Cartwheel CEO D Ramakrishna on six of the very many things that will never change in adland

    D Ramakrishna on 6 (of many) things that’ll never change in advertising

    By D Ramakrishna

     

    1. Creatives will come late to work, (except for those who slept the night in office)

     

    2. Clients will say, ‘ we need it yesterday’

     

    3. The client will want to meet at 10 in the morning. The agency ‘sometime in the second half’

     

    4. Everybody will be jealous of how much money the photographers, directors, and voice over artists are making.

     

    5. The audio mix will never be right.

     

    6. And of course, the client will say, ‘make the logo bigger’.

     

    D Ramakrishna (Ramki) is the CEO at Cartwheel Creative Consultancy

     

  • Mobile advertising in current scenario remains a part of overall digital mix, rather than a standalone platform and therefore advertising spend is limited by overall media budget mix, says Sunny Nagpal

    The Anchor: 5 reasons why mobile advtg has a gr8 future

    By Sunny Nagpal, Co-Founder & MD, Httpool India

     

    We’ve come a long way since Martin Cooper invented mobile phone in 1973 as a portable handset, to early 1990s when they were actually available in the markets, or in 1994 when the first SMS was sent in Finland to 2000 when mobile advertising made its debut and still grows strong in the marketing scenario of the world.

     

    We have seen an exponential growth in mobile web and app usership, through the release and distribution of smart phones and open platforms like Android.Mobileis shaping up as an exciting medium for advertising and we have seen that the smart brands have already taken these first green shoots of growth as a sign to start investing in the medium.

     

    Mobile advertising, undoubtedly, has a great future as it begins to prove itself as the most effective digital advertising channel.

     

    Here is why the advertising on cellph”one” will be the most preferred one:

     

    1. One on One: (Personalized, location sensitive)

    One of the major reasons why mobile ads are so effective is largely due to mobile phones allowing advertisers to target their audience with messages that are intended just for the user. Users generally pay more careful attention to mobile ads (example: banner on a notification page). You see people adding utility and productivity tools to their phones in a very personalized manner. Advertisers have already started focusing here, creating such tools, applications which work as enhanced sponsorship and works well with mobile because it is such an intimate environment – people are looking to add more content to their phones and personalize them.

     

    Moreover, a mobile phone can provide information about the user’s movement and changing location that can be used for timely offers, such as a discount at a store or at a cafe in the food court as a user enters a mall.

     

    So, the next big thing is location-based marketing. This means the example that is often cited of someone walking past a coffee shop and getting a text telling him to come in and have a cup of coffee is not far off. Advertising for small local businesses can have a much stronger business case.

     

    2. Many to One: (Manifold Messaging)

    There are multiple points to deliver your brand messages, unlike other media, mobile advertising has a much richer menu of options to offer advertisers: voice (visual voicemail, ringback tones, missed call notifications), text (SMS), multimedia messaging (MMS), mobile Internet, billing touchpoints, handset clients and more.

     

    This allows an advertiser to create a trail with multiple messages delivered to same user through above means. However, here the attempt should be to deliver them as seamlessly and non-intrusively as possible.

     

    There are ads that can come across as real-time situations such as billing and location triggers, and can be highly effective in meeting immediate real-life needs and maximizing response rates.

     

    3. Two sided one: (Interactive)

    The interactive nature of the mobile phone removes barriers to responding and purchasing through direct user response capabilities.

     

    As mentioned, mobile’s targeting technologies make ads more relevant to users, while also delivering successful campaigns for advertisers. With mobile, the ads can become more effective and relevant to the user when they can engage in a conversation with the person with regards to the advertised product or service. Mobile advertising allows for users to click/touch the banner ad and then is prompted to their dial screens with the number already configured into their dialers. This functionality is called Click to call.

     

    There are also possibilities to do campaigns with a click to SMS/Purchase/Download/View Video/Email functions as well, all depending upon the campaign objective. Instant interaction will make the lead more valuable and in result lead to an increase in sales.

     

    4. “That” one: (Targeted)

    A mobile phone provides extremely granular details about the user. This allows advertisers to know exactly who the users are in order to target ads effectively. They can thus target by Geography (Country, City), Carrier (Airtel, Vodafone and so on), Channel (category of content – Entertainment, Business Finance, Travel and so on), Device (Nokia, Samsung, Micromax, iPhone and so on) and Operating System (IOS, Android, RIM, Symbian).

     

    Because targeted ads are inherently more relevant, they are more interesting. Users pay more attention to them, and advertisers get a higher response rate. This makes the medium really cost effective and ROI driven.

     

    5. Everyone has one

    Well, we all know that by now! Very often, we see people having more than one mobile phone. While volumes are great and will give you that reach, it is the way people use their phones that is of more interest to the advertisers. Mobile phones today are central to many aspects of people’s lives, and are a key access point for most media consumption – information, entertainment, communication, transaction, self expression and socializing.Mobileis a huge part of people’s live already and it continues to evolve its purposes.

