Kerala Tourism uses an iPhone and iPad advertising campaign to promote the state as one of the top tourist destinations in the world. It uses AdMob?s interactive video ads on iPhone and click-to-play ads on iPad to drive viewership for the new video. It has also built a social connect in the campaign through clickable action buttons that are linked directly to Kerala Tourism?s Facebook, Twitter and Youtube pages.
Rich media advertising on smartphones was an obvious choice when General Motors was targetting its new Chevrolet Cruze at men in the 35-45 years age group last year. So the auto major ran rich media video ads across the InMobi network targeted at high-end video enabled devices. Display banner ads were also used in order to extend the reach of the campaign. The brand saw increased levels of engagement from the incorporation of video into the campaign.
Just before popular TV show MTV Roadies 8 debuted early last year, MTV?s marketing team launched a marketing campaign on Google AdMob to generate online excitement among their core target audience of young smartphone-wielding males and females with a predilection for reality TV. The marketers created compelling banner ads that appeared across screens of a variety of downloadable apps. Users who clicked through to the mobile-optimized Roadies website could either view show previews, download special content, or participate in a relevant contest with goodies and vouchers. Around 2.5 lakh cellular users clicked through to the Roadies site and 80% of those, almost 200,000, then took the time to download show content or play different contests.
A first-ever advertising campaign for Domino?s Pizza was flagged off last year where potential consumers within 5 km of the 176 participating Domino?s Pizza outlets were actually given navigation instructions?every step of the way, on the shortest route to the nearest Domino?s outlet on their high-end Nokia smartphones. The banner ad placed by Navteq Media Solutions within a bookmarked section of premium Nokia portal, Ovi Services?Weather, Events, Lonely Planet and Here & Now saw 22.6% of customers clicking to map to reach the outlet, while 10.8% chose to call the nearest Domino?s outlet for home delivery options and 8% sought more information at the pizza chain?s website.
India is one of the few countries where an entire generation has skipped the personal computer and has directly moved onto using internet on their mobile phones. So the mobile phone is a medium that cannot be ignored by marketers for the sheer factor of its ubiquity in the country. And thus not surprisingly, India is by far the largest mobile advertising market in the Asia-Pacific region, with over 6.5 billion advertising impressions served monthly, even while being categorised largely as an advanced phone market. The Indian market is dominated by two players?Google?s Admob and InMobi, and there are more ad networks waiting in the wings. According to Admob, there are 70 million mobile internet users from India in 2011. InMobi serves about 7 billion ad impressions every month.
The medium is clearly growing. However, are marketers doing enough to leverage it fully? Experts feel that marketers are now finally waking up and smelling the coffee and thus the focus on this medium is quite recent. Says Abhay Doshi, senior director, product development and marketing, Flytxt (a mobile advertising company), ?Marketers have just started realising the importance of this medium. It is a requirement from every brand but they still don?t know what to do exactly. However, awareness has started for sure.? Adds Raj Menon, director, Games2win, ?Like in all markets, there are few early movers/adaptors who are willing to experiment in a new market and there are many traditional companies who are process driven and will only commit money based on facts and figures.? The good news is that consumers are evolving continuously (thanks to the advent of smart-phones and 3G), thus forcing marketers to evolve their marketing strategies too.
According to Saugata Bagchi, vice-president, Tribal DDB Mudra, ?India is seeing a base of more mature m-consumers, with the urban population showing an interesting consumption pattern, increasingly characterized by reduced tolerance in terms of page opening time and quality/richness of content owing to 3G.?
He, however, adds that it is difficult to say whether enough is being done to tap the potential of this channel as this has been a classic case of ?earn while you learn? for the advertisers ? while in the early days of mobile advertising, the content was intrusive and unsolicited; advertisers today realise that urban consumers are happy to receive commercial messages on their phones, as long as it is perceived as a value addition, in terms of services or other benefits, while the rural mobile consumer currently seems receptive to all kinds of messaging as long as it is deemed ?interesting? by her.
