From someone, whose first company was a vacuum cleaning service and whose first two companies were non-starter, who would have wanted to listen some gyan on digital media marketing. Yet, recording its highest ever attendance, DARE webinar today, with speaker, the renowned VC and digital marketing expert - Mahesh Murthy, founder of Pinstorm and Seedfund, was a big success, being our first of-its kind initiative for entrepreneurs in India.
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Murthy has had along stint in advertising with the biggest brands such as FCB Ulka, Grey, Ogilvy in different countries and helped launch Amazon.com and Yahoo in US. After starting and selling an e-commerce company, he came back to India 11 years back to run ‘Channel V’ and turned around Star TV. He then helped invest in startups like Webdunia, Carwale, Geodesic, Redbus, Vaatsalya through Seedfund and Passionfund. The same time he started a digital marketing company – Pinstorm, with clients like Airtel, ICICI, CCD, Wipro, WSJ, etc.
Speaking on “Secrets of Online Marketing”, Murthy presented some mind boggling statistics, in favour of online media, which could blow up any print/ TV/radio fanatic. He exemplified how media numbers have changed in India. The number of people that are reached through ads on mobiles phones is higher than all TV channels combined.
Some interesting statistics that he gave are:
- Mobile population is ~500 million, vis-à-vis TV viewing population, which is ~300 million.
- 24 million people give Facebook platform higher rating than to Big Boss, everyday.
- Google gets 100 m users in a month. And more people look there than on all General Entertainment Channels (GEC) combined.
- More people read Shashi Tharoor (with 900,000 followers on twitter) daily, than they read any columnist of Times of India.
- Every day, SRK is read by his 600,000 followers on Twitter while Filmfare magazine has 40,000 readers (Ratio of 15:1)
- Everyday Vodafone’s ZooZoos talk to over 1 million fans on Facebook.
- Café Coffee Day has 700,000 fans in three groups, while Flipkart has 600,000 fans.
What these statistics show is how media has changed in times, how cheaper it can be to reach people, and how targetable and measurable digital media is. “The Cost per Target (CPT) is about the same as TV, but the reach is greater, targetablity is greater and your ability to measure your impact is much greater,” said Murthy.
He also emphasized on the fact that digital media agencies are valued at 5-8 times their revenues, while traditional media agencies are valued at just 1.2 times their revenues. And even then we invest Rs. 24,000 crore in TV, Print and outdoor with almost nothing in digital. Even an optimistic guess of a spend of Rs 1400 crore is just 7% of the traditional media spend.
Giving some more statistics gathered from IMRB, IAMAI, Airtel and Google (internal), he said 2010 has been a watershed year for India as the number of internet users in India has crossed the figure of 100 million. With 84 million desktop internet users, 40 million mobile internet users in India (with good enough overlap between the two) as contrasted to 78 million cable and satellite TV sets ad 125 million total TV sets, he expressed his belief that India’s internet users will surpass this figure of 125 million in numbers, which is much larger than the national readership of print, directing us to the huge growth socia media has had in India.
Interestingly Murthy says “Anybody who tells you Digital Media is small, unremarkable niche, or digital is “a 2% medium” is either blind, ignorant or sells TV or print or all of these.”
In light of the fact that - while internet users have increased by 100%, the usage has also increased by 70% over 2008-2009, upto 16 hours/week, Murthy went on to illustrate where is the growth of internet users coming from. With portals like Rediff, Yahoo, In.com, Indiatimes registering CAGR (Compounded Annual Growth Rate) of a mere 3%, 12-15%, 3%, 2-3% over last 2 years, the portal growth has stagnated. The implication is that the online marketing focus need not be on buying ads on social media sites like those mentioned.
On the other hand, social sites like Blogger, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter have grown by enormous 65%, 440%, 900% and 1900% respectively YoY which infers that almost all growth has been through social sites. Reiterating his stand on social media’s fast growth, he pointed out the growth pattern of various websites in a list, wherein Orkut and Youtube, in addition to other sites already mentioned, with viewership ranging between 120 million and 4.4 billion and 12 to 24 million monthly viewership. “With 5 of the biggest sites in India, already social sites, the revolution of digital media is already upon us,” said Murthy.
