Within digital space, there are different platforms

Nobel Laureate George Bernard Shaw said, “The problem with communication is the illusion that it has been accomplished.” And, to accomplish communication, content and context are key. Well, at least that’s the digital marketing mantra for 2016!

Mindful of the fact that consumers today, are always connected, “Optimising and modifying content to ensure customers receive messages at the right time and in the right format is extremely imortant,” said Mark Henning, Head of Media & Digital, AMAP, Millward Brown.

Millward Brown, part of market research company Kantar Group, is a market research agency with expertise in areas such as effective advertising, marketing communications, media and brand equity research. The company, in its annual Digital & Media Predictions report, this year, said, “Successful marketing is all about delivering the right content to the right person in the right context.”  

Ennummerating the major predictions for this year, Henning said:
First and foremost, rather than thinking of digital as one big mess, markets are going to start realising that within digital there are different platforms and channels, which deserve direct attention.

Second, on video advertising, we think that across the globe, billions of dollars are going to be wasted on online video advertising. While it will continue to be a big medium, its effectiveness is doubtable. Mostly due to connectivity issues and lack of customisation.

“You can’t take a TV ad and use it on the digital medium. That would be the biggest failure in digtal marketing,” added Ashish Karnad, Director, Media & Digital Solutions, Millward Brown (South Asia).

“In the online space, generating intrigue, skip resistance and branded impact in the first 2, 5 or 10 seconds are three very different structural creative challenges. Advertisers should stop thinking about one 30-second video ad and focus on 30 one-second intervals, where they can engage or lose viewers,” the Millward Brown report said.
That said, video ads have witnessed the fastest growth with 56 per cent CAGR since 2011, as per IAMAI’s Digital Advertising Report 2014.

Bringing a new dimension into perspective, Apurva Chamaria, Vice President and Head — Strategic Marketing at HCL Technologies, said, “Digital is allowing the return of long duration videos. Marketing is to engage, and digital allows you the freedom of time and story-telling unlike TV, which is constrained by high costs.”

He cites Maggi’s ‘Mom Knows Best’ campaign and Tanishq’s ‘Mother-Daughter Bond’ campaign that featured Deepika Padukone with her mother, as shining examples of how content on video, through elaborate story-telling has been able to achieve contextualisation. Zenith Optimedia estimates that global online video ad spend totaled $10.9 billion in 2014, and it forecasts it to grow at an average of 29 per cent a year to reach $23.3 billion in 2017.    

Digitally social

Social selling, however, is the next big thing, said Chamaria. Referring to China’s chat-based app WeChat that has pioneered the enablement of diverse functionalities, he said, “The popularity of chat-based apps is gaining in India and China, unlike in the West. It only makes sense to take it further by making it additionally functional like what WeChat is pioneering.”

Taking a leap ahead of its contemporaries, WeChat has rolled out additional functionalities such as taxi booking, buying film tickets, check-in for flights and bills payments, among others on the app.

 He cited the example of Café TC (Turquoise Cottage) that embarked on digital marketing campaign that was led by a Whatsapp ticker as an innovative and effective move in the direction. “Smarter merchants will start enabling transactions on such apps that are inevitably present on an average user’s smartphone, thereby making interaction simpler,”  he said.

Across the industry, eCommerce and FMCG sectors are leading the path of digital advertising. The digital ad spends by the eCommerce Industry has been growing at a CAGR of 59 per cent since 2011, said the IAMAI report.

“The finance sector is also doing good stuff,“ added Chamaria.  
Ultimately, those companies that are not just hopping on the digital marketing ride, but are driving it, stand to win big, the industry concurs. 

Digital ad spend on mobile devices is at 14 per cent in India, whereas on Desktops and Laptops,  it is 86 per cent. Although traditional media still holds strong ground in the Indian ad space, digital advertising is catching up fast and is expected to overtake traditional media within the next 5-10 years, the IAMAI report said. While the growth is going to be led by videos and mobile penetration, contextualisation remains key, without which not much can be achieved. “Contextualising is like hedging today, you have to do it, and the best marketers are going to start developing specific, mobile-based content,”  said Karnad.