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Who are we? Where did we come from? What do we do? What did we do? And what will
we do? Answers to all the questions you may have. And even the ones you don’t. |
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With the increasing fragmentation of the consumer in Pakistan, it still continues
to amaze me how much money still gets pumped into traditional media when even at
the best of times, leading advertising practitioners used to admit that only 50
per cent worked and even then they weren’t sure which 50 percent. Life is more challenging
for advertisers now that it's generally accepted that mass marketing is no longer
as effective as it was when they only had a 50/50 chance of success. Infact even
twenty years ago nobody could have foreseen the challenges today's marketers would
be facing.
The base of this shift we’re facing now were the seeds that were planted about 10
years ago, when we saw the advent of the mobile in Pakistan through Paktel. It was
a huge handset then, which only facilitated the dialing of the number. The SMS feature
was inferior and still in nascent stages. However just 1½ after Paktel, global MVOs
started looking at the potential of this market and introduced new and better handsets
especially those based on GSM standards. Mobilink entered Pakistan and changed the
face of the markets as we knew it. Now we’re witnesses to such metamorphosis in
consumer behavior as such which has not been seen since the emergence of television
in Pakistan decades ago.
Today the agency profession (and because of it traditional media) is being marginalized
by businesses looking for bottom line accountability. This is simply because traditional
media-based marketing models are shattering like Humpty Dumpty falling off a very
high wall.
The economics of the industrial era were the ones in which the models for traditional
media made sense. Interaction was expensive, so information about the expected benefits
of consumption of products had to be squeezed into slogans, characters, and logos,
compressed into thirty-second TV ads and radio spots. With the advent of the information
age however and cheap digital interaction, these models are falling apart. When
interaction is cheap, the very economic rationale which furthered the growth of
traditional media actually begins to implode.
Let’s stop a bit and define ‘brand’ as the ‘total sum of all consumer experiences’.
Now think about this next statement for a second: the #1 global brand belongs to
a company that doesn’t advertise. Can you guess which brand it is? It’s not Microsoft.
It’s not GE. It’s not even IBM. It’s simply Google. With every click of a mouse,
every read of an article or completion of a search query, the digital brand delivers
on its promise. The actual transactional cost of the brand’s interaction with the
consumer is miniscule and yet each is responsible for creating an impression and
giving value to the customer.
Building further on this base and depending upon number of touch-points as our criteria
for choice of medium, you can easily see that the impact and reach of a digital
brand is going to be leaps and bounds ahead of the non-digital brand. This is because
information about the costs and benefits associated with consumption will no longer
have to be compressed into logos, slogans, ad-spots and column-inches as with traditional
media. Instead, with digital media consumers can and will debate and discuss expected
costs associated with and the benefits of the brand in incredibly rich details and
the more cheaper the interaction gets, the more connected consumers will become
and the more they will talk to each other – and the less time they will spend listening
to the often empty promises of advertisers.
The information gap created in the past too will disappear. Before advertisers had
focused heavily on measuring the means of awareness such as reach, frequency, etc
(which too were theoretical) rather than the economic value they gained from traditional
advertising such as ‘Advocacy Rates’, ‘Sales Conversion’, ‘Sales Uplift’, etc because
with the limitations of traditional media there were simply very few other metrics
possible. However common sense dictates that just because I'm aware of something,
doesn't mean I want it (Guy Soap, anyone?). Marketers still do not fully understand
this especially with regard to new media. Digital media is not shackled by this
lack of data which pervaded traditional media and allows for metrics far beyond
awareness, is superior and can be measured from the instant the user sees the advertised
message up to the moment of sale and afterwards as well. Digital is the most accurate,
transparent, and reliable type of media. The simplest metrics e.g. can enable the
calculation of the cost of acquisition of a customer giving you a rupee for rupee
analysis of your spending in real-time.
Increasingly the marketer should realize that the multi-tasking, instant-messaging,
e-mailing, cell phoning, emoticoning ;-), always on, gaming, Web-searching, blogging,
social networking customers are for real and as they will scramble to find their
footing in this new hyper-fragmented world, they will become painfully aware of
the fact that customers are increasingly ignoring their marketing efforts. In what
is being called the ‘experience’ economy, the customers overall experience of a
product or service "throughout the customer life cycle" (Reach, Acquisition, Conversion,
Retention) is now becoming the primary arbiter of a successful relationship with
a brand. To add complexity to this model, we have the burgeoning media options which
have fragmented the universe of customers and have made possible on-demand media
consumption and lightning-quick word of mouth.
This trend will only amplify as the pace of digital innovation accelerates and is
matched, step for step, by our interest in technology. One by-product of this development
will be that the measures by which we understand "audience" will be shifting e.g.
with longer working hours and a blurring of the boundaries between "work" and "life",
more and more we as consumers will be on the lookout for approaches, tools and technologies
(not to mention friends, networks and colleagues) that will help us filter, assess
and analyze information regardless of its source. We will become "Continuously Connected".
