<FONT COLOR="#FF0033"><B>IAMAI Digital Marketing Conference:</B></FONT>Offline creatives can’t work online

It’s no longer enough for marketers to place a picture with the brand logo on a website, hoping that’ll do the trick. The Internet revolution may be less than a decade old and minus the legacy of print (over 100 years), radio (80 years) or even television (some 50 years), but it is a story that is here to stay.

At the IAMAI Digital Marketing Conference 2007, held in Mumbai, marketers and industry experts discussed the pros and cons of investing in the Internet as a vehicle for advertising. Srinivasan Rajgopal, head, eBiz Special Initiatives, Citibank, pointed out the obvious benefits for a marketer if he puts his paisa on the web – interactivity, flexibility, speed, innovation, versatility, fine-tuned target groups, particularly the youth, and, most important, measurability.

“However, as of today, some Internet ads – pop-ups, for example – can be intrusive and banner ads can often hit a website visitor’s blind spot,” he said, hinting at a need for more subtlety and clarity in thought. Rajgopal cautioned marketers looking to invest in the medium on two counts: While they need to be clear on their intent for advertising on the Internet, they should also follow what he labelled a thumb rule – offline creatives simply don’t work online.

While Rajgopal was gung-ho about the Internet as a vehicle for brand building, his rival in the financial space, Tina Singh, head, corporate brand, ICICI Bank, was of the opinion that the Internet is an excellent medium for a financial brand when it comes to lead generation and customer acquisition, while branding is a mere by-product. In fact, the Internet has helped ICICI Bank reduce its customer acquisition costs by one-fifth and its customer service costs by one-tenth, as compared with traditional media.

“Through data and web analytics, the Internet is very measurable, not to mention, contextual,” she said. As the Internet is more of a pull medium, a marketer literally gets to choose his customer, and vice versa. “Look at it this way – product forms actually get filled on the Internet, as opposed to pushy telecalling or random direct mailers,” Singh asserted.

In ICICI’s own experience, when the phone banking systems were flooded with calls, it was decided to introduce a request-taking mechanism on the Internet, which proved to be an immediate success, thus helping de-clog phone lines. These positive experiences led to ICICI Bank increasing its spends on the Internet to 18 per cent as of March 2006, compared with only 2 per cent in March 2000.

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