Category: THE ANCHOR

By Bobby Pawar, Chief Creative Officer, JWT India

 

I think that there is no one idea that can bring about a change in advertising. In fact, that, I think, is part of the trouble – that we are looking at one big idea to bring about a change, whereas one has to look at a suite of solutions that can help us in doing our business better.

 

Everybody has an opinion on what is wrong with the advertising business today, and ready with a cure, but I think it’s this mindset we need to change. We need to have a holistic view of the situation we find ourselves in today.

 

We need to understand that the world around us is rapidly changing and there is a need to adapt to these changes at a similar pace at which it is changing. Like with technology being liberated there is a need to come out with client centric solutions using advances in technology.

 

If we are able to adapt to the changing consumer culture and technology, we might be able to deliver more value to our clients.

 

By Sanjay Tripathy, Executive Vice President, Head, Marketing, Products & Direct Channels, HDFC Life

 

According to Google, one of the three big changes which will impact how people view and use technology and internet is the need for greater mobility and leveraging its advantages in our everyday life. And within mobile, the one big idea that I feel will change the game of business in the long run is Mobile Commerce. Let’s look at the statistics. Growth searches from mobile devices are actually doubling every 12 months. We have more people in the country and world accessing the internet through mobile devices than the fixed web – the mobile has become the first device to connect a majority of the populace to the web.

 

Currently, 25% of all the web searches are through mobile devices. One of the reasons behind this is the high penetration of mobile technology and rapid adoption of smart phones with 3G enabled services. Gartner says around 500 million phones were sold in Q2, of which 154 million were smartphones. This suggests that the total market for smartphones is around 600-800 million pa. All the important regulators and key players in mobile technology are working towards more efficient mobile commerce in India. Mobile commerce also provides immense opportunities to retailers in areas such as location-based services, near-field communication etc.

 

I feel m-commerce is more than just a tool for financial transactions; it is an enabler for information transaction and sharing while on the move. Convenient, and how! Smartphone users are already doing first level mobile transactions through the buying of different paid applications. As smart mobile devices proliferate the world over, it makes a good business case for businesses to create a strategic approach to m-commerce that provides a world-class customer experience.

 

For that I would like to quote my favourite case study on this accord; More than 42 million mobile payments have been processed at Starbucks locations in the US, Canada, and the UK, over the past 15 months. That’s an average of almost 3 million payments every month. However, the total figure in December alone was 26 million. This alone showcases the true potential of m-commerce. With Google driving its Google Wallet aggressively and Apple unveiling its response through ‘Passbook’, it’s bound to scale up and reach critical mass sooner than later.

 

By Ashish Bhasin, Chairman India & CEO South East Asia, Aegis Media

 

In my view, the best service niche channels can do to themselves is to think of themselves as neither ‘Niche’ nor ‘Channels’. Just this One Big Idea can transform them as a genre.

 

What we refer to as ‘Niche’ is in contrast to channels getting more viewership. But that is with reference to a different universe. In its own space, when the universe is redefined as the audience relevant to that channel, it is not niche, it is mass for that universe of the target audience. So an English movies channel, catering to only those people who are interested in English movies, is niche when compared to the total TV viewers, and hence will have a miniscule rating of less than one percent, but it may capture 40 or 50 per cent of audiences that are interested in English movies. How is it ‘Niche’ for them?

 

Likewise, thinking of themselves as a ‘Channel’ is a mistake. They are an efficient way of connecting with special-interest consumers. In today’s highly digitized and personalized world, their efforts need to be all-encompassing, around the audience. Web, mobile, social media, activation, ground events, OOH and other means of interactivity have to be woven into their very existence, not as a promotional tool. They should see themselves as content creators for a special-interest audience and hence create content that transcends one-way broadcast.

 

Actually they are in a sweet spot if they get it right. We all know that the consumer is king and content is the route to the king. The so-called niche channels have both. They just need to think differently and tap into their strengths, and not get worried about their share of the total viewing universe.

 

As always, some will do it better than others and thrive, others won’t and will barely survive. The latter group will be those that continue to think of themselves as ‘Niche Channels’.

 

By Kanika Mathur, President (India), Digitas

 

In the future, consumers will rule completely. They will demand an experience on their terms; especially if they are willing to share who they are, where they are and what they are doing. At this juncture, agencies will need to enable a value exchange between marketers and consumers. To enable value exchanges between customers and marketers, agencies will need to offer more than one service; more than just creative or just technology or just content. The key will be the way in which agencies can combine strategic and creative services with UX, digital commerce and technology. The interplay between these skills will lead to blockbuster conversations and relationships in the online world. This complex interplay between diverse skills is the future big idea for agency success and we call it “creating digital chemistry”.