?This calls for an astute sense of ‘how much is too much’ on the part of the advertisers and the networks. The increasing share of the ad pie for mobile advertising indicates the increasing interest and confidence levels that marketers are developing towards this channel,? he says.
The role of digital agencies has also assumed more importance since they are the ones who can actually educate marketers as to how much is too much. Says Vinod Thadani, regional mobile director, India and South Asia, of media investment management operations company GroupM, ?It’s our job as an agency to educate our brands on what is the targeted reach of this medium and what are the different ways currently available to target their specific target group. A lot of innovations are currently possible on mobile today. We need to be up the curve to first understand and then recommend a brand on what should they do on this medium.?
SMS (short messaging service) marketing, search and display have been the most visible form of mobile advertising so far but there is a lot more that is happening in the space now. According to Doshi of Flytxt, overall, the definition of mobile advertising is ranging. ?Multi-channel is better than a single rich media channel. Multi- channel integration is important. You have to integrate new media such as the mobile with traditional media,? he says.
According to Ashok Lalla, leader, digital, South Asia, Mindshare, location-based or proximity marketing (localised distribution of advertising messages associated with a particular place) is an area of mobile marketing that is fast growing in popularity among marketers. Brands using ‘social’ check-ins by consumers via platforms such as FourSquare (location-based social networking website for mobile devices), or ‘blue casting? content to consumers? bluetooth-enabled mobile handsets are examples of newer ways in which mobiles are being used for marketing communications. There is also in-app advertising (ads inside an app), display advertising with multiple and device based call to action and viral content and QR codes (Quick Response codes in smart phones are similiar to bar codes on normal products. When a QR code is scanned by a mobile, it can link the users to content on web, video, email, and instant messaging) mobile marketing.
Citing the specific example of travel portal makemytrip.com, Mohit Gupta, chief marketing officer, MakeMyTrip says, ?We use a variety of mobile and WAP sites for promoting our products and services. We target most mobile versions of the popular websites and ensure our presence through banners and also through the ?click to call? functionality, where-in the reader/mobile user can click on the number mentioned and place a call. Travel on the mobile will be monetizable in a similar way as the web. We are geared up for the mobile revolution and ensure we capitalise on the unique opportunities and advantages that mobile offers.?
The travel portal also has an application for BlackBerry smartphone that allows the users to make or change their travel plans. Users can search, compare air-fares and also use filters to decide on the right choice of flight. They can see recent searches and can save their flying preferences on the device to reduce the time and effort for future searches.
According to Menon of Games2win, some of the brands which have used the mobile in innovative ways are MTV Roadies, Samsung Galaxy Tab, Kerala Tourism and Chevrolet Cruz. Thadani of Mindshare thinks that brands such as Nokia, Iodex, Nike and Titan have leveraged the medium well. In terms of SMS marketing, Domino’s Pizza is a good example, according to Doshi, as they have time-bound discount mobile ad coupons which have worked well for the brand.
Mobile as a medium clearly offers quite a few unique advantages, the most important ones being interactivity, integration with the web and its explosive growth. Says Doshi, ?Mobile ads have five to seven more times the reach as compared to other mediums. There is more opportunity to interact and the time spent is larger.? According to Bagchi, some of the advantages it offers include it being a direct response medium, lowered cost/impression, easy customisation and sophisticated tracking.
Mobile is a much bigger medium than just the web, believes Thadani. ?Price is no more a constraint to buy smart phones or a tablet and increasingly data charges will get cheaper and hence there will be more customers using these devices. And with the kind of innovative ad formats, this medium is bound to only double year on year.? He adds, ?The biggest plus of this medium which no other medium has is the reach. Today we have the capability to target the entire mobile base using all different formats – SMS, voice, mobile internet and proximity. If any brand would want to have reach as its objective, that’s when the power of this medium will be unleashed. Also, because of the ubiquitous nature this integrates very well with other mass mediums.?
