@NDTV NMC: Mainstream Digital Media; Display Beats Search Advertising?
By Nikhil Pahwa
- Fri 09 May 2008 10:15 AM PST
Mainstream Digital Media? A term for us to consider - when asked about Motorola’s (NYSE: MOT) position on spends on regional language content, Lloyd Mathias, Marketing Director for India & South West Asia said that the company doesn’t have a position on regional digital media- “We target mainstream digital media”.
Display vs Search advertising: “We found display marketing works better than search - 2.5 times more than search, and I can contest that.” Manish Vij, Chief Business Officer of the Smile Interactive Group put forth a fairly strong challenge to search marketing; makes me wonder if there has been a significant shift in spends from display to search marketing. Vij said that when agencies started in the interactive medium, they undersold it by selling by Cost Per Lead. That’s a vicious circle, because the day you stop spending money, the leads stop. “So don’t put 100 percent of your money in just acquising leads”. He also mentioned that people use search better than display advertising because analytics are not used well enough in display.
Publisher Issues: Dinesh Agarwal, Founder & CEO of IndiaMART raised a key issue during the discussion, something we’ve mentioned before at ContentSutra: that every site is priced the same - Rs. 100 cpm; there’s no distinction between publishers, between social networks and websites. Also, where’s the quality of inventory on the Internet? Responding, Vij mentioned that it’s advisable not to have more than two banners on a single page - the ad gets served, but its not quality inventory. Ravi Kiran, CEO of Starcom (South East & South Asia) mentioned that this issue is valid for all kinds of media - what is high value for one brand isn’t for another. Anurag Batra, MD and Editor-in-Chief of Exchange4media, moderating the panel said they don’t sell CPM on exchange4media, but on the basis of the brand strength.
Some Numbers: Rohit Sharma, COO of Zapak mentioned that 70 million unique visitors have logged on to Zapak since launch; 38 brands advertised on the gaming site last year. Another interesting tidbit: someone from Times Business Solutions mentioned that 80 percent of marketing spends are online.
Still New Media? That’s the question Ravi Kiran asked - how come we’re discussing the same things we were four years ago? How come new media is still new media after 8 years? Dividing the world into digital, non-digital, new, old, online, offline...it’s pointless. The digital-non-digital mindset should have died with the first dotcom bust. Today, we are all doing digital things - sending email, on facebook, on twitter...yet, when we go into the office and have to make buying decisions, we think differently.
Selling Digital Media: Anurag Batra was of the opinion that we aren’t seeing sufficient innovation around advertising in digital media because most sales execs come from a background of print, where innovation was less. Some of the questions put forward as the moderator of this session - on the adoption of ad networks, what went wrong with social media in India, reputation management on the Web and why blogging hasn’t picked up in India remained unanswered.
P.s.: Great to have conferences without company pitches on panels (apart from the Polycon bit), and a conference with a strong editorial driven discussion...it certainly wasn’t one of those “been there, heard that” events. More of these, please...And before I forget - we were also updating live on Twitter - me from the New Media Congress in Delhi, and Cerius from an apparently drab Web Innovation Summit in Mumbai. Here’s ContentSutra on Twitter.
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@NDTV NMC: Old Media Evolves With Consumers; Regulation Biggest Bottleneck; Who’s The Consumer?
By Nikhil Pahwa
- Fri 09 May 2008 08:00 AM PST
For some reason, at the NDTV New Media Congress, the session focusing on mass media companies taking to the Internet digressed down the New Media vs Old Media path. Kevin Obi, SVP (Digital Assets) for NBCU International seemed rather annoyed at the “ridiculous” distinction between new media and old media, saying that latter evolves with its consumers, and the two domains do not compete, but co-operate. He spoke of Hulu, calling it the number one destination in the US for premium content (from a commercial point of view), saying that NBCU has created a destination site,and are reaching out into the marketplace and partnering with other content providers. In a way, this was also a response to my question, about how business models will change for mass media companies as they move on to the Internet, and will have to compete for attention with multiple, global, content providers; the issue is - there can be an infinite number of destination sites as well.
An answer to this question also came from Viren Popli, SVP & Head of Mobile for STAR India, who said that local content providers are competing with content providers around the world anyway - they bring what is local, and what works for an audience. During his presentation, Popli also mentioned that content creation is becoming more expensive - cost of sets, talent etc is going up, while it’s also becoming cheaper with mobile phone cameras and digicams. Another bugbear - technology is changing very fast, and multiple delivery platforms are evolving - cable, digital cable, DTH, IPTV, Internet and mobile Streaming etc. Business is becoming more scattered - today, having an office in every state capital is not enough. And too much is dependent on advertising - Everyone expects advertisers to fund the future. However, the biggest bottleneck is regulation: every day there are new regulations, and they are not keeping pace with technology. 3G and Mobile TV haven’t happened in India because of regulation.
Another issue that Popli mentioned was with programming and delivering content for consumers in India: multiple generations reside in the same household, with distinctly different preferences and most often, there’s a single user device in the house; at the same time, preferences vary across rural india, class 2 towns, class 1 towns and metros. One suggestion that he gave: opportunity lies not in creating a YouTube for India, but creating a light version so Indian consumers don’t have to wait for the video to load.
Tarun Katial, COO of Big FM sees new media as a new broadcast platform; he mentioned that mass media companies will at monetizing the space with pre and post roll advertising; it’s not as much about moving to a new medium, but about monetizing more than one media. During the Q&A, he mentioned that there’s a saturation of televoting right now, and new ways of monetizing TV on mobile will have to be developed. The session was moderated by Vir Sanghvi, Advisory Editorial Director for HT Media, who concluded as follows: convergence is a reality, people who never had access now have access; the internet makes everyones voice heard. The notion that because you can produce cheap content, entertainment is going to be cheap is not accurate. For example - Hollywood studios have started making money from new streams, and at the same time, the budget for films has gone up.
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