Mr. Srinivas, as someone who has been in the industry for a while, how do you feel media is evolving as compared to older times? There has been a fair amount of evolution in the media space in the last 5 to 10 years and we have been setting up networks in India. So apart from having standalone media planning and buying agencies and were planning on buying agencies which share a similar portfolio. We have also gone ahead and invested in a host of specialist units in areas of trading, content, activation in experiential and data analytics. Over the last few years we have upgraded our specialist units and it reminded me of our early years when we were setting up the networks we referred to the planning and buying business as the ‘core’ business and experiential as the ‘non-core’ business and that is an indication of how we have evolved. None core is now called the new core which is where most of the driving forces is coming from. What is the role of experiential marketing in building brands? Today experiential marketing plays an important role in brand building. With the fragmentation and inflation of media, especially mass media, it is difficult for advertisers to get a return on their investment, which is one factor. The other factor is the attention deficit economy we live in; it is difficult for any brand to attain its objective only through traditional advertising. Traditional advertising basically builds awareness of the brand and the products. With the fragmentation of media,where the product is not consumed with as much patience, experiential has a very important role to play. It actually helps the brand fly and helps client actually experience the product and become stronger advocates than marketing and advertising. GroupM has done a lot of work with experiential over the years and has a body of over 200 projects. It also has a unit called Dialogue Factory headed by Balbir Singh, a known figure in the field of experiential marketing. He and his team are doing a great job within the company and providing value to our clients. So what do you think that brands are not understanding about the role of experiential marketing? The barriers with experiential marketing are different for different clients. Some are hesitant to get into experiential because they bring up measurements as part of the issue but solutions are available today thanks to technology and to mobile media. There are ways of measuring this and another way is to build a link between what you with an investment in experiential marketing and what that does for a brand. Over the years, in our own body of work we have seen that with our knowledge and expertise we can advise clients on what could be their returns on their investments. One thing that is important in experiential marketing is that to know and be clear on what their objectives are such as figuring out or revising a campaign. We have been in this space for long and built up a body that guides the clients in setting up the right objectives in the first place to the strategy and implementation coming back right at the end to measure the impact of the cycle. How have you equipped yourself to specialize in experiential marketing? We believe very clearly in media planning and buying especially traditional media when it comes to brands engaging with the category developing and so on. We were the early movers in the areas of activation and content. We have a robust offering pretty much all of these areas and mentioning earlier, this is the new core and are providing value to our clients and these categories are working closely with our existing media planning and buying team that is able to provide diversified services to the client; a very holistic kind of a product which is the need of the hour. At the Mobile Marketing Association, do you have any announcements to make for us? Yes, I’m delighted to let you know that Madhouse which is our brand marketing partner is bringing the MMA conference to India. They have done fabulous work across the world and this is the third country that the MMA is coming to after China and Vietnam. Madhouse investing in and set up this body and hopefully we can work with other industry partners and help grow the advertising base in India. It is the most under leveraged medium in the country but with the highest penetration and which offers a lot of unique advantages to the advertisers. I am hoping that associating with MMA and working with the rest of the industry will be able to extrapolate the overall marketing base.
