Hardselling soft brand advertising

If you are a big advertiser looking for innovative ways to promote your brand on television, your search could end at TAM Media Research, the TV advertising monitoring agency.

For, the research company has come up with a white paper on "Evaluating Soft Brand Advertising on Television including product placement and in-program Brand Exposure".

The paper, declared the best among 22 entries at ESOMAR (European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research), a prestigious market research forum, deals with in-program placement of brands across different television programming genres.

For product placement on television, TAM has devised a unique system to track brand exposures. The technique involves in-depth reporting of various parameters to monitor the number, duration and quality of brand mentions and visibility in a particular programme or show.

Through the technique, one can get an exact picture of the duration of visibility of a brand, its frequency and the best platforms available to showcase it.

For instance, it may now be easy to figure out whether a brand will get the best exposure on ground signage, side boards or players' T-shirt in case of a cricket match.

"Till now the decisions were based on gut-feel. Now there is a quantifiable method of doing it," says TAM Media's chief executive officer, L V Krishnan. "It is a user-friendly research," he adds.

Besides exposures, the new technique also allows one to measure the quality of prominence as well. "The variables that get captured in our study help in assessing the quality of brand visibility.

For instance, it will help monitor the size of the brand in terms of area occupied as well as the angle of its exposure," says Krishnan. The biggest advantage is that this data can be fused with the regular Peoplemeter viewership data to find out how many consumers were exposed to the brand.

TAM's vice president, Atul Phadnis, says that the product placement can be monitored in any show format: sports events, game shows, news channels or even serials. "We already have examples of popular Hindi soaps where names of car and diamond jewellery brands have been mentioned," he says.

Phadnis says that though the channels are already earning revenue through product placements, they weren't really sure of how to charge and how much to charge their clients. "On the flip side, the advertisers did not know how to measure if they were getting their money's worth. Now they can check," he says.

Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest broadcasters generate nearly Rs 400 crore a year from in-program product placement business. The medium is said to be growing at the rate of 35 per cent a year.

"Channels must be generating between 5 and 8 per cent of their total revenue from soft brand advertising already and it is set to explode much like it has in the West," says Krishnan.

Buoyed by the response to its research, TAM is already on to the second phase. It is now looking at the effectiveness of such placements versus normal advertising.