The marketing budget allocated to digital is increasing and, consequently, the budget for mobile advertising is gradually going up too. Says Bagchi, ?Currently, the size of the channel (mobile) is approximately pegged at Rs130-140 crore and forms about 12-13% of the overall digital advertising spend.? Doshi of Flytxt has slightly different figures. According to him, the total mobile marketing market is about Rs 250 crore, out of which, Rs150-200 crore is for banner and Rs 50 crore for SMS. He says that the total digital budget was about Rs 2300 crore in 2011 and thus, mobile allocation was about 10% of that. Menon, however, thinks that the spends are still quite low. He says, ?Mobile internet is rarely in the to-do list of any marketing manager. As a consequence, a fraction (decimal points actually) of a marketing budget gets allocated to it.?
In spite of the numerous advantages, targeting the consumers through mobile is not a cakewalk as the medium has limitations also. Says Gupta of makemytrip.com, ?Navigation on a mobile phone may get difficult for the user because of a small screen. In such a case, most ads may go untouched, as the user may find it too tedious to look at the details. Technical hindrances are also a challenge in mobile marketing ?for example, multimedia messaging may not be available on every customers handset.? Gupta’s advice to the brands going for mobile marketing is that they should be sensitive towards not breaching the privacy of the customers but delivering the relevant message. The message should be informative and not intrusive in nature.
Doshi says that mobile operators need to cooperate more. ?Operators need to play a bigger role. Operator has a billing relationship with the subscribers, so if operators allow advertisers to access subscribers profiles, it can be a win-win situation for both. Of course, there are privacy laws and thus operators need to choose an appropriate way of using the information. They need to convert PII (personally identifiable information) into non-PII (something that Flytxt does) and then derive usable actionable insight. For example, if somebody travels from point A to point B, operators can give non-specific information like how many subscribers do that and this could be a great insight for an automobile brand,? he says.
Analytics is a factor that comes into play. Says Menon, ?Analytics is not 100% accurate. Click-throughs rarely translate to 100% visits. There is usually a 30-40% drop-off.? Bagchi says that most of the challenges in this medium are predominantly network and device based. ?Use of several operating systems and browsers in mobile devices poses challenges in rich media content creation and, more importantly, adaptations. Privacy is always in question on any network or device. Advertisers need to take cognizance of privacy considerations and offer clear instructions for opting out of marketing communications.?
Another issue, according to him, is education. ?Most of the features on mobile devices remain unused because consumers are not savvy enough. This creates a gap in the nature of content created and actually consumed by consumers.? Thadani agrees with this completely. ?The operators and OEM (original equipment manufacturers) have done and are doing a lot to educate consumers on how to use their services, yet education is taking time. Secondly, while smartphones and tablets are getting affordable, not too much customized content is truly available and what is available is very difficult or expensive to get. Finally, India being diverse in nature, much is done for the urban population but we do not see too much for rural yet.?
However, the biggest issue in this medium has been spam messages. Menon says, ?Spam SMS has not worked for any category. For any marketing effort to work, it has to be targeted to the right audience and contextual which SMS rarely is.?
Says Doshi, ?Mobile is still mainly used for spam. And a lot of main brands are apprehensive about associating with the medium because of this.?
In 2011, telecom regulator Trai (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) directed that no one could send more than 200 bulk SMSes in a day. In such a situation, Lalla feels that its important for consumers to opt in for receiving marketing messages. ?When consumers opt-in to receive SMS messages from brands, that’s really when it has the best chance of not being see as invasive.? From a marketer’s point of view, Batra of makemytrip.com feels that mobile marketing is a good way of reaching out to the right target audience but the catchword is ?relevance?. ?If you push relevant content to customers, they will not mind it. It is important to draw the line between junk content pushing and relevant information dissemination,? he says.
So there are some creases that still need to be ironed out but the medium is definitely poised for growth. As per Trai’s report, India had about 884.3 million mobile subscribers by November 2011. As per IMRB International?s latest estimates, the number of claimed mobile internet users has risen to nearly 35 million, and the number of active mobile internet users has also increased to 26.3 million by March 2011. Says Bagchi, ?With smartphone penetration increasing and a healthy ad ecosystem, Indian mobile advertising will soon become a major influence in the global scheme of things.?