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Trends in 2008-
The November 26, 2008 terror attack and incursions into sovereign Indian civil space by a bunch of terrorists with AK 47s in their hands and terror-indoctrination in their hearts is going to make your cappuccino more expensive. 26/11 is going to give a big boost to the security product and security service industry at large. Everything impacts everything. Every event of our daily life impacts every marketing action there is going to be. I will flag 26/11 as the one date that is the defining moment that epitomizes the loss of innocence of the Indian marketing man at large. It means that the hospitality sector in India will view everyone who enters its portals as a potential terror threat. If you live in a hotel, you will feel very secure inside from now on. So secure that you will love being viewed as a potential terror threat even. And this is not a temporary phenomenon. The security hackle and mantle, once up, is a mantle of cover forever. The Indian hospitality industry in the five-star space has lost its innocence
That’s obvious. The advertising you are approached by will change. The theme, tone, tenor and decibel of Indian marketing will change as well. Just peek into the trends that shaped our marketing lives in 2008, and peek further into the crystal ball for 2009, and you have it all. Life changed in 2008. The marketing man morphed his every appeal to the needs, wants, desires, aspirations and fantasies of consumer 2008.
Let me then wear my annual trend-spotter’s hat and paint the picture of the year just gone by. Let me dig and go a little deeper than skin-depth marketing to draw the blood and gore of marketing the way it was in 2008. The trends that shaped Indian marketing.

Public utility spaces got branded
Public space has been very much under-utilized in India for branding and advertisement. Gone are the days when companies painting entire rocks and walls with their brand massage. The year 2008 saw the emergence of systematic play in the utilization of public utility space. Road stretches got branded inputs. Roads such as the ones that ply between a Chennai-Pondicherry, Mumbai-Pune, Delhi-UP, and more. Branded milestones (would the cigarette brand want to take that 555 km milestone just outside of Bangalore that has Hyderabad and its distance listed out there?) Add to it the potential of building brand and brand romance in the roads of yore, such as the Grand Trunk Road. Or the Great Silk Route.

Low cost bows out
The space Air Deccan vacated is being filled in by a GoAir and a SpiceJet. One doesn’t know for how long, though. The trend is clear. Low-cost models in the aviation space just don’t seem to work. If one looks into the bottom lines of the airline experiments in this space, one nearly baulks at what might have been termed predatory-pricing tactics in another country altogether.
International airlines reserve anywhere between 40 and 50 per cent of their ad spends for brand building; Kingfisher and Jet spend 20-30 per cent on branding while other domestic airlines concentrate primarily on tactical advertising.In 2008, all Airlines were under intense pressure because they have to advertise to fill their seats. Airlines continued with tactical and promotional advertisement, but brand advertisement took a hit. Very les number of hoarding and very less advertisement in specialty magazine were seen. That shift would be more visible and Full page ads could thus shrink to strips
In an effort to increase revenues, airlines will also look at their registrations and use their database of both frequent fliers and others for marketing. The category being a lucrative one and attracting more visibility, used to get better deals from print media, but those could also be renegotiated in the near future


Singh is King
Though our Prime Minister Manmohan Singh may not really be the king behind the kingdom that is India, Singh surely was king in many, many ways in 2008. The branding of movies took a new turn. Hindi cinema adopted the tone, tenor, mood, lingo, food, dress and everything else from Punjab. Punjabi cinema and Punjabi lingo went mainstream. The two big hits of the year were certainly Singh is King and Rab ne Banaa di Jodi. While box office collections of the first grossed Rs 48 crore in the first ten days, the Rab Ne option actually notched up Rs 60 crore in the same period. Punjabi lingo became the lingo to use in a Chennai and a Kovilpatti alike. Many a discotheque across the country played music from both movies to get their dance floors scorching. In many ways, Hindi cinema did yeoman service to the task of knitting this country together. Race no bar, language no bar, culture no bar, food no bar. At least for now.

