IAMAI Digital Marketing: Getting on the media planner’s list

The third session, ‘Brand Building: Can My Coffee Make Breakfast? You’ll Be Surprised’, at the IAMAI Digital Marketing seminar aimed to assess why traditional media marketers do not perceive digital as an effective media tool for their brand building exercises. “The Internet is so narrowly seen as a mere lead generation tool. In fact, the Internet started off as a brand building medium,” said the session moderator, Jaspreet Bindra, country manager, Online Service Business, Microsoft India.

Challenging the lead generation perception, Rohit Sharma, COO, Zapak, said, “The Internet is not for products that are looking for lead generation. It is purely for brand building. We don’t do any advertising that is for lead generation. We are pro-brand builders.” He gave examples of in-game advertising, which are for the purpose of brand building only.

Lloyd Mathias, marketing director, Motorola, also on the panel, said that traditional agencies tended to leave digital advertising out. “The digital medium faces a lot of challenge from advertisers. In digital, the creative agency is constantly asked about the real reach numbers of the total ad spend on the Internet.”

Advertisers in India still aren’t fully aware of the potential of digital advertising, agreed Rahul Agarwal, marketing director at Lenovo. “We have not used this medium as much as we should have. We are not willing to experiment (and put) even 40 per cent of our ad spend on the Internet. There is hesitation.”

In the fourth session, ‘Media Planning: What’s Breakfast Without Coffee?’, the ability of media planners to integrate the digital medium into their media planning came into question.

Ratish Nair, CEO, Interactive Avenues, said, “A lot of planning is based on gut feeling. Not all things work out on all platforms. One needs to design separate messages for each platform.”

Krishna Kumar, CEO, Media2win, said, “Planning is a word that never gets operational. Bringing digital to the forefront will require broadband penetration, easy availability and ownership of PCs, and growth in the use of mobile Internet, along with good content and quality research.”

Milind Pathak, co-CEO and country manager, Buongiorno, declared that the mobile would change everyone’s life in the next five years. “The consumers in India and abroad are responding heavily to interactive campaigns. An ideal media plan has to be an all-encompassing media plan. But digital continues to remain enclosed.”

Pathak said that there was a need for permission-based, relevant marketing in mobile. He added that while CPM (cost per thousand) rates in contextual mobile advertising are $35-50 in Western countries, it is $8-10 in India. “We need to build opt-in communities to interact with customers,” he said.

“It’s only when we have 5 per cent of the advertising budget that the medium will be taken seriously. The online manager should not be afraid of experimenting, but should keep pushing for a higher online marketing spend. It will better his chances of a promotion, not diminish it!” he said.