Do we need a clean-up?

The way we in India evolved as a digital marketing industry is both interesting and surprising. We embraced the medium and technology so rapidly that it created a large opportunity for online advertising and marketing.

In today’s ecosystem, we see a lot of advertisers and publishers compromising user experience by bombarding our screen time with ads, hoping they will convert into business. While ads obviously are an interruption, they must be created in such a way that they intrigue the viewer in the first three seconds. If they are not that captivating, they shouldn’t be there at all because bad ads make the audience feel they are being intruded upon.

A user’s online experience is interrupted by 80 or more ads on an average as compared to a television experience which makes for fewer interruptions – 10 to 12 ads every 50 minutes. From a user’s point of view, a digital clean-up is a must; it is as cluttered as outdoor was around two decades ago, or when TRAI stepped in to lay down the 12-minute per hour advertising rule for TV channels.

The industry is growing on steroids and is expected to reach another 24 per cent growth by 2020. This is largely due to the greater effectiveness and benefits of hyper-targeting, according to the Digital Advertising Report 2017 released by the global digital marketing company Dentsu Aegis Network India. Keeping the growth of the entire segment in mind our approach should be mobile-first as the time users spend browsing is five times more on that medium as compared to desktop, However, they still prefer making the purchase decision on the desktop. The transition from one medium to another should be seamless and the storytelling on both media should be in sync so that there is no opportunity loss. There should be adequate opportunity, gross margins and uniqueness in serving the ad.

Tracking return on investment (ROI) is the biggest challenge faced by brands, closely followed by content creation, quality lead generation and attracting the right eyeballs.

In spite of this fast-growing medium, brands spend only 14-15 per cent of ad spend on digital. There is a younger audience that spends about two-thirds of its time on digital as compared to one-third of the other age group that surfs the internet and thus marketing budgets should shift to digital. This will lead to exponential growth in consumption habits of the users and then marketers can cater to various audiences as per their needs. Viewability will automatically increase, resulting in a decrease in ad blocking.

At the same time measurement matrix should be well planted to see the success of the specific ad or an ad campaign, and a sentiment analysis tool should also be seeded to understand how users are accepting the communication.

But with time and age, not just marketers, users have also benefited with the advancement of technology. Now when serving an ad, we advertisers have to ensure the user experience is imperative, else users have the option of installing ad blockers. I believe a clean-up of the medium is of utmost importance to create its stickiness for the users.

Faisal Haq is Vice-President, Operations (North India), WATConsult

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