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by Sreejiraj Eluvangal

Soaring user numbers aren’t quite translating into moolah for social networking and social media sites.

The likes of Orkut, Myspace and Facebook are fast realising that the traditional pay-per-click advertising model is just not working for them.

Such networks, based on content created by members, account for the largest chunk of web traffic today. Yet, almost all of them are struggling to monetise these numbers. Hari Krishnan, who heads the Indian unit of the world’s largest social networking site, the Rupert Murdoch-owned Myspace.com, acknowledges that unlike users of search engines, their members may not be in a mood to click on advertising links.

“The concept that you keep opening new pages to get information is from the age of the portal. Besides, our pages are designed in such a way that the user has all the information on a single page,” Krishnan said at the ‘Social Media Summit’ in Mumbai on Friday. “So, the click-through rate for ads is very low on social networks.”

Most of the big internet players are present in the ’social networking’ category, built around the concept of users keeping themselves entertained by sharing thoughts, videos and pictures, etc. While Google has Orkut, News Corp has Myspace and Microsoft bought a stake in Facebook a year and a half ago.

The popularity of such sites has rocketed over the years. According to web analytics firm compete.com, Myspace accounted for 2.35% of the total time spent online by all US residents in February 2009, compared with 0.34% for CNN.com and 0.09% for NYTimes.com.

Globally, around a third of all web traffic is estimated to be generated by such websites. Orkut, for example, has around 14 million registrations from India, where only 35 million people access internet at least once a month.

The category accounts for five out of the top ten most visited sites. However, thanks to very low click rates, industry participants suspect the category accounted for just 5% or less of the total online ad spend in the country in the last 12 months.

“The return on investment (RoI) from social media don’t match the media planners’ idea of RoI,” says Beerud Sheth, co-founder of mobile and online solutions provider Webaroo Technology India. “You cannot ask me ‘CPL (cost per lead) kya milega’?” he says, referring to the price quoted by search-engine-marketing firms for each lead they generate.

Instead, he is hawking ‘engagement’ with consumers through discussion fora, groups and even the plain old banner ads around brands and products. “If a consumer endorses your product on a social network, it will have much more impact than any form of advertisement,” says Sheth.

However, most brand managers are looking for measurable results such as clicks and leads. Prasad Narasimhan, marketing head, Virgin Mobile, says, “We can talk about engagement and all that. But if I have to put in Rs 2 crore of my brand’s money, you need to find some mathematics to measure the impact.”

Some stakeholders believe the impasse will be ultimately resolved by going back to the conventional idea of charging for the ad, whether or not someone has clicked on it. “The problem is that we are applying the metric of search advertising to social media,” says Mahesh Murthy, founder of the digital marketing agency Pinstorm. “How are you measuring the RoI when you advertise on TV? You are paying because people are spending time in front of your brand. They have to come back to the idea for social networks as well,” he adds.

Management guru Thomas Davenport had told DNA earlier that it was doubtful these sites would ever make money. “Some of these things kind of rise and fall with fashion. Clearly, they have tapped into something, but I am slightly sceptical about them in a business context,” said Davenport, who holds the President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, located in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

by Kapil Ohri

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Idea Cellular has extended its recent television commercial, which shows a politician asking for public opinion before finalising a development project, to real life. The MyIdea campaign uses the Internet, TV and radio media to engage people, demonstrate the power of collective decision making and the usability of mobile phones in that process.

A website, myidea.co.in, has been created, which allows users to raise or submit questions related to issues in their cities or districts, politics, society, economy, entertainment and sports in 150 words. Users are also allowed to upload pictures to support their questions and can forward the questions submitted by them to their friends.

Users are also empowered to garner support and votes for their ideas. A user can also submit his vote on questions raised by others.

Ideas such as ‘Criminals shouldn’t stand for elections’, ‘Should LK Advani stop his online campaign?’, ‘Save the girl child’ and ‘Ban plastic bags’ have been entered by users.

Within three weeks of its launch, the website claims that a total of 1,29,758 votes have been received for 1,806 questions raised by users, with 755and 479 questions submitted under the politics and society categories. The website has received 3,06,896 page views.

The Lintas Media Group, in association with Pinstorm Technologies, has conceptualised and managed the creative, media planning and technology part of the campaign.

Speaking to afaqs!, Mahesh Murthy, chief executive officer, Pinstorm, an interactive agency, says, “Idea Cellular wanted to demonstrate the participative democratic process in reality and that’s why we were briefed to develop an interactive application or website which will engage and enable users to submit their opinions.”

