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The Christmas season and the Super Bowl are two cal-endar events that witness a great proliferation of not just
marketing spends but stellar creative work. They are marked much in ad-vance in the marketer’s calendar. Super Bowl has seen some iconic cre-ative work for brands over the years including Coke’s ‘Mean Joe Greene’ (1979), Apple ‘Sledgehammer’ (1984), Budweiser ‘Frogs’ (1995) and more recently Doritos’ ‘Ultrasound’ and Audi’s ‘Commander’. Not to forget Oreo’s famous blackout tweet in the 2013 Super Bowl match.
In the UK, retail as a category has the most fun with brands like John Lewis and Harvey Nichols leading the pack. John Lewis fans are already looking forward to what the UK retailer has in store for its next Christmas campaign. Nils Leonard, former chief creative of-ficer of Grey London had said, on the sidelines of the D&AD in London earli-er this year, “We hope that we’ll have that Christmas ad that people will like and that can be the game-changer.”
Closer home too, the festive season gets robust attention from marketers. While chief spenders are seemingly ecommerce players, other catego-ries like auto, apparel, durables, cell phones, home décor, and many others, are equally buoyant. So, is this our Super Bowl? Says Ram Madhvani, ad filmmaker, Equinox, “There are two seasons, which is advertising rush-hour: IPL and Diwali. Everyone wants their ads timed around these.”
However, a large chunk of the com-munication ends up pretty formulaic – like the ‘happy family and a dog’ automobile ads one sees by the dozen. Creative is constantly playing catch-up to high-spends. Or maybe, market-ers for now are happy with the lower
hanging fruit and looking for salience and immediate conversions.
Festive-sale campaign communica-tion so far has been largely transac-tional, pegged on sales and discounts. Manish Tiwary, VP, category manage-ment, Amazon India agrees and shares how they tried approaching it differ-ently: “We’ve tried to underpin the big-heartedness that underlies festivities and thus themed the festive month as ‘Tyohaar Bade Dilwala’.” The brief giv-en to the creative agency was to make it a great Indian festival without neces-sarily calling it a sale.
Continued on Pg4 >>
It’s the season to be merry. Also the season to make a lot of money for a slew of retailers, old and new. Here’s how they are doing it By Ravi Balakrishnan & Amit Bapna
Crackling Yet?
Diwali: The Indian Marketer’s 5th Quarter
They call it the “fifth quarter”. At least some marketers do. It’s a reference to the glut of sales that take place during the festive sea-son — loosely defined
as a time that starts around Ganesh Chaturthi and which for some brands goes on all the way to Christmas. Trying to get consumers to buy is the entire universe of Indian retail. We spoke to a few of the biggest names — online, offline, hybrid and niche — to figure how and why festive season 2016 has been different for them. What they did differently and how they made old concepts work better.
SNAPDEALThe festival of data: Never mind the crit-ics who argue that Indian ecommerce sites are still in the acquisition mode as opposed to trying to sell more and better to their existing consumer base. According to Snapdeal, this sale season there was a greater focus on data and ana-lytics: aka selling what a customer want-ed to buy or was interested in as opposed to overwhelming her with catalogue. It resulted in categories like luggage and travel gear doing remarkably well, and the saris for customers in West Bengal, being radically different from those on offer up north. Helping Snapdeal along was a lot of app based shopping, which allowed for far better targeting.
Turning shopping into a game: What about customers who had the app on their phones but didn’t fire it up? Between 9pm and 9:30 pm, consumers were encouraged to turn on the Snapdeal app and shake it every time the commercial played. A spinning wheel would then appear of-fering discounts up to 50%. Says Kanika Kalra, CMO, Snapdeal, “There’s nothing
better for me than having every-one who sees the ad opening
the app.” Snapdeal registered over 2.5 lakh shakes. To make the experience more social, it allowed for the creation of groups that shopped together — over 25,000 of these were formed — which got an additional 6% off over and above any already prevailing discounts. Partnering with banks and not just brands: Apart from tie-ups with brands like Lakme, Maggi, Safari, Yu and Xiaomi among others, Snapdeal had different bank partners for various parts of its cus-tomer base. For instance, people shopping on iPhones got offers from Amex; while SBI and Citibank were among partners on other sale days.
