In India, Media & Communication industry is changing at a rapid speed and so is the consumer market dynamics. In this complex time when media innovation is dominating how advertising would work and impact consumer behavior to its greatest extent; it’s becoming extremely challenging for agencies to keep up with the pace of technological advancements and align their offerings with it to deliver results remaining within the ever-shrinking marketing budgets of the brands.
Industry trends are favorable
The media industry is now in an intermediary stage in which digital has been playing a pivotal role for an overall forward movement. Adoption of new digital tools and invest in innovation seem to be the ultimate mantra to move ahead in the current changeover phase of the media industry. Today we all participate in online experiences and interact with peers, brands, prospective customers on real-time basis. Today, technology is such an indispensable part of our lives that we are exhaustively dependent on it for our daily feeds on information, communication and entertainment.
This paradigm shift in consumer behavior is aiding the digital media to become robust and powerful more than ever before. We as an agency are well aware of this shift in media dynamics and always strive to bring tangible benefits of the powerful media, to our clients.
Going with the market
As per our internal research and several external data, brands are going to adore professional agencies that are able to deliver result-oriented digital marketing plans and campaigns. Understanding customers’ changing needs and characteristics is a must while integrating media activities successfully to maximize ROI in a consistent manner is considered to be the biggest plus in the industry.
It is not only the invasion of Social Media that is fuelling the growth of Digital Advertising in India; there are multitudes of changes in business dynamics, brands’ outlooks and audience-preferences that are transforming and empowering the vertical. Though content has been always been the backbone of the advertising business, in the digital era, it has become the soul of advertising. While content plays a versatile and inarguably the most important role in social media channels, networking sites, blogs and mobile apps, we are successfully upped our game by introducing content marketing services to a host of its clients where the effectiveness of content management is measured in results and outputs.
With the advent of digital media, customers are becoming persistent about enhanced user experience in their digital dealings. Virtual reality is changing the way we define user experience, and going with the demands, we have developed an in-house capability to develop strikingly beautiful interactive 3D motion graphic projects, which have helped the agency to add immense values to the portfolio management service it provides to the real estate industry.
Today’s customers prefer to view audiovisual contents as a promotional tool. Growing need for the visual content has turned video marketing to be one of the most appealing trends of digital marketing off late. Conversion is an easier game when a well-conceived and well-produced visual content is used instead of static ones. With thriving mobile marketing, video content needs to be well thought, informative and short. We offer highly effective video content, which is developed in-house and is cost-effective.
Mobile is the key
India currently has more than 220 million smart phone users who are consuming digital content mostly on mobile. Internet penetration and the change in content consumption pattern, today’s Indians are readier than ever to interact with the brands of their choice through the windows of their smart phones.  As Indian consumers spend nearly three hours on mobile each day, it doesn’t take much of brain to understand that digital media solutions that an agency offers need to be ‘mobile-first’.
Advertising is all about impactful storytelling. With the right creative ability, we have developed a capability to narrate a brand’s story in an immersive way, which is always optimized for mobile. India is expected to grow at the rate of 15% to reach 1.2 billion mobile subscribers by 2020 with close to 60% of the new subscriptions coming from non-metro cities and rural parts of India. This is a good enough reason why agencies need to invest time and resource to research on how semi-urban and rural markets of India tend to respond to mobile advertising. While it’s a fact that mobile marketing strategy is still evolving in India, agencies will definitely have to revamp their strategies and become more relevant to a mobile-first generation.
Way Forward
Asia Pacific is the second largest regional advertising market in the world with India being the fastest growing country with an increment of 2.84 billion USD between 2015 and 2018, which happens to be the 5th largest ad expenditure growth in the world during this time period.
In the conventional advertising landscape of the country, newspapers and magazines are still very much relevant for a section of brands; Television and Radio continue to grow with an annual growth rate of around 10%. In this state of affairs, the beauty of communication lies in successful cross-channel synergies and that’s how an ROI centric campaign stands out from a regular campaign. I must say that we as an agency have mastered the art.
Over the last few years, media has dramatically changed and today it’s way more than a print advertisement or a direct mail, an email, banners or social networks. Media is now a customized vehicle only purpose of which is to drive the right communication home.
About the Author
Smita Thorat is the Founder of Brandniti + Design – A Regenti Media Pvt. Ltd. The venture is a full service independent strategic agency focused on guaranteed results through maximizing innovation in designs. An amalgamation of strategic thinking and design optimization Brandniti + Design promises to deliver to the mark solutions for brands diverse domains with a 360 degree approach. She is responsible for execution of the operation, innovative ideas, strategy, business plan, managing growth, revenue generating operations and fund raising for the company. She also undertakes the additional responsibility to review activity reports, financial statements of the company, to determine progress and update the status periodically in attaining objectives and fine tuning them according to the current business environment.
Brandniti+Design Agency’s perspective on the art and science of brand engagement in Digital Age