IPL did it
Five-day cricket played in whites is boring today. It’s for the oldies. One-day cricket played in colors is better, but still not the best. As the attention span of the new generation of Indians shortens, IPL is the best there is to savour in cricket. A short game of 20 overs each.
IPL did one more thing. It removed national jingoism and replaced it with city-jingoism. A Kolkata Knight Riders (KKRs) now vies for attention that is local in a unique manner. Never mind where you live, just as long as you are a Kolkata fan, you will root for the KKRs.
IPL did one more thing. The multi-country composition of teams has erased international boundaries in one quick stroke of a set of matches of one IPL season. Today, an Australian will root for the Chennai Super Kings just as a person of British origin will root for the Rajasthan Royals (the country’s players are part of the team).
The nation kept breathing cricket. The game remained the lowest common denominator that unites the rich, the poor, the partisan and the political. If there is one thing that can pan out as a conversation point across income groups, religious, political and social divides and divides of every kind, it sure is cricket. And IPL is king!

“The Indian Premier League (IPL) added an inflationary spike to television rates, at the same time advertisers on general entertainment channels during the IPL tournament ended up paying more money for a smaller audience, or higher Cost Per Rating Point. Gross rating points of general entertainment channels (GEC’s) is 1,100 from an earlier 800-900. In terms of share of viewership, GECs now account for 36 per cent of total viewership from 30 per cent earlier.
In late 2008, it was believed that there is no slowdown, advertisement and sales have been growing at a double digit rate. I feel that those who are in lead space would hardly suffer. It is those at bottom of the pyramid who should worry because when ad spends are reconsidered, advertiser continue to stick with the leaders for maximum coverage.

Security services see a boom
The events of 26Eleven got every Tom, Dick and Harish very, very awake. Every hotel of every star category reviewed its security arrangements. Every apartment owner’s association woke up to the threat possibility that looms large on soft-targets as well. IT companies invested in sniffer dogs. The dogs are happy. The demand is big in this space, I hear.
High-end hotels went back to every vendor who offered superior technology. Sniffer room cards that find and report electronically of traces of petroleum or RDX alike were explored. The demand for electronic surveillance systems is up. Scanners are in short supply, I hear.
Employment booms in this category. Many a call centre cab driver in Noida, Gurgaon and Bangalore is now getting trained to be a security guard. As BPOs lay off operators, they are forced to lay off outsourced drivers as well. The driver now finds a new avenue.

Advertising morphed
Advertising rose from an acute clutter of its own making in a remarkable manner. While most brands kept experimenting with themes, some brands went the way of the long-running story. Advertising as we see it today can be divided into the tactical promotional pieces that talk of the latest price and the latest gifts that go with the brand. A superior form of this is the advertising that is theme-centric. One product story brought to life with a 30- or 60-seconder that established the long term brand proposition. This year, advertisers went one step forward. Airtel experimented with the format of story-advertising. Madhavan and Vidya Balan did cameo roles as a couple on-the-move. This did Airtel a lot of good. Story replaced the boring single-theme led advertising of last year. Idea Cellular did similar stuff with its “What an idea, sir-ji’ series. There is a new version every other month. Way to go.

Blank noise. Blank hoardings
The year saw a lot of these all around. The outdoor industry is a bellwether industry. The first signs of recession typically translate themselves into the visual displays on the hoardings of our cities and towns. The moment you see blank hoardings with messages that advertise numbers and names of the hoarding owners, be sure recession is here. The depth of such recession can be gauged by the width of such blank hoardings.
It works this way. The marketer, who is on a cost-cutting spree as he watches his sales volumes and values touching lows as never before, chops the advertising budget. And the first one to face the axe is outdoor advertising. Next comes point-of-purchase. Simultaneously with that is the cut on TV expenditure. Print falls next.
November saw loads of hoarding spaces looking blank. December has seen a deepening of that. Wonder how the month of January will pan out!
With that point to mull over, let me close this piece. Remember, there are only two kinds of people in the world – the marketing person and the other is the marketed-to person. Whichever you are, wish each one of you a Happy Marketing New Year!
FM radio in India believes it is finally coming of age as an efficient and cost-effective medium of advertising. That belief manifested itself as a 15-20 per cent hike in ad rates in the last couple of months after a gap of more than a year. Also, th e launch of more radio stations during that period gave rise to much unsold inventory which had to be disposed of at throwaway prices and established radio stations had to compromise on their rates to take on the new competition.

