The Hindu Business Line : The future of interactivity

COLLEGE-going Priyanka prefers to get news updates on her cellphone, surfs the Net for information and tunes into television during her free time for entertainment. The new-age kid has taken to interactivity with gusto.

This is evident from the brisk growth in mobile phones and Internet connectivity. The total number of GSM subscribers in September this year crossed the 50-million-mark to reach 50.87 million. This may be minuscule compared to China, which has reported about 380 million users by the end of September, but the market continues to burgeon. Similarly, there are about 28 million online users in India, mainly in the 20-40-age bracket.

These numbers may still be smaller than the traditional media comprising print and television, but media planners such as Kartik Iyer, President - Initiative, a part of Lintas Media Group, believe that online and mobile phones will be important communication vehicles. The latest National Readership Survey (NRS 2005) has estimated 170 million readers of daily newspapers and 200 million readers of all publications across India. It has also indicated that 108 million homes in the country have television sets and over 450 million viewers watch TV.

Little wonder then that Cadbury India chose the online medium to complement its `Pappu pass ho gaya' campaign with a banner campaign online. Pepsi recently previewed its Shah Rukh Khan-Sapera campaign online before taking it to TV while arch-rival Coca-Cola created a promotional blitzkrieg around the Vanilla Coke launch on its Web site.

The Internet, armed with a personalising and customising edge, was considered a niche medium for advertising but is now becoming popular. Estimates suggest that the online market could touch Rs 162 crore by March 2006, up from Rs 107 crore recorded last year.

According to Preeti Desai, President of Internet and Mobile Association of India, "These numbers will get further support from business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce sales which crossed Rs 570 crore last year and is projected to be at Rs 1,180 crore for 2005-06."

"Online advertising has become a major part of our media planning and we are recommending it to almost all our clients. It may not be a universal medium like print or television, but the customisation helps us deliver results," says Iyer. "With convergence, millions of consumers will have mobile handsets that can access rich media content and services from the Internet making this a very potent medium for the advertisers," adds Jasmeet Singh, Vice-President - Product Marketing, Rediff.com.

Most of the Internet users are young and prefer to read about the product online before making a purchase decision. It also facilitates an "extended dialogue" with viewers. For instance, against an average dialogue window of 30 seconds in traditional media, Net ads can provide an extended dialogue of six minutes including the time taken to do research, download information, leave behind their own information and conclude a transaction. Another advantage with online advertising is that it provides 24X7 access to information. Besides, it is the customer who decides which advertisement to watch.

A 30-second spot on any of the popular K-serials or during an important cricket match costs several lakhs, but a one-month banner ad on homepages of popular Web sites can vary from Rs 1 lakh to even Rs 25 lakh.

Usually, media planners prefer to opt for rotating banners, which change every few seconds. Returns are calculated based on cost-per-impression (how many times the ad is noticed on the site), cost-per-click and cost-per-conversion. Since the medium enables the planner to keep track of the exact response of the viewer, it is regarded as a highly efficient one.

Elaborates Singh of Rediff.com, "Increase in ad rates is directly related to the reach and the effectiveness of any medium. The increase in the number of advertisers is an indicator of increasing trust in the effectiveness of the medium and like in any other medium, ad rates have increased and only large portal sites are able to provide the reach and the desired response to the advertisers. Rich media advertising that will include audio and video streaming is expected to take off in the future."

The number of categories that are bullish about the medium has also gone up in the recent times. Though most of the sectors have been spending a minor percentage of their total ad budget on the interactive medium, last year financial services companies spent 2.5 per cent of their budget on Net advertising. This year the industry expects that some of the sectors such as consumer durables, financial services and even fast moving consumer goods to spend up to four per cent of their budgets on this medium.

Going forward, search ads would gain prominence as they allow companies with smaller ad budgets to reach out to targeted set of customers in a more focused manner, says Ratish Nair, COO, Internet Communications Company, Media Turf.

When Manisha Gupta, a 35-year-old software engineer from Delhi, decided to buy a DVD player, she logged on to the Internet to first check out various brands before making a beeline to the nearest consumer durables store to purchase it. Twenty-two-year-old Abhijit Sharma went a step ahead and bought the camcorder he had been saving-up for, on a popular e-commerce site after browsing through the slew of offerings online.

True, Indian consumers - the majority of them - still visit stores and chat up with sales representatives, or gather product information from their friends and acquaintances, but a growing number of people are sifting through millions of pages of online information before making purchase decisions.

According to the Internet Association's Desai, no other form of communication comes close to turning exposure to promotion into immediate customer action as the Internet, which allows customers to make purchases immediately after experiencing a promotion. Prior to the Internet, the most productive call-to-action was through television `infomercials' that encouraged viewers to call toll-free phone numbers. However, moving customers from a non-active state (i.e., watching television) to an active state (i.e., picking up the phone to call the number) is not nearly as effective as getting people to click on an Internet ad while they are actively using the Internet.

With Internet and mobile phones' usage gaining ground, companies are beginning to experiment with different models for enhanced brand recall. And what could be more effective than linking brand messages with games? Advergaming is the new tool being used to connect consumers with brands and companies through games on the internet or mobile phones.

With this, you could make rubberman Hrithik Roshan dance to your mouse or be part of the next Bunty Aur Babli plot. Remember Coke's association with the Abhishek Bachchan-Aishwarya Rai- starrer, Kuch Na Kaho, where the company's site carried movie specific content, sneak peeks, games and downloads ... more than seven million people visited the site during the period!

The film industry is trying to create advergames around certain specific movie properties that would help create interest in the movie as well as give mileage to the brand associating itself with such a promotion.

Says Sanjay Bhutiani, CEO, P9 Integrated (a movie and entertainment marketing company), "We are in talks with both gaming production companies as well as film producers for this. Advergaming would work for certain genre of films. Besides, increasing interactivity, this could also bring in some additional revenues through pay-per-download."

Unlike other media such as television where viewers generally multi-task, an estimated 93-94 per cent of Netizens engaged in a gaming session prefer to concentrate on the task at hand while only a small percentage may engage in simultaneous tasks like chatting online. This makes advergaming an effective way to communicate with people.

Carlton D'Silva, Creative Director of promotion firm Hungama, which has so far worked on six-seven advergames, feels that advergaming should take-off now more than ever as the new version of Flash — a multimedia tool used for creation of new applications on Internet — enables one to include video in advergames, thus making the experience a lot more exciting and enriching.

Currently the business of Internet advergaming is still small in India and is pegged at Rs 1-1.5 crore per annum. But it has potential as worldwide; Net advergaming is already a Rs 1,000-crore business. The future is here!

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