e Magus

Dear Remarketers, You have been one of the early adopters of this technology innovation in media - Remarketing. It is wonderful to see that 'performance' metrics drives your online campaign. As a digital marketer it is heartening for me to note that more and more of you are joining this band-wagon. Here is what I've experienced over the past couple of weeks. I was searching online couple of toys for my 3 year old son. After the necessary search and browsing, I zeroed on and the purchased items on the Amazon of India - FlipKart. Now I get bombarded by remarketing messages from FlipKart on the same toys (and another one which I browsed, but did not buy). Why? No clue. For God's sake!  I'm not a 3 year old with a credit card It should have been a simpler story for the website: I came, I saw, I bought. End of story. In case you still want to engage with me, go for sequels or with 'what-if' scenarios..but stop following me with non-relevant messages As...

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...

I ’m not sure why am I even writing about this. It is mid-March and there would be 1000’s of articles forecasting what will happen this year. Do I need to add more pixels to the ones that are already there? Well, maybe...or maybe not. Having worked in the digital marketing for so long, I’ve realized that we tend to forecast the same thing over and over again like - the mobile story, online video, the King content, etc - and guess what, most of the time this holds true - like statement written on stone :). The following are what I’d want to add on to what other Digital Marketing pundits have predicted: Digital story-retelling: For long brands in India have looked at online as a place to create and publish content. Most social media activities too are loosely based on content distribution and ‘engagement’ (from contests to customer service to games). The most popular stories are children’s story or mythology - and the reason for their popularity is that it is simple and easily ...

Digital advertising is built on the story of performance measurement and ROI. Be it the CPM, CPC, CPL, CPA…and the other entire sundry C’s, the story is about everything being able to be tracked and measured. It is also about remarketing, behavioural targeting, etc… but frankly, is digital advertising all about WYSIWYG of the data that is shown in the ad-serving tool? I think not. While there needs to be a bias towards the numbers, there is also an untold story of a banner ad being effective but not captured in the tool. Few weeks back, I was looking for purchasing a formal pair of shoes. I checked few online stores on different brands, and the prices and offers they had. One particular site was Jabong.com . After visiting the website, I was shown remarketing ads of Jabong (the communication being of the Shoes :) ) on various other websites that I was visiting. On spur of the moment, I decided to remove all the cookies in my system I got busy and a we...

The most preferred time for marketers and advertisers on Television is the ‘Prime time’. By definition it means – “ the time period when the television or radio audience is the largest”. Now for years, this block of programming is based on time (Evening hours between 8 PM to 11 PM) or between programming that gathers maximum eyeballs, like sports events. One of the reasons of prime time being there, as mentioned in Wikipedia is – “ Most people tend to watch television at prime time because most people who are usually tired coming home from work or school tend to watch TV, usually right after dinner…” But, is reach of the communication the only reason for advertisers to flock across to prime time? I guess not. Literally, there is much more than what meets the eye (and when) We all are aware that advertising works on the basis of stimulus and response.   Psychologist Daniel Gilbert in his essay “How Mental Systems Believe” theorizes about believing...

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...

Some random thoughts on what ails Internet advertising in India - 1) Internet advertising always comes as an after thought in client's campaign 2) few publishers control most of the traffic and ad revenue 3) Always have been sold on 'performance' parameter... branding was never considered as an option 4) In India Internet has been synonymous with 'Free' - even the marketers demand it 5) Penetration has been a perennial problem 6) cost per reach is still higher compared to other mediums 7) Tracking and optimizing the campaign is expensive... and client's mostly are not willing to invest or pay for the same 8) No standards - in rates, measurements - varies from publisher to publisher 9) success stories of internet advertising are by and far few & rare 10) Most restaurants (digital ad agencies) believes in the presentation (creative) not the cooking (science/strategy) of what they serve 10.a) Most of the online campaigns are half cooked dishes served to the cli...

techTribe Says Referral Job Site Not Working Out, Looking For A Buyer techTribe, backed by Canaan Partners, is now exploring options like finding a strategic partner or a buyer. The business model for online recruitment based on referrals is not “working out”, techTribe CEO and Founder Rohit Agarwal admitted in an interview to VCCircle. The company is now exploring options like a strategic partner or a buyer. San Francisco and New Delhi-based techTribe was founded by serial entrepreneur Rohit Agarwal, in 2006. Before starting techTribes, Agarwal was co-founder and VP of marketing and business development at Webify Solutions, which got acquired by IBM in July 2006. The company hoped to make money by becoming a referral job portal. It had received an undisclosed amount of funding from Canaan Partners, US-based Miven Venture Partners and The Entrepreneur Funds in 2007. “The model for referral recruitment as we had planned is not working out,” said Agarwal. Read more Will we be looking at ...

