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| Bhupesh Bhandari: Online tracking | | Internet advertising is minuscule but firms are turning to YouTube and social networking sites to see how their campaigns are faring |
| Bhupesh Bhandari / New Delhi Dec 03, 2009, 00:30 IST |
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The brand team at Bharti Airtel is trying out something new these days. It tracks the share of its advertisements in online conversations. It started with the Dil Titli campaign for its direct-to-home service, which featured Saif Ali Khan and Kareena Kapoor. The team has mined blogs, social networking sites and video sites like YouTube to know what buzz its campaigns have managed to generate.
This has never happened before. So far, companies have done this kind of work by talking offline to consumer groups. Market research agencies are mandated to find out how a particular campaign has affected brand recall and sale. The Bharti Airtel experiment shows that the digital world now offers an alternative to that kind of work. It is not yet quantifiable, Bharti Airtel Senior Vice-President (Marketing) R Chandrasekar admits. But he adds that some measurements are available — how many blogs that dissect new advertisements talked about its campaign. More important, the feedback whether people liked the advertisements or not can be known in a jiffy.
Most marketers now load their advertisements on YouTube the very day they break on mass media. Consumer feedback can be got in an instant.
The Internet has changed our lives in many ways. It has also changed the way marketers and brand-builders work. The biggest benefit is that the impact is measurable. How many people clicked on your advertisement on a website? How many people bothered to open the e-mail you sent? How many just trashed it? How many read it and trashed it? This behaviour of the consumer lends itself to easy measurement and analysis in the digital world. It helps marketers calculate their return on investment better than mass-media advertising.
But is the Indian digital universe big enough? At the moment, less than 3 per cent of the total annual advertising money of over Rs 15,000 crore goes to the digital media. Not that at less than 5 per cent it is dramatically different in the mature markets. Dentsu India Executive Vice-Chairman Gullu Sen says internet penetration in the country is still low. (Industry estimates it is below 6 per cent.) As a result, it is of limited use for brands that are mass-market in nature. Cars below a certain price, says he, cannot be promoted online. Sen, in fact, is more upbeat on mobile advertising. It is a cost-effective way to reach the masses. Conversions could be low but given the large mass of mobile phone users, the numbers will never be insignificant.
A look at some numbers could be useful. Research has shown that over 75 per cent of the online population in the country is between 19 and 35 years of age. Close to 80 per cent of this young population prefers the Internet over television when it comes to entertainment and information. The share of top eight metros in the internet population has halved from 77 per cent in 2000 to below 40 per cent now, while the share of socio-economic category A has come down from 49 per cent to 39 per cent. Clearly, the Internet has begun to spread to the bottom.
That’s why companies have taken to the digital media like fish to water. Yahoo!, for instance, has earmarked 25 per cent of the spend for its brand new campaign, It’s You!, for the digital media. Bharti Airtel has broken two campaigns on the Web — one for its broadband service and the other for the Twitter service for its mobile subscribers. It has more than doubled its digital ad spend in the last one year.
Yahoo! Executive Vice-President and Chief Marketing Officer Elisa Steele makes an interesting distinction. Advertisers either have performance goals or branded goals. In performance goals, the Internet has proved its efficacy. These goals could be reaching out to specific consumer communities — students, sports addicts, young parents et al. (Yahoo!, for instance, has 50 per cent female users in the US. So it becomes an effective medium for advertisers to reach women. In India, women constitute just 30 per cent of its users.) The challenge is to help companies build brands on the internet. That will be the giant leap, the game-changer. Once that happens, there will be no looking back for the Internet.
Steele was recently in India with Yahoo!’s tough-talking, ass-kicking CEO Carol Bartz to meet advertisers and convince them that brands can be built on their website. It has 70 per cent reach in India, and is number one in email, front page and cricket. It remains to be seen if advertisers bite into that argument.
What is certain is that digital advertising and marketing have really evolved in India during the last few years. Till recently, it meant banner ads on web pages. It has since moved from broadcast to engagement. Most companies launch micro-sites with every product or brand launch. Companies have begun to use blogs and social networking sites effectively for brand promotion. Many of them seed blogs with their thoughts and then get users to comment. Or they set up groups on social networking sites around their products. Every company works on search engine optimisation — a random search for its product or service category should lead to its website.
Carlsberg India Managing Director Pradeep Gidwani was pleasantly surprised to find communities in the digital world around its brands Carlsberg and Tuborg. This has made him look for a digital strategy to popularise his beer brands in the country. He has so far relied on consumer sampling to promote his brands — he is convinced his beer is superior than others’ and that won’t show up unless a consumer samples it. In the days to come, Carlsberg could shift some of its advertising dollar from below-the-line to the digital media.
What has helped the cause of the digital media is the fledgling readership of newspapers and magazines among the youth and the proliferation of television channels. Advertisers have come round the perception that there is a lot of spillage in mass media. Digital media, in contrast, can help advertisers focus on a closed user group.
Examples of innovation on the Internet are growing by the day. Religare Enterprises has used the Internet to generate leads for the various financial services it offers — broking, insurance, wealth management, mutual funds etc. It used its association with the Delhi Daredevils to run a microsite to engage customers. It got a database which it leveraged for business. Conversion to enquiries was in the range of 10 to 15 per cent. Given the low cost of the initiative, the company has no reason to complain. Religare spends around 10 per cent of its advertising money on the digital media. It could go up to 15 per cent in a year’s time. It is busy chalking out a marketing agenda for the social media. The party has just begun.
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