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Nirmal D. Menon

Mumbai , Oct. 11

INTERNET services company Yahoo! India has closed its home page advertising order book for the calendar year 2004-2005. It plans to aggressively market its untapped forte - IMVironments (IMVs) - to its Indian clients next year.

IMVs are backgrounds of instant messaging windows on Yahoo! Messenger, which until recently has been aggressively exploited by the parent company Yahoo! Inc, but needs to be introduced to Indian advertisers.

"As of now, we have no clients exploiting our IMVs and we plan to aggressively market IMVs in India for the next calendar year, besides adding innovative features to our existing Web site," said Mr Neville Taraporewalla, Country Manager, Yahoo! India, while banking on its 1.6 crore unique Web site users from India.

The closure of order books has offered the Internet company a reason to smile, as it witnessed a major draw from some leading brands of FMCG companies such as HLL and Marico.

"FMCG advertisers are aggressively using Internet as a medium of advertising on our portal and we have played host to some of the leading HLL brands like Close Up, Axe and Clinic Plus and Silk-n-Shine conditioners from Marico," said Mr Taraporewalla.

Yahoo! India revved up it promotional strategy by launching television commercials recently, but below-the-line promotional strategies still remain its best bet as they cover both its users and potential advertisers.

Addressing its primary target audience - the youth - the company is currently running an online and SMS promotional campaign for the second series of BBC World's University Challenge quiz produced by Mr Siddartha Basu.

"We have tied up with Hutch and Airtel for this initiative. These mobile users could participate in this challenge by responding to few questions through our short code 8243 and the winners have surprises in store," said Mr Taraporewalla.

Meanwhile, the company will present the Effie Awards organised by the Advertising Club of Bombay for the third time in a row in line with its strategy to promote the effectiveness of online advertising. .

"Our three years of association with Effie Awards has been really rewarding and we have been able to create the desired `shift of minds' of media planners, agencies and clients towards the online medium," said Mr Taraporewalla.

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