 "Anil K Nair")
What are the challenges for advertisers in terms of creating engaging content in the online video ecosystem? How is the Indian digital video market different from other markets?
We are a visual country. We have grown up on Bollywood and a lot of other regional content. Like America, we have a growing TV viewing population, and if you a look at it from a category per se, India is right for video as a medium. If you were to consider the situation 10 years ago we only had x number of channels and constrained programming. Today, thanks to the proliferation of devices and channels to propagate video I think it’s a giant opportunity compared to other countries, like the US which is a single language/demographic. I think it is early times yet in India. We are not fully on top of the curve creating engaging content. It is still adaptive kind of video, and as advertisers we are not genuinely creating video content that is native to the space.
In India, one obvious thing that comes to mind is the need to produce content in so many different languages. The effect of Bollywood and its impact on any kind of content that you create is unique. Also, video needs a bandwidth for the end consumer and therefore buffering, etc. will always be a challenge in the Indian context.
How has the growth of online channels impacted and influenced the advertising agency’s approach towards brand building and content creation?
Again I believe the leadership in the space of creating online video content has been taken by a lot of new intermediaries, and agencies have been a little slow on the uptake. Initially, both advertisers and agencies tried to pass off offline content as online. Over the last two or three years both advertisers and ad agencies have woken up to the importance of creating fresh, organic content for various channels and contexts. Most brands and advertisers realise that video content/branded content is a great opportunity to communicate with consumers in ways which are more consumer-speak than brand-speak and which is more entertaining to consume. It’s just that different brands have different levels of adoption.
How has the diversification of media services for agencies impacted people training and management?
Never in my two decades of this business has there been so much change. And therefore as we speak agencies are being forced to do a 360-degree turn on their heads in terms of quickly training their personnel to think differently and be ready for newer formats and channels. Luckily, the youth demographic in most agencies are ready for it, because they any way dabble in this medium.
The agencies that are aware of this and changing are retooling their people faster. In areas like creating a quick video edit studio, people in-house who to train others in different techniques and algorithms of video proliferation, new analytic tools and just newer formats of storytelling are areas agencies are focusing on. It’s not the classical art director-copy writer partnership sitting and creating some kind of communication for the client. So, today is the age of the generalist where you need to be a bit of a creative person, a bit of a producer, a bit of an editor, a bit of a videographer with multiple skills thrown into one.
Are traditional established brands ready to experiment with their brands in digital space?
To answer that, you cannot paint all the brands with the same brush because different categories have different points of view on digital. So beauty products are very different on digital, as compared to cars. If your consumers are expecting to interact with you in this space, you should be there. If they aren’t, don’t even waste your time. You need to mirror your consumers’ aspiration and then decide on your digital play. Every client I have spoken to or met in the last year or so has been at least curious about digital play. In fact, some conservative brands and their owners are hungrier to learn. Since they come from a space of ignorance I think they are much more open to suggestions from agencies. But the flip side is, since it is a sunrise space there are too many players, too much of the bad is also being sold with the good, sometimes what it does therefore is that brands and clients end up burning their fingers.
Could you give a rough estimate?
I can’t give you a number. But for example, a brand which 10 years ago was 100 per cent in traditional media is today aware of something called digital. There are brands like Google, there is branded content, a bunch of branded content producers, and then there is analytics, storytelling and even in digital there are multiple sectoral experts — some in social media, building web assets, mobile ad, contextual, performance marketing. So I believe because there is a plethora of options it is not necessarily good for advertisers and brands because they end up either overbuying or underbuying products and solutions.
