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by Shivani Mohan

FOUNDER and chief executive officer of Pinstorm, the world’s first pay-for-performance digital marketing firm, Mahesh Murthy has made his own rules for success.

Murthy, 43, has worked with some of the leading multinational ad agencies – Grey in India and Ogilvy in Hong Kong, spearheading campaigns for HP, Nike, Coca Cola and The Economist. He wrote and directed a spot for MTV voted “Asia’s best commercial of the decade”.

He helped launch the first commercial version of Yahoo! in 1995 and the Earth’s Biggest Bookstore campaign for Amazon.com in 1997. Murthy also consulted with Star TV, launching its youth vehicle, Channel V, and creating a net and TV presence for it.

He played the Donald Trump-equivalent role in Business Baazigar, an Indian game show similar to The Apprentice, involving entrepreneurs and business plans. In 2006, Mahesh helped set up Seedfund, an early-stage venture capital fund in India. Pinstorm, headquartered at Mumbai, has more than 120 staff.

Mahesh spoke recently with Khaleej Times. Following are excerpts from the interview:

How did the idea for Pinstorm occur to you?

I love advertising. I’ve been in the business since 1984 – but over time I saw advertising break up and go two separate ways… into a brokerage business and a consulting business. If I was to use a financial analogy – rather than run a hedge fund or a portfolio, it meant that you had to pay one man a flat fee for advice and another to simply trade the shares. This almost never works for you in finance – and it certainly doesn’t work for you in advertising.

After 15 years in this business, I knew I loved it, but I realised that because you never got paid for your good work, you could never get rich. I looked around me — there were no advertising billionaires — and not too many millionaires either. And there were no ad firms in the Fortune 500. The work was great – but (not) the business… So I got out and moved over to the marketing side of things, invested in startups and such, till I saw the rise of something interesting.

Google was the medium that first opened my eyes to a curious form of advertising. On Google, you didn’t pay for your ad – or sponsored link – to appear. You paid only if the consumer responded to it and clicked on it. When I thought about it I figured that this was perhaps the kind of advertising I was waiting for – pay-for-performance.

So I started Pinstorm in 2004 in a 550 square foot office with one person, and we proudly declared ourselves the first pay-for-performance advertising firm in the world. We did something truly crazy – we didn’t charge a retainer, we didn’t charge for creative, we didn’t charge a media commission – in fact, we paid for media from our own pockets – but we put it all together – and charged the clients on the basis of the results our campaigns delivered.

What was the initial response to this model of advertising?

Our clients were curious at first. When they saw results coming in, they were excited – and our business grew as theirs grew. In fact, once we moved them to this model, they didn’t question us on the creatives or the media plans – but only on the results. And happy clients talk to other clients.

From then till a few months ago, in the first 5 years, we never had to actually make a cold call to pitch a client in India – we were invited every time by word of mouth – that was the power of the concept we had.

But of course, pay-for-performance was not the only problem we wanted to solve in advertising. Another big issue is that ad agencies say they’ll build consistent global brands — and they do so for everybody, except themselves. A McDonalds and a Pepsi are the same around the world – but a JWT and Bates are different in every city they are in. So I was clear that we had to change the way strategy and ads are created.

We learned from Infosys and Wipro here — building a strong, centralised creative and media team in India that worked on all brands around the world. It allowed us to offer a consistent quality of creative and results to all our clients globally.

Again, nobody else in the world has done this –and we think it’ll have great benefits for us in the long run.

The third thing we tried was to be global from as early as possible. Most Indian and UAE agencies stay local — we set up offices in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Beijing, San Francisco, Delhi, Zurich and Bangalore – all on our own steam, all with no (venture capital) investors, and all with no foreign big brother. It’s started paying off. We now handle a few clients globally already — and we hope to grow this side of our business over the next few years a lot.

Who are your biggest competitors today?

We have a few types of competition. After we started offering performance advertising, we’ve perhaps helped change the market in India – today over 65 per cent of the digital ad market in India is performance-driven and we’re the leading player…. Many independent digital agencies had to change their models to match our offering. So there are a couple of smaller performance ad firms who copy our every move. We keep a close eye on them.

That apart, we have the digital arms of the big ad agencies. We’re not so worried about them, because they don’t have the flexibility, the technology and the approach we have to delivering results to the client – but they’re good at client service. So we have to match their service levels to be able to win clients away from them.

The third, the category I always worry about- is the small and hungry ones. These are the tiny startups which are motivated to take us on, like we were once motivated to take on the WPPs of the world. I’m always afraid that we’ve become the large firm that smaller firms like us used to once take potshots at.

Does Pinstorm, have any plans for expansion, especially in the Middle East?

Pinstorm’s premise is to manage global brands with consistence and through pay-for-performance. To support this, we will soon need an EMEA office, and hence the Middle East is certainly on our radar.

