Hey Apple! This watch is useless since you could just bend the iPhone 6 around your wrist?? goes a cheeky, hash-tagged comment on Twitter. This was part of what has come to be known as ?Bendgate?, a social media smear campaign directed against Apple Inc., for its iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus models. Soon after their launch, social media was agog with comments that suggested that the two models could bend in trouser pockets. There was a viral video of a blogger who managed to bend the larger iPhone 6 Plus by using his hands. Other brands were quick to cash in on a snowballing situation. Chocolate brand Kit-Kat came up with a slogan:?We don?t bend. We break?. Samsung Mobile came up with: ?Curved. Not Bent?. LG said: ?Our phone doesn?t bend. It flexes on purpose?.
Welcome to the digital world where communication is not the marketers? preserve alone and where consumers take no time in rewarding or punishing a brand for its virtues or follies. While most marketers are struggling to come to terms with this shift in the power equation with consumers, the smarter among them see it as an opportunity to explore their relationship more deeply. Kiran Khalap, founder of brand consultancy Chlorophyll says the ?multi-logue? among stakeholders makes the brand owner?s life very complicated at one level and simpler at another. ?The legal owner may be the company, but social media has enabled multiple stakeholders such as customers, activists and shareholders to actually give voice to their stake using social media,? he says.
Marketers only have to find smarter ways to steer their conversations in a manner that is conducive for brands. To be sure, the digital space is more crowded than any traditional media platform and audience segmentation takes a whole new meaning on the digital platform. For instance, social networking platforms are multiplying by the dozen even as the older players such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, Google Plus, Vine or Tumblr, fight for larger share of the audiences. A new social network called ?Ello? claims that it is simple, beautiful and ad free and is seeing a barrage of sign-ups even as new experiments go on in the background.
Then, there is Google that still draws consumers in hordes as they set out on searches for various kinds across the world. There are also hundreds of popular content sites that draw in audiences in impressive numbers besides platforms such as YouTube. Even the legacy media companies are building a digital presence and attracting eyeballs. There is indeed a plethora of options to reach out to one?s target consumer but it isn?t necessarily a good news for marketers and their media agencies. ?If you ask me what the media agency of the future looks like I would say that we would resemble a newsroom. Increasingly, it is about real time data,? says CVL Srinivas, chief executive of GroupM South Asia.
Agrees Brian Lesser, chief executive of digital firm Xaxis, which is part of WPP Plc?s GroupM. ?I do think that the Don Drapers (a fictional character in the American TV series on the advertising industry called Mad Men) of the future will be the statisticians, data scientists and engineers, not the creative folks. Eventually all advertising will be digital and all digital advertising will be bought and sold programmatically.? Programmatic buying refers to an automated media buying process, where everything happens digitally and in real time.
The future that Lesser speaks of may be inevitable but it doesn?t seem imminent. As of now, it is the creative, the media and the marketing teams of various brands that continue to brainstorm on where to route their digital communications budgets. Even as display and viral advertising continue their run, the biggest chunk of the budgets goes to search engine marketing (SEM) while social media platforms are vying hard to catch up. Some experts, however, feel that SEM is increasingly losing its relevance.
Last week while speaking at the Social Media Week in Mumbai, Ashwin Ramesh, co-founder of Synup Inc, a local marketing service and once India?s youngest chief executive, said: ?Search Engine Optimization is dead.?
Operating out of Canada and the US, his company, which recently got R3 crore funding from Angel Prime Partners, specialises in a cloud-based software that allows small and medium enterprises to maintain their online presence. ?I have done search engine management for a number of years now. It is about mass production and a crowd of rats. You cannot keep optimising for search engines because they throw up update after update. So you keep stuffing key words and keep building links. I am saying it should be natural. You write interesting content and make yourself discoverable,? he said.
He says right now search may be the big part of the digital ad pie, but social will catch up fast. A report by the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and IMRB International shows that the digital advertising market stood at R2,750 crore in March 2014. Of this, search ads constituted 38% followed by display ads, which accounted for 29% while social media only got 13% of the overall spends. Industry believes that spends on search will reduce while on e-mail; video and mobile marketing will go up. By 2015, spends on video ads will grow by a CAGR of 56% and contribute 12% to the overall market share of digital advertisements, says the report.
There are, however, some who feel SEM still delivers and will continue to attract budgets. Vasantha V Kumar, director of marketing and communications, IBM, India & South Asia says that the search supremacy is not likely to end anytime soon. ?In this sort of new world?where do consumers begin from? They make important decisions based on what they find on search. Unless that changes, search engine optimisation will always hold importance.?
