IAMAI Digital Marketing Summit Delhi - A Strong Coffee Brewed?
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IAMAI’s Digital marketing summit was held at Delhi on 14th September. The summit was called Wake up and smell the coffee! And surely some very interesting insights were talked about and discussed at the IAMAI conference.
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Here is a session by session run down on what took place..
The first session of the seminar, ‘Digital marketing has arrived: Are you ready for coffee?’ was moderated by R Sundar, President, Times Business Solutions. The panellists in this session included Sam Balsara, Chairman and MD, Madison; Raj Nayak, CEO, NDTV Media; Dinesh Wadhawan, MD and CEO, Times Internet Ltd; Debraj Tripathy, Strategic Business Unit Head-Mobile Marketing, OnMobile; Gurtej Sandhu, Senior VP-Digital, Star TV; and Vivek Kumar, Head-Consumer Marketing and New Initatives, Sify Ltd.
The most impactful speaker of this session was Mr.Sam Balsara of Madison who put the session on course.
The key points discussed during the session were:
1) Online advertising was 1.5% of the total advertising market which is a pittance when you consider US which is 4.5% of an even larger advertising market and UK which is 14%.
2) Selling on ROI is killing Online advertising! ROI Based advertising is a very small part of the entire 17000 crore indian advertising market as most of it is brand building oriented and not ROI oriented!
3) Internet has to build brand building tools and sell the same to the right audience that is media agencies and media planners who control budgets.
4) IAMAI should work towards connecting the internet publishers and media sellers with teh traditional media agencies and media planners. Also Sam Balsara pointed out that such conferences should be invite only and should be free for traditional media agencies to visit and learn more on online and mobile marketing. Is IAMAI listening?
5) Currently the discussion about internet is happening among the internet industry its about time it got to be heard by traditional media agencies who should participate in the IAMAI Conference (Just to let our readers know when Mr.Sam Balsara asked the audience to raise their hands if they were a part of any traditional media agency only two hands came up showing the dearth of interest from traditional agencies in the online medium).
The second session of the seminar, ‘Creativity: Does it have to only be drunk from a cup?’ was moderated by Adrian Moss, Group CEO, Deal Group Media PLC. Panelists included Chaya Brian Carvalho, MD and CEO, BC Web Wise; Rahul Nanda, COO, Webchutney; Rajagopal Menon, COO, Contests2win; Bhavna Giani, Associate Creative Director, Mediaturf Worldwide; and Subhomoy Sengupta, Creative Director, Interactive Avenues.
This session discussed whether there was creativity prevalent in the digital marketing space.. Here is teh list of points discussed:
1) Creativity is prevalent but the clients aren’t willing to experiment.
2) Ideas are a dime a dozen its the execution where creativity takes the cake.
3) Sometimes creativity is as simple as putting ourselves in the consumers shoes. Subhomoy gave the example of a little girl beggar creatively making faces to earn 1 rupee.
4) Rahul nanda of webchutney gave examples of sites to show how creative the web could be. Besides a few indian sites most of the other example were international (clearly showing a dearth of creativity by indians if you ask me.)
5) Brian Carvalho of BCwebwise showed a pretty lengthy showreal of work by BCwebwise out of which she emphasized upon sunsilkgangofgirls.com. My question is besides fo sunsilkgangofgirls which was back by crores of marketing spend is there any other work that BCwebwise has done which has caught on purly due to creativity? .. Hmmm.. Anyone wanna answer that?
After the first two sessions there was lunch and all the sessions post lunch spoke about the same thing. How online advertising has to be promoted in traditional agencies and to marketers in companies. How online advertising show be a larger part of the media mix blah blah.. Pretty boring stuff if you ask me! I wish there was more to the summit than company promotion and tom toming about online advertising.
Here are some key points discussed from the last three sessions:
1) Internet can be used for brand building but television is here to stay for the next 5 years
2) Internet has to become more entertaining in order to make it a number one choice for marketers to spend money on.
3) Marketers still dont understand the value that internet brings to the table. They need to wake up and shake up the agencies inorder to get internet its due.
4) The last session was on small and medium enterprises and how they can use the digital medium for marketing. There was talk of everything from sem to b2b portals but no one spoke of blogs and how they can be used to leverage the power of content to market ones wares.
Conclusion: All in all i was pretty disappointed with the IAMAI conference. I felt the conference need to have a better format maybe more conversational. I felt the speakers just end up promoting their companies and there are no concrete steps taken on the discussions that take place. Also lots of disussion still revolved around banners, virals, microsites and search engine marketing. No one spoke much about mobile marketing or social media or blog marketing both of which are the most upcoming forms of digital marketing.
In conclusion id like to say though the coffee was strong in the morning it lost its flavour by the time the day ended.
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Yes Gang of Girls was backed by major media by HLL.
GOG when initially started was just another site for showcasing the Sunsilk product.It went through multiple updates and it was noticed that the interactive section was getting a huge traffic and the average time spent on the section was quite phenomenal and the simple site took up the shape of the largest Indian online community in that particular TG.
As far as the creativity is concerns, am sure you are yet to give a visit to the site.
P.S. Please visit http://www.bcwebwise.com
Why are you so concerned about Social media?, Mobile marketing is very critical though, But social media and blog marketing are not that much critical, its just like a pickle, that can neither be avoided nor given importance
Hey… Rajiv.. i was very surprised that you actually wrote: “has any work done by BC Web Wise caught on by pure creative.” I would have expected someone of your stature and understanding to be smarter than that. Any product requires marketing. Google would probably be the only exception of something that worked without any marketing. And Internet would be the only space where things do get recognised without marketing, and loads of our work has, much beyond what you can imagine. You should visit BC Web Wise when you can, and also look at our case studies. And not just our products but there are loads of successful case studies out there which may or may not have been written about in the press. Very disheartened that you could make such a flippant remark about a company like ours who have really fought and survived independantly in this industry. I think today we all need support from each other. While everyone has a right to their opinion, as responsible opinion makers, unfair/unresearched criticism of fellow brethren companies in such a nascent industry is not going to help any of us. Also .. i must add your report is incomplete, we discussed considerably on mobile space during our panel discussion.
I also want to comment on this bit about `crores of rupees on sunsilkgangofgirls.com. Sunsilkgangofgirls.com was promoted not to promote the url as much as to promote the brand — today the web is a very strong part of the brand image strategy. This is something that people need to understand. HUL is not the biggest player in the FMCG industry without reason. And let us add, they invested in the web-led strategy because over the previous three years we as an agency proved to them how the web can deliver.
@Brian - Firstly thanks for commenting. Its appreciated. Im glad you took notice of the question i raised. Honestly i know of the work that BCWebwise does and ive been a big fan of the same. But i think there is still room to raise the bar beyond sunsilkgangofgirls when it comes to your outreach of campaigns. I know you are limited by client budgets but the web which is fast becoming a powerful conversational medium can help scaling campaigns even without major media spends.
My question wasn’t intended to belittle the work that BCWebwise does infact it was for coaxing you to raise the bar even further much beyond sunsilkgangofgirls. And Im sure you will. With respect to supporting each other is concerned i guess someone who motivates you to do better is a best friend as only praise will make you complacent not competitive. So I hope my question in this post will be taken in the right spirit and soon BCWebwise will prove that the question isn’t valid ..My best wishes are with you!
Hey Rajiv, thanks for this interaction, and your kind words and support for us. Oh yes, watblog is closely tracked by some of our team members. Yes, we are trying to beat ourselves at the game… and hope you will be able spot some of the stuff that’s being worked on.