A spokesperson from Idea Cellular tells afaqs!, “In a mobile market, where the call rates offered and the technology available to all mobile operators are almost similar, Idea wanted to differentiate its communication from the other players. That’s why, it has opted for the participative decision making route to demonstrate the efficient ways of using mobile telephony.”

He adds, “Idea Cellular is not doing the campaign for any social cause. The website has been created to amplify the communication put forward by the current television commercial.”

Apart from the website, the mobile operator is also using TV and radio platforms to engage users with the MyIdea campaign.

Idea Cellular has tied up with TV news channels such as Zee News, STAR News, CNBC Awaaz, CNBC, NDTV India and NDTV 24×7, and FM radio stations such as Radio Mirchi, Radio City, Big FM and My FM to execute the campaign.

Every day, the news channels pick up a topic and ask a question on the same. Viewers are requested to vote and send in their replies via SMSes. The results are announced on the news channels at 8-9pm.

On radio, radio jockeys ask a question of the day and invite listeners to call and discuss the issue.

Sathyamurthy NP, president and chief operating officer, Lintas Media Group, tells afaqs!, “Everyday, 18,000 people participate on TV, while 3,000 people take part in the MyIdea questions through radio.”

Idea Cellular is using search engine marketing (SEM) and display advertising across all major portals such as Yahoo! and Rediff to promote the MyIdea website. It has even developed special applications for Orkut and Facebook to gather ideas.

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by Kapil Ohri

If you happen to search for the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi, on Google, the landing page with results on Sonia Gandhi will also display a message by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) – “Do You Know Why Advaniji is a better leader, BJP a better party? If you don’t, visit Lkadvani.in.”

This message is a part of the search marketing technique adopted by the BJP for many political leaders. The political party has used search marketing and contextual advertising tools on Google (AdWords and AdSense) so that whenever anyone searches for Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Manmohan Singh or even Mayawati, the landing page will have sponsored links from the BJP.

For instance, when you search for Manmohan Singh, the sponsored link on the landing page says, “Do you share the dream? 21st Century India’s Century, Advani for PM – Lkadvani.in.”

This strategy is also called brand-jacking on Google.com. The BJP has actually bought 850 keywords, including the names of its rivals such as Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, Mayawati, Congress and Samajwadi Party to run search ads on Google.com.

“Already 619,695,254 ad impressions promoting the LKAdvani website have been served on Google.com and its network of sites since the inception of the campaign on January 2,” Prodyut Bora, chief, IT, BJP, tells afaqs!.

Speaking to afaqs!, Ansoo Gupta, head, global business, Pinstorm, says that the practice of purchasing keywords related to the competition is not new in the world of search marketing.

A Google search for ‘Taj Hotel’ results in sponsored links of ‘Oberoi Hotels’. Similarly, a search on Go Air leads to sponsored links related to Jetlite.com and SpiceJet.com, the rival airline brands.

However, a Google search on Jet Airways only generates sponsored links for JetAirways.com. JetaAirways.com is registered as a trademark. If an advertiser owns a trademark on its name or brand, it can ask Google.com to block the usage of its trademark keywords by its competitors. A complaint can also be filed with Google in case any advertiser uses a particular keyword owned as a trademark by its competitor.

“Usage of keywords such as ‘Sonia Gandhi’, ‘Rahul Gandhi’ and ‘Congress’ implies that these words are not registered as trademarks and that’s why the BJP is exploiting and capitalising these keywords in their SEM campaign,” says an industry observer.

Interestingly, the US President, Barack Obama, owns copyrights on his name.

It seems that search marketing strategy will work for BJP, as the search volume patterns derived via Google Insights for Search, clearly indicates that ‘Sonia Gandhi’ and ‘Rahul Gandhi’ keywords received 1.5 times more searches than LK Advani.

This means higher number of searches for Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi can help BJP to drive traffic to the LK Advani’s website. Bora claims that on an average basis, LKAdvani.in receives 20,000 unique visitors daily.

Google.com is managing the SEM campaign of BJP.

© 2009 afaqs!

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by Arcopol Chaudhuri

Mumbai: In an age where parties and their leaders are driven by expediency rather than ideology, how are agencies, used to working with a clear brief, grappling with the task of building a strong political brand? DNA sifts the hype from the ground realities

Every toothpaste worth your teeth has a distinct brand promise: one will claim to protect your gums, another will promise relief from bad breath, yet another will assure you security against germs. They may be empty promises, like a politician’s, but they do have a singular brand-differentiating promise. Indian politicians, however, differ from toothpastes in this respect. They, and the parties they belong to, have a more fluid brand promise, which mutates — from election to election, alliance to alliance, and vote bank to vote bank. What this means, from the ad agency’s point of view, is that brand-building has to be achieved without the one element necessary for successful brand communications: a clearly spelt-out brief.