Expectation from 2009-

I am trying to recollect what the New Year, 2009 hold for marketing, advertising and the consumer who is really going to be the key.
In my view, the mood was worse than the actual situation but I guess corporate India believes that it is better to be safe than sorry which is perfectly understandable given all that has just hit us. But in the same breath, there is no denying the fact that it has had an impact on consumer sentiment. The reality is that many of us have become poorer and our ability and our confidence to spend have been reduced if not completely eroded. There is a palpable erosion of confidence as some of us fear for our jobs as well. Industries such as the automotive sector that grew exponentially on the basis of easy and poorly administered credit are now probably much harder hit than other sectors and I am sure that other industries such as real estate that expanded as though there was no tomorrow are now licking their wounds
The troubled agency
There is no denying the fact that the agency business has been booming over the last three years and for many of us the first six months of the current financial year too have been exceedingly good. And then we walked into a Brett Lee bouncer, without a helmet.The other reality is that multinational business, which is no small proportion of our Indian advertising pie, could be guided by the poor sentiments globally. The head of the local operations of a multinational company had received directives from his boss in North America asking him to stop all advertising in India. His protests that India needed advertising to build the brand locally and was doing comparatively better fell on deaf ears. In the same breath we must mention that large categories such as FMCG have to continue their advertising spends. People will hopefully brush their teeth, bathe and on occasion wash their hair, downturn notwithstanding.
While the financial markets have been the cause of a lot of the global turmoil, in India at least there is still an opportunity for advertising agencies in the form of public sector banks which are being frequently asked to reduce their lending rates and raise their deposit rates. Let’s not forget too that these banks are being politically induced to advertise these changes at frequent intervals in tune with the actual and frequent change in rates. Advertising agencies too would do well to remember that there is an election due next year and irrespective of the quality of candidates who would be fielded and irrespective of the creativity in the advertising that some of the political parties might approve, there is no denying the fact that crores of rupees will be spent on advertising. Something to look forward to even if the result at the end of the exercise may not be all that heartening!
The cement industry had a dream run over the last three years as prices kept going up without any real marketing efforts from the cement companies, though one tended to hear whispers of a cement cartel, not that it called for a great strategy. Many of the cement majors have significantly enhanced their capacities in recent times and have also been hit by the palpable slump that the real estate industry has been exposed to and the lethargy of the Government to get into infrastructure with the seriousness that the sector and the economy deserves. The cement industry will have to spend in 2009 as the attractive home loan rates of the public sector banks will make a difference to individual construction. At least that is the hope!

The client’s world
The client had the very reason for our being and the very centre of our business. And today the client is troubled, to put it mildly. She needs the agency’s empathy, not criticism. And there is another reality too. There was a time and an age when clients did not give the agency the respect or the ears that they deserved. But today the client is willing to listen as she needs all the advice she can get on what might work in these troubled times. Of course, the flip side to this is that the agency and its personnel must be in a position to provide value.

