[Link]

by Satrajit Sen

Consim Info, which owns matrimony portal BharatMatrimony.com, recently filed a trademark infringement case against the internet search company Google and three other matrimony portals Jeevansathi.com, Shaadi.com and SimplyMarry.com in the Madras High Court. The court while hearing the case ex parte, gave an interim injunction to Consim. In the light of this case, AlooTechie tried to talk with some experts and see how they view the development.
According to Murugavel Janakiraman, founder and CEO, Consim Info, there are two reasons why the group has sued Google, and competitors Shaadi.com, Jeevansathi.com and SimplyMarry.com. “Firstly, we filed the case seeking prevention of competitive advertising on Google. People searching for our trademarks know what they are searching for, and Google is the entry point for our sites. And hence the users should not be shown ads of other similar websites. Secondly, we have asked Google to stop allowing our competitors using our trademarked keywords as headings. For example, if someone searches for ‘Tamil Bride’, which is a generic keyword, competitors use our trademarks (Tamil Matrimony) as headings in Google AdWords, which linkback to their websites,” Janakiraman told AlooTechie.

Following the Consim Vs Google case, AlooTechie tried to explore if the practice of showing competitors’ ads when one is searching for a brand name on Google, is happening only in the online matrimony space or in other verticals as well and found that there are similar cases happening with even offline brands such as Adidas, Dell and Max New York Life. For instance, a search for Adidas, Puma or Reebok on Google shows advertisements from Nike, while a search for LIC shows up ads from Max New York Life and Aegon Religare. Similarly, a search for HP leads us to ads from Dell and a search for Dell shows ads from Samsung. Looking into the online real estate space, we found that a search for 99acres shows ads from MagicBricks.

Clearly, this appears to be a common problem across the verticals and categories and is not only confined to the online matrimony space or even online space. Hence, we caught up with Mahesh Murthy, founder and CEO, Pinstorm, to know more about the practice of using a competitor’s registered trademark to advertise one’s products and services online.

According to Murthy, Google already has a rule in place which says that if a company can show the proof of its registered trademarks to Google, no one else would be allowed to advertise using these keywords. “For example, words like Jet and Microsoft are registered keywords for Jet Airways and Microsoft Corporation and Google doesn’t allow any other advertisements around the same search keyword. Now, in India, if a company fails to show the proof of its registered keywords, Google allows competitors’ ads to appear on search results, but restricts usage of the keywords in the copy of the ads,” said Murthy.

Speaking on whether BharatMatrimony is right in asking Google to stop competitors from using its keywords as ad headlines, Murthy said, “As claimed by Consim, ‘TamilMatrimony’ (without a space) is a registered keyword of the group. So, it appears that the group owns a combination of two generic words Tamil and Matrimony. Now, the competitors are using Tamil Matrimony as two separate generic keywords in their ad copies and hence BharatMatrimony can’t claim that these two separate generic terms are their registered keywords,” he added.

Agreeing with Mahesh Murthy, Pavan Duggal, advocate, Supreme Court of India, said that the usage of two generic terms separately in the search ads cannot be considered as a registered trademark infringement as BharatMatrimony just owns a joined version of the two generic terms. According to Duggal, depending on usage patterns, even a generic word can be registered as a keyword and once the trademark is registered the party has the legitimacy to ask search engines to protect the usage of that particular keyword by competitive properties in search results.

Describing the complaints made by BharatMatrimony as meaningless, Mahesh Murthy said that the group itself can be held guilty for a similar practice. “Though the Madras High Court has given an interim injunction, this is a wrong judgement and the decision should be challenged or else Jet Airways will tomorrow say that ‘Airways’ is their registered keyword and they want other airlines to stop advertising around that keyword,” said Murthy. He further suggested Google to stop using different policies in different countries and to make a standard keyword advertising policy across the world.

Commenting on the Consim Info Vs Google case, Pavan Duggal, a cyber law expert, further said that the existing provisions of Indian cyber laws are being tested by the new challenges of this growing medium. “However, in this case where there is an Indian dispute, between Indian parties and in an Indian court, the enforceability of the law in favour of BharatMatrimony is something which is expected,” said Duggal.

When asked why Consim focused its trademark infringement case on the group’s matrimonial competitors, Janakiraman said that though the problem persists across categories and verticals, they have decided to go for BharatMatrimony as it is the company’s premiere and well-known brand. He further said that the company had earlier contacted Google on the same but did not get a good response and hence had to move to court.

Responding to the case filed by Consim Info, a Google India spokesperson has said, “We have received the court papers and are in the process of reviewing those. We believe that our policies are in compliance with the mandate of trademark law and we will defend our position on that basis. We also believe that consumers are smart and are not confused when they see a variety of ads displayed in response to their search queries. We will not be able to go into further details of the case, since the matter is sub judice.”

