Adgully Exclusive | Strong ideas with longevity: Euro RSCG's Ashok Lalla

Digital media is soon making its presence felt across marketing plans and the industry at large is ideating on better measurability scales. Today as TVC sends the message across, social media keeps the conversation going.

To understand the digital truth of today, Adgully caught up with Ashok Lalla, President- Digital, Euro RSCG.

Talking about the digital industry and its gradual evolution over the year, Lalla, says, "In India digital is a lot like check-box marketing, earlier clients wanted a website then blogs started getting client's attention and gradually social media pages started gaining popularity. So what people did was got themselves a summer intern who would create YouTube pages out of the TV commercials, went and put some pictures on flickr, created a Facebook fan page and close to summer's end the intern went away while nobody was adding any value to all the interactivity created."

According to him digital media's functions have been misunderstood by the clients to a large extent and the effectiveness is thus lost in the process. "This misunderstanding is also because of the way digital has been sold in the country, digital is sold from the seller's perspective and not from the buyer's perspective. In India digital has been sort of a knee-jerk and not a lot of potential brands have actually integrated it to the overall marketing very well. Brands have never seen at digital individually or exclusively, it has always been a subtantiator to the other media in a marketing plan. However in the last two years there has been a lot of action in digital and many brands have gone digital but the challenge has been that the clients do not come to us with a problem but come to us with a add-on to their marketing solution," he adds

In terms of increasing its share in the marketing pie, Lalla feels the challenge lies in integrating digital into the bigger picture. He adds that honesty and foresight are the two important things that digital agencies should practice when they discuss a digital solution with the clients. "If a client's brand does not require SEO we at Euro RSCG believe in telling them so with necessary insight to back it. On the other hand clients also have to understand that a digital ad take over of a website's home page is plain intrusive, there are standard norms that a website follows and this idea could sound innovative but the ad will seem like it is interfering and in your face," he points out.

When asked what are some of the challenges for the digital industry as of today?

As a line of caution while signing off he says, "Agencies need to stop slicing the shares smaller and smaller, there are too many specialised digital agencies as of now. Rather than chasing the smaller shares of the pie, the digital agencies should together chase better and bigger businesses. And being young certainly does not mean that they understand digital better. We should look at creating strong ideas with longevity." | By Prabha Hegde [prabha(at)adgully.com]

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