 

The ingredients for digital chemistry will of course be great creative thinking but with the ability to create not just visual beauty those users will want to look at, but interactive experiences that encourage engagement – supported by techniques such as fun ware and gamification. Copywriters teamed with illustrators will be replaced by storytellers teamed with UX engineers, game developers and big data analysts who provide insight into what users will want (before they know they want it). Strategists will need to understand how to use social networks to reach an increasingly mobile customer.

 

Digital commerce, with application development skills for creating customer-facing experiences will be requested from players with deep system integration skills capabilities of building digital commerce sites that transact thousands of secure transactions.

 

Lastly, acquiring different types of talent, particularly social, mobile and video capabilities that beg for screenwriters, journalists and game designers to join in will be paramount! All these ingredients will mash up to create a lasting bond between the consumer and the agency – this will be digital chemistry at work.

 

By Sanjay Shah, CEO, Blue Sky Brandcomm Asia Pvt Ltd

 

The greatest challenge for the OOH sector is in demonstrating accountability, measurability, and ROI. It is extremely important for gut feel to be replaced by science and mathematics.

 

Being able to demonstrate these to clients will be one of the greatest opportunities for the OOH sector. It will help agencies to bring in efficiencies where marketing budgets will work harder to achieve more or the same, with less rupees. It will enable OOH to demonstrate its ability to deliver on campaign goals and ultimately, to contribute to the clients’ bottom-line. It is admittedly an opportunity and simultaneously, a challenge.

 

It is my firm belief, the day this medium becomes authentically measurable and the ROI can be calculated, this medium will rule.

 

Spends in the medium will grow by leaps and bounds and more and more categories and brands will start using the OOH medium. The conventional outdoor medium will grow in stature and will be more often used as the lead medium for launches and repositioning… And the medium, which had a non supportive attitude all this while, will now shift to be an infrastructure support industry. This will definitely help the medium get an industry status, which is strongly lacking today. Once this happens, the whole outlook towards the medium will change. Media owners will not at all hesitate in ploughing back their revenues into the medium to make outdoor properties look aesthetically good and pleasing to the eye and which would easily enhance and blend into the environment

 

This would ensure that the OOH industry has a robust infrastructure, disciplined and organized to meet top-notch global standards and continue to support the booming Indian advertising landscape.

 

By Avinash Kaul, Chief Executive Officer, ET Now, Times Now and zoOm

 

The youth segment always adapts much faster and continuously demands more. Nothing can satiate their appetite for long and we as content creators need to continuously re-invent ourselves to keep their interest alive.

 

“You can buy attention (advertising). You can beg for attention from the media (PR). You can bug people one at a time to get attention (sales). Or you can earn attention by creating something interesting and valuable and then publishing it online for free.”

 

Let’s get the most obvious question out of the way: Has television viewing undergone a paradigm shift? Yes, and it is more true for the youth segment than any other age group. TV trends change with every generation and more often than not, the youth segment is the initiator of this change, lapped up by everyone else in due course.

 

The youth segment always adapts much faster and continuously demands more. Nothing can satiate their appetite for long and we as content creators need to continuously re-invent ourselves to keep their interest alive. This has been true for the entire history of television. Game shows, reality television, fiction, all have had their time in the sun with the Indian youth and while we strive to find the next content genre our audience will be hooked to, there is an altogether different change, revolution if you may, driven largely by the youth which is taking the industry by storm. Every channel worth its salt is trying to decode this new creature called ‘Youth on Social Media’.

 

You must have already read about it on the net, heard colleagues furiously debate over it, speakers at seminars glorifying it and have a patchy picture in your mind on this new phenomenon of “Television + Social Media”.

 

The basic fact still remains that your content needs to be interesting enough for your audience to keep coming back to you. So what exactly has changed?

 

The way youngsters consume content and the platforms they use for it have changed. We put up a teaser on our Facebook page about an exclusive news piece on our show Planet Bollywood News. One of our fans tunes into the show on-air, likes what he sees and immediately tweets about it. His friend reads the tweet, gets intrigued and checks zoOm’s YouTube channel for the show video. He shares the video on Facebook for his friends to see and before you know it, the video has been viewed thousands of times. In the process, you have reminded your existing viewers about the show and also acquired new viewers who will tune-in into the next episode.

 

This is just one of the examples of how you can use social media to drive viewers to your channel.

 

Another good example of on-air and online synergy is our new song request application on Facebook. Fans can dedicate a song for their loved ones with a Facebook message to be played on the show Your Likes every day at 11 am. The dedicatee gets a message about the dedication and the tune-in time of the show.

