Cyber cafe audience: Captive power

A Nielsen survey reveals that the anonymous throng of cyber café audience has a profile much sought-after by marketers.

Companies are measuring every step they take post the slowdown. As marketers, they are gravitating towards media such as the internet — a medium ideal for tactical campaigns and, of course, for easy tracking of the number of audience perusing the communication. But in their zest to cash in on the social networking, blogging and online gaming by their target audiences, could they be missing the woods for the trees?

While most of urban India (37 per cent of an urban population of 17.9 million, according to the iCube study in 2008 by Internet & Mobile Association of India and IMRB) still surfs at cyber cafés, marketers seem less intent on talking to this segment. A February 2009 Nielsen survey on the profile of cyber cafés users, however, reveals a captive audience.

A sought-after profile
The study finds that 90 per cent of the audience, across eight cities and 3,500 cafés, is male and in the age bracket of 15 to 35 years; 52 per cent are graduates and post-graduates, though over 50 per cent are students. But the latter should be no reason to gloss over this segment when communicating.

“Often to an advertiser, the cyber café audience comprises people with low-purchasing power,” points out Saurabh Khullar, one of the co-founders and head of sales of Ideacts Innovations, the maker of CLINCK, a desktop interface that is meant for cyber café terminals, carrying ads and shortcuts to programmes popular with surfers. The Nielsen study, commissioned by Ideacts, finds 50 per cent of the audience is SEC A (Figure 1), with considerable decision-making powers. More than 70 per cent of the visitors decide which electronic appliance to buy and nearly 60 per cent which household durables (Figure 2). While 61 per cent of them own a personal computer (Figure 3), a sizeable 39 per cent also listen to their music on iPods.

The study thus reveals a profile that can match the audience of products ranging from FMCGs, gadgets, web services to two-wheelers. While 80 per cent own a two-wheeler, nearly 47 per cent have a debit card and 68 per cent have a savings bank account (Figure 4), marking out significant opportunities for financial services companies. Fitness and health companies might want to sit up and listen since the respondents ranked the gym as the haunt they visited the most. Eateries could be sure to target an eager audience that had cafés and restaurants next on their list of most-frequented places. Geo-tracking at cyber cafés could help these advertisers further, but more on that later.

Cyber cafés rule

However, cyber café communication has remained low-key and low clutter (which could become a strength) because of net-surfers increasingly accessing the internet in their offices. Mobile screens, getting spruced up by the hour with newer intuitive technology, too, have taken the sheen off cyber cafés as advertising stops. “You can now reach a similar audience through mobile advertising or catch them at malls,” feels Vijay Singh, managing director and CEO of 141 Sercon, Bates’ below-the-line marketing division.

Though these internet access-points have slowed down in growth, yet they have registered a 1 per cent rise this year (according to the iCube 2008), while the ease of using the internet at office and home may just be illusory. Cyber cafés still remain the most frequently-used internet windows for the Indian populace because of the restrictions that get levied both at office and home. While at office, it is usually the systems administrator playing spoilsport, at home it is a family member who might cut short the surfer’s joyride on the information highway. Despite a majority of the users surveyed owning computers at home, they were still found accessing the internet through cyber cafes.

But the major reasons behind cyber café use are the usage familiarity and the lack of infrastructure elsewhere — few hotspots and poor broadband networks for home use. Khullar points out, “The surfing experience with household connections is often not good. So, the computer at home is not used as an internet device.” Palal Bhattacharjee, associate director at The Nielsen Company, says, “The problems with choosing a subscription plan, the connectivity and so on are all solved by just going to cyber cafés. Few want to forego that convenience.” Atit Mehta, a media services manager at Hindustan Unilever (HUL), agrees that the low cost (around Rs 10 to 15 per hour) of surfing at cyber cafés has made these even more popular.

Hard-to-miss targets
The Nielsen survey arms advertisers and their media planners with a clearer image of the quintessential cyber café user, whom they can reach not just through portals but desktop application such as CLINCK and café chains such as Reliance World. Those who have tapped the cyber café audience through such desktop interfaces, which carry ads in addition to programme icons, admit the high levels of accuracy in targeting the audience.

Mehta of HUL explains how the digital campaign for Axe Chocolate, one of the company’s new range of deodorants, saw the company advertising on the desktops at cyber cafés. “We wanted to target young men, aged 15-25 years in specific cities and this promised a targeting accuracy of 90-95 per cent,” says Mehta. HUL’s decision was backed by its own set of findings, similar to the Nielsen report, which showed the majority of visitors to be young men intent on emailing, social networking and playing games. But more important, Mehta reveals that the CTR (click-through-ratio) at cyber cafés were double that of portals.

Khullar says, “The USP of CLINCK and other such software is that no matter where the user is headed on the internet, he will still have to start from and come back to the desktop interface. The ads get viewed much before the surfer moves on to a portal. To a marketer, it is equivalent to placing ads on, say, 10 or even 50 websites.” He puts the CTRs at an average of 2.5 per cent for the 180 campaigns Ideacts has done till now, as against the industry average of 0.5 per cent through other internet vehicles, with costs that are comparable to that of portal advertising.

Geo-tagging edge
Gopa Kumar, a business group head at MEC Interaction, Group M, thinks the users at cyber cafés could be an excellent captive audience for test-marketing. Kumar says, “Promoting a product or a brand for a pre-launch testing could be done for just Rs 4-5 lakh. Geographic tracking could help a small brand wanting to target the youth reach a large chunk of relevant consumers by advertising through cyber cafes at Pune, for example.” CLINCK too has carried out location-specific advertising, as Khullar explains, “We have done campaigns for Radio Mirchi which tailored its communication with city-specific RJs. We can track CTRs though computers, each one of which are tagged with its serial number, café code and city code making geo-tagging very easy.” So, eateries could dole out discounts specific to certain locations through this medium. With companies and their retail stores opting for tactical advertising instead of generic ads, either to trigger sales for fresh stocks or to clear piled-up stocks, geography-specific targeting will come in handy.

While cyber-café advertising through desktops won’t replace portal advertising (media planners always start with mainline portals), marketers agree that it is a strong supplement. But if brands aim at reining in media costs, all they need to do is find a fit in the cyber café audience profile. That could cut short the unwieldy task of letting loose viral ads, putting up banners or inserting text links on different portals.