There’s big money being spent in the Internet marketplace. Last year, more than $175 billion passed through the Internet in the form of airline tickets, insurance premiums, online bill payments and paperback books, among thousands of other items. But for many consumers, at some point in the process, the online transaction came to a screeching halt. Perhaps, the customer became frustrated with the typing in their shipping information. Maybe the person got cold feet just as it came time to type in a credit card number. Maybe the customer was never able to find the right product in a vast catalog of products. TeaLeaf, a San Francisco startup that analyzes online consumer behavior, has released a study that looks closely at e-commerce stop points - the place in the online process where a potential customer “walks away” from the sale. Clearly, TeaLeaf has reason to commission such a study - but it was interesting that the company looked beyond the stop-points of a sale - which is its sweet ...

In this Adage article, Kevin Nalts, explains how you can help your brand thrive online. Online video is changing the way we market, and it requires skill sets they don't teach in business school (at least they didn't a decade ago, but now I'm dating myself). On one hand we have marketers believing their "unique selling proposition" is as interesting as the "Numa Numa" kid. On the other, we have today's ADHD-prone video viewers demanding short entertainment whether it is promotional or not. So the rules are fairly simple: Keep your promotion short, interesting, edgy and give us a surprise that makes us want to forward your clip. After all, it's not a "viral video" if nobody wants to share it. Lesson one: Tap into the video community We online-video creators and watchers are a community that's not shrinking and not growing slowly. Your customers are among us unless you're targeting the maybe 10%-20% of people that haven't wat...

Online shopping has come of age. Due to dearth of time and tedious ways of traditional shopping, customers are increasingly seeking the convenience of shopping from their home. And this Diwali the online marketeers are busy wooing the 37 million strong Indian net users with festival packages and Maha Diwali sales. According to a report by Internet and Mobile Association of India (IMAI), this Diwali the online sales are expected to go up by more than 100 per cent. In 2006, online business conducted during Diwali was around Rs 115 crore which is expected to cross the Rs 250 crore mark this year, according to the report. Even the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham) in its press release said e-shopping is a preferred mode this Diwali as it has already registered a growth of 40 per cent and is expected to register a growth of 130 per cent. As per Assocham, more than 30 lakh consumers in order to avoid security threats and physical movement will be using internet...

A recent IAMAI-IMRB survey on e-commerce in India reveals that in 2006-07, the online paid content subscription market was worth a mere Rs 20 crore, a fragment of the Rs 7,080 crore e-commerce market, which is made up of online travel, e-tailing, paid content subscription and digital download sites. In a paid content or subscription model, a content owner provides consumers access to content for a subscription fee. In India, paid content subscriptions are offered across various categories like news, legal or financial information, online games, audio books or research reports. For example, Indian Petro Group (IPG) is one such company that offers information related to the oil, gas, power and fertiliser sectors to its clients – ONGC, Lehman Brothers, KPMG and ABN Amro, among others – for a monthly subscription fee of $500 per month. Indian Petro Group owns sites such as Indianpetro.com, Energylineindia.com and Indianfertilizer.com. Says Santanu Saikia, executive editor, IPG: “Paid conte...

2750000000 Rupees ($60 Million) that is the online ad spends on Internet during the year 2006-07. Good or Bad. Here are some of my random thoughts with regard to the online advertising in India Bad: The online ad spends is less than 1 % of the total ad spends in India Internet reaches to only 3% of the Indian population Most the monies are spent in the top 10 sites Rich media creative are not fully accepted by publishers Still many live in the era of 20 Kb file size, and under Flash Player Version 6 There is no proper audit on the figures publisher quotes in terms of page impressions, UVs etc Behavioral targeting – What is that? Frequency capping – Yeah, we can do it, provided it is above 100 J Web 2.0 – okies, we shall talk about it, once we complete Web 1.0 Broadband – yeah… in my office at home I have a BB connection at 128Kbps, on a 12.3kbps telephone line Search Marketing – must.. but do we optimize the same? eCom...