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Mr. Sheikhawat, you are a dominant brand in the market, how have you evolved in your media to consolidate and grow in market share? It gets tougher every year. For a brand like Kingfisher, it is important to be young, fresh, aspirational, sexy, dynamic, relevant and glamorous for a new and ever evolving consumer dynamic. A lot of people don’t want to drink the beer brand but go for the father brand and the only way to do it is to remain as aspirational and desirable for them as for the previous generation. So, everything we do for Kingfisher is centered around that; whether its participating or being the content creators for some of the sports, music, fashion and food activation programs to being ubiquitously available across the country. We have the strongest distributional capability and the largest footprint in the country in terms of manufacturing capability. We have the largest environment handling competency because the government handles close to 60 % of the alcohol business in the country. With third generation distributors, we have the strongest and largest distributional network in the country with powerful brands and sharply defined exciting marketing activational platforms. So, when all these work together in harmony as one then you have growing value in market share. what is your media strategy to remain young and sexy in the market? There are several things that you need to do. A. a target audience- knowing what they do, where they go, what they buy, what drives them, their choice of music food , entertainment, travel, dining and see where your brand can fit into that lifestyle and that thought process. One really intervenes at that points of occasion and medium such as digital and mobile are big forces and our way of leveraging and using them is what helps us. You have associated yourselves with social events such as the Kingfisher derby and sports events such as the F1 or the IPL, what are your future plans to own event platforms to promote your brand? Sports and cricket are going to be our number one platform and it’s not just cricket, we also have a football club called the Kingfisher East Bengal Football Club. We also associate with the running events such as the Bombay marathon and the Delhi half marathon and others such as the Bangalore and Hyderabad 10 and 15 km runs, respectively. We have also associated with tennis tournaments, hockey tournaments, the rugby tour, F1, horse racing derby and so, we do a variety of sports. We associate with every genre of music and we were the first to bring music and big bands into the country and we continue to do that. Food is a critical part of our association because beer goes very well with Indian food and all our programs across pubs, bars and restaurants have food festivals which are big part of our marketing. Fashion also because we are the only beer brand that participates in all the nation and international fashion weeks. And so these are the four major platforms that help us achieve our objectives. The hunt for the Kingfisher calendar girl is a highly acclaimed initiative of yours, how is this added to your brand value? Well, I think, driven desirability. It is the most up market and exclusive calendar show and reality program in the country. The calendar itself is a highly prized object with only 3000 copies that are not for sale and you can only get them if your are on the chairman’s mailing list and there is thus a huge desirability that we leverage with audience participation and the reality show called the ‘hunt for the kingfisher girl’ on NDTV Goodtimes. This year is going to have a tighter programming, bigger names as hosts, exotic locations, and production values far superior than the past. The glamour drives the desire, style and fashion quotient of the brand and since this is the eleventh year, it’s going to be bigger and better. What do brands in India not understand about experiential marketing? Some of the best brands understand experiential marketing very well but the one thing one needs to understand is that Indians, by and large don’t complain very much and are tolerant consumers. We are willing to put up with a lot but this not going to continue. The younger audience which has money and customer service and so, the bar is continually raised in terms of what experiences the consumers expect and you cannot thrust it into their lives. There is need to interweave it seamlessly into their lives and they should see value in it and need to be educated, entertained and informed. A bad quality program thrust onto the viewer who may or may not be engaged is really not the way to go. Content is going to be king. Mediums and channels to access content are exploding. Content itself is exploding. And all these experiences need to add up and consumers need to participate. So you either need to entertain them, or educate them or inform them. Preferable all should be ticked but at least one of these three should be ticked.