In light of these statistics, he gave the fact that while people pay to be on yahoo, Rediff, Microsoft and others, they don’t need to pay, to be on Facebook, Twitter, Youtube among other social sites. “You don’t spend on audience, You earn them. And you earn audience by building assets, being entertaining, interesting, and remark-worthy, all this after taking care of their basic issues.” “It pays more to invest in unpaid media than in paid media”, added Murthy.
Through another graph, he showed the figures of 'whom consumers trust more' for may be something like movie reviews. While Word of Mouth, gets 90% votes, online consumer reviews and editorial content get 70% votes each, TV, newspapers, magazines, ads and radio are ranked below them.
Talking about challenges of managing brands in real time, he said that while earlier brands had 2-3 months available for planning and testing traditional ads, which would get obsolete as newer products came out, today brands have just few days to do any planning. So, the brands have to be faster to take advantage. Giving the instance of Paul the Octopus, which was trending higher than Football World Cup itself, Murthy said, although companies had 12 months to plan for World Cup, they needed to be very fast to take advantage of Paul – a one-week phenomenon, which was only possible through digital media.
About media tracking of brands, he mentioned a number of things that can be tracked about a brand through active lisetining, which for a car manufacturer, include – how many conversations are happening, for which brand of cars, are they positive/ negative, what is public sentiment about conversations among others.
So, according to Murthy, all of this translates into fact that Digital Media practioners can far better help a brand with strategic and tactical insights than traditional media based strategies. The data flows much faster and more credibly.
The marketing manager’s job has changed in last decade. He/she now has to manage real time media campaigns happening all across the world and has to listen to thousands of conversations happening ad take action, where immediately required.
Giving a diagrammatic presentation with some examples, he gave a plan to manage digital media.
Listen → Plan & React & Plan → Pro-act
which means many aspects of the organization need to be integrated – Customer Service, Corp-Comm, Brand Marketing, Product Marketing and Employer Branding. The work styles and habits of marketing managers need to change from 9 to 5 job to 24/7 work-style.
At the end, he gave 10 main insights into using digital media:
- Its more strategic and has some merits over traditional media.
- Its better integrated.
- Its not about buying media. Smart firms buy less overtime.
- Its not about clever lines and advertising clients but interacting with humans.
- Its about conversing in your own personality.
- ts about accountability with Pay for Performance and Transparency being just two parts.
- Its always 24/7.
- It’s a different world, and getting more different.
- Its about discovering new truths – and taking advantage before others.
- Its about combining Customer Service, Corp-Comm, Brand and Product Marketing into one seamless user experience.
Q&As
The audience asked lots of questions, which included following:
"At what stage should a corporate decide to outsource its Digital Plan / Social Media initiatives beyond its internal Communications / PR team?"
to which Murthy answered,
“Its not an either/or decision. You should always have people in your organization, who are in charge of social media. Post that, you ca decide, how much should be done in-house and how much outsource. E.g., if you are a big brand like Airtel, you need lot of technology to talk to 500-700 people a day, to gauge sentiments in those conversations, to analyse that, to respond, to undertake customer service and to build online presence So, if you don’t have that technology, you will need to have a partner who does that."
Prashanth Hebbar, Dare Editor thanked Murthy, all previous speakers, Dare team and all the audience for making the webinar series a success. For questions that could not be answered, they shall be answered by Murthy and put up online for the audience on www.dare.co.in/eweek.
With today’s webinar, the monthly series of Dare webinars came to an end, and our audience gave us confidence riding on which we shall have this series for entrepreneurs in January as well.
If you have missed any of the webinars, you can read the webinar reports on www.dare.co.in/eweek and also write a message on the Wall, thanking your mentor, in addition to registering as a mentor to help upcoming startups.
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written by coolfunnytshirts.net, December 21, 2010
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