Continued on Pg4 >>
FESTI
VAL SPECIAL
By scale and spends, Diwali’16 is being compared to the American Superbowl and Christmas in the UK. By the creative chops on display, not so much. By Amit Bapna
The saris on sale for Snapdeal shoppers in West Bengal were radically different from those on offer up North
Top to bottom: Stills from OnePlus, Amazon, Cadbury ‘Celebrations’ (2016)and Big Bazaar (2015) Diwali campaigns
THE ECONOMIC TIMES OCTOBER 26-NOVEMBER 01, 2016 � WEST
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TYPE A We have to do something bigAh! Diwali. A time when whole cities are smothered in a fog of sulphur dioxide. And all its living creatures suffer from temporary deafness, breathing ailments, and nervous-twitches. There really is no better time than the festival of crackers and lights for marketers. These few weeks in a year is when everybody, from the poorest to the richest, spend their hard or hardly earned cash on new paint jobs for houses and persons, and spanking new TVs, cars, smartphones and whatnot. Naturally, it’s a celebration market-ers must hijack with all they’ve got in order to push their wares. Which gives us the most common type of fes-tive client, the ‘let’s-do-something-BIG-this-year’ kind. Alas, that usually turns into the equivalent of a malfunctioning fooljhari. As Flarepath’s head – brand so-lutions, Gaurav Derebail says, “We have to do something big, different and award winning for Diwali’ in the end turns out to be one soulless, over-branded creative that does absolutely nothing to capture the essence of the season and is just a ‘check mark’ on some to-do list.” What promises to be a spectacular fountain of sparks actually ends up being a dud lost in the din of Diwali bombs.
TYPE BIf not Ganga then Danube will doThere are some clients, howev-er, who’ll move mountains and entire productions to make a big festive campaign a reality. Bang In The Middle’s managing partner and chief creative of-ficer, Prathap Suthan remembers one such moment while leading a job for Samsung during his stint at Cheil. “The script revolved around the thought of life prospering on the banks of rivers. The creative idea was about life on the shores of the blue Samsung digital river. While the idea required us to shoot alongside real riv-ers sloshing with blue water, and it looked very possible to do this in India, thanks to a longer monsoon, most Indian rivers were muddy and nowhere close to blue.” The so-lution: Shoot the film abroad, on the banks of muck-less rivers, with an expat Indian cast and fly down products since most of them are “tropicalised” for India, and are not available beyond our borders. The budget changed too. Suthan dreaded the moment when he had to break the news to the client. “But, thankfully, as he was sold on the idea and because he understood that the creative department couldn’t photoshop rain swollen Indian rivers, he cleared a humungous budget and we went ahead.” The film was shot across New Zealand, with cast flown in from Fiji and Australia, “along with bits and pieces of Kerala backwaters thrown in to get authentic Indian flavor,” says Suthan. It certainly wasn’t a smooth Strauss waltz but where there’s will, there’s a prosper-ous Diwali.
TYPE CWake me up when Dussehra endsTo be fair, not just cli-ents are a f f l icted by tubelightsytis just before Diwali. Agencies too suf-fer from this seasonal ail-ment. Primary symptoms include memory loss. For instance, patients forget they have calendars, be
it Kalnirnay or the digital kind, until a few weeks before Diwali. Thankfully, the festival now has a run-up period of weeks, extending all the way to before Dussehra. The condition also affects a gene that controls the spirit of generos-ity. Clients tend to be in a giving mood with media budgets, and Ebenezer Scrooge to creative agencies.
What one generally ends up with, ac-cording to Publicis’ creative chief Bobby Pawar, are super tactical campaigns which inevitably begin with ‘This festive season…’ “But if you start early you can find your voice, your point of view,” says Pawar. His advice: agencies and clients ought to take a leaf out of John Lewis’ Christmas campaigns, ads that have
turned into events people look forward to. JWT’s Bodhisatwa Dasgupta, senior creative direc-tor, says, “Even the pretty great clients turn into monsters come festive time - but I’ve been lucky. The thing is, if you’re a part of a big network agency, chances are everything will be streamlined to the T. So if something has to be turned around quickly for Diwali, we’ll possibly seal the creative a week before. Less nerves on edge that way, and certainly less fireworks.”
However, he does recall one instance of a typical Diwali occurrence. “Many years back, this client called us and want-
ed an ad done by the evening. “No prob-lem!”, my art partner and I said in chorus, ever the eager beavers. “Write a simple headline”, wrote the client. “I want the words ‘Diwali’, ‘Presenting’, ‘This’ and X (Brand name)” The art was simple. Diwali lights from a free library. The product bang in the centre. And the headline? Yeah, that pretty much wrote itself. Not portfolio work, no.”
TYPE DCampaign today. Big sales tomorrow. Or no payThis type of festive cli-ent is perhaps every agency’s worst night-mare. The defaulter. The client who woke up late and pushed its agency to make a Diwali campaign. Competition had already spent a sizable fortunes, and by then produc-tion houses, crews, and directors were all booked. Somehow Suthan and his agency managed to book a foreign crew. He tells us the campaign had three films and the plan was to seed one film at a time. However, the client began dilly-dallying on delivering the advances. So, the agency fronted half of the production
money. What follows is a lesson in the fu-tility of being too earnest.
Suthan recalls that the first film went on television, and in the flurry of mega brands burning tons of money, it almost made no dent on the sales; “Obviously some clients want India to fall in love and buy them immediately. In the next couple of days while we got the other two films ready, their sales weren’t showing any signs of growth. Commonsense told us that it would take at least a week, but in a blistering mad moment, they said they didn’t want the campaign anymore
and refused to pay us for the produc-tion costs.” Almost a crore and
a half was due. “No agency can ever take that kind
of hit even for the big-gest of clients. As a trickle-down effect, there was no Diwali for the agency em-ployees a nd some
s e r v i c i n g p e o p l e were asked to leave.
