IAMAI Digital Marketing Conference - Be open to learning and be prepared to unlearn
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Be open to learning and be prepared to unlearn.
The above line was by a panelist to describe ‘Digital Marketing’ in the recent IAMAI Digital Marketing Conference which was held in Mumbai on the 16th of March.
It was nice seeing a more than healthy turn-out and the ITC Grand Central Ballroom was actually packed to its seating capacity!
The first discussion was an inaugural session on – “What is and what can be?”
The panel boasted of the real biggies of the Indian Online scene: George Zacharias (MD, Yahoo! India), Ajit Balakrishnan (Chairman and MD, Rediff.com) and the session was to be moderated by J Murugavel (CEO, BharatMatrimony.com).
Mr. Murugavel mentioned the obvious benefits of online advertising and targeting benefits of this medium over other mediums. “Most spending for BharatMatrimony is done online – mainly because it can be tracked.”
He also questioned that how many agencies really understood the online market? And he gave an example of an agency coming up with a 500Kb banner for a small slot. “What really lacks, is good case studies” he added.
WATBlog view: I feel that BharatMatrimony still does a lot of spending in the non-digital world. I am sure most of you will re-call Outdoor hoardings proclaiming BM’s entry into the Limca Book of World Records! ClickJobs.com also from their stable came up with a rather cool TVC of Happy Kumar, which I think has bagged an Abby award. ClickJobs recently allocated Rs 7 crore to be spent over 3 months and I wonder how much of it would be spent on online advertising.
George Zacharias threw up a lot of facts and figures and mentioned the growth of the online advertising medium in the US & Europe.
Some interesting remarks that he made included: As a result of greater internet penetration - English newspaper readership will decline and so will the number of ads that we see on them, though this won’t affect the regional language papers much.
Another one was – Targeted video advertising in the future will threaten the TV.
Interesting note: 83% of advertising in local dailies is in the form of classifieds.
Mr. Ajit Balakrishnan was of course pretty happy with his co. as Rediff.com has been mentioned in Business Week as one of the 10 Indian companies one needs to watch out for (internationally). Though he felt there was a dearth of websites in India and that there is scope for lots and lots of more websites and portals. He was pretty bullish about blogging (Which is music to our ears – being a Web 2.0 Strategy Consulting co.).
The second panel discussion was on the Effectiveness of Digital Marketing.
The sessions was moderated by Mahesh Murthy (CEO, Pinstorm) who was at his funniest best and tried to get out some real numbers for us from the other panelists.
Panelists were: Leroy Alvares (Country Head, TribalDDB), Tina Singh (Head - Corporate Brand, ICICI Bank), Srinivasan Rajagopal (Head eBiz Special Initiatives, Citibank), Rajjat Barjatya (MD, Rajshri Media), Ashok Lalla (Director Internet Marketing, Taj Hotels Resorts & Palaces).
Mr. Alvares showcased 2 campaigns which proved the effectiveness of digital marketing. One was for TimesJobs – which was eventually getting them around 20,000 CV’s/day and the other one was a viral online campaign for MTV which got them 30,000 viewers within 12 hours.
Tina Singh revealed the basics followed while advertising online and the main advantage of the ROI being measurable. Some interesting numbers from her presentation:
Cost of customer acquisition online is 1/5th as compared to offline and cost of customer service is 1/10th to that of offline.
Internet transactions at ICICI have increased from 2% - 18% (Of all transactions) from the year 2000 to 2006.
Mr. Rajagopal had similar inputs but hardly revealed any real figures even after being pushed a lot by Mahesh Murthy. Mahesh ultimately revealed that one of Pinstorm’s financial clients allocated 68% to online advertising and 40% is purely to Search Engine Marketing. Pretty big numbers considering online spend of ICICI and Citibank definitely does not exceed 10% of their total ad budget.
Mr. Barjatya proudly announced that Hattrick was being released that very same day on their website – simultaneous with its release in Cinema Halls.
This itself speaks a lot about the effectiveness of the digital world.
Rajjat was not too upbeat about User Generated Content when it came to videos and his vision of rajshri.com was no where close to that of youtube.com. He mentioned that video ads on their website receive a CTR of 7-10% (This is bound to be a record of sorts).
WATBlog view: Something which baffles me is if one is commanding such a healthy CTR rate, why not pass the cost of seeing a movie or a music video to the advertisers in some way or the other. 0.99$ for a music video and 9.99$ for a movie is still quite a lot! Unless they are planning to cater only to the niche NRI junta forever.
Mr. Barjatya did reveal some interesting figures:
Vivah was released online and since its release it has commanded approximately 6000 views at a rate of 9.99$/view.
For ‘Main Prem Ki Deewaani Hoon’ – 2.25% of total marketing spend was reserved for online advertising. Only non-Indian IP’s were targeted for this campaign – primarily to target the NRI market.
For ‘Vivah’ – 12.5% of total marketing spend was reserved for online advertising and again only non-Indian IP’s were targeted.
“Digital marketing is fun, exciting and rewarding,” said Ashok Lalla. He also expressed the need for creating awareness about the potential of digital marketing because “it may seem easy but is not a child’s play.”
The Taj group primarily uses the Online medium to reach out to international tourists and they could be looking at using blogging to reach such an audience.
The remaining 3 panel discussions would be covered in the next post at WATBlog
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Ajit B. was bullish about blogging - from what perspective ? Could you elaborate a little bit on that ?
thanks
Pranav.