This hoarding has been making the rounds lately. It talks of the war in the skies. Only recently Jet Airways after it acquired Sahara Airlines, annonced its plans for low cost full service arilines called 'Jet Lite'. Jet also unviled its new uniform in yellow for the same.
Soon after doing that it came out with an outdoor campign which says 'We'Ve Changed' and countering this move of Jet , Kingfisher came out with an outdoor campaign saying 'We Made Them Change' which was created by Portland, one of the leading outdoor advertising company owned by Kinetic, a WPP Group company.
Interesting to note that the war is not in the skies alone but in the outdoor advertising arena as well.
While only the King Fisher and Jet Airways hordings are real, the GO Air hoarding is a result of some smart alec's creative abilities on Photo Shop or Paint Brush. It says: 'We are still the smartest way to fly'. However, it's interesting.

Promoting Responsibility

This is the India Unbreakable campaign done by Rediff Y&R. This campaign was done after the Mumbai Unbreakable camapign

The above picture is of an adoption campaign done by O&M

Go to the multiplex for a movie, switch on your TV, or tune into any FM radio station, and sooner, rather than later, you’ll be bombarded with a public service message, whether on conserving ground water, AIDS awareness and prevention, child adoption or how you can help the law enforcement agencies in their fight against terror. They are, almost without exception, slickly produced and expensively mounted. According to ad inventory data for 2006 compiled by TAM Adex, “social advertising” as this genre is called, is the top advertising category of ads on TV. Between January and November 2006, social advertisements saw a 90 per cent growth in volumes on TV over January-November 2005. So what’s the buzz all about?
“The objective of social advertising is to change public attitudes and behaviour, thereby stimulating positive social change,” says Sandeep Goyal, CEO, Dentsu. Incidentally, this was the agency that created the Mumbai Unbreakable campaign for the Mumbai Police following the 7/11 blasts in that city. “Social causes are now defining corporate vision and brand stances. Hence, they are seen as part of total branding exercises,” says R. Lakshminarayanan, CEO, Mudra Marketing Services.
Another noticeable change in social advertising is the massive increase in the levels of professionalism in this area. Explains Sumanto Chattopadhyay Group Creative Director, WHICH AGENCY: “Since the work is mostly pro bono, creative people get a free hand while working with this genre of ads. That is probably what results in the high quality of these campaigns.” M.G. Parameswaran, Executive Director, FCB Ulka, however, says that today, organisations are willing to pay for social campaigns. John Hopkins Centre of Communication’s AIDS Campaign ‘Jawan Hoon Nadaan Nahi’ created by FCB ULka is a Rs 10-crore campaign. Dentsu’s Creative Director Adrian Mendonca adds: “Social advertising is coming of age.” Result: the planning, execution and evaluation of these campaigns are now accorded the same importance as regular commercial ones. “Also, the absolute sums of money being spent on social advertising have increased substantially—our estimate is that the budgets could be running into several hundred crore, especially if one monetises the media exposure,” says Lakshminarayan.

(Published in Business Today in February)

Context is King

On the internet user behaviour matters more than content.

PERHAPS THE MOST EXCITING feature of the Indian online advertising market is not so much the advertising itself but the impressive buzzwords that keep floating in.
The latest mantra doing the rounds globally—Yahoo, MSN and Google are said to be testing this new format —is behavioural advertising which is being touted as the next big
thing since contextual advertising.
Also dubbed as behavioural targeting, this trend refers to an individual’s surfing behaviour, and is a bit different from the more common targeting method of displaying ads matched to the specific content of an individual page or to all users.
Says Rajneesh, Head of Digital Marketing (Revenue & Strategic Business), MSN India: “With behavioural advertising, the per user yield goes up by two to three times. It enables marketers to deliver ads to consumers based on their online behaviour—what they recently bought, where they surfed, or what they searched for. Based on this information, ads can be tailored to drive users back to the advertiser’s site to complete the desired registration, purchase, or other action.”
Adds George Zacharias, Managing Director, Yahoo India: “Two things increase the effectiveness of advertising in the online medium. One, the right ad product should creative rich media forms of advertising and has further potential to grow.”
Adds Rajneesh, “Behavioural targeting cannot be done in a portal scenario like email portals and messenger. Secondly there has to be enough internet penetration. Online advertising market is directly related with Internet penetration in any country.
So it will take some time. We at MSN are constantly evaluating these new formats and opportunities.”
Sources indicate that MSN in India is trying to test behavioural targeting on live.co.in (Windows’ live search beta). While Yahoo has rolled out behaviour targeting across the world, in India, Zacharias says that it will take time before it starts off in India as the media itself needs to grow. According to a study by Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI), in India internet penetration is less than 2 per cent of the total population and the online advertising market is only 0.5 per cent of the total ad spend. The good news of course is the potential that hides behind those numbers.

(Published in Business Today in January 2007)

Introduction

Introduction:

Advertising has been around for centuries now. It is a persuasive communication attempt to change or reinforce ones’ prior attitude that is predictable of future. In the current times advertising just hits you on your face. It’s become part of our culture and day to day life. If you look around you, you will find your world filled with advertising - on huge billboards in the streets, on the pages of magazines, between the tracks played on the radio, on the walls of the subway, on the pages of internet sites, at the bottom of emails, on the backs of cinema tickets, on the shirts of football players. It seems that any surface that will hold still long enough to be read is considered a potential advertising medium. The fact that there is so much advertising out there means that it is part of our daily cultural experience - it's just impossible to avoid it. Advertisements often take on a cultural life of their own, and occupy space in the media beyond that which has been paid for. This, of course, is great for the advertisers!
While advertising can be seen as necessary for economic growth, it is not without social costs. Unsolicited and other forms of spam have become so prevalent as to have become a major nuisance to users of these services. Advertising is increasingly invading public spaces, such as schools, which some critics argue is a form of child exploitation. One scholar has argued that advertising is a toxic by-product of industrial society which may bring about the end of life on earth.
But it’s not end of life on this ad media world. So look out for more ……………on Indian advertising and what’s happening internationally.