     

    Think most developing countries. Think India, where most cities are still fighting to meet their power needs. In such times, mobile phones come up as a vital source of information, utility and entertainment. Broadband is still to cover whole of India, but mobile providers with 3G have changed the scenario of Internet browsing. This will only get better with time.

     

    Historically, it is clear that people don’t like to pay for content. So then, we shall see advertising fund the mobile content as it funds TV, Print and Online.

     

    Mobile advertising in current scenario remains a part of overall digital mix, rather than a standalone platform and therefore advertising spend is largely contingent on, and limited by, overall media budget mix. However, this is slated to change soon, with most advertisers and agencies realizing the effectiveness of the medium both as a standalone and an integrated channel. We see major agencies appointing media planners dedicated to mobile, and it would be an understatement to say mobile advertising has a very bright future globally and in India.

     

    And for the advocates against the perception, here is what Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM in 1943 said: “There is a world market for maybe five computers”.

     

    Sunny Nagpal is co-Founder & MD, Httpool India

     

  • No matter how interesting the idea… If the technology doesn’t deliver, neither will the message, says Viren Popli

    The Anchor: Viren Popli on 5 things mobile advertising in India should adopt

    By Viren Popli

     

    It is not internet advertising:

    Don’t treat it like internet advertising – banners, spam, CTR, CPI. It didn’t work, doesn’t work and will not work.

     

    More co-operation needed:

    Handset manufacturer, content owner and telecom companies need to work together and maybe share 30-30-30 and give the tech/reseller 10.

     

    Don’t interrupt conversation:

    Use waiting times when we are staring at a blank screen, or listening to a dumb audio sound for advertising. Keep it out of my real conversation.

     

    Consumer is the king:

    Allow consumers to select brands he wants to hear from, and ads he wants people to see when they reach out to him. After all, many of us use brands to define our personality – give him a piece of the action.

     

    More engineers in creative agencies:

    Have creative agencies hire more engineers and put them on par with the “creative types” – create internal stress. You can’t separate the technology from the message. So no matter how interesting the idea… If the technology doesn’t deliver, neither will the message.

     

    Viren Popli is Senior Vice President – Strategy and Market Development at Mahindra & Mahindra

     

  • "Idea" is the constant factor which keeps production house smiling, says Hemal Thakkar

    The Anchor: 5 things to keep in mind while running a production house

    By Hemal Thakkar

     

    1) Focus on future is the most important as “change” is the only constant thing in the industry.

     

    2) Talent needs to be nurtured; nurturing means patience and patience means money.

     

    3) Teamwork is the most essential underestimated product; it’s the most crucial for functioning of any production house.

     

    4) “Idea” is the constant factor which keeps production house smiling, with churning of new ideas comes more work and this keeps everyone smiling.

     

    5) Patience is the biggest investment, so yoga is a must!

     

    Hemal Thakkar is the Producer/Partner of Playtime Creations

     

  • A brand is a sum total of the creative elements that go into designing the product, its packaging and its communication, says Sumanto Chattopadhyay

    The Anchor: Sumanto Chattopadhyay on 5 ways how creativity can change the image of a brand

    By Sumanto Chattopadhyay

     

    A brand is nothing without creativity. It is, in fact, a sum total of the creative elements that go into designing the product, its packaging and its communication. There are ways and ways of giving these elements a new spin – a new lease of life.

     

    Here are five examples of how a brand can hit the refresh button:

     

    1. Creativity can gloss over history: Volkswagen was launched by Hitler. But creative communication made the brand that rides the Beetle Bug one of the most lovable automobile icons of our times.

     

    2. Creative rebranding can make an old brand new and improved: When UTI Bank became Axis Bank – adopting a contemporary look and logo along with the changed name – it shed some of the negatives – ‘public sector’, ‘technologically outmoded’ – associated with the UTI label and made itself relevant to modern consumers.

     

    3. Not just products, but people too can change the image of their brand: In order to join Bollywood’s A List, Brand Karishma Kapoor underwent a total makeover. It took considerable creativity – that of hair stylists, beauticians, costume designers, film directors, publicists – to change her persona and transform her into one of tinsel town’s more premium brands.

     

    4. Creativity can make a brand attractive by putting it in a different slot in people’s minds: Cadbury’s told consumers to think about it in the same way as they do about Indian sweets – something you eat to make an auspicious beginning. Imaginative skill went into making people see an inherently Western product as something that satisfies a very traditional Indian need. And voilà  – Cadbury’s was reborn in a new avatar.

     

    5. Brand China wanted to replace the existing view of a grey, regressive totalitarian state with the image of a vibrant, young and capable nation. And so, at the 2008 China Olympics, it put on the greatest spectacle on Earth, taking branded event management to a new high.

