Perspective | Digital advertising is passe, social engagement leading to good mullah?!
If you are worried about your folk’s friend request on a social media website, get over it. Today families bond over Instant Messaging platforms, our young sisters and older aunts learn fashion rules and cook fabulous American-style apple pie by watching videos on YouTube and our fathers now have the ease of catching up online, their favourite show or game they missed out the last weekend! Well, clearly, the world is ‘going digital’. The boundaries between real and virtual world is increasingly blurring and the bridge between online consumers and offline consumers is decreasing everyday as digital marketing is becoming the tool for every marketer. As more and more people are logging on the web through every medium possible, more brands are joining the bandwagon to make their presence online. Traditional advertisements are created thinking whether or not it would be shared online. Word-of-mouth now happens more on digital platforms like Social Media and Mobile.
Digital world is on the cusp of finally becoming the leaders in brand building. Brands are becoming social and digital in attitude as well as in using the media. There are now movements rather than just simple campaigns. All this has meant that brands have to use different tools and give up on the tenets that they hold dear.
We at Adgully spoke to some industry personals, like Anuj Kumar, Co-Founder, ED & MD, Ripple, Affle Group; Rameet Arora, Senior Director Marketing, McDonalds India; Ekalavya Bhattacharya, Head Digital, MTV India; Priya Jayaraman, Co-Founder & Business Director, Propaganda India, Preethi Mariappan, ECD, Razorfish Germany and Seeraj Katoch, COO, Tangerine Digital to know brands and their ‘digital first strategies’ and understand how profitable has this ‘social-media-engagement’ phenomenon for the brands in terms of sales and figures rather in terms of reach.
Arora believes that it is an amazing phenomenon and all marketers know that all their TG is tech-savvy and is quite effective on digital and social media. Hence tapping and enticing the customers on that medium is very essential for any marketer.
Mariappan opined that it is great way to reach out to any brand’s audience. “Today it is better to create that talk of engagement because nobody wants to see a pre-rolling add. We all wait for the skip button to come so that we can get rid of it. That is an act of forcing the customers but in case of engagement it is a mutual act which leads to good will and encouraging. The brands get to transform from such step”, she said.
“As a youth TV channel, we cannot say that we do not want to be present on these platforms and device out communication in that way. We need to understand that today, all consumers want to consume content on-the-go and thus we can’t be sticking to traditional means to communication,” Bhattacharya added.
In terms of how such engagement tools have helped his brands, Kumar said, “We have seen a lot of brands leveraging social engagements to meet sales objectives. One of the recent examples is the BJP where their entire social and digital marketing campaign was aimed at engaging the youth and driving conversations; while it achieved that objective, it finally helped convert the engagement to votes too (which is akin to a sale here) and for a lot of other brands too.”
Arora here told us that, though he is not sanctioned to share numbers, they have been able to track good sales. “Social engagement is good for any brand and what is good for a brand is good for its business too. A product like us has huge potential on digital media as we can tell masses about our new products, discounts and a lot more at a single team and which will surely give us good sales numbers. The growth has been double digit from this medium”, he said.
Mariappan told us that interestingly with the brands that she has worked on; the growth rate has been pretty high with social and digital engagement steps. “It has been close to 80 percent especially with Audi. While doing any activity for any brand we clearly discuss about the kind value and sales we should target and that are how we strategize our conversation of social media and digital.”
Bhattacharya said, “Coming down why we think it is more engagement and less advertising; it is primarily because people shun advertising. For example the most clicked button on YouTube is the ‘Skip Ad’ button! So that is the reason why engagement is about how your brand message gets across in the most subtle way; which is why MTV is now concentrating on branded content where we develop a brand within the content we offer. Also, we do a lot of web-based shows since on TV our content will be about 98% Hindi and 2% English while on the web it is the other way round. For us, digital is omnipresence where our strategy is not just informing via a digital activity, but offering our content right there on your phone, tablet or PC. This would obviously get more balls which would in-turn bring in more money!”
Kumar believes that every campaign has its unique objectives and both brand building and engagement driven campaigns would always co-exist. ‘If the scenario be this way then going further down the line the reach at some point might decrease and then what the brands will do, that is still a debatable question”, he stated.
But what surely remains a fact is that social / digital / real-time engagement not only tracks and builds good reach but if used correctly it results in better mullah too...!!!!