Finally, legal took over, and thanks to some serious
multinational pressure, they paid up after 6 months. The CEO and the CMO lost their jobs, and the brand has since faded into oblivion.” Forget kuch meetha ho jaye, there’s nothing like the sweetness of karma’s revenge to bright-en up one’s Diwali.
66% 73% 54%Ecomm shoppers
consider delivery as a
‘decisive factor of the
shopping experience.’
3 TIMES bigger
was the magnitude
of Amazon’s Great
Indian Festival
Sale this year
from last year
20 TIMES: Increase
in number of orders
bound to Tier 2 & 3
cities that Snapdeal
had processed by
18th October’16
Consumers prefer
to switch etailers
for a superior
delivery service
Shoppers indicate delivery
concerns make them wary
of making large-item
purchases online
Only 11.3% consumers
feel delivery
experience can
be counted as
retailers’ strength
Source: The Cost of Poor Delivery: Four Steps To Go From ‘Cost Centre’ To ‘Competitive Advantage’ by Texas-based Convey
Hike in orders at Flipkart
this #BigBillionDay sale
as opposed to last year
60%
THE SPIKE STORY-Nothing New About It
These fi gures aren’t surprising, neither is the fact that if there’s one thing all ecommerce portals have taken fl ak for in the last two festive seasons, it is the abysmal delivery mechanism. Scroll through your Twitter and Facebook timeline of the last two Diwalis and it won’t be too long before you fi nd consumers outraging about everything from late deliveries with no intimation to torn packages to bricks in place of phones (a one-off incident, that). But you live and learn, and that’s pretty much what the likes of Flipkart, Amazon, and Snapdeal have done this year by signifi cantly revamping their delivery muscle. Let’s take a look at how robust each of their delivery departments are for ‘this festive season’…
DELIVERY BOYS
working during this
Festival Quarter*
Source: Flipkart, Amazon, Snapdeal*Source: Industry
Flipkart
30,000
STORAGE CAPACITY where the size really
matters
PINCODE
Coverage
KIRANASTORE
Strength
7.2millioncubicfeet
19,000
Amazon
20,000
7.5millioncubicfeet
19,000
Snapdeal
15,000
18million cubic feet
24,000
*(A
ppro
x)
*
THIS YEAR LAST YEAR
Flipkart 13,000 0
Amazon 12,500 2,500
Snapdeal 0 0
WHO’S THE MOST INNOVATIVE OF THEM ALL?FLIPKART: Does ‘Stress Tests’ two months before the festive season
begins. Handles 15%-20% of its volume transactions through alternate delivery channels like tie-ups with Apollo Pharmacy (2,500 stores), etc.
SNAPDEAL: Offered two weeks internship to college students to work with its various support teams from 15 September to 15 November’16.
AMAZON: Working with NGOs to train people in rural areas in route planning and making deliveries.
If you were to observe, the delivery-related complaints have considerably gone down this year as opposed to the last two. But Diwali isn’t over until that schmuck in the neighbourhood burns the last cracker, three days afterthe festival. We’ll just have to wait a couple more days toknow who won the Delivery Game this festive season.
Delivery is one of the major roadblocks in the path of any
ecomm player’s success. No matter how many jacket ads
you publish in leading newspapers pushing their front
pages to Page 7, no matter how much discount you may
offer on similar products available on each of the ecomm
sites; if you fail at getting the ‘delivery’ part of the process
right, you just fail. Period
— By Shephali Bhatt
TheeDelivery Muscle
HOW DIWALI PLAYED OUT ON TWITTERTwitter India’s Business Head, Taranjeet Singh’s top tips for brands hoping to cele-brate this Diwali on Twitter.