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It turns out that 150 million times a day someone somewhere chooses a Unilever product. From Lux to Kwality Walls, Wheel detergent and Fair & Lovely, Hindustan Unilever Company continues to grow as one of the most respected FMCG companies in India. A company with a plethora of products in its kitty, creating strategies to market a varied product range calls for a strategy of its own. And what could be the A1 game plan to sell cheap products to millions? Hire the best (and the most expensive) brains in the industry, of course. In conversation with Ateet Mehta, Media Services Head at HUL, we gain perspective on how it all falls together. EE: Unilever spends a significant amount of sum in its advertising. Out of your entire budget, how much do you devote specifically to experiential marketing? It’s very difficult to qualify numbers in terms of how much money is spent on experiential marketing. It all depends upon the brand’s objective and the jobs to be done. So if a job to be done for a brand is to communicate the message and give it an engagement then the expenses will be higher but if a brand’s job is to only create sales and awareness for the brand then it will be much lower. So it’s completely dependent upon the brand’s objective. EE: What do you think about experiential marketing as a marketing campaign? Is it more effective than over-the-line marketing campaigns? There are no right or wrong answers. It again depends upon the objectives. So today, if I want to showcase that by using a particular shampoo you will get very, very smooth hair or a nice bounce to your hair then it is more effectively done by experiential marketing because you’re giving the consumers a demonstration of your product. But if I have to showcase something which does not require product demonstration but a regular communication then experiential will not make sense. So it’s completely dependent upon what message you’re trying to put across. EE: You have big and small brands in your portfolio. As Unilever, how do you arrive at a marketing strategy targeted at multiple brands? Unilever has a plethora of brands catering to each and every consumer segment. At the bottom of the pyramid there are brands like Lifebuoy and at the top, high end brands like Pond’s Age Miracle and the recently launched Toni and Guy Range. Marketing strategy is a function of a brand’s marketing communication objective and its marketing measurable objectives. So if the objective is to reach as many people as possible then it’s all about broadcast media. If I want to reach pan India then certainly the strategy is to use television, which is a mass communication channel. But if the marketing objective is to reach 2 million people out of the billion people in the country, residing in the 6 metros, then mass media does not make sense. At that point you look at options that are particularly catering to the specific needs of the target audience, both in terms of demographic and psychograhic. You select mediums that appeal to them, the consumer behaviour and the media they consume and on that basis you decide the strategy. For eg, Fair and Lovely, which is a pan India brand and the largest selling fairness cream in the country, it would require a mass media approach. But for Toni and Guy and Tresemme, which are shampoo brands selling in some parts of the country, focussed on modern trade, television does not make sense. Then you look at other mediums like digital and hard core non-casting segmented targeting campaigns. EE: The missed call initiative engaged 18 million people. Do you foresee similar initiatives for other brands as well? After the Wheel Missed Call Activity there have been a plethora of brands that have joined in this campaign. Last year, we had signed Akshay Kumar and Sonakshi Sinha for our Red Label brand of tea – it was missed call activity with a call to action. Like Red Label there have been similar campaigns for Fair & Lovely and a number of our laundry brands, so all brands that are catering to that segment of the society where a feature phone is the only device we are able to reach and television is not reached because of power shortage or because the overall presentation of television is less, feature phone features are used extensively to reach these consumers
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Hitting a three week high, Canon Inc. went up by 4.5 per cent on 4 September becoming the third most traded stock by turnover on the mainboard. Clearly the company is doing something right. As one of the front runners in digital printing and imaging technologies, Canon has swiftly spread its roots in the Indian market ever since its debut in the year 1997 as a subsidiary of Canon Singapore. Dr. Alok Bharadwaj is the Executive Vice President of Canon India and is amongst the “Global Top 100 People” Influencing Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMS). He has received the “Pride of the Industry” Award and also the “Best CMO” Award by the CMO council. A strong advocate of the efficacy of experiential activity, we got a taste of his ideology when midway through our interview a popular tune suddenly flooded the office and employees did a shimmy in their personal work spaces. What a great way to revitalize an otherwise dreary day! He calls it ‘experiential learning for employees’. In his interview with EE he tells us how Canon is implementing experiential marketing to promote consumer experience and shares his vision of experiential marketing in digital printing and imaging technology. EE: What ‘images’ come to your mind when you talk about experiential marketing? When we talk about marketing its all about creating desirability, either for the brand or product. It is an endeavour to position ourselves in a way that the consumer is influenced to love us more. Experiential marketing is an attempt to add to this pursuit of creating intense desirability among the targeted consumers. While conventional ways of marketing may positively stimulate the consumers imagination, experiential marketing goes a step ahead and hands the product to the consumer to touch, feel, grasp