 

Social media also has brought about another major change: it is providing direct access to your favorite stars, anchors, celebs with a tool as simple as your smartphone. For example, fans can have a one-on-one chat with Omar Qureshi (anchor of The zoOm Review Show and a renowned journalist) on Twitter (@zoOmOQ) and discuss the movie he has reviewed immediately after the episode has been aired. All our anchors are on social media and we actively encourage a two-way dialogue between them and fans. We don’t just use platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for brand communication, but have established a strong feedback mechanism through these. We don’t just talk to our consumers, but we listen to them too. We make it a point to reply to all our fan messages within 24 hours. It’s essential that fans know that we care about their opinions.

 

Today, any channel which can successfully keep its fans engaged across all its platforms, and not just on TV, will be successful. zoOm has always kept its approach flexible and has been identifying trends early and adapting successfully. zoOm’s success on-air and on social media is testimony to this.

 

While we are the largest player in the youth music genre, both in terms of reach and GRPs, we are also the no. 1 brand on social media in Asia with over 660 million video views on YouTube, 2 million+ fans on Facebook, 4 lakh+ on Google+ and taking giant strides on Twitter, Pinterest, SocialCam, Tumblr, Hulu, Dailymotion and the likes.
I would like to leave you guys with just one piece of advice: Focus on how to be social, not how to do social.

 

By Ajit Varghese, MD, Maxus & Motivator – South Asia

 

The radio industry doesn’t need an idea as game changers. It needs content differentiation that has to do with govt licensing and red tape. Radio as a medium is very apt for fun and excitement about things happening very locally, a medium that could be used as a local solutions provider for consumers and offer differentiated and innovative means to connect with local consumers.

 

Unfortunately, the medium is stifled with song-based content, which therefore is losing relevance in the mind of both the advertiser and the consumer.

 

By Khalid Jamal, Principal Consultant & CEO, Orion PR & Digital Pvt. Ltd.

 

The luvvies at Cannes Festival 2012 lapped up the celebrations: JWT, an ad agency winning the lions at the Cannes for PR. Many, however, lamented the lack of big ideas in PR campaigns by PR agencies.

 

The truth is otherwise. For, very often the distinction in functional expectations from advertising and PR still remains largely blurred in marketing fraternity. Cannes is just an example of the undercurrent.

 

The big idea in PR cannot be an admirable piece of brilliant artwork. It’s got to be ‘idea in motion’ that communicates in real-time consistently and convinces all stakeholders of the conviction, viability, fairness, vision, social conscience and fair-play of a brand, an enterprise, a management and its practices, a social movement or a government or for that matter any institution. This is where the dichotomy of ‘big idea’ in PR lies.

 

Given the flux in operating environment with heightened consumer activism, newer legislations, vociferous pressure groups and active social media enthusiasts the big idea in PR will have to be in excelling the brief beyond the ‘column centimeter coverage’ syndrome and engaging the stakeholders with credible communication that could contribute to building credibility.

 

Recall how Narayan Murthy of Infosys and herbal queen Shahnaz Husain leveraged PR: Murthy on front pages of all dailies seen playing golf with the visiting Japanese premiere or Shahnaz’s enterprise featuring on CNN International and her ‘Shahnaz Live Make Over’ Shows in Southern cities that enhanced market share. In contrast, millions were poured into building a now-defunct hospital by Dabhol Power Company which elicited the media headline: “Hiding behind the hospital”. No wonder, the company has since shut shop.

 

Today, the ‘PR idea in motion’ must reflect tactical moves that intervene and foster a conducive operating environment and resolve conflicts and contradictions, democratically.

 

By Vandana Das, President, DDB Mudra Group

 

The biggest ideas will strike us in social media. Proximity-based social networks, understanding chatter, mobile learning and new benchmarks in ad measurement will storm the whole place and help marketers get into the consumer’s skin.

 

Communication will evolve by leaps and bounds. We’ll start talking to strangers in a big way. Proximity-based social networks will allow you to identify like-minded individuals. As you ride a bus or attend a seminar, your smartphone will identify individuals nearby whom you should probably know. Our smart devices will become a way to meet new people in realtime, taking networking, hiring, marketing, dating and other interactions to the next level.

 

We’ll focus on understanding chatter (those billions of data points being created by people every day as they interact online, with each other and with a multitude of websites and social networks) and understanding how chatter can be used to improve customer relationships and drive sales.

 

With millions of smartphones in and the tablet market taking off, companies will invest in mobile learning in order to reach customers.

