With a buyers market, and customer being the king, today marketers are looking at new avenues to sell and promote their products. Gone are the days when consumer use to wait for years to get their hand on to their scooters from Bajaj, or wait in que, tolerate the wims & fancies of the babu’s to withdraw their hard earned money. I may be few fortunate or unfortunate ones born just before the so called “Gen Y” and “Youngistan” to experience this and thus today may be able to take you through “Kal Aaj Aur Kal” of advertisement!!
From traditional marketing through advertisements on hoardings, news paper, magazine, television; advertisement today have evolved as days & decades went by. I still remember a hoarding on Park Street crossing in Kolkata, which had 2 way advertisements. It was a hoarding with wooden perforated slides, which had one advertisement when it swayed to the right and another when it swayed to the left. Me as a kid was excited to see that and wanted the traffic signal to be red, so that I can read and see the ads when our car stopped. Those innocent days!!
From that day till date I have seen phenomenal changes in advertisement, not only in the way it is presented, but where and through what medium it has been presented. I remember one day seeing the Times of India having a full page advertisement on the cover page. People in their weirdest dream would not have visualized that. It was for a new portal “Indya.com”, now an internal portal for Star TV network. That was an innovation in advertisement and now we see it quite often, be it the new Audi A4 or obituary of Dhirubhai Ambani.
I remember movies, which used common things like Colgate toothpaste or a Wills cigarette, which a protagonist may be using while playing his character casually, the producer never thought that it’s a way of publicity and brands used had to pay for it. Today they pay!! If my memory serves correct I had seen such thing in a Showman Subash Ghai’s movie, where he charged a whopping sum to publicize a brand, his protagonist used. Be it a Cola or a brand of pan masala. People saw and product owners paid for those advertisements.
Television & Radio was not behind. I remembered switching on my TV at 9.10 for a 9PM serial, as we knew that it shall be advertisement which shall be shown at the beginning of the serial. With one channel, it was possible, but with television being revolutionized with private channels, the trick had to be changed to catch eyeballs. The broadcaster split the ads in 2 parts one in the beginning, and other in between a 30 min prime time. The ads worked, but then with competition, channels had to keep TRP’s high and keep the audience glued to the same channel was a challenge as Surfing of channels had caught on with the audience as they flipped to other channels to view something else while one channel broadcasted the ads!!!
Innovators came up with another idea, now they started the serial once the previous ended and plugged in all the advertisements in between. And if they had something cracking to start with, like death scene of Mihir in Kyuki, or revenge scene of Tulsi etc etc, Eureka!!, the audience was glued!!
Indian advertisement has gone through phenomenal shift, and the new age of advertisement is catching up. The foremost thought for a campaign is “target audience” and “eyeballs of target audience”. Where do we get them?
With communication being redefined, today we have millions of people on the internet; it is time for Online & Viral Marketing, the new age advertisement to be unleashed. Be it a campaign for Monstor.com (job portal), Reliance Communication or Citi Bank these virals are a sensible & cost effective way to advertisement to promote a message at the end of a spoof. You like it, you send it to your friends and then they send it to their friends and it spreads like virus, and thus the name Viral!!!
The essence of advertisement has changed in India, and changed for good, intelligent and creative. From a simple print ads of yester years, today’s campaigns are funny, thought provoking and at times with social message. Few campaigns that caught my attention are one from Durex, to be funny yet innovative. A surf excel, “Daag Acche Hai” campaign, Hutch / Vodaphone pug ads.
Social Networking sites like Orkut, Facebook, today have collective subscribers in millions, people use this platform to advertise, create a craze and sense the pulse too. You have communities for Roadies, for different movies when they launch. This is a great platform to advertise and also analyze the pulse of target audience.
With a country of 246 million plus mobile subscribers, mobile phones cannot be left behind. With the new age models coming up and requirement of people minimizing to one device for everything, mobile gaming is catching up big time. Advertiser finds a medium to advertise, Bingo, the chips manufacturer from ITC, have games where you solve puzzles to reach to the Bingo packet, is a new way of advertising, and also creating a craze amongst Yougistan to associate with a brand, and maintain loyalty too.
Advertisement through SMS is also catching up. Be it reality show, or a contest people are advertising and making revenue with their simple pull and push advertisement campaign.
But has these campaigns today taken a toll on our lives? Have they intruded our private space? Will too many advertisements kill the essence of this productive tool? Is the product manufacturer paying too much for visibility?
Answers to these questions will be the future of advertisement in the next generation!!!
With a buyers market, and customer being the king, today marketers are looking at new avenues to sell and promote their products. Gone are the days when consumer use to wait for years to get their hand on to their scooters from Bajaj, or wait in que, tolerate the wims & fancies of the babu’s to withdraw their hard earned money. 
With communication being redefined, today we have millions of people on the internet; it is time for Online & Viral Marketing, the new age advertisement to be unleashed. Be it a campaign for Monstor.com (job portal), Reliance Communication or Citi Bank these virals are a sensible & cost effective way to advertisement to promote a message at the end of a spoof. You like it, you send it to your friends and then they send it to their friends and it spreads like virus, and thus the name Viral!!! 
This post is certainly one of the more comprehensive ones that I have read on the advertising trends. But one area of the advertising media that you may have overlooked (or simply chose to exclude) is the mailers, and in these days, the email campaigns. You will see the best copywriting brains in the world being hired to frame the copy for these mails. Why? Well, to begin with, there is hardly any investment involved (no media buying required). So even if only 1% of the target audience gives a favorable response, it's totally worth it as the margin is almost 100%. All you need to do is to figure out a way to stay one step ahead of the spam filters.
ReplyDeleteAnother area of opportunity in advertising that has really captured my imagination are the ones in the gaming sector. It won't be long before the main protagonists in these games are opening a bottle of Coke or wearing those new Nike shoes. For all you know, the designers at Electronic Arts are already working on it as you are reading this comment.