TWITTER TRACKED+ MENTIONS OF SOME KEYWORDS FROM INDIA
TWIITER CONVERSATION ANALYSIS REPORT - 2016 (THE REPORT TRACKED CONVERSATIONS FOR THE PERIOD SEPT-NOV 2015)
THERE WERE ALSO A HIGH NUMBER OF MENTIONS
MAJORITY OF DIWALI MENTIONS AREFROM INDIA; ALSO WIDELY MENTIONED ABROAD
E-COMMERCE BRANDS WERE HIGHLY ASSOCIATED WITH GIFTING AS THEY GAVE AWAY VOUCHERS
PEOPLE TALKED ABOUT DIWALI AND RELATED FESTIVALS 2 MONTHS IN ADVANCE
Ganesh220K
Navratri143K
Dussehra119K
Diwlainearly 1Mmentions onthe peak day
6M2X
PEAKS OF MENTIONS WERE CONTRIBUTED
BY DIWALI CAMPAIGNS, AND,
THEY STARTED EARLY
BUYMillion mentionson Twitter1.2 Thousand
mentionson Twitter350
SHOPPINGMillion mentionson Twitter0.8
SALE
32K
#DiwaliDilKiDealWali
#BigBillionDays
Num
ber
of tw
eets
#DiwalionAmazon#DiwaliWithMi#GharLaoDiwali
16K
DIWALI DAY
9-1-
15
9-8-
15
9-15
-15
9-22
-15
9-29
-15
10-6
-15
10-1
3-15
10-2
0-15
10-2
7-15
11-3
-15
11-1
0-15
11-1
7-15
11-2
4-15
Million mentionson Twitter1.6
FAMILY
GIFTThousand mentionson Twitter707
Thousand mentionson Twitter118
DONATION
14 Other2 Indonesia3 Malaysia3 UK6 USA
72 India
Mentions of Diwali globally
Increasefrom2014
Country distribution of Diwali mentions (%) Top handles associated with Diwali gifting
INFO
GR
AP
HIC
: BH
AV
IN G
AJJ
AR
Of all of India’s countless festivals, Diwali has the most curious effect on advertisers. Ad agencies must bear the brunt of this
most unusual transformation in clients during the festival of lights. Some turn into Mr Hyde others are tube-lights. But they all make life at agencies a living
nightmare. Here are some close encounters of the cracker kind. And the types of clients responsible for them.
By Delshad Irani
@amazonIN@Gurmeetramrahim
@WindowsInd@BeingSalmanKhan
@Flipkart@snapdeal
@UCBrowser @iamsrk
@ShopClues@PMOIndia
#DiwaliBumperMSG2In8thWeek#Diwali
#DiwaliWithMi#DiwaliDhamakaWithPRDP
#HappyDiwali#Vedalam
# PRDP#MSG2onTheTopInHaryana
#DiwaliSurprise#GaneshChaturthi
@Gurmeetramrahim@amazonIN
@beingsalmankhan@XiaomiIndia
@narendramodi@snapdeal
@GANESHHEGDE@YouTube
@MSGTheFilm@ganeshdeux
3.3K3.1K
1.6K1.5K
1.3K1.1K
1K1K
0.9K0.7K
Number of mentions (handle and Diwali gifting)
Source: Crimson Hexagon, Accessed July 2016 | Tracking period: September - November 2015
280K+
170K+
110K+
94K+
75K+
69K+
63K+
54K+
43K+
400K+
63K+
59K+
44K+
39K+
33K+
27K+
24K+
24K+
24K+
420K+
Most mentioned hashtags among Diwali mentions
Most mentioned handles among Diwali mentions
20%Eager beavers. Plan for next Diwali
in current Diwali
20%Magically find some extra cash stuffed in secret
hiding places just in time for the festivities
30%Indecisive planners. Also panic just before deadline
because sales are down. Ask agency to perform miracles. Post-diwali if sales are still unsatisfactory,
blame the agency
30%Do you know who I am! The Mr Bigs who say
“I don’t care...I want...do what it takes.” “Have you called Mr ‘CEO of major
media company’?”
A MEDIA AGENCY HEAD BREAKS DOWN THE TYPES
OF FESTIVE CLIENTS
“In India, Diwali is one of the busiest retail festivals of the year. In a review of Twitter conversations, we found that users start planning their festive shopping almost a month in advance. During Diwali, 46% of shoppers on Twitter would use Twitter to explore brands and products for their Diwali shopping.”
ENHANCE THE ex-perience with live video. (There’s been a 400% increase in video consumption on Twitter in India this year.)BUILD LIMITED time discount messaging into the creative to drive sales.BUILD EMOTIONtugging brand cam-paigns for cultural moments.CONVERSATIONALapproach and an H2H Factor can help brands gain maxi-mum engagement.
Surf Excel recently launched their brand creative for the season with a hashtag #AbLagRa-hiDiwali and a crea-tive that in true Surf Excel style talks about how dirt is good if it helps bring the festive cheer to people. Similarly Maruti Celerio has also launched a campaign #One-Change around re-latable day to day moments around Diwali that the brand is asking peo-ple to change.
Taranjeet Singh
“shopping”“sale”
INFOGRAPHIC: BHAVIN GAJJAR
BEExclusive
“IT’S DIWALI! LET’S DO SOMETHING
BIG!”
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Shoppers are in a fren-zied st ate du ri ng festive season, al l thanks to the volley of discounts ecomm sites keep hurling
their way. The same tactics with minor variations that off line retailers have been trying since the time all retail was off line. However some of them are get-ting a lot smarter, leaving les-sons for the wiser ones to pick up.
The numbers are few and far be-tween: we dug up these anecdotes after several conversations. A telling statement on how few tra-ditional retailers look beyond the obvious, perhaps?
