Goafest 2017: Back to basics for advertisers, agencies

The three-day Goafest exhorted participants to focus on the core promise of the brand

At the recently concluded Goafest, the annual three-day advertising, media and marketing festival, star speaker Amitabh Kant managed to get the crowd on his side early on. The CEO of Niti Aayog got the applause going when he said he had always chosen to work with Indian agencies for all his campaigns, since local creative talent was amongst the best in the world.

Coming from the man who has won accolades for the transformation of Kerala as a tourist destination with the ‘God’s own country’ (for Kerala Tourism) campaign, the ‘Incredible India’ and ‘Make in India’ campaigns, his words helped boost confidence and dispel some of the fears that had been churning the gossip mills at the festival. India’s Rs 50,000-crore advertising market has had to contend with lower adex growth in 2016 triggered in part by demonetisation as well as a cut back from sectors such as e-commerce that have been big spenders on digital, print and television.

While the forecast for 2017 remains mixed, GroupM has lowered its adex projection for the year to 10 per cent and Pitch Madison has raised it to 13.5 per cent, the dissonance hardly bodes well for the market. Some agencies say they hope to do well this year, while others are not so optimistic. The three-day conclave chose to dwell on what agencies as well as clients could do in these tough times. The message was simple: Do away with gimmicks and focus on the core promise of the brand.

“Technology can lure an agency or client to embellish their ads. This will mean nothing if it fails to engage the audience,” Rod Findley, executive creative director at US-based digital agency C2K, best known for its work with Toyota, Toshiba, Sony and Canon, said. Findley’s words are significant because: According to comScore, a global media measurement and analytics company, almost 50 per cent of global ad impressions delivered (in the context of online advertising) are out of target. That is, these ads are not viewable or haven’t registered in the minds of its target audience at all.

For a market that is seeing the emergence of digital – it is already a nearly Rs  8,000 crore market now in India – this prognosis is not good at all, say experts. Especially because digital advertising is expected to grow and possibly surpass mainline advertising in the next few years. Amardeep Singh, chief executive officer of digital agency Interactive Avenues, which is part of IPG Mediabrands, the media unit of the Interpublic Group, says that though television advertising will continue to be the largest ad medium in India, digital advertising with a growth rate in excess of 30-35 per cent will fast catch up. “While TV advertising is about Rs 18,000-20,000 crore now, digital advertising will continue to grow steadily over the next few years,” he says.
 

Sanjay Nazerali, global chief strategy officer, Carat, a media agency, which is part of the Dentsu group, said that what could help advertisers and agencies in the digital age is a focus on data mining, innovation and understanding where and how convergence is happening. “By 2018, connected things will overtake connected people and what will help agencies and marketers navigate themselves through this complex, inter-dependent world is data. It (data) is like nirvana and can get you closer to the consumer,” he says.

Findley, who has helped C2K stand out of the digital-agency clutter in the US by focusing on virtual reality (VR), says there are seven drivers that can help build an effective VR campaign. They include being immersive, interactive, memorable, empathetic, scalable, novel and stimulating. But Laura Ries, daughter of marketing guru Al Ries, went straight to the core of the issue when she said that effective communication starts with positioning the brand appropriately. “Positioning starts with identifying a hole in the receiver’s mind and then working towards filling it,” she said.

Ries said that with the help of visual hammers or cues, advertisers as well as their agencies could help induce brand recall among consumers. These could come in the form of shapes (value retailer Target’s blue dotted logo), colour (the bright yellow arches in McDonald’s logo), uniqueness of the product (the metal watchstrap pioneered by Rolex in its ads), intelligent packaging (Redbull’s can size), action (packaged juice brand Tropicana’s use of the picture of a straw through an orange to indicate freshness), founder (KFC’s use of the image of founder Colonel Sanders in its logo), using a celebrity (finding an endorser who can be used to communicate through visuals) and symbol (such as Nike’s swoosh).

Juhi Kalia, head of Facebook Creative Shop, agreed that visuals have a deeper, more long lasting impact on the consumers’ psyche than words and must be exploited to achieve the communication goal for a brand. “A brand can use multiple tools on social media to create interest and even drive sales. With mobile viewing on the rise, consumption patterns change according to the time of day, and the activity the user is involved in,” she said.