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by Mahesh Murthy

For weeks before the elections, the online world was abuzz with reports of BJP ads turning up everywhere.

Bloggers saw these ads placed on their pages, visitors to even Pakistani websites saw these ads appear. There virtually wasn’t a single site where you did not come across an image of LK Advani with some message that positioned the 81-year old as a “strong and decisive leader”.

The Congress ran a muted campaign online, in contrast to BJP’s multi-crore extravaganza. There were occasional ads with the hand symbol that turned up on Yahoo and other sites, along with the usual Bollywood-style cut-outs of all the main leaders.

Come the results, and a lot of pundits were extraordinarily surprised at the whitewash by the Congress. And the questions were raised, fast and furious, about the efficacy of online advertising, or whether it was useless in India and such.

Here’s what we think. We had an early sniff of the Congress landslide, when we did a limited straw poll on our clients’ site MyIdea.co.in back in early March 2009. The results then, across a little less than 1,000 respondents, pointed to a UPA win by a little more than a 5:3 ratio. Perhaps it’s not just a coincidence that the final seat tally ended up in quite the same ratio.

We also took a look at the traffic to LK Advani’s site that the ads were directed to (lkadvani.in) and also to the Congress site (aicc.org.in). We used Google Trends and Vizisense data to see who was visiting each of these places — and how many of them were doing so. We did this before the results were announced.

One surprising result, considering BJP’s early start and massive online presence, was that it only showed about 25% more traffic (around 2,50,000 visitors a month) than the Congress site (with 2,00,000 visitors a month), which had relatively far less advertising.
Data also showed that the Congress site had caught up with the BJPs by the end of the election.

But looking deeper, we saw truly interesting patterns. The visitors to Advani’s site had a much-greater-than-normal propensity to be either over 60 years in age — and hence retired — or between 18 and 22 years and hence in college. Taking our mind back to the advertising of Advani as a “strong, decisive leader”, we wondered who it could have been aimed at.

The “strong man” premise has historically been one aimed at idealists, who believed a country was weak and needed a jolt of muscle at the top. Not surprisingly, to our mind, the age groups that resonated best with this message were the students and the retired folks — idealists in each sense, who were not “made pragmatic” by the pressures of working life.

In contrast, most working people, even the more affluent among this group, didn’t seem to have any such perception that the country was weak. Perhaps they had other issues, relating to the economy or stability — and the Congress tapped into those.

The site visit analysis to the AICC site showed exactly such trends. The bulk of the traffic reflected the Indian mainstream working class, with a bump towards the more affluent.

Anybody with even a rudimentary grasp of numbers can tell you that you cannot win an election by aiming at the under-22s and the over-60s. There are far too few of these people in this demographic to start with, and though they may be influential, they have relatively little economic power. To be a mainstream party, you have to aim for the big segments.

The Congress didn’t goof up here. They didn’t do anything remarkable — but they didn’t get it completely wrong either.

What this tells us is that this is not a failure of the online medium — but a failure of the creative minds behind the online advertising in the case of the BJP. The medium was right, but the strategy and creative were dead wrong. The Congress did both reasonably fairly, if not splashily.

People online are looking for solutions to economic problems, to save their jobs in the downturn and more. Putting an old man as the face of your campaign and rattling sabres did the opposite of what it was intended to do. The BJP campaign polarised the target audience. Some of the young bought the “strong man” theory. To the rest of us, it wasn’t a solution to any of our problems — and indeed it turned quite few of us off. We wanted economic problems solved — not someone who could likely take us to war with Pakistan over Kashmir, or Article 370.

What could the BJP have done right? Well, for starters, they had a formidable economic promise — fewer taxes, better business. They ignored this completely. They had a far-signed open source-centric IT manifesto. They ignored this too. By focusing on an irrelevancy (the alleged strength and decisiveness of an 81-year old man) they got the online eyeballs — but turned them off.

Doing an online campaign doesn’t mean you ignore the three key sides of communication. Media is only one component — getting the strategy and creative right are essential too. Better luck to the BJP the next time!

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by Sruthi Krishnan

What if you could ask any question and the Internet could give you an answer? All you need to do this is an ultimate knowledge engine.

The tasks it needs to do are straightforward — take raw data, convert it into a structured format and then use it to obtain knowledge. A tall order? Yes, but brave souls powered by grey cells are trying to tackle this head-on.

When you search for ‘India GDP,’ you could get around six million pages. The first page of results gives you around 10 results, from which you find the information you need.

What if the information was presented in a different fashion? Instead of a page with 10 links, you see a graph of India’s GDP over 10 years, comparison of India’s growth with that of other countries, and India’s GDP in five different currencies.

Wolfram Alpha, a computational knowledge engine, which is set to have a full-scale launch on May 18, says it will provide you with such answers. It is a product of Wolfram Research, founded by Steven Wolfram, a scientist and author.

