Adgully Exclusive | Hoping, digital communication method to change: media2win's Krishna Kumar

Over the years the company has grown from strength to strength not only adding new team members but newer and bigger clients along the way. With the current noise about social media, conversational advertising and 3G, the company seems to hold a leadership position amongst all these media trends.

To know more about the company's steady journey over the years and plans for the new year, Adgully caught up with Krishna Kumar, Chief Executive Officer, Media2win.

Kumar has been heading the company ever since its inception. He started his career in advertising in the year 1994 with Publicis Ambience. In 1998 Kumar joined Contract Advertising and before joining Media2win he was with Mindshare as a Business Director.

Talking about leading the company, Kumar, says, "I never really thought that I will embark into an entrepreneurial role. But I took up the challenge when Media2win was launched as it was a fantastic opportunity to get into the wave of the future; quite early in India. Since then the business has evolved as the medium has grown. The field of digital advertising is very different from the field of traditional advertising. It is much more challenging because it is so dynamic."

When asked about the journey and the challenges for the company from being a start-up to a full-fledged digital advertising leader, Kumar says, "As a start-up it began as a one man show for the first couple of months. There were challenges as we were getting into an arena which was extremely nascent. However it does not mean that this domain has evolved to maturity since then. It is still poses a big question mark for many marketers. Back then we had to pitch the digital medium & how it works, more than us as an agency."

"We also realised that compared to traditional advertising, in digital advertising, the zeros reduced by plenty! The budgets were quite low. I was used to handling ad businesses earlier and the budgets there were larger than the whole digital industry ad spend in that year. A key challenge was to recruit talent which frankly did not exist or was too limited. So we did not acquire talent but we had to build it by recruiting people with the right mindset and training them. Talent still continues to be a challenge for the entire digital industry 6 years later," he adds.

Kumar feels that the digital space is still evolving given the dynamic nature of the medium. He further points out that in all the other media, evolution is primarily in terms of content which influences consumption patterns. With digital, it's the technology and usage that is changing at the same time as the consumer adopts it. Also multiple screens are increasingly the norm. "So the evolution is at a phase where it has to match the pace of technology. Unlike other media, on digital, you control the implementation. Here you can decide what you want your consumer to see, create that environment & further integrate that with all screens. The immersive experience that the consumer has on the digital medium is drastically different from other forms," he contends.

He further adds that as the medium evolves gradually the clients' approach has also changed over the years. Kumar says, "People who have tested the medium seem to be deep diving. The challenge for the medium today is the ability to convince a client not to evaluate digital simply on the same lines as other media. The measurement and behavioural patterns on the digital medium is different because the consumer is tracked from view to action."

"When I say some clients are deep diving, they are looking at the medium to engage the consumer with communication as or more effectively than other mediums. With one of our clients, Bajaj Auto, we created a campaign specifically for a TV ad that was released only on the internet (and not on TV). Digital also has the advantage of providing the client real time measurement which no other medium has hence the efficiency of the media choices can be made to work much harder," he points out.

When asked what can bring about a change in the client's approach, Kumar opines, "It is difficult to measure every aspect of consumption of digital using a single parameter, given the dynamism of the medium. So one has to use different measurement techniques available in the market for each stage of consumption (ad banner vs website) and then arrive at a decision instead of using only traditional media paradigms."

He says clients have to realise that digital media cannot simply be an extension to their direct marketing strategy even if it has the ability to interact with the consumers on a one-on-one basis. "One has to also look at customised creation of communication for digital consumers by keeping the core brand thought and proposition. Adapting mainline communication is not the future of this medium. Like there is an established copy test practice for mainline creative, digital too needs a focus on creating customised communication and testing it," he adds.

For the New Year, Kumar says the roadmap will be clearly to deep dive into the infrastructural changes that are going to happen in the first quarter of the year. "Starting February or March the 3G consumption patterns will change the digital consumption patterns too. Given this change, we will have to focus even more on creating engaging communication. We need to start thinking about richer engagement with the consumers. The year 2011 should change the way we have been creating communication for digital so far," he says.

Talking about digital medium being considered as a poor cousin in a media mix, he explains, "The reason is because the audience penetration numbers are low - digital for example is just 1/10th of the television industry. Moreover the medium talks to a literate (mostly English speaking) person who is comfortable accessing/ using technology. Given what is needed to access the medium, it ends up talking to the SEC A and B categories largely. Besides the perception of measurement techniques being available for traditional media and not for digital accounts for digital being the poor cousin. The other important factor is many of the marketers at a senior level are themselves not active consumers of the medium ' and they are the decision makers."

When asked about what potential he sees in IMRB's new metrics for web called Web Audience Measurement, Kumar says, "The measurement methods people are putting forth are still trying to map what the marketer is comfortable with. If we try to use the same metric used for TV or Print to digital then we are negating the other benefits of the medium. Though the marketer is asking for more information, the information does not have to necessarily have the same measurement parameters which are used for other media."

While the agency has been constantly doing some great work, it has not been out and out talking about it, Kumar light-heartedly adds while signing off, "We are probably one of the few agencies which has won digital creative awards consistently year on year. But we have not been active advertisers of ourselves. More often than not we believe in letting our work speak for itself. We have capability in all aspects of digital media, with in-house teams for all areas. In the last few months, we have conceptualised and created a made-for-web video for the launch of Xbox Kinect, made multiple Facebook & ipad applications for a host of clients like Tata Sky, Max New York Life, Microsoft amongst others, managed social media programmes for many brands, as well as strategized & released numerous ad campaigns. So here I am talking about our work for a change." | By Prabha Hegde [prabha(at)adgully.com]