No doubt discounts work, but when everyone in the market is making the same moves, some new strategies need to be de-ployed to win. Here are a few of the best:
Even big brands need to be-have like next-door kirana stores:Charanjeev Singh is the founder of SinghStyled, a one-of-a-kind online platform exclusively for Sikh men’s grooming. For the last two years, Godrej Nature’s Basket store in Bandra has kept a firm grip on his mother’s orders, he tells us. “They regularly call to check if she has something to order, even if she needs a lemon. The follow-ups started from the time she said, “Oh! we order from bigbasket.com now.” The store now calls her in excitement every time carrots are in stock. “They know mom will definitely
order,” says Singh. The kirana formula is season-agnostic, ba-sically. It has never depended on discounts.
Beat users who research of-fline but buy online at their own gameSingh was out buying shoes one day and heard an interest-ing development about German sports accessories brand Puma. “Most of the off line shoes you see at the store are not available on any online carts. It was true for the pair I bought as well.” Traditional retailers have been whining about users checking products at their stores and then buying online. But differ-ent assortments for each chan-nel makes it obvious who went to the store and who got a pair of
shoes on the cheap — given the same models are on offer across all sites, at similar discounts.
Ensure the ads don’t become a blind spot
Three years ago, getting an ad on the front page of any leading publication used to be a brand’s most coveted dream. Suffice to say, in the festive season that’s no longer such a unique or excit-ing position. Even a few clients don’t care about it as much as they used to given the front page shows up after seven pages of
jacket ads. Even those eventual-ly become blind spot for readers because there are just so many, and almost all of them are of the “never-before-offer” on a mobile phone or TV variety.
Which brings us to a gif doing the rounds last week on how news was ruining people’s ad-viewing experience in papers. Speaking of gif and memes, Karthik Srinivasan, national lead of social@Ogilvy, shares an interesting one. It’s built around the ads for a Chennai-based re-tail chain called Saravana Stores - one of the largest family-owned and run retail chains in India. The ad in question has the own-er’s son Ss Saravanan sharing a frame with leading actors and actresses from South India. So how did it get meme-fied? “The memes suggested we better buy from Saravana Stores lest this guy keep appearing in its ads,” says Srinivasan. It sure did get noticed: the argument about whether this is the best way and if all publicity is good is one for another day.
Make ‘Free’ aspirational This is an interesting anec-dote Kiran Khalap, MD and co-founder of chlorophyll brand consultancy, shares with us. He tells us about MM Mithaiwala, a popular chain of sweets, snacks, and savouries, headquartered in the Malad suburb of Mumbai. “Every year when the academic results are out, MM Mithaiwala offers students to bring their marksheets along. If you have secured a first division, you get a box of best savouries from the shop. And people flock to shop.”
There are so many things right about this strategy. There’s a per-fect brand fit with the occasion: you celebrate your success with MM Mithaiwala sweets. And you don’t discount your product, you actually make it exclusive and aspirational.
Hope more offline retailers are able to find that sweet spot in the future.
When Physical Stores Fight BackHow a few offl ine retailers, big and small, adopt unique marketing tactics (other than crazy discounts) to pull consumers towards them and away from ecomm sites. By Shephali Bhatt
At least on YouTube, few festive themed ads have any takers, even if we are plumb in the middle of the season for such advertising. By Ravi Balakrishnan
Festive ads coming out of your ears, eyes and other less mentionable plac-es? We don’t blame you; it certainly seems that way. Except cold hard data from YouTube on the most viewed ads for the first chunk of the festive season (September 15 to October 15 2016) tells a different story.
Of all the festive ads only two make the cut: Sonam Kapoor packing an Oppo F1 for a selfie obsessed fan and her pet; and Snapdeal’s charm-ing little commercial about a little boy transformed into a rocket by his love for a pair of sneakers, part of its Unbox Diwali campaign. Interesting, considering the fact that this includes the first week of October, a time when every online etailer worth its name and funding, was mounting massive campaigns to promote their biggest sales of the year.
What’s also interesting is the ads that have done well: there are a few functional ones like Samsung Galaxy S7 (with a bunch of snarky commenters talking about explo-sions) and Dove, but most of the ads, have a strong emotional hook, deals and offers be damned. Like Johnson’s film about a young harrowed couple putting their baby to bed or the latest in the Suresh-Ramesh series from 5Star in which the two unlikely he-roes unwittingly foil a theft while on vacation.
As for brands pushing festive adver-tising and/or offers: try harder either by spending more or by coming up with something that people actually want to see.
This marks the beginning of a monthly series on the most viewed ads on YouTube. Watch out for this round up in future editions of Brand Equity.
Not So Festive After All
They regularly call to check if she has something to order, even if she needs a lemon. Follow-ups started ever since she said we order from bigbasket nowCharanjeev SinghSinghStyled
Translation:‘I’ll borrow money and buy clothes from your store, but please stop acting in your ads’
The importance of print and tele-vision media spans not only the ecommerce category but a host of others as well – FMCG, telecom, mobile handsets, auto, finance, education to name a few.
The undisputed reach of both these medium and the specific strength they lend a campaign is enormous.
When ecommerce players en-tered the Indian market, their media usage was predominantly online. By the year 2013/2014 their outlook changed. Ecommerce players realised the power tradi-tional media can lend campaigns. Being present only in digital me-dium did not fructify expectations the business model and campaign was expected to deliver.
