e Magus

Image source: Forbes.com Online advertising spends, including spends on Adwords have been coming under a lot of scrutiny and discussion. In a world of numerous options, the marketers are looking for the greatest ROMI (return on marketing investments) Traditionally, search marketing has been the most effective way to reach the target audience. Target audience defined here are the people who are in-market for a solution that pertains to the product or service offerings. However, with proliferation of different platforms, the way people discover and consume content too has changed. The beauty of Google was that it’s search results were the closest to what people actually wanted. ( While I have a different take on this, I’ll save it for a different post of a different date ). When the paid search was added to the search results, a clear demarkation with the paid content on the right and organic results on the left still kept the ‘territorial integrity’ in tact. Even when the ...

For past few days, I was busy tying up with a logistics fulfilment partner for my Ecom company www.celebstall.com .  I was also reading articles about how the drone technology will be used for commercial purposes. Google, Amazon, and many other players are working towards the last mile dash through drone delivery. In future, literarily, things will fall from the sky :) This made me wonder, can such a model exist in India? India is never far behind, when it comes to replicating success of any such initiatives, especially those undertaken by Ecommerce / technology companies. But replicating the delivery through drones will be tricky. Here are few random reasons why I think it will not work in India The drone might never reach its destination - wires, wrong address, stolen in mid air, bird attack, getting tangled in a kite thread No place to land…especially in the metros .. There are no open spaces (most houses open to the main road) & access to the apartment rooft...

I n the ancient world, temples (yes, the ones we people go to pray) were the center of all things. Of course, they were considered sacred and people believed that the all-knowing and powerful entity lived inside the temple portals. It was also a place that imparted learning for students, gave employment to few. It was also a place where people congregated regularly and most people frequented and spent their free time in its premises. Temples were also a place that provided opportunity for cultural growth – be it the dances, the sculptors, paintings etc; The temple neighbourhood always brimmed with business – people selling their wares – flowers, food, pottery, clothes, jewels, etc.   Yes, temples played a significant role in terms of social, economic, religious, political, cultural, educational purposes in those times While some of these roles were soon taken over by big manufacturing industries, there was no clear consolidation of one entity that was the driving force be...

E xcept for HPTOs (Home Page Take Overs), it seems as if re-marketing drives the entire online display advertising. Be it OTA ads, e-commerce sites, review sites, or even some corporate websites, everybody seems to be riding on this bandwagon. It must be effective and hence the rush. I’m told that remarketing ads gets an average CTR of above 0.75% where as a similar communication through a plain display ad would give a CTR of about 0.25%. A 300% increase in CTR, coupled by the fact that the conversion from such traffic also will be high (can safely assume double the conversion). Such effectiveness will surely keep the interest level high amongst marketers and advertisers. However, like most people, I am being ‘stalked’ by these salesman-ads. Be it a review site that I had gone to, or checked out ticket price and availability on an OTA site, these salesman-ads with standard copy flyers keep popping up in almost all the sites that I visit. For me, after a few repetitive messa...

One good thing about writing about future trends is that no one has been there. If you are wrong, nobody notices; and if you are right, you could tom-tom about it, saying, ‘I said so…’ So, here I go with my 4 safe bets for the year:: 1) Facebook will become more Google 2) Google will become more Facebook 3) Year of engagement (likeable and shareable) 4) Convergence – One content, many formats Facebook will become more Google: Even today, advertisement revenues happen to be lifeline for most online platforms. The success of the Google PPC campaigns is based on the ability to place preferred advertisement, with high relevancy. This Google business model hinges on its algorithm. Be it the ubiquitous search results or their adwords, it all is possible because of the logic that is build basis the data. Advertising on Facebook has so far been on the basis of the user profile. But, unlike the profile, which becomes mostly static (as most people do not update it after creating it)…....

For the past few days, I’ve been working on an online media plan for a client. It has been almost 5 years since I had actively been involved in making media plans. I realize nothing much has changed – then & now… Media planning, we have been made to believe, is a mixture of art + science. What the ratio of the secret mixture is like the Coke recipe formula – everyone knows it is there, but no-one is aware what exactly it is. 5 years back, media planning was mostly about impressions (CPM), Clicks (CPC), and Leads…. The ROI’s were mostly about Click through Rates (CTRs) and effective CPCs… It still is. 5 years back, the tags and weight of the creative were an issue with most publishers… it still is. A normal flash file of 25KB to 35KB is what most of the publisher accepts. It seems like the broadband penetration has done nothing good to the quality of ads that can be served. 5 years back most ad serving tools reported the performance, basis the type of inventory, time, g...

Couple of things that happened recently, made me think… Has the growth of technology (esp. Internet) actually diminished the value of information? 2 reasons that got me thinking were - 1) I was planning to make a Goan dish – Vindaloo... I logged on to the Internet to check the recipe. I read it, used it to make the dish. All throughout, I never made an effort to remember the recipe and process of making it…One reason could be - In case I need the same information in the future, I could get it at the click of a button… 2) In the past few weeks… the (scam) news sequence could be summed up as follows – IPL scam>CWG scam>2G scam>Adarsh>Media Tapes. While each of the news is important in terms of the freshness and context…the value we attach to the previous incident diminishes drastically with each passing day. The News today has a short shelf life About 20 years back, (access to) information was scarce. The only known and popular sources of information were – the books, Newspap...

An interesting news article that came out a few weeks back has got me thinking…. Facebook has overtaken Google to become the most popular website in the United States for the first time, according to new data from Hitwise, which measures Internet traffic. For the week ending March 13, the social networking juggernaut registered 7.07% market share, beating the search giant's 7.03% market share. See full article from DailyFinance: http://srph.it/8XVAKZ What got me thinking was how could Facebook in such a short span of time overtake Google -the default destination for millions of internet users globally? The data shows dramatic rise of Facebook- this can be attributed to the fact that people are spending more time on the net socializing, and an average user visits more pages on Facebook (not sure though if the Facebook Chat window refreshes are counted as part of the Hitwise data as the chart shows a phenomenal increase since April 2009). On a different note, a person usually visits ...