“Can the face of my party leader be made to look better, what should be the font size on my poster, how should I place my logo — these are questions to which parties want immediate answers from the ad agencies,” says Agnello Dias, chief creative officer, Taproot India. “For the rest, they already have a publicity mechanism — they know what’s to be written, where and how to get the screen printing done.”

In other words, the big political parties in India don’t seem to be thinking beyond the ‘arty’ skills they can derive from ad agencies. After all, they’ve been in the public domain for decades and built brands of sorts on their own. “Be it the socialism of the Nehru-Gandhi family in the Congress, or the Hindu fundamentalism of the BJP, each of them already has what brands like Coke and McDonald’s possess — brand recall and imagery, and loyalists and critics amongst the masses,” points out Prathap Suthan, national creative director of Cheil Worldwide and the man behind the BJP’s 2004 India Shining campaign.

Why, then, would a political party still seek support in brand-building, going as far as to spend crores on an agency? According to Dias, “using advertising agencies for brand-building has become a ritual. One party did it, and the rest of them followed suit.”

Advertising and branding exercises can be traced to the Swatantra Party’s roping in of the late Kersey Katrak, a creative genius, back in 1966. “And then, the highpoint of Indian political advertising was what Rediffusion DY&R did for the Congress in 1984,” recollects Mahesh Murthy, CEO, Pinstorm. Rajiv Gandhi’s strategy was soon aped by the BJP, which brought in Trikaya Grey.

“Since then, the quality of agencies, strategy and tactics used in political campaigns has deteriorated into an anything-is-possible mantra, which defines politics itself,” observes Murthy, a veteran of 24 years in advertising. “There was a brief spark in the BJP’s India Shining campaign which, though much vilified, was at least focused in its message. Since then, no agency has made any impact on the political scene.”

Ranjan Bargotra, president of Crayons Advertising, which is collaborating on the Congress account this year, has a different take. “As an agency, the main challenge for us is not the fact that it’s a political account. It’s just that the target audience is so huge; the entire universe of adults. That’s not the case with other brands, which have a defined and much narrower target audience.”

But there’s another reason why ad agencies struggle to make a big impact in elections. Copywriters have often found it difficult to distinguish, or even make sense of, the brief given by a political party. The approach is very different from making an ad for a soft drink or telecom product. The result: while Indian advertising reaches new highs through global acclaim at Cannes, political ads are stuck in a time warp.

Rohit Ohri, managing partner of JWT, which is doing the radio and TV ads for the Congress, counters that the brief for a political account is limited, compared to that for an FMCG product, because party representatives are in touch with the voters’ pulse and ground realities. “They know exactly what they want, so the agency guys need not do much of research. The best that an agency can do for a political party before the elections is to create a positive aura around it, like strong positive wind.”

Dias however thinks parties simply don’t realise the full potential of creative advertising. “At best, they know the importance of a slogan. But their focus is on the ground-level campaigning. In a politician’s mental landscape, the image of a thousand poor Indians nodding and clapping at a speech is more powerful than an ad agency’s skills.”

Which is why some agencies, such as Ogilvy & Mather, never pitch for political accounts. The agency’s founder David Ogilvy had listed some do’s and don’ts for the agency, one of which was to never take up a political account. A stress on resources and meagre returns were cited as reasons.

Still, agencies pitch. Recently when the Congress and the BJP called for proposals, each with an advertising budget upwards of Rs150 crore, it got the big agencies salivating. “The money is a big attraction,” says Suthan. “And if the campaign is successful, then there are huge favours that people at the agency can run through the political party. All it takes is dialing a few numbers.”

Marketing through the recession:

is pay-for-performance advertising the silver bullet?

A Pinstorm-IAMAI Digital Marketing Roundtable

Pinstorm (and our partner, Lintas Media Group) along with IAMAI hosted their second event in a series of digital marketing roundtables titled – “Marketing through the recession: is pay-for-performance advertising the silver bullet?” on Wednesday, February 25, 2009, in Delhi.

This Digital Marketing Roundtable answered questions relating to the effectiveness of pay-for-performance advertising in these times of a slow-down.

Though Google started the trend of accountable search advertising, can it spread beyond that to all digital advertising, including banners? Should this be the model for TV and print? How do marketers see media spends in this era of unprecedented accountability? – These were some of the questions answered at the event.