While the debate on the relevance of SEM continues, marketers are focussing a lot of attention and resources on how to optimise social media where the real conversations about brands are happening between consumers and which also makes real time engagement with consumers possible. According to a research by GroupM, internet users in India spend an average of two hours and five minutes on social media platforms. Deepali Nair, chief marketing officer at Mahindra Holidays & Resorts India says social platforms are increasingly being resorted to by consumers before making any purchase decision be it a newspaper, a flat screen TV or deciding on a holiday.
Some brands have employed traditional agencies to do their social bidding. ?We work jointly with Nestle to manage a real time social media centre. We have some thoughts on how to align it to other areas of their business,? says GroupM?s Srinivas. Such cells, he says, will be the norm over the next few years. ?You will have sharply focused communities emerging on social media, which in turn will spring opportunities for niche brands.?
While marketers and their agencies invest more of their resources on social media, a majority of them agrees that they still haven?t figured the best way to optimise the platform and target audiences most effectively. An academician who was part of Social Media Week (SMW) last week noted that most marketers were running like headless chickens, due to poor targeting. ?I wanted to purchase a USB drive and went online to check out my options. I purchased one from an e-commerce site. Later wherever I would go on the web, I was inundated with pop ups and other ads on data storage devices. If I have made my purchase already, why are these ads being directed at me??
In their effort to find the best solution most marketers have employed a plethora of agencies such as the social marketing agency, the social listening agency, the online public relations agency besides agencies that are aggregators of digital ad inventory and that specialise in online videos. Digital units of larger marketing communications groups?a lot of whom outsource work to others are also part of the mileu. This practice, according to some experts, is fraught with the possibility of inducing inconsistencies in brand persona.
Agrees Sanjay Tripathy, senior executive vice president- marketing, product, digital and ecommerce, HDFC Life who says that a big part of the brand team?s job now involves identifying the right partners.
According to Khalap of Chlorophyll the best users of social media are those brands who have discovered the 1:9:90 formula. One creates message. Nine curate and spread across networks and 90 listen on to the conversations that ensue without necessarily responding.
Another question that marketers are grappling with is whether a company should operate as a commercial entity or a personality on social media. Hanneli Slabber, country head, India at South African Tourism, says: ?You should be the company. We at South African Tourism are very business-like on social media. A lot of the stuff for us on social media is simply giving out information about who we are as a company and what we do.? The use of social media has been both challenging as well as rewarding for South African Tourism. Slabber says that tourists have been known to leave their GPS on, and inadvertently lead poachers to endangered species such as rhinos. Then again, social media works as an information facilitator. ?If a restaurant is serving a rare fish on the endangered list, patrons have been known to protest,? she says adding that social media networks help South African Tourism communicate about the hygiene of its beaches and natural surroundings. She also points out that disclosures help build credibility for the brand. ?If we host a particular blogger, we make the adequate disclosures,? says Slabber. The Tourism board claims that the number of travelers from India has doubled in the last few years. Listening in to social networks and investing in research has helped them figure out that an increasing number of travelers to South Africa are Indian women and they team up via travel and book clubs.
While marketers make efforts at their end to devise ways for better engagement and targetting on social media, the platforms themselves are trying to come up with tools that will facilitate this quest. Facebook, for instance, recently announced a new version of its Atlas ad platform that helps advertisers follow users across devices. In effect, Atlas will pin-point as to whether someone saw the ad on a smart phone and made purchase on some other device. Pinterest has said that it will offer new conversion tracking and audience targeting features which will allow advertisers to understand how promoted pins affect their business and how they can personalise them. Twitter is testing out a new system of ad targeting for films.
Management consultancy Deloitte in one of its reports says that multiple third party providers are also entering the fray. For instance, Uber Media has launched a mobile advertising platform called UberAds that tracks publicly available information provided by smart phone users and offers interest based advertisement to the users. Facebook has partnered with data companies such as Epsilon, Datalogix, Acxiom and Blue Kai, which help it to track both online and offline purchase behavior. LinkedIn, along with targeting options for ads, also offers sponsored updates that allow companies to promote their content to specific audiences on LinkedIn in a similar manner as companies post sponsored tweets on Twitter and promote page posts on Facebook.
Clearly, the digital space is seeing a lot of action. All stakeholders are in an experiment mode trying to find ways in how to get more intimate with their audiences. There are, however, no clear answers to the digital puzzle yet.