 

Measuring the success of advertising and marketing campaigns has historically been a challenge for marketers, most notably with print campaigns and television. With social media emerging as an appealing channel for many brands today, marketers are likewise faced with similar challenges with regard to tracking campaign success. In time to come we’ll see more marketers tracking the ROI of campaigns like these through call tracking. TV and print will grow distant, social media will come closest. Life will be digitized.

 

From the consumer’s skin in the real world to the consumer’s skin in the virtual world… that’s where we are headed.

 

By Abhishek Karnani, Director, Free Press Group

 

There was a time when media was a fortress that new entrants could scarcely breach. You could pour money, might and all kinds of material but the entry barriers were so high that media empires of yore remained secure.

 

Suddenly, all of that is history. If media was an empire, it now finds itself in a sunset setting. You need nothing more than an internet connection and an ordinary phone to breach the biggest and the best. And the best itself is a value proposition that few can define in a market that is as fragmented and diverse now as it was monolithic and narrow earlier.

 

In the US, one of the biggest stories of the Presidential election was Mitt Romney’s secret remarks at a GOP fund-raiser where he said 47% of Americans did not take responsibility for their lives. That story was broken by a magazine called ‘Mother Jones’, which is a not-for-profit and offers “smart, fearless journalism”.

 

Now ‘Mother Jones’ is not a media name many would have heard, certainly not here. Yet, it shook the race for the most powerful office in the world like no other story in recent times. More such examples will follow, and we will increasingly see them play out.
This is because the big new reality of the media today is that there is no big media and small media. Small can work like big. Big can and does become small. We see it happen every day.
This is change for the good. It offers people a whole new world of ideas, thoughts and stories in a culture of diversity, openness and equal opportunity. It opens exciting new doors of opportunity for media groups like The Free Press Journal, where we are uniquely placed to meet the new market realities. We are agile, light and specially focused on the common man, and we are seeing a boost in our readership like never before.

By Prasad Shejale, CEO and Co-Founder, LogicServe

 

“Customer is King” may be an old adage, but stands accurate. The next big idea in online commerce is identifying and catering to the unique needs of the king, without having him spell it out but by simply observing and gathering his online patterns with Big Data. Big Data is user’s online behaviour gathered from everywhere – sensors accumulating climate information, social media sites, pictures, videos, purchase records, GPS signals, browsing history to name a few.

 

Big Data is big, fast and real-time and making sense of this data via thorough analysis gives invaluable insights to customise customers’ shopping experience with you. Analysing the Big Data, attributing the findings to various layers and bucketing this information enables marketers to smartly link up their product offerings. This must NOT be confused with re-marketing, it is beyond all that. With Big Data one can tap the user’s nerve from moment to moment. It can drill down to this: A person comments on a photo from Kerala stating ‘he wishes to visit this place’ on Facebook and is currently located near a travel vendor listed on your website; he can be shown a relevant ad about this destination and packages offered by your vendor. Big Data makes online marketing more intuitive and aids in predicting user’s next purchase. To a marketer it gives freedom from predetermined report based on sampling of limited TG that fails to give a holistic picture to base a strategy on. In the age of automation Big Data caters to the idea of ‘customer ecstasy ‘, where his needs are catered to without him really asking for it.

 

With LogicServe’s legacy of building successful consumer brands in dynamic space of comparison and voucher, capturing and analysing Big Data has been a necessity. Hence, we have categorically built and tweaked technology to fetch meaningful data that can be effectively utilised with our partners to cater to consumer’s ever changing needs.

 

By Siddhartha Mukherjee, Sr. VP – Eikona PR Measurement

 

‘One’ Measurement Currency: One central currency is a sign of health for any economy or industry sector. Today, our Public Relations industry needs ‘One Single’ (measurement) currency to create oneness and initiate healthy dialogues between corporates and their consultancies. First create health by converging and creating ONE central PR Measurement system…wealth will automatically follow! Let us no longer boast of high annual growth rates on small denominators.

 

PR’s ‘Big’ Leap: Don’t do PR just because that is simply the norm or if you are not clear about the business objective. Here is where PR should take the next Big Leap to ‘Reputation’ building. Mere sprinkle of your brand’s name in editorials does not create reputation…instead reputation is all about what brands emote for each stakeholder. Very few corporates though, but good to see them getting internally aligned with the single objective of creating reputation!

 

The ‘Idea’ of doing PR for PR and with numbers: The internal customers of the PR desk want proof that PR works, can be measured and hence involve top management. Here is where the PR machinery should do PR for PR with Data/Measurement. Even after more than two decades, we are yet to weed out the elementary yet, cancerous EAV evaluation from the system. The industry needs organic growth which is possible only if: a) We do our PR b) For this, use self devised scientific metrics…not those that have been copy-pasted from advertising! Get an idea…think long term!