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The Economic Times

Title : Nice Handset. Where Are The Ads?

Author : Delshad Irani and Amit Bapna

Location :

Article Date : 12/24/2014

For a market touted as one of the fastest growing, the Indian mobile marketing story is hardly a

potboiler, so far Not two months ago, Mark D'Arcy, vice president and chief creative officer of Facebook CreativeShop, the people responsible for shaping advertising on the world's largest social network, was inMumbai.

Surviving on practically no sleep in over 24 hours, he was, however, energised like the Bunny whenhe spoke about Premium Video, one of Facebook's latest offerings that provides advertisers with newand richer ways to make advertising look good on smartphone screens. He told us of the heateddiscussions that dominated creative council meetings at the Facebook HQ: “When I think back to thefirst meetings of the council, one of the big debates was whether people will watch video on mobile.That was 24 months ago. Well, I know who won.“ Globally, Facebook has 1.35 billion users. Of the

total 112 million users in India, 99 million access Facebook through their mobile phones at least oncea month. “If you think about great commercials, `Epic Split' with Jean Claude Van Damme by Volvo,who saw that on a TV?,“ asks D'Arcy . “Everyone saw that on their phone. These epic films wesurround ourselves with as an industry and community and we celebrate, ask yourself, who saw thaton TV?“ While the population which sees epic films during commercial breaks on the telly iscertainly not falling, the number who see videos on mobile is multiplying at a pace one would befoolish to dismiss. With one of the world's largest and most diverse mobile universes, mobile shouldhave been something that marketers put front and centre and which agencies ought to be struggling tocrack. Yet the good mobile idea from India is more exception than rule.

The big, innovative, breakthrough, potential Cannes-Lion-winning mobile ideas revolve around themissed call or app. Mobile-first campaigns are rarer than steak that still moos.Mobile, if givenseparate status in the larger digital strategy, is more often relegated to the last slide in the deck andmust survive on whatever budget scraps are leftover. And to add insult to injury, the campaigns aremere adaptations of work designed for other media.Or, as Rahul Pandey, CEO and co-founder of mobile advertising agency Bonzai says it's a victim of the “free creative syndrome“ ie asking vendorsto adapt print ads or any and every for m of brand imagery to mobile platforms at no additional cost,thus saving pots on pricey creative wizardry.When advertisers spend, a brand's mobile strategy oftentranslates into an app-only strategy with them investing heavily on building hollow applications andnot communications, even as the experts warn that the lines between app and communication arequickly blurring. That measurability is still a question mark bigger than Big Data doesn't help mobile'scause either. Hell, even the inter net analytics company, ComScore, till about a month ago, didn't

provide mobile data. Says Tanya Dubash, executive director and chief brand officer, Godrej Group,“For a marketer to spend money on a medium, it isn't enough for a medium to be promising or highreach. It must be practical, affordable and effective. Marketers need to work hard at evolving modelsthat can leverage the mobile in the right way. That takes effort, ingenuity, patience and commitment -all of which compete for attention versus other business actions. Thus for some, the cost of that mayappear larger than the benefits.“

With a dense cloud of ambiguity surrounding the medium, marketers' wait and watch approach isunderstandable. What's not is the fact that ad agencies still have a hard time merging creative and

technology, the two increasingly inextricable. Instead creatives are slapped on to media platforms likea generic screen-guard on a brand new smartphone. The bottomline is the narrative of advertising onmobile is the story of every new, unfamiliar media that came before it. And as users and mediumgrow up together, marketers will be left playing catch-up, rendering some obsolete.We're not psychic;we're just saying History is a pain in the you-know-what that has an infuriating habit. It repeats itself.


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1. nice handset. where are the ads_ for a market touted as one of the fastest growing, the indian...

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