Madhukar Sabnavis: Pervasive technology

Technology will be the fifth pillar of advertising

The Mapo Bridge in Seoul is a site of many suicides. In September 2012, Samsung Life Insurance placed inspirational messages on the railing along the bridge. As people walked down the bridge, the messages lit up and dissuaded visitors from committing suicide. The innovation got a lot of traditional and social media coverage; over three months, the number of suicides dropped by 77 per cent.

Lima and its surrounding villages are situated in coastal deserts of Peru. The region receives zero rainfall, and faces a severe water scarcity and 98 per cent humidity. UTEC, an engineering and technology university, set up a unique billboard to recruit students for its 2013-15 course. This billboard used technology to convert air into water and purify it for potability, thereby generating 9,450 litres of water in three months. The billboard, needless to say, helped the university get extensive media coverage.

Berlin loses 2,000 trees every year. To create awareness and to attract donations to protect trees, BUND created a unique musical instrument - and called it the Tree Orchestra - under a chestnut tree in September 2012. As a chestnut fell, it lit up the instrument and produced a unique note. Over a week, the notes were gathered to create a track, which was was then given to donors. The musical track was remixed a few months later to gather more donations.

The Philippines' leading telecommunications company Smart Telecom created textbooks on mobile SIM cards for schoolchildren. Smart work with education publishers converted traditional textbooks into SMS messages that could be stored and retrieved from SIM cards. In a market where the penetration of mobile phones is high but access to tablets and e-readers is limited, this helped children unload their burden of traditional books and provided them access to books on mobile phones.

These four campaigns were winners at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, 2013.

Closer home, Allen Solly created the first tweet-related hoarding. This hoarding, placed outside a mall in Bangalore, had a number of shirts mounted on it; to get a shirt, the consumer had to post a message on Twitter.

What's interesting about all these five ideas is that technology is at the core of their strategies. Understanding technology and making it work enabled the brand to engage consumers. The innovativeness of the idea helped create a buzz and generate "earned" media for the brand and the message. This, to me, portends the future of advertising.

Technology has pervaded our everyday lives; advertising has seen this happen, through the arrival of digital media in the form of mobile phones and the internet. However, in the future, technology can change even traditional venues, such as outdoor and ambient media, to provide new ways of communicating. Not surprisingly, at this year's Cannes festival - where the world's best in advertising gathered - technology companies were dominant and omnipresent. Technology is not only about product innovation but also about communication innovation, and the lines between the two are beginning to blur. Is the smart textbook by Smart Telecom of the Philippines a product or a communication idea?

The implications for the way advertising agencies traditionally think are interesting. They started as partnerships between the media and an agency. Creative became the next service to be offered; and, as markets got more complicated, the fourth pillar - planning, or the understanding of consumers as people - was added. However, going forward, agencies need to include - through partnership or adoption - technology enthusiasts to develop client solutions that are both relevant and feasible. If creative thinking brought ideas into brand messaging, planners made them more consumer-relevant; technology can help make ideas forward-looking and consumer-leading.

In the traditional media world, creativity was more spaced out in time. In a campaign, you invested a lot of time developing the work; then, once it was out, you sat back for a period (which is called "campaign period" in marketing and advertising jargon), and learned from its experience in the marketplace before embarking on the next campaign. Production costs and the limited ability to change necessitated this. However, as technology invades this process, creativity stretches to two extremes.

At one end, the costs of failure go up dramatically, with limited returns. If the Bridge of Life or the Tree Orchestra hadn't created a buzz, all the innovation would have been wasted since its direct reach was limited. On the other hand, it also offers an opportunity for creativity - as experienced on the internet. Messaging and advertising there can be changed every day, based on instant feedback. Hence, sending out the message is only the beginning of creativity rather than the end of it. Much as with Facebook or LinkedIn, any innovation gets instant consumer response and technologists need to evolve according to feedback. The digital medium provides both the opportunity to do so and the challenges requiring it. One cannot sit back and wait for the next campaign period for the next round of creativity. It's creativity 24x7!

The impact of this mindset shift on traditional advertising media - even film - is quite interesting. There will be big films where the scale and cost will be so great that the high risk will be accompanied with high impact and returns. The scale will make them mega-productions, and there will be a story in their making too! These will go on television and in cinema halls. On the other hand, there will be small films - cheap and cheerful - for internet channels like YouTube, where the focus will be on quantity rather than on quality. The aim will be to create the buzz and "shareability".

However, in order to tap the power and opportunity of what technology can offer, advertising will need to keep an eye on technology experts and find a way to engage them for their ideas. Advertising creativity cannot see itself as being just content providers for existing platforms; there is an opportunity to create platforms. Ideas and technology will be strongly intertwined. Solutions will emerge from their partnership.

Google is creating the first driverless car. According to traditional thinking, such an innovation should have come from a car company, rather than from a technology platform company. Something worth thinking about.

The writer is vice-chairman, Ogilvy India.
These views are his own.
madhukar.sabnavis@ogilvy.com