[Link]

by Abhimanyu Radhakrishnan

TechCrunch has scooped the mainstream media yet again! It’s the first to report that Facebook has acquired FriendFeed. (The official FB press release page is down as of 0125h IST presumably because of an avalanche of traffic!)

ET’s Lightning Analysis: This is a BIG deal in the Web 2.0 war! While at one level Facebook is conceding that its recent homepage overhaul has not been able to dent twitter, it has now put pressure on Google-Twitter to do a similar deal. I think the biggest gain for Facebook though is the FriendFeed founder team (early Googlers all) who come on board. Between the gang, you more or less have the brains behind Gmail, Google Maps and some critical parts of Search, which makes them invaluable to anyone wanting to challenge the big GOOG.

But enough of ‘gyaan’ from me – hey, what do I know? I’m just commenting as a user of these sites. Let’s get in a REAL expert, who’s also insane enough to take a journalist’s call at 0130 IST! Here’s a quick Q&A on the Facebook – FriendFeed deal, with the Founder-CEO of India’s (and probably Asia’s) largest Search Advertising company, Pinstorm: (NB: answers are not exact quotes & are paraphrased from a telephonic interview)

Economic Times: Mahesh, no numbers have been disclosed, so as a VC who knows Silicon Valley math inside-out, what’s your ‘back of the envelope’ guess?

Mahesh Murthy (@maheshmurthy on Twitter) : This is speculation, but typically, its a million per person, so I would assume this is in the range of 30-50 million dollars. But then again I’m known to be conservative (“Sabko pata hai main kanjoos hoon”) so that’s what I would pay for it, but it could be more, maybe even close to three figures, if they got a good deal. The founders though are the real value that Facebook gets out of this. One of them, Paul Buchheit coined Google’s “Don’t be Evil” motto!

ET: Does this mean Facebook failed with their new home page?

MM: The page wasn’t a good substitute for Twitter – you had to manually refresh, while FriendFeed and others do it automatically. I suspect FriendFeed will become Facebook’s new home page.

ET: Does this increase the pressure on Google to buy Twitter?

MM: I think this increases the pressure on Twitter to get acquired by someone – they’ve been talking to everybody of late.

ET: Why did FriendFeed do this?

MM: Out of my 2400 odd followers on Twitter, only about 200 subscribe to me via FriendFeed. I don’t know what FriendFeed’s user numbers are but I suspect they’re not more than a fifth of Twitter’s 50 million. FriendFeed had no choice, since they were never going to catch up with Twitter.

ET: Does this get the industry any closer to figuring out how to monetize social media?

MM: Well, more people will come to the Facebook homepage for sure, but there aren’t many monetizing options there. Google does 21 billion dollars in revenue with about 700 million unique users giving it approximately 30 dollars per user. Facebook barely gets a dollar per user, so they’ve resorted to selling ads like television – “We get the attention of “x” users for “y” amount of time” – since they don’t have much to write home about, on web parameters like Cost per Click or Cost per (1000) Impressions. So I don’t think this deal addresses that issue, since FriendFeed is also more about watching the action and less about acting upon it.

ET: These FriendFeed founders include the guys responsible for Gmail! Do you think they could bring some of that expertise to making Facebook’s inbox better?

MM: Hmmm, that’s something I never thought of (abhi2point0 pats self on back)…. problem is you can read all your Facebook messages from your email inbox – and most people give their Gmail IDs these days – so Facebook will need a different approach to how they’re currently doing it, if they’re serious about monetizing it.

[Link]

by Sruthi Krishnan

“Those in Mumbai, slums @ Geeta Nagar destroyed in rains, help with rice/atta/tea/pulses/clothes.”

Recently a variant of this message kept echoing online in Twitter, the short messaging service. These messages would be tagged with #mumbairains, and anyone who wanted updates on how the city was coping with the annual monsoons — be it traffic jams, college attendance or office woes — could log in. And perhaps, wade through the water to Geeta Nagar with some hot tea.

These messages were not being posted by one person, an organised group, the authorities or an institution; they came from the crowd — spread all over the world, united by a desire to help.

Crowdsourcing involves taking a task and letting others do it, says Gaurav Mishra, founder and CEO, 20:20 Web Tech, a social media research and analytics firm.

The crowd voluntarily took on the task of monitoring the rains. Interest was a major driver.

A company may want to know how to put pictures on potato chips. There would be many people in the world who would know how to go about it. The company could ask for contributions from all of them and choose the best one for use, says Mr. Mishra, explaining how crowdsourcing worked.

As these people are amateurs, the company would not need to pay as much, and the person, whose motivation is to make that advertisement rather than commercial ends, is also satisfied. So a person living in Italy could give an idea to a person in India — something made possible by the Internet.