Another reason was also be-cause, growing economy, young entrepreneurs, a stable political environment spurred by business ambition resulted in enormous funding by venture capitalists. The ecommerce players now had the budget to run ambitious media campaigns to further their busi-ness prospects. This led to domi-nant presence in offline media as they could now target beyond key metros. The sheer reach and cost efficiency of traditional media spurred their business ambition.
Once they had a product that could hook a customer, advertis-ing was necessary to highlight the product benefits.
Given this backdrop, television and print became key for any cam-paign to succeed. Both offer im-mediacy and instant awareness in one shot across different tier cities – from metros to the Tier 4 and 5
markets also. Over the years ecom-merce players realised the poten-tial lower tier markets offered and the power of regional language in these markets.
Print remains important for any high impact campaign. Regional language dailies have been grow-ing steadily going by the increase in the number of editions, circula-tion and readership. Digital and emerging media cannot create the impact within a short campaign timespan that print medium can with its large format ads; more so when the audience the campaign is cater-ing to is a mass one. Campaigns targeted for largescale audi-ences require width and depth of reach which traditional me-dia offers. Since most ecom campaigns are promo/offer/discount led valid for short timelines, the need for cover from tradi-tional media is high. In this scenario presence in print becomes key. As all ecommerce brands are fighting for the same share of wallet during important festive and topical events such as Valentines, Mother’s Day, dif-ferent festive periods, print gives them the opportunity to release ads on a daily basis. Print till date remains a credible medium, even with the overflow of advertising messages.
Newspapers and their editions
across the different Indian states deliver immediate impact in the targeted markets. Large format ads in the form of jackets and full pages allow the message to be dis-played well. Print also offers the flexibility to run different cam-paigns in different editions with-in the same state, thereby offering tailor-made tactical information
dissemination.Television comple-
ment s t he pr i nt medium very well. Television lends ad-ditional reach and frequency. Television allows one to place numerous spots in a single day across different time bands, ac r o s s d i f fer ent genres and across dif-ferent TV channels. Thereby allowing various opportuni-ties for the consumer to view the commu-nication and brand message at his/her convenience through the day.
Televi sion cut s across tiers and the plethora of channels helps segregate genres for mass and class when planning campaigns. Free to Air and Pay to View channels also help add relevancy to a specific campaign. Sheer cost efficiency makes tele-vision an ideal medium to reach a wide audience base across the length and breadth of India.
The author is chief operating offi-cer, OmnicomMediaGroup. Views
expressed are personal.
Online Sales, Offline Media
Oppo
Samsung
eBay
Cadbury 5Star1 6
2 7
3 8
4 9
5 10
Johnsons Sony Bravia
Snapdeal
Uber
Swachh Bharat Mission Gramin
OMG’S HARISH SHRIYAN ON WHY EVEN DIGITAL NATIVE BRANDS CAN’T DO WITHOUT PRINT AND TELEVISION
Digital media cannot create
the impact within a short timespan that print can with
large format ads
ByInvitation
Dove
Ss Saravanan
THE ECONOMIC TIMES OCTOBER 26-NOVEMBER 01, 2016 3
CCI NG 3.5 Product: ETMumbaiBS PubDate: 26-10-2016 Zone: BrandEquityWest Edition: 1 Page: BEWPG3 User: sandeep.dutta Time: 10-22-2016 00:12 Color: CMYK
It has become fashionable to talk about the “struggle” an ecom-merce brand undergoes during festive season to meet unprec-edented rise in demand. The de-livery departments go through
their own share of woe trying to make sure a parcel is shipped on time, so they are spared the wrathful indignant rant-ing on social media. One empathises with the creative community that men-tally burns The Copy Book while writ-ing body copy starting with ‘70% Off On…’. The one leg of this Festival Sale Chain that seldom gets acknowledged is media buyers and implementation offi-cers (or ‘Ops’ guys, as they’re popularly referred to) at media agencies.
It starts from Ganpati Visarjan for most media agencies, Gandhi Jayanti for a few others, and lasts till Diwali. This is the period when nobody is al-lowed to take leave. When the frequen-cy of calls to vendors (newspapers, TV/radio channels, etc) increases from twice a fortnight to twice a day. When their family often prefers to leave them alone rather than ask after work has-sles. When they do double the work and yet manage to sell only 1.2 times the number of spots (video commercials) they would during regular quarters. That said, some of them admit this is also the period they enjoy the most. It gives them a much-needed adrenaline rush. It is basically three months of high highs and low lows. Here are four stories that explain just why that is so:
Spots drop at the 11th hourThe conflict between media buyer and vendor/channel arises during this pe-riod primarily because certain adver-tisers become active only during the festive season, in addition to regular advertisers. It is difficult to place all of them within the same inventory space (advertising slots). Parag Mhatre, gen-eral manager - investment, at Madison Media, tells us some channels take
Release Orders (ROs) for 200 seconds worth of inventory when they actually have only 100 seconds to sell. “On any other occasion, they’ll take ROs for 120 seconds maybe. During this period, they tend to create this hype of no in-ventory and use phrases like ‘choc-a-bloc’. They basically play around with the additional 100 seconds. An RO doesn’t guarantee anything so you have to ensure you get your spot within those 100 seconds. You literally have to sit on the vendor’s head to make sure your spot isn’t dropped at the last min-ute (Spots getting dropped a day prior is normal panic situation during fes-tive season),” he says.
