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Agency
Related Matters
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Strategic
Media Planning
Redundancy or Oxymoron?
Andre
Nair
The writer is CEO, WPP Media - South Asia
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Even
as more and more advertisements are turning to humour
and surprise in an attempt to engage and entertain,
genuinely engaging advertisements are still few and
far between. The truth is that for most brands—except
for those that have radically new and meaningful benefits
to offer—today, engagingness is the only route to
advertising success
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Advertising
has been described as the greatest art form of the 20th
century. Indian advertising, over the last decade, has
experienced more than it’s fair share of action. Little
big things like shifting consumer paradigms, changing
client equations, new emerging stereotypes, aggressive
brand wars, media fragmentation and mega-brands have
all contributed to changing the face and feel of Indian
advertising. Each of these is worthy of a full-fledged
article but I’ve chosen instead to focus on a few key
issues. Issues that are key to keeping advertising central
to clients’ efforts in driving their brands forward.
Media fragmentation has probably been one of the greatest
events to overtake global and Indian advertising. To
take the television as a case in point, the fact that
a TV viewer now has more than a hundred channels to
choose from, is a chilling prospect for any advertiser.
The same TV budget now buys a fraction of the exposures
it bought for a brand a decade ago. The challenge is
two-fold. On the one hand, the ad must create enough
impact to be remembered with much fewer exposures. On
the other, it must give the viewer a compelling reason
to stay tuned in, instead of switching to a favourite
entertainer playing three channels away. The emergence
of diverse and constantly changing television content
as the real competition to advertisements has exerted
pressure on advertisers and agencies to come up with
ads that succeed in engaging and entertaining the viewers,
while conveying the brand message. Leo Burnett had once
said that “...one of the greatest dangers in advertising
is not that of misleading people, but that of boring
them to death”. It’s never been more relevant.
Most of the successful advertisements of the past decade
have shared this indefinable engagingness that endears
them to their watchers. Years after being aired, mentions
of the Ariel launch commercials, Fevicol commercials
and Caliber advertisements still keep cropping up in
consumer groups. But, even as more and more advertisements
are turning to humour and surprise in an attempt to
engage and entertain, genuinely engaging advertisements
are still few and far between. The truth is that for
most brands-except for those that have radically new
and meaningful benefits to offer-today, engagingness
is the only route to advertising success.
While on this issue, one factor, which needs careful
consideration, is the ever-shifting consumer definition
of what constitutes ‘engaging’. Possibilities in consumers’
minds and hearts have changed more dramatically than
is apparent in their reality. Indians, after liberal
doses of international satellite channels and exposure
to thoughts and values from all over the world, may
seem not very different on the surface but their media-content
interests and preferences pose a tough challenge to
fathom.
Producing outstanding work in such a fluid environment
is a tall order and, to make it possible, we need to
bring more ‘ideas’ people into the industry. Not so
long ago, the industry could get away with having good
executors-be it writers or visualisers-all meticulous
craftsmen in their own fields. Today, it’s a different
ballgame. For one, there is no one master medium of
brand communication and the client’s media spends are
distributed over many, very diverse media vehicles.
What we need now is not so much execution as fresh ideas,
which transcend media boundaries and lend themselves
with as much ease to promotions and ground activation
as they do to television. Not so much craftsmen as conceptualisers
who can zoom in on human insights and leverage them
to create brand miracles. If Indian advertising has
to maintain its relevance in the years to come, it must
find ways of attracting such talented young ideators.
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Indian
advertising has reason to give itself a pat
on the back. Its success in being able to create
national brands in a market where cultural diversity
exceeds that of Europe, is commendable. It is
also an undeniable fact that our creative standards
have significantly risen over the years and
that more ads today are peppered with perceptive
human insights
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On a parallel plane, the agency itself needs to partner
its clients in the successful marketing of their brands.
At the moment, most clients are warding off enough devils
of their own. Most product categories are cluttered,
making brand differentiation look like a Herculean task.
Bankable media of yesteryear-most notably television,
newspapers and magazines-are less effective than a decade
ago. And to top that, recessionary pressures aren’t
helping any. The last few years have seen many new product
launches and brand extensions being put off for a more
upbeat market. It’s a long way since the days when advertising
hogged 70 to 80 per cent of the promotion spend and
played a pivotal role in shaping the brand’s image.
Today, the equations have reversed. Clients are spending
30 per cent of their spend on advertising and the rest
70 per cent on other promotion. This 70 per cent can
either enhance or undo the brand building done through
advertising, depending on how aligned it is with the
central brand idea. More than ever before, it is now
imperative for agencies to work closely with clients
to ensure that in the scattered promotion efforts, the
broader vision of the brand is not lost.
Breakthrough ideas are equally relevant for the media
side of advertising. The challenge is to look beyond
superlative media buying and planning and come up with
media ideas that can deliver returns disproportionately
higher than the spends. Ingenious, unorthodox media
have been known to create formidable brand icons in
the past. What is needed is a constant endeavour on
the part of the media specialists to incorporate innovative
media ideas in the broad action plan for the brand.
To put it in a nutshell then, Indian advertising has
reason to give itself a pat on the back. It’s success
in being able to create national brands in a market
where cultural diversity exceeds that of Europe is commendable.
It is also an undeniable fact that our creative standards
have significantly risen over the years and that more
ads today are peppered with perceptive human insights.
But I think that somewhere, people who say that Indian
advertising has a lot of catching up to do also have
a point. Compared to the exponential rate of change
in some of the other markets, our progress seems flat-footed.
We have to alter the reality that, in our entire advertising
history, we have managed only two Cannes Lions when
countries like Singapore and Brazil bagged three and
five Lions respectively, in Cannes 2001 itself. Clients
who are questioning the role that advertising should
and can play in building their brands have their basis
in changing realities. If agencies have to win the trust
of their clients, they need to pump up the flow of fresh
engaging ideas that keep the brands alive in the consumers’
minds. We live in interesting and rapidly changing times
and everything and everybody has to keep pace with them.
Advertising is no exception..
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