“The key is presentation of results,” says Mahesh Murthy, founder of Pinstorm, a digital marketing firm, which is also into search engine advertising. Wolfram Alpha takes unstructured data and crunches it into an easy-to-understand format.

Wolfram Alpha’s backbone is Mathematica, a computational tool, which can perform complex scientific computation. Using this, Wolfram Alpha can not only compute a country’s GDP in various currencies but also calculate the weight of 100,000 molecules of salt and draw weather forecast graphs.

According to the pre-launch material, Wolfram Alpha has curated information from various sources and converted it into formats its computational engine can work on. The query is broken down into chunks, and Wolfram Alpha then decides what information you require. Taking inputs from different sources on the fly, the engine can compute results, which are provided in an accessible format.

But Wolfram Alpha is not a replacement for search engines, Mr. Murthy says.

Google’s search options

In the attempt to provide more relevant search results, Google has come up with a ‘Search Options’ feature, says Vinay Goel, Head of Products, Google India.

If you search for the number of Internet users in India, you will not want a study done in 2007. The ‘Search Options’ feature helps you filter results you want. “You can then see results within a year, or 24 hours, or the last hour,” he says.

Google Squared is another experimental product in Google labs, which aggregates a lot of data and provides the results in the form of a spreadsheet. If you want to search for digital cameras, you could get attributes such as pricing, availability and user reviews, packed into a single spreadsheet. The Wonder Wheel in Google labs is another product that provides a pictorial representation of related searches, he says.

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by Marion Arathoon and Anushree Chandran

The swine flu scare may be over, but some companies are looking to infuse an A/H1N1 strain—the technical name for the virus—into their advertising.

So, if purchases of Tamiflu, the Roche drug that fights the flu are regulated by the government, what can people do?

Ad inventory: A doctor uses a thermal scanner on a policeman in Mexico. There has been a spike in cold- and flu-related content being put out on websites, and traffic on these pages has also surged.Henry Romero / Reuters

For starters, they can wash their hands more often, says a microsite that is part of the website of Unilever Plc. brand Lifebuoy (www.lifebuoy.com).

“Swine flu? Not in my house. Have no fear with Lifebuoy,” says the microsite. The microsite was commissioned by Unilever to OgilvyOne.

“Lifebuoy globally is doing an educational activity…to educate consumers on how proper hand washing can help consumers protect themselves from swine flu,” said a Unilever spokesperson. “The microsite is one of the initiatives.”

An executive at an Indian agency, who is familiar with the development and who did not want to be identified, also claimed that Procter & Gamble Co. is working on a similar “swine flu” campaign for one of its brands.

Procter and Gamble India Ltd did not respond to emails from Mint on the subject.

Meanwhile, Kimberly-Clark Corp. has just broken ads for its Kleenex antiviral tissues on the swine flu theme in the UK on the back of the government’s mass door drop campaign: “Catch it, kill it, bin it”.

In Lifebuoy’s case, the executive said the microsite was an extension of the brand’s “keep your hands clean” campaign strategy running on traditional media and is part of the brand’s global hand-washing project conducted with the World Health Organization. This digital blitz is expected to have a positive rub-off on sales of liquid handwashing soap in various markets, including India.

The executive added that Lifebuoy plans to extend its campaign to digital screens in major airports across the world, and even on mobile phones of travellers using Bluetooth technology. The brand, he said, would follow up with its ads linked to searches on terms such as travel or Mexico.

There are already clear signs that the virus is set to become the marketing catchword of 2009, especially in the digital realm. According to Jay Sears, executive vice-president of strategic products and business development, ContextWeb Inc., which runs an online exchange for buyers and sellers of ad inventory, there has been a spike in cold- and flu-related content being put out by publishers. Traffic on these pages has jumped from almost zero to 400,000 a day, he claimed.

A similar trend can be seen in India. According to Mahesh Murthy, founder of Mumbai-based digital agency Pinstorm Technologies Pvt. Ltd, there was a 250% increase in volumes of online searches around swine flu around India between 25 April and 2 May. And the searches originate from all over India, even remote locations such as the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

Another expert said the spike continued well into May.

Tanay Tayal, director (product management) of digital agency Komli Media Pvt. Ltd said that between 26 April and 11 May, there were 1.5 million page views in India of articles on swine flu and at least 400,000 unique users who searched for something related to swine flu.

Till date, though, only international advertisers such as Red Cross and Pig333, a blog on pigs, AOL health advertising and National Public Radio are leveraging this search opportunity, said Murthy. He added that he sees a marketing opportunity here for Indian medical firms and products such as hand washes and disinfectants. Tayal concurs. “This could be an opportunity for pharma companies and companies that are promoting better lifestyle and hygiene.”

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by Gouri Shah

Meet the Zoozoos, the stick-like figures with egg-like heads that appear in TV ads for Vodafone and have become all the rage in India.