Innocentive ( www.innocentive.com) is a crowdsourcing site based on this idea.

In India, crowdsourcing as businesses is just catching up. Lattice Purple, a Delhi-based firm, has created a platform ‘YouSuggest’ (http://yousuggest.us) for companies to crowdsource ideas from customers. “The best of the ideas could be implemented for the product,” says Arvind Nigam, one of the founders of Lattice Purple. The platform is available for use through a SaaS (software as a service) model.

“This is a democratic platform for ideas,” says Mr. Nigam. If the company does not implement an idea, there could be risk of a backlash. But companies could moderate discussions.

Other tweaks may be needed for crowdsourcing to work in India. Myidea ( www.myidea.co.in), started by a private cellular service provider as a platform to crowdsource ideas on Indian politics, integrated SMS. “We kept in touch with the crowd using email, SMS and Web, because we’re not as “on the net” as people in the U.S. are,” says Mahesh Murthy, founder of Pinstorm, a digital advertising firm that managed Myidea.

Crowdsourcing could take on other forms. For instance, Amazon Mechanical Turk ( www.mturk.com) calls itself a ‘marketplace for work.’ If you need to translate 10 pages in English into Telugu, you could advertise on this site. This task will be broken down and parcelled out to many people and then aggregated to provide you the translation.

The photo site iStockphoto ( www.istockphoto.com) and the T-shirt site Threadless ( www.threadless.com) are some popular examples of sites using crowdsourcing.

[Link]

by Seema Sindhu

The digital media industry will grow over 80% Y-o-Y as the base is quite small.

The growth potential of digital advertising is prompting traditional ad agencies to join hands with online companies.

In Cannes, Microsoft announced partnerships with two leading advertising companies — the WPP Group and Publicis Groupe. Rishi Srivastava, consumer and online marketing officer, Microsoft India, did not comment on the nature of the deals but said Microsoft was already working closely with all major agencies in India and such deals were the need of the hour.

“Online advertising is increasing rapidly and the deals are aimed at offering better solutions to large brands,” he reasons.

Figures speak for themselves. While the traditional media will not grow over 13 per cent year-on-year this year, analysts believe digital media will grow over 80 per cent Y-o-Y as the base is quite small in India. Internet advertising is a Rs 250-300 crore market and, according to a Ficci-PwC study, is expected to touch Rs 1,100 crore by 2011.

Tapping this growth requires deeper relationships between stakeholders. Some data are with agencies, some with publishers. To convince clients to put money into a new medium, the stakeholders will have to work together. Agencies are tying up with publishers for consumer research, data sharing, training and leveraging of technology platform.

Parminder Singh, business head, technology, at Google India, adds: “Now agencies are willing to do joint pitches (for accounts). One reason is also that digital is a very dynamic medium. Agencies have to collaborate with publishers for technical know-how to keep pace with the medium. Also, the social media frenzy has opened up new avenues. Offline agencies need publishers’ expertise to explore such avenues.” Google works closely with all big agencies in India.

Nitin Mathur, director (marketing), Yahoo! India, adds: “Creative agencies play a very critical role in incorporating digital at the core of any idea. This is vital because when they begin to think digital as a key alternative at a campaign conception stage, there will definitely be a larger shift of ad dollars moving from offline to online.”

Yahoo also works with them closely at a client account level, in helping shape the digital component of all marketing campaigns. It also invests in time and effort in educating creative agencies on thinking digital and even helping them learn how to develop creatives for the medium. Sidharth Rao, CEO and co-founder of Webchutney, concurs that internet companies and advertising agencies “will have to spend a lot of time and effort evangelising the medium to their clients.”

Most of the top 500 advertisers in India, according to a recent Webchutney survey, are allocating only 5 per cent of their spends on digital advertising. And, though the industry will grow a healthy 44 per cent this year (more than most other mediums like print and television), “We have a long journey ahead, which requires stronger partnerships and coordinated efforts,” Rao says.

Prashant Mehta, COO, Komli Media (an ad network which provides products and service for digital advertisers and publishers), agrees the space is witnessing more deals. Komli is also chasing some deals with some big names, but Mehta refused to divulge any details.

Independent digital advertising agencies don’t feel any threat, though. Mahesh Murthy, founder and CEO of Pinstorm, believes traditional ad agencies are yet to understand how to work in the digital medium. Their structure, which separates creative and media buying, is not suited for the integration that digital needs.

Moreover, their business models, based on flat fees or commissions, are also unsuited to the performance-driven digital advertising industry. For this reason, he feels this space will probably be led by independent digital agencies. Conventional agencies also realise that independent digital ad agencies are tough rivals, according to industry observers.

[Link]

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.”