This open-format discussion was led by prominent speakers like Hitesh Oberoi, Director & COO, Info Edge, Vineet Taneja, Head Marketing, Nokia India, Santosh Nair, Head, Strategic Marketing, NIIT, Parminder Singh, Business Head, Technology & Media, Google India, and Lynn de Souza, Chairperson and CEO, Lintas Media Group. The discussion will be moderated by Mahesh Murthy, CEO of Pinstorm.

During the digital marketing roundtable, the speakers talked about the various issues surrounding the advertising industry today, and how ‘pay-for-performance’ has emerged as a model of accountable advertising to give advertisers more bang for their buck in these times of a slow-down. Companies like Naukri have been continually increasing their digital advertising spends year-on-year to the point that their online spends are higher than their offline spending. The mood of the event indicated that digital advertising is going to take up a considerable amount of ad spend this year in India.

Vineet Taneja, Head Marketing, of Nokia India commented, “I think people search online, however, conversion to final purchase is offline. The theme that I am referring to is conversion at every stage of the market process. If we look at the first level of conversion, it is awareness to persuasion. At the second level, people go online, speak to their friends. In our category, people are experts, and word of mouth really counts, and this is the next stage of conversion.”

On the topic of using different advertising mediums, he went on to say that Nokia believed in exploring various mediums and making sure that those mediums deliver those conversions.

According to Santosh Nair, Head, Strategic Marketing, NIIT, any campaign that uses current news events for publicity must use information quickly and turn it around into results. “The shorter the gap between the advertisement, sales process, and turnaround, the better the results will be”, he said.

Lynn de Souza, Chairperson and CEO, Lintas Media Group talked of how the GoaFest of 2009 is concisely titled – ‘Don’t waste a good recession!’ She went on to say that there seems to be a mood versus a reality situation and we need to think about ways to combat – what we believe – is recession rather than sitting back.

She further stressed that the area of performance in online advertising needs to be looked at seriously in these times. “You have to focus on what you are delivering, challenge your current concepts of performance and only then can we debate on improving performance measures,” de Souza pointed out.

Parminder Singh, Business Head, Technology & Media, Google India observed that advertisers have started realising that the Internet is a multi-layered advertising and marketing medium, which one can experiment and mould. Different companies are exploring the medium in different ways – from user experience, to lead generation, and going all the way up to branding. According to him, “This will continue in the future, though there is fear of meltdown because the fact remains that the Internet is used by most consumers to do significant research.”
He further said, “In the last month, we saw 9 million searches just related to mobile phones and 6.5 lakh searches for DVD players in India.”

Hitesh Oberoi, Director & COO, Info Edge pointed out that on one side where television advertising brings visibility and credibility, the online medium is good for lead generation, transaction and inquiry.” He said that in 2005-06, they began spending almost half their marketing budget online. Print and TV had never really helped Info Edge get too many resumes, so they had to get aggressive on resume acquisition.

“We did a Rs. 5 crore annual deal with Rediff, which took a long time to negotiate. With that, our resume database suddenly went through the roof. The conversion rates were around 4%-5% of all traffic. It fundamentally changed the way we looked at advertising. Since then it has been at around 50% for the last three years.”

According to Mahesh Murthy, CEO of Pinstorm, one of Asia’s largest pay-for-performance digital advertising agencies said, “It seems pretty clear from the panel and the audience that pay-for-performance is here to stay. I am not sure how traditional agencies will take it, but change is upon us you can choose to evolve or be the dinosaur.”

The session was later made more interactive when the floor was later opened to the audience who participated in the roundtable discussion during the Q&A session. Sujata Datta, Senior VP, DLF Pramerica, Alok Bharathwaj, Senior VP, Canon, Mohit Heera, President, NIIT, and Cyril Mani of Sony were amongst the esteemed audience at the venue. The overall sentiment showed that buyers are looking at pay-for-performance seriously. The conference was well attended by CEOs and Marketing Heads with a mix of buyers and sellers.

The first roundtable, held in Mumbai on January 13, 2009 was led by Pradeep Shrivastava, CMO, Idea Cellular; Aekta Shyam, General Manager – Online Marketing and Technology, Taj Group; Rajiv Prabhakar, Vice President- Retail Business, Sharekhan; and Debadutta Upadhyaya, National Sales Head, Yahoo! India.

The press coverage for our earlier roundtable event held in Mumbai can be read on Afaqs!, Exchange4Media, Campaign India, AlooTechie or WatBlog. We have photographs and video too!

You may want to read more about the event on Exchange4Media or MediaNama or possibly view photographs of the event here or here.