We created a questionnaire to find out more about the economic downturn in India and if it had affected your finances and thinking.

Those following us on Twitter will recall that we had promised to share results of the survey. We were glad to receive 112 responses. We believe the responses are a fair indicator of the questions asked in the survey.

Therefore, as promised, here are the unedited results of the survey, ‘Managing Finances Through The Downturn’. Click on the images for a larger graph:

(Click on the images to view a larger graph)

You can also view the HTML version of this report from here. Also, thanks to the following people for helping us spread the survey on Twitter: @Maheshmurthy, @Netra, @Asfaq, @Mekkanikal, @Jinadcruz, @amit3d, @viveksigh, @sumeet, @theanand, @fossiloflife, @just08in, @piyushgupta, @iqbalgandham, @dhempe, and @pujamadan. You can follow us here on Twitter: @Pinstormer.

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.

Marketing through the recession:
is pay-for-performance advertising the silver bullet?

In these times we’re seeing ad budgets cut, agreements re-negotiated and the pressure to deliver increase on marketing, advertising and publisher teams.

Is pay-for-performance advertising the answer? Instead of paying for eyeballs or impressions, would you rather pay for sales or leads? Whither branding?

Google started this trend – can it spread beyond search to all digital advertising, including banners? Should this be the model for TV and print? Will we see the good old days of large allocations to branding again? How do marketers see media spends in this era of unprecedented accountability?

We (Pinstorm & our partner Lintas Media Group) along with the IAMAI are hosting a series of closed-door roundtables on these questions. The first one:

“Marketing through the recession: is pay-for-performance advertising the silver bullet?”

is on Tuesday, January 13, 2009, Mumbai – the first in a series of events to be conducted in Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai.

This open-format discussion will be led by Pradeep Srivastava of Idea Cellular, Ronita Mitra of ICICI, Rajiv Prabhakar of Sharekhan, Debadutta Upadhyaya of Yahoo and Lynn de Souza of Lintas and moderated by Mahesh Murthy of Pinstorm.

This closed-door event will be beneficial to those who make marketing / advertising decisions for their brands.

For more details, contact:
Asfaq Tapia | asfaq@pinstorm.com | +91 989 211 3910

Last night, November 26 2008, Mumbai was attacked. Mumbai is not just where Pinstorm is headquartered, but it’s a city that all 100 or so of us in this office love truly, deeply, madly.

It has turned out that the attack was a well-funded, well-trained effort. One that killed innocent guests and employees at one of our clients’ hotels – The Taj. In addition to horrors at another hotel, The Trident and at a building called Nariman House. The attack eventually ended up killing at least 100 people, and left at least 3 times as many injured. And the toll rises as I write this.

We were extraordinarily fortunate to find out that none of our people and their immediate families was affected. Many others, we know, are not so lucky. Our heart goes out to them.

We followed the news closely. While the news TV had sketchy or downright wrong information, we noticed that some of the more reliable updates on the #Mumbai Twitter stream came from two of our own people- Netra and Asfaq.( I added a bit.)

Both worked tirelessly through the night updating the planet on what was going on. Netra in fact was interviewed by several international news organisations.

We figured out this morning- the 27th, that our co-citizens in Bombay perhaps could do with a simple, reliable source of important information. While the TV channels did their canned-panic-overkill-designed-for-rating, we felt there was a need for basic, useful information: how to contact the hotels, the hospitals, the authorities, or the right people at the blood banks and the embassies.

So we decided to put it together. In another superhuman effort, Netra and Asfaq, along with Vikas, Naman and Sanjeev put together a page rather quickly to serve this need: http://helpmumbai.pinstorm.com .

I write this while many of us have not slept in 36 hours.

To the Pinstorm team and to everyone else in Mumbai, you’re the real heroes. We’ve been through crap like this before – and we’ve fought it together. We’ll fight this one with everything at our disposal, and we’ll get through this too.

And all I’ll say is this – let’s keep calm, let’s not descend into terror. For if we do that, then the terrorists will have won.

- Mahesh

Indian firm chosen among “Asia’s Hottest” three times in four years.

Pinstorm, the world’s leading pay-for-performance digital marketing firm has been selected by Red Herring Magazine to their list of Asia’s 200 Hottest companies for 2008. This is Pinstorm’s third appearance in the list, having graced it earlier in 2005 & 2006. Pinstorm has the distinction of being perhaps the only firm in the world to be selected thrice in four years.

The Red Herring Award is bestowed by Silicon Valley-based Red Herring magazine after evaluating the business model, analysing profitability forecasts, and assessing the management team.

Mahesh Murthy, Founder, Pinstorm said “Colour us red with joy. We first won when we were barely 20 people working out of one office. Today we are over 120 from 7 offices in 6 countries – and it’s a thrill to know that the world sees us just as hot as ever. Our pay-for-performance model is revolutionizing advertising both on the search and display fronts – and we hope to continue this hot streak for a long time to come”, Mahesh Murthy added.

Pinstorm is the only India-based MNC advertising firm, with offices in USA, Europe, China, Singapore, Malaysia and India. We are unique for our integrated approach which re-bundles creative and media in the digital world. Pinstorm’s solutions are created across Display, SEM, SEO, WAP, SMS, Social Media, Viral and other digital media – while they are charged for only on a pay-for-performance basis. Clients don’t pay for strategy, creative, servicing or media – but only pay for the measurable branding impact and prospect responses generated. Our clients around the world include Microsoft, Jet Airways, Yahoo, HSBC, Standard Chartered, Canon, Panasonic, Sharekhan and NIIT.