     

    Sumanto Chattopadhyay is Ecd, South Asia, Ogilvy

     

  • The print companies need to realize that the main asset they hold is their relationship with their consumers and their readers, says Ashish Pherwani

    The Anchor: 5 ways to make print more relevant for advertisers

    By Ashish Pherwani

     

    1. To make print more relevant for advertisers, we’ve got to have more interactions and more engagement through either digital or activations on radio or any other vehicle. There needs to be a level of engagement built into the print offerings of media companies. Advertisers are looking at some kind of measurement which is not just readership but a measurement of a deeper level of engagement.

     

    2. You have got to make print more relevant to the reader, and therefore the one-size-fix-all newspapers being generated today may not be the answer and it may call for better segmentation and better understanding.

     

    3. Overall, the print companies need to realize that they are no longer B2B companies, that the main asset they hold is their relationship with their consumers and their readers. And therefore, they need to evolve into B2C companies, build databases with their customers as information and optimize that database for different advertisements.

     

    4. As youth moves away from its consumption of newspapers and moves towards different methods of consuming media, newspapers need to be able to figure out ways to retain those youth, either on some other medium or by giving them the kind of news that they want to read. Most publishers still believe in giving out news which they believe is relevant. Therefore giving youth-centric content is something that the industry needs to work on and youth is a category which most advertisers look forward to.

     

    5. Print companies need to proactively come to advertisers with innovations with products that resonate with their brands.

     

    Ashish Pherwani is Partner-Advisory Services, Ernst & Young India

     

  • Videos, app-based ads and interactive ads are just a few forms of advertising that we would like to see in mobile advertising, says Albert Almeida

    The Anchor: Albert Almeida on 5 things he would like to see happen in Mobile Advertising

    By Albert Almeida

     

    1. Ads beyond mobile internet:

    India is still a voice driven market. It would be great if consumers can hear an ad and make a free call rather than see an ad.

     

    2. Better targeting via location-based services and near field communication:

    Both these words have become full fledged buzz words in mobile advertising. This can be used for payment with your mobile device, pushing marketing or other content to the user’s phone, as well as many other possible scenarios we have not even thought of yet. NFC has taken off in many parts of Asia, and there is a huge potential for it in India as well.

     

    3. Richer forms of ads (beyond the banners and text ads) – videos – interactive flash based ads:

    The changes to the pricing strategies for advanced GPRS and 3G will allow more consumers to access mobile internet. With richer content, we would like to see a surge in creativity in the mobile advertising platform as well. Videos, app-based ads and interactive ads are just a few forms of advertising that we would like to see in mobile advertising.

     

    4. Social Integration in mobile advertising:

    With the surge in social networking via mobile devices, we would definitely like to see social integration in mobile advertising. This would also help create word of mouth for brands on social media.

     

    5. Advergaming on a mobile platform:

    Gaming has always had great pull and with mobile gaming on the rise, we would want more branded gaming content that can be offered for free in an ad funded model.

     

    Albert Almeida is the COO, Hungama Mobile

     

  • Comics are an essential part of growing up and for millions they continue to be an essential part of their lives, says Jatin Varma

    The Anchor: 6 reasons why comics are useful, essential and appeal to various age groups

    By Jatin Varma

     

    1. Everyone loves comics

    Everyone has read comics as they grew up and many continue to read them. From reading Chacha Choudhary to the Spider-man, they bring alive amazing characters and worlds. You can be of any age and you’ll have comics that will cater to your taste.

     

    2. Prolific, powerful & great literary works

    The world of comics has given us writers, editors and artists such as Neil Gaiman, Stan Lee, Warren Ellis, Harvey Pekar, Alan Moore, Art Spiegelman, Robert Crumb, Jack Kirby…the list goes on and on. So many of their creations are considered literary masterpieces, and some of the most prolific sequential art in the world. In India, we have people such as Anant Pai, Pran, Ram Wareekar, RK Laxman, to name a few, whose work has touched many people and continues to inspire so many readers and creators in the medium.

     

    3. Socially and politically relevant

    Comics are a very powerful visual medium. They put faces and images to various issues and topics facing our society, I can cite Joe Sacco’s Palestine & Amir-Khalil’s Zahra’s Paradise as examples of two really powerful graphic novels that highlight conflicts and injustices in different parts of the world, helping us understand them in much more personal way.

     

    4. Great tool for inculcating reading habits at an early age

    Comics are a great way of introducing children to the world of books. It’s the perfect tool for engaging children.

     

    5. Fun & Educational

    Some of the most popular comic books in India are based around our History and Mythology. Both Amar Chitra Katha and Tinkle are proof of that. Lastly, I feel everyone who reads comics develops a strong personal and emotional bond with them. Comics are an essential part of growing up and for millions they continue to be an essential part of their lives.

     

    Jatin Varma is the founder, Twenty Onwards Media and Comic Con India