Changes at the 11th hourbecause: AmbushLast year, Amol Dighe’s team was han-dling a major client during the sale phase. The head of investment for OMG India somehow came to know about the
creative of a competing brand, slated for a leading publication the next day. “We managed to change our client’s creative overnight. The team went to the client’s office, got approval for the change, approached the creative agency to create a fresh ad and got it approved,” he recalls. It was an am-bush strategy and Dighe admits these
things don’t happen on a daily basis. “It wasn’t just about oneupmanship. This directly impacts business. You see the impact on sales quickly,” he adds. Amidst all of this, his team had to request the publication to stand by as well. The publication had a deadline, the page was supposed to go to print. How did he manage that we ask. “Well, that’s a trade secret,” he remarks.
Caught in a tight spot
A media agency professional who sits between a media buyer and an ops guy at work, tells us how the trading room turns into a B grade war room during the festive spell. “The main issue is that client buys 10 spots but channels drop spots like anything. So, you’re never able to service 100% of your client’s demand. There are fights happening with each party at any given point in time. Itna gaali galoch hota hai ki kaan garam ho jaate hain(Swearing loudly becomes the norm during office hours. Code of conduct be damned!),” he shares on the condi-tion of anonymity. “Getting even 50-60 of the initially booked 100 spots is good enough,” says Madhavan PE (aka Maddy), general manager, Publicis Media. Maddy feels vendors tend to service smaller clients because if you
miss out on them, you may never get them again. Bigger clients have annu-al deals so you can make up for the gap. “You will see clients like P&G having maximum spot drops during this time because for them Diwali doesn’t mat-ter all that much. In any case, bigger clients pay lesser money. Smaller ones get penalised for everything,” he feels.
Spotted at work on Diwali? No biggie Two years ago, Lee had relaunched in India around Diwali season. On the day of Diwali, Maddy was at home with extended family and friends. Suddenly he got a call about some ma-terial he could only send from his of-fice PC. While sharing this incident, he received a mail that said ‘Your Ad Has Been Shifted’. After a few seconds of laughter, we told him someone has saved his number on Truecaller as ‘Ads on Paper’. “I have no clue who that
is but it’s funny nonetheless.” Despite Diwali away from family, Maddy con-fesses he loves the festival quarter. “We get maximum appreciation from clients. And client is our bread and but-ter,” he concludes.
The Unsung Heroes Of Festival QuarterBE brings to you the highs and lows of media agencies who fi ght against all odds so that brand’s ads appear at the right place and time, during the festive season. By Shephali Bhatt
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Making the most of a new brand cam-paign: Snapdeal went in for a major rebranding exercise just before the festive season began. This allowed the brand to be about more than just great deals. Even for its exclusive ads for Facebook and pre-rolls on YouTube, Snapdeal pushed the emotional tenor of its unbox campaign, leveraging the red box and the music across media. It made use of the recently launched Canvas platform in collaboration with Facebook Creative Shop. The traction on Facebook was 30% above Snapdeal’s own average for its ads.
AMAZON Going bigger: 200% more sell-ers with 20,000 coming on board over the last month and a half; thrice the selection and 1.5X more fulfilment capacity. Just some of what went into Amazon’s sales efforts this year. “We continue to be India’s largest store, hav-ing added over 150,000 products a day since January this year,” says Manish Tiwary, VP – category management, Amazon India. All these preparations anticipated a season which the online giant expected to be the biggest in terms of traffic, new customers, and gross sales. There were also exclusive tie-ups including 55 with smartphone brands and 31 with TV brands. Not forgetting Amazon’s heritage:Amazon rolled out Prime earlier this year, and sure enough, Prime custom-ers got priority shipping and early ac-cess to deals. While sites like Flipkart appear to have de-emphasised books, the category they started off with, in favour of hotter moving items like mo-bile phones, Amazon has taken on the mantle of India’s largest bookstore. Resisting the temptation to go with a transactional thematic campaign: Sure, a lot of Amazon’s advertising, especially in print was purely deal led. And yet the overarching campaign for the season went beyond the sale with ‘Tyohaar Bade Dilwala’. Says Tiwary, “It marks the biggest festival season, uniting feelings of happiness and generosity. Festivals encourage mag-nanimity that manifests into small acts of benevolence not just towards immediate family members but also towards extended friends, family and people in general.”
