IAMAI Digital Marketing Conference - World Headlines: HINDI�d
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World Headlines: HINDI’d
The above was the conclusion to a panel discussion in the recent IAMAI Digital Marketing Conference which was held in Mumbai on the 16th of March.
The first 2 sessions of the conference have been covered in the last post at WATBlog. Be sure to check it out.
The next discussion was on: Creativity: "Is it an impediment on the digital medium?"
The session was moderated by Ranjan Kapur (Country Manager, WPP India) and the panel included K V Shridhar (National Creative Director, Leo Burnett), Chaya Brian Carvalho (CEO, BC Web Wise), Vivek Bhargava (CEO, Communicate2) and Priti Nair (Executive Creative Director, Lowe).
Vivek gave some excellent insights into Search Engine Marketing and explained what really is creativity when it comes to just a few words and how at times words are worth a 1000 pictures.
Illustration: A search string “Pink Bluetooth Headset” gets you to visualize a young girl, who loves pink, stylish, obviously has a pink phone and has money to spend.
Another example: Spelling mistakes are of 2 types – typos and moronic mistakes and how guys who make moronic spelling mistakes automatically label themselves as economically backward who are not worth targeting online. While someone making a typo (A typing error arising out of pressing a wrong key on the keyboard in other words an un-intentional spelling mistake) could still be targeted and such words would have a lesser bid value at Google.
Vivek went on to mention how one uses creativity to reach out to niche audience like say – Wealthy Saudis.
He even mentioned tactics used by Communicate2 to reach out and hire the best writers!
BC Web Wise has been doing some real neat work in the online space – they are guys behind the execution of SunsilkGangOfGirls.com and we recently wrote about a campaign of theirs – MyRegret.in
Chaya (CEO, BC Web Wise) talked about the 5 I’s of Digital Marketing. I (Time person of the year being ‘You’ – this refers to User Generated Content on the web), Infinite, Impulse, Interactive and Information.
Firstly the individual – who is linked to unlimited free space on the internet – every action while surfing is based on impulse – the interactivity is what engages the user – and the information is what the user ultimately gets.
According to Mr. Sridhar – the 2 things which drive the creativity in Digital Marketing are Ideas and Engagement.
He talked a lot about SecondLife and how even Leo Burnett has an idea hub in SecondLife. He went on to talk about UGC and how it is catching up in India.
WATBlog View: So is there a scope of an Indian version of SecondLife? Here’s a rather interesting statistic: 0.18% of the Active Users on Second Life are Indians. That comes to about 7000 users. (‘Active users’ is defined by SecondLife as users who have spent more than an hour logged on to SecondLife in the month).
Mr. Kapur said that V-Mail (Video Mail) was going to be the next big thing on the net scene.
Well the conclusion of this discussion was really cool. When asked what do you see the headlines to be in 5 years from now?
HINDI’d was what Mr. Sridhar had to say and almost the entire panel agreed with him! Priti was rather fascinated on finding videos of Bhojpuri songs uploaded on youtube and felt that India would definitely be ruling the net scene 5 years from now.
WATBlog View: That’s being rather overly optimistic, considering the fact the Mr. Zacharias (MD, Yahoo! India) had mentioned earlier in the day – that we are already a couple of years behind in the net scene. Anyways, let us hope that we can learn real fast and overtake the world soon.
The next discussion was: Brand Building: "How far can digital medium take you?"
The session was moderated by Mr. Neville Taraporewalla and the panelists were: Rahul Welde (GM Media, Hindustan Lever), Vikram Sakhuja (COO, Group M), Pearl Uppal (Director Advertising Sales, Yahoo! India), Sharat Jain (CEO, Dentsu Media Palette).
Rahul Welde started of by showing us a case study of sorts of SunsilkGangOfGirls.com and what it has done for the brand Sunsilk. He mentioned about how the community is now run by the girls of the community and there is no external interference. He went on to say that they had stopped advertising it now – but later when I asked him about the recent television ads of GOG Tv and promoting User generated video content, he mentioned that they were not advertising as heavily as before. I guess there are now trying to engage their 5,00,000+ registered users.
I asked him how difficult it was for the Sunsilk Brand Manager to push this campaign through and Rahul replied with a strong, ‘Very difficult’.
Pearl Uppal spoke about Yahoo! per say and what online advertising can do for your brand. Yahoo! India has recently launched their SEM Operations in India – though Google have a considerable lead, let us see how aggressively Yahoo pushes it. One thing in their favour is that Yahoo! is still extremely popular in India.
Vikram Sakhuja mentioned the Listerine innovative campaign on Yahoo! Messenger via audibles.
The conclusion was pretty similar to the previous sessions – The scope of the digital medium is immense and it can indeed take us quite far.
Final discussion of the day was Promotional Marketing: "Is digital medium breeding ground of new ideas?"
The session was moderated by R Sundar (President, Times Business Solutions) and the panelists were: Rammohan Sundaram (National Sales Director, Tribal DDB India), CVS Sharma (Sr Vice President, Arc Worldwide), Naren Chandra (Head - Marketing International Banking Group, ICICI Bank Ltd)
Naren Chandra gave some insights into internationally advertising online and how ICICI Bank tapped the NRI Market abroad. Special mention about the Shahrukh Khan campaign and how it worked wonders in Canada.
A rather interesting comment was: Even if countries like UK and the US command immense net penetration – Indians in these countries are not necessarily equally net-savvy. Another figure which caught my attention was: ING and HSBC both have online ad budgets of around 20 million dollars annually for UK alone.
The necessity of coupling the net with the mobile, print and TV was also emphasized upon – primarily because of the low internet penetration of our nation.
The conclusion was similar to all the previous discussions and in fact this is to be noted – Marketers are now asking other media and medium what is the ROI!
…and thus concluded the IAMAI Digital Media Conference 2007.
I wish there were more marketers and especially FMCG product brand managers who had attended this conference because it’s the offline world which needs to know that it is time to start switching online.
Being a foodie, I simply couldn’t resist adding this line – The Jalapeno Cheese balls served with cocktails were simply awesome!
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