Therefore the term audience in the near future e.g. will include Pakistani technology
blogs as well as normal consumers. This oncoming trend will have profound implications
for brands and the way the consumer engages them.
Thus for marketers, the challenges—and the opportunities—are huge. Advertisers know
that the traditional model is broken, and that the old rules do not apply. In this
case it is digital marketing that will increasingly become the means of tapping
onto such a consumer base, which has little time for TV, Print or Radio. Already
we can see this manifesting itself into our consumer’s lives. A research conducted
by Google Pakistan e.g. estimated that at least 70% of the total internet population
of 14 Million Pakistan spends between 1 & 6 hours online. Thus advertising is
already becoming a choice - something that people can easily filter out and only
choose to engage with if it helps them out, makes them laugh or turns them on.
“You tap onto the [digital] consumer because they’re more conducive to technology
than any other medium even if they don’t understand it fully. The attention of marketers
now should be on mobile devices & laptops. To tap into these mediums and to
let the corporate message be available to them - this is the definition and the
scope of Digital Medium in Pakistan in the current scenario.” Said Fouad Husain,
GM, Mindshare, a GroupM company.
“Clients approach online media the same way they approach other traditional media.
Digital marketing is not a mass medium. It is a peer-to-peer medium. When we realize
that is it not a mass medium, we will begin to see the necessity of focusing on
the right content for the right audience.”, said Najamus Saqib, Head of Business
Development, Intelligenes, a software house working on digital marketing techniques
in Pakistan.
Taking notice of these trends in place, already companies like Unilever are moving
into the digital realm. The brand Energile e.g. which is using football in its communication
as a way of driving its brand amongst the youth is especially using this medium.
To tap into the youth market further it has launched its own football portal online
and has even made football interactive. People who don’t enjoy physical football
will interact with the brand by a mobile game based on penalty shootouts which is
downloadable from all mobile networks. Thus the brand is seamlessly integrating
itself in the lives and conversations of its consumers further.
All things said, it’s about time that marketers grasp the changes that digital has
brought to the communications industry - all media are digital, that all marketing
is interactive and that all customer communications have to be integrated across
media and time. Not that this is easy. The consumer has moved up. Unfortunately,
the consumer has not been educated what this technology can do and consumer dynamics
play a very important role when it comes to mass adoption of the technology. Aside
from this we still have other obstacles to overcome, such as broadband penetration
and speeds and most of all talent which can work with this medium.
“We do not have the capabilities in the agencies to tackle this medium. So for the
near future, I do not foresee the digital medium growing. Talent and investment
in this area will be required, because this area has not been recognized as yet.”
said Husain.
Yet some companies, such as GroupM & Media Idee Interactive, are still making
a conscious decision to go digital. Response based marketing is now driving advertising
globally and companies utilizing digital media are building up consumer profiles,
tailoring their offerings to those bases. Yet we still have a long way to go.
“Talk is easy. The real skill will be getting companies seeped in traditional advertising
methods to realize how the market is changing. That's a problem new media companies
like ours are struggling to solve - pushing our clients to try different media &
mediums and in different ways.” said Ehmer Kirmani, CEO Media Idee.
“How do we bring the brand to interact with the consumer [digitally]? We have to
ask the question has it been built from real creative thinking with regard to the
medium or is it just part of the overall package once the creative thinking has
been completed. If it doesn’t get started from the former position, it never gets
started at all. Digital means ‘Consumer Engagement’. It’s not about sending them
informative SMS. It means molding your brand to fit the medium.” said Husain.
“The challenge for advertising agencies and marketers is how you converge technology
into mass media first to create awareness, pull and then start going niche. The
survival of traditional media will depend on how they converge into new digital
media. Sports channels are the world’s best examples of going digital. ESPN, Start
Sports, etc, they all have very strong digital media attached to them, so that their
audience base is updated on their favorite sports 24/7.”, added Husain.
This is an early warning for brands which are not developing their digital mindspace.
These brands are bound to face substantial challenges as older teens & young
adults begin moving into the workforce. Not only will non-digital brands find it
hard to reach this new workforce, they will be missing opportunities to engage a
savvy consumer-force fully conversant with technology and its place in their lives
and while admittedly the real impact of this oncoming shift may be a few years off,
the shockwaves of the change are being felt even now. The consumer has adopted the
immersive worlds of digital media, the bi-directionality of INSperiences which is
being manifested in their consumer space and whom they let enter into those worlds.
The future is about brands opening their brand stories in a way that allows consumers
to step inside. Surprisingly, it is NOT about big shifts. It is about the little
ones – the ones that go click! click!
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