TATACLIQCreating a sale cycle without ‘artifi-cial scarcity’: The recently launched physical meets digital offering from Tata, TataCliQ decided to turn all of October into Festober. Says Prathyusha Agarwal, head – marketing, TataCLiQ, “We had offers created along two lay-ers – a month of offers and then weekly humpdays every Wednesday. Unlike the artificial scarcity created by ecom-merce sales our offering is about rel-evance through the month, with some anchor properties.” Why spend on marketing when you can spend on data: TataCliQ integrated consumer data from multiple touch-points, such as supply-chain, commerce and partner-interfaces across custom-ers, products, sellers, and transactions. This helped understand the customer’s journey and respond to individual needs in real time. Backend-analytics helped classify the consumers on the basis of tastes and preferences into segments like value seekers, brand en-thusiasts, product researchers, win-dow surfing impulse buyers etc. The brand’s marketing has been less about ATL and more about the data and digi-tal corridors.
PEPPERFRY In with the new: To combat the reputa-tion that online stores are a little behind the curve when it comes to the latest, Pepperfry devoted 25% of its lighting, décor and lamps to brand new products. The always popular cash-backs kicked in once customers spent over `25,000, bagging them a chance to get back 10%.
Going offline: Pepperfry experienced an almost 70% increase in visits and walk-ins to its experience centres. On offer: a chance to consult with an inte-rior designer to understand one’s home better, says Kashyap Vadapalli, CMO. He adds, “We are trying to build up the ceilings for Pepperfry as a brand; not necessarily pushing people into the experience centre or online store. We are channel agnostic.” However hav-ing enough channels to be agnostic, always helps.
CROMARelying on the stores to do heavy lifting: Croma has a fully functional website. However, it accounts for less than 5% of its traffic. The festive sea-son is very important to the electronic goods retailer, part of the Tata group. According to Ritesh Ghosal, CMO Infiniti Retail, “The business in the 35 odd days from Navratri through Diwali matches two and half months of (our) regular business.” Croma decided to not fight its rivals on-line, believing its site is more a point of influence, driving people to its network of 100 plus stores across the country. Instead it started a day earlier (the 1st of October) and went on a day later (7th of October) than most ecommerce driven sales with aggressive discounts around hot categories like mobile phones. “We have seen a 30% growth during this period. Largely digital products which are the key products promoted even by e-tailers picked up during this phase,” says Ghosal.
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Crackling Yet?
Diwali: The Indian Marketer’s 5th Quarter
Another ecommerce brand Jabong launched ‘You Are The Festival’; built around evoking the essence of festivi-ties by celebrating who we are with a song playing in the background and montages of people traipsing around talking more about the selection than about offers. Snapdeal continued with its ‘Unbox Zindagi’ theme that has changed to ‘Unbox Diwali’.
It is a fact that most players around this time are too caught up with pro-moting sales during Diwali, to wor-ry about doing great thematic advertising, which possibly has more of a slow burn effect. So car-brands talk only of the percentage discount on offer and the laptops and the mobile brands too keep highlighting price. Nothing different or unique there. Sumanto Chattopadhyay, executive creative director – South Asia, Ogilvy Mumbai recalls the Big Bazaar ‘Paper Phataka’ ad from last Diwali as something that went beyond both ‘special offers’ and the cliché of ‘heart-warming’ advertising. For him, most brands in categories like elec-tronics, home furnishings and gifting-related items prefer to play it safe, with low-risk sales promotions that reliably translate into sales spikes.
Here is how the planner in Arvind Krishnan, managing director, BBH India explains this. “Over 90% of ad-vertising is not interesting, and that holds true for festival advertising as well.” There is this sea of sameness, with themes repeated over years, across categories and markets that one can spot, whether its deals, dis-counts or affinity building commu-nication, he adds. Currently, in India,
t her e i s t o o much focus on mai ntai n-ing the tone of voice that fits the festival, instead of letting the brand lead the dance, say Ni ma Na mchu, chief creative officer, Havas Worldwide. The way John Lewis and
Harvey Nichols manage to do for their Christmas campaigns.
Amaresh Godbole, managing di-rector, India at DigitasLBi is candid enough to admit that both agencies and clients, are guilty of too much generic ‘festive’ work with the bulk of com-munication following the same trope. More fireworks. More gifting. More people. Finish with a discount/offer.”
We were still a few critical days shy of the final push towards Diwali at the time of going to print. Who knows — the industry may surprise us with fireworks of the creative variety in the next few days. If not, there’s at least the regular lights and sounds of the fes-tival to look forward to; and the hope that at least next year, the creative sparks will fly.
Festive-sale campaign communication has been largely transactional, pegged on sales and discounts
Top: John Lewis ‘Man on The Moon’ Christmas campaign; Bottom: Harvey Nichols 2015 ‘Gift Face’ campaign
THE ECONOMIC TIMES OCTOBER 26-NOVEMBER 01, 2016 4
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CCI NG 3.5 Product: ETMumbaiBS PubDate: 26-10-2016 Zone: BrandEquityWest Edition: 1 Page: BEWBP User: sandeep.dutta Time: 10-22-2016 00:11 Color: CMYK
