Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Thursday, Mar 10, 2005
Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Thursday, Mar 10, 2005 |
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Catalyst
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Interview `Interactive media is staggeringly effective'
Sriram Srinivasan
Matt Freeman, CEO, Tribal DDB Worldwide
Interactive marketing or digital branding is the newest mantra of marketers worldwide, as consumers get increasingly Net savvy. In fact, marketing gurus feel brands can create a deeper involvement with their target audiences, considering the long number of hours they spend online. Though it is still at a nascent stage in India, advertisers here are also beginning to look at it as an effective media to reach out to their target audiences.
Does interactive marketing work the same way as other media, or is it different?
What is fundamentally different about it is that it is a consumer-controlled set of media. In other words, if you don't choose to go to the Web site, you will never see the Web site as opposed to more intrusive forms of advertising like in a newspaper or television, where you have no choice. Interactive grew up a different way, in a way that made brands convey a value to consumers to be attractive enough so that the consumers would decide to interact with them. If it's Pepsi, which is a large client of ours, it meant having original music from Shakira or Britney Spears on the Web site, so that people would say, `I want to interact with Pepsi as I am interested in the music that Pepsi brings to me.' This is a different model than just pushing the messages at people. How do you create that urge?
For example, for Mountain Dew, another Pepsi brand, we created a television show called `Mountain Dew Network,' which was on TV and also online. We created games for the Mountain Dew Network, which attracted 3.5 lakh unique players within two weeks. When you think about the amount of consumer time they were able to generate compared to a 30-second television spot, the ROI is staggeringly effective. But you have to approach it in a fundamentally different way — you have to decide what would attract people to the brand rather than what you would want to push at people about the brand. Are the numbers targeted vastly different than mass media?
They are less different today than they were a couple of years ago. In many markets, interactive now accounts for a larger proportion of consumer time than television and newspapers. The younger generation, especially, spends more time in using instant messenger, e-mail, surfing the Web, watching videos and downloading music than watching television. So, the audiences are now there and our effectiveness in reaching them has increased commensurately. And it's led by the youngsters?
The largest target audience from the percentage standpoint are the 18-35-year-olds. But that's also the most valuable target group for advertisers in general. Surprisingly enough, the population online has normalised quite a bit over the last two years. In other words, you have retirees and older folk who are spending a large amount of time online, finding out about vacation packages, medication, banking and retirement accounts. And as more and more aspects of their lives have migrated online, a larger portion of their media time is spent online. Online started as just a large library of information. Now, it's a primary mode of communication, self-expression (uploading photographs, creating Web sites), financial transaction mode, education, gaming and so on. Now, it's a much broader slice of media apertures that online represents. You were saying interactive media in some markets is much popular than standalone media. Which are these markets?
US, Germany, markets in Northern Europe and Canada. And there are markets such as China and Hong Kong where, if you include mobile phones, it will be overwhelmingly more popular. Interactive is no longer just the Internet; if you broaden the category and think about any two-way interaction with the consumer, you are not talking just about the Internet but also about mobile phones, gaming, ITV, kiosks and a whole swathe of interactive media. What form would the interactive media take in a relatively less interactive market like India?
The investment always has to be sensible with regards to the audience. We just met with the DBS team from Mudra, which is working on Citibank, and although the online population is small from the percentage standpoint, from the absolute numbers standpoint it is very significant. And the effectiveness of reaching that audience is very attractive. The other thing is about not being so parochial — about just the Internet. Reaching people at the theatres, with interactive kiosks, reaching people with branded services on mobile phones ... there are different touch-points which can be used beyond the Internet. Lakshminarayan:
The Indian youth is fast becoming similar to the worldwide youth, therefore there is not going to be much disparity when we look at the Indian market. In terms of percentage the online advertising market here is small, but the opportunity is huge. Let's not forget that the country has the largest number of cyber cafes in the world, which not only caters to online chatting but also to people doing business. On the other hand, the mobile market is also booming, which is approaching the 200-million milestone. A part of our strategy would be to offer this menu of specialised services to Mudra's clients, depending on how appropriate and how relevant that offering is going to be. At the same time, we won't restrict ourselves to that. For example, Pepsi is not a Mudra client but Tribal certainly has a very large relationship with it and we would go and talk to them. I see no reason why a year down the line Tribal should not offer its clients Mudra's advertising services. What is the percentage share of interactive branding vis-à-vis total spending?
In the US, it's approaching five per cent. But the gap between the percentage allocated to interactive and the percentage of time that interactive represents in a consumer's life is about 15. In other words, it consumes about 20 per cent of the total media but only 5 per cent of the marketing investment. And that number is growing quickly. But it also points to a large opportunity gap in the market place. Also, what has not been accounted for properly is the value of interactivity. Thirty seconds of television or 10 seconds of print exposure, the quality of exposure is not necessarily the same as someone who has decided to interact with you for five minutes. It's a deeper involvement that you have online than you have anywhere else. What we are trying to figure out in the industry right now is how to value interaction. In other words, instead of GRPs, what are the gross interaction points that we are talking about. Are advertisers fed up with mass media? Do you see interactive becoming the biggest player in the media?
I don't think advertisers are fed up with the mass media. In fact, the Internet is a mass media when you think about it. So, it would be hard to say that they are going away from one mass medium and rushing into another. But what has become more important to advertisers is the accountability of its work. The average tenure of a chief marketing officer is 24 months. That's an extremely short period of time in which to prove your value. So, accountability is hugely important. If they have a million or billion dollars to spend, they need to go back and show their CEO what it generated for the company. And interactive does have a great advantage in terms of accountability but to say that it can stand alone and become the largest would be short-sighted. Examples of interactive campaigns that you have done?
We just did a campaign for McDonald's which was aired on the Super Bowl. It was a fake documentary, or what they call a `mocumentary', about a person in a small town in the US who discovers a French fry that looks like the profile of Abraham Lincoln. And he becomes a celebrity in the town and there's a huge swell of popular interest in the French fry. And what we did, knowing it was going to be aired on the Super Bowl, was create a blog for this guy and have huge amounts of traffic coming in to this blog. This was before the campaign got aired. So, people didn't know whether it was real or it was a joke. And the viral activity online made the character so popular that when it was aired on television there was a collective `Aha!' The Super Bowl spot pushed people back to the Web site, which we launched during the Super Bowl, and auctioned the French fry. Now, we have a bid for over $100,000 for this French fry, which will be donated to charity — to the Ronald McDonald House. I think it's an interesting case study about how we can use old media, new media, pro bono work and corporate branding work all in the same context.
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