2009- not very good for advertisement-
I just think of commercial of the early Nineties for Band Aid, made by Johnson & Johnson. A kid has hurt himself playing football and his father who is a doctor (incidentally the model looks amazingly like Bhaskar Bhat, Managing Director of Titan Industries) tells him of the need to use Band Aid and how the injury should not be left open and the boy repeats the messages mechanically, his mind obviously on something else. Both of them leave the frame and as we expect the commercial to end the boy comes darting back into the frame and shouts, ‘ Bhoolna math match jeet gaya!' (‘Don't forget we won the match!').
Strikingly, perhaps the most significant recall factor of 2009 for me is the fact that India is the No. 1 test team in the world and was also the one-day leader for approximately 24 hours.
The US and the Western world would like to forget 2009 in a hurry and wish it would end soon but the happenings in September 2008 spilled over for most of the year and had far-reaching implications for many countries, including India. Let me stay with the impact on advertising during the year that is chugging to a painful close. I think the year served more than ever to remind us of the fact that the truly Indian agency is a rarity and every second agency is part of a global network. The headquarters of global agencies panicked, and how! It is fair to say that India in real terms was not as badly affected as the rest of the world. But this did not prevent extreme reactions.
India was administered the same medicine as the rest of the world, never mind the fact that it did not have the same degree of sickness. There was a ban on recruitment, travel, training … you get the drift? Agencies for once took their eyes off the headline and focused on the bottom line.
I dare say agencies treated talent in a harsh manner, to put it mildly, and let a number of people go. It is perhaps correct to say that the industry has alienated a whole lot of talent which was unable to understand or appreciate the steps being taken. In a sense it has been beneficial as it has spawned a few start-ups of disenchanted creative people who quite rightly want to do their own thing. Of course, agency heads, like their clients in the IT industry, kept parroting that they were only asking non-performers to leave and were improving the quality of their talent. I did feel sorry for the people in the advertising business, some of whom lost their jobs, forgot about raises and were not even trained during the year as all budgets were frozen.
If advertising is ailing can media be far behind? Media has become the truly lowest common denominator and television is the primary offender as media woos eyeballs and revenue. Television seems to be going the David Dhawan way and we seem to revel in the era of ‘manufactured reality'. The Raakhi Sawant show is a case in point. People, it seems, are avidly switching on to things that you love to hate.
Thankfully, cinema, which people used to castigate readily, is moving up in creativity, technique and a lot of young talent is moving into it. What about news channels and their enormous capability at branding non-events as ‘breaking news?' I guess one of the commercials for the Hindustan Times where an anguished mother has a child in hospital thanks to defective medicine while an intrusive reporter asks her obnoxious questions best sums up the pathetic state of the channels.
About newspapers, the distressing trend of ‘paid editorial' is spreading like the AIDS virus. Recently when we were speaking about possible PR coverage for one of our clients, a prominent challenger newspaper, not the leader as one would suspect, asked “Why do you want PR coverage for this client? In any case they are not advertising in our paper; surely our readers are not the target audience?” I think the newspaper industry needs to step back for just a moment and consider its very reason for being. The world has enough products and services that are marketed mindlessly, often without the slightest consideration for truth, honesty and the consumer. Must the newspaper be just another product like these or must it stand for truth and fairness?

What about creativity?
The advertising industry seems to have lost its penchant for storytelling. Of course, the Zoozoos were a beacon of light in an otherwise dark and often depressing creative environment.
Mind you, this is not to ignore some isolated campaigns which still stood out from the clutter. But this has been a lean year for creativity as perhaps it has been for Ishant Sharma who was the greatest thing that happened to Indian fast bowling not so long ago.
There were very few campaigns that made one stand up and cheer as David Ogilvy would say, or make one wistfully say, “I wish I had written that.” There was the trend of some brands such as Idea Cellular and Tata Tea trying to tap into the social consciousness of the country, particularly of youth which may have some implications in terms of future possibility.
If one were to sum up the mass media creative, we probably delivered a plateful of advertising that one did not want. There was too much advertising and too little engagement, as an expert said, and advertising runs the risk of killing the reason why we are watching the media.
I think this is affecting the customer adversely. Have you ever tried to watch an interesting Hindi or Tamil movie on TV on Sunday? More than ever advertising needs to remind itself that at the best of times it is an interruption. People do not switch on the TV to watch the ads or buy a newspaper to see the ads, unless, of course, they want a job or wish to sell their apartment.
The advertising of today which tries so hard to be different is actually getting commoditised. While a good trend is that people from advertising have moved to films and are directing noticeable, popular films - the most visible of them being Balki and his second film Paa – clients too must realise that unless they give their agencies elbow room, the best of them will drift away to pastures where their creativity is recognised and rewarded and that will be disastrous for the industry as a whole.

Innovation the name of the game
Obviously advertising is moving down the value chain and is becoming more low-involvement as a career, which is in fact affecting the overall perception of the industry. Tata DoCoMo revolutionised the mobile services market with its per-second billing. Where is the innovation from advertising? I know that agencies will talk about roadblocks that they have created for Volkswagen and Hindustan Unilever. My take on this is slightly different. Are agencies being self-indulgent or are customers noticing these innovations that agencies are so proud about?
And as a prospective customer I am taken aback at the advertising for the Volkswagen Beetle here in India.
Will I pay over Rs 22 lakh after seeing this ad or even ask for a test drive? Is this aspirational? What a fantastic opportunity to work on an iconic brand! Has the opportunity been seized? I wonder. I remember seeing the room that Bill Bernbach used to work from in Madison Avenue.
We have no way of knowing what Bill would have to say about the creativity of Indian advertising in 2009, but something tells me that the advertising legend who created campaigns which conformed to the 3 Ss of ‘simplicity, surprise, smile' might have for once been ‘stumped' for an answer!