and understand it in real-time. Experiential marketing, to my mind, is a great tool that marketers are now increasingly beginning to realize and make good use of. For example, we take great pride in being the number one brand in digital imaging but even then we need to compete with various categories of smart phones, tablets, ipads and other devices. So today we need to create a compelling desire among the customer to look at Canon as not only the best camera but also look at it on a priority before he considers any other device, be it a smartphone, an ipad etc. Experiential marketing is the only tool that can achieve such a task. EE: What makes a campaign truly experiential campaign? An experiential campaign essentially means inviting the consumer to be part of the brand’s ecosystem. So, for example, when i’m trying to sell my customer a printer, my aim is not only to produce a high quality print but also meet the customer’s need to be able to connect the printer to his other devices of choice and enjoy the entire process in the bargain. So I’m not just marketing a printer here I’m marketing the whole way of using it. The idea is to create an enhanced experience using a variety of elements in such a way that your brand is projected as dominating and indispensable within that experience. The attempt is to try and fit your brand into the lives of your customer so that using your product seems natural to him and he can relate to it better. EE: How is Canon using experiential marketing to reach out to its potential customers? Canon has taken digital imaging and printer technology to various dimensions. One is the B to B segment where our copiers and printers are in high demand with their feature of internal document security. In the B to C category, besides printers, our cameras are the highest selling product. Cameras have undergone a major reconfiguration over the past few years where digitalization has advanced tremendously and features such as remote capturing allow the customer to use their smartphones to remotely operate their cameras. So while you can ‘test-drive’ a few products to understand the technicalities what it ‘can’t’ do is often more prominent after the purchase than what it ‘can’. I think the index of measuring the output of experiential marketing is basically the ratio of the extent to which you experience the product before you buy it divided by the experience of the product post-purchase. The efficacy of a successful campaign should be aimed at 70% or more. In our case we keep that as an aim when we try an experiential activity. We have 105 retails stores that we call ‘Canon image square’ where we encourage our customers to entirely experience our products before making a purchase. EE: In an attempt at experiential marketing we believe you conduct a lot of photography workshops as well, how has that worked out for you? Photography has undergone tremendous transformation in the past few years. People would earlier capture photos, then print them and then finally see and enjoy them. But then came along digitalization, and photography became limitless. It became less and less about capturing a moment and more about telling a story. Then came social networking and people began instantly sharing their stories. And this became an integral part of ones life. Photography has now become a language where instead of words photographs are used to communicate the message, often better. The brain has a logical side and an emotional side. It is through the use of imagination and art forms that we feed our emotions. The cameras we offer allow people emotional gratification by not just capturing moments but also creating them. Therefore in this attempt to giving this experience to our customers, workshops become key. We have a tie up with several workshop centres in India in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore and we are in talks of including other cities too. So when someone is buying a camera from us he is also signing an invisible emotional contract with us where our responsibility becomes to ensure we enrich his life using photography as a medium. The outcome is that the customer now begins to like us more and becomes a protagonist. EE: What are the criterion for someone to enroll in such a workshop? For the last two years we’ve conducted hundred workshops each year across about 25 towns in India. This is a free of cost single day workshop with the purchase of a camera. Since photography works very well in a community, our customers are also registered on a portal where members help enhance each others skills and, in the bargain, experience photography more closely. We also conduct 2 hour workshops once a week in all our retail stores. We are also planning specialized workshops especially for kids to harness their creativity at a young age. In this light, one demand for an SLR camera coming from the child is usually a 100% strike rate. We soon realised our customers were demanding smaller groups for specialized training and more personalized attention. Therefore, we recently implemented the training of smaller focussed groups on a chargeable basis. We’ve named it the EOS Academy. In fact we’ve noticed the price tag has actually added value to the program and we are increasingly being approached by commercial photographers and photography enthusiasts for training. This activity has made a considerable impact on our sales. It has also helped us get acquainted with the challenges our customers may face while using our products, their features and technical issues. EE: What media channels do you use to promote such kind of workshops? We largely spread the word through social media, our retail outlets and product brochures as we are mainly targeting the hot prospects. These workshops are not leading people to buying a Canon but definitely allowing people a greater opportunity to enjoying their Canon. EE: What is the future of experiential marketing in digital printing in India? In printing, while the content is becoming more electronic, the consumption of content is also becoming more electronic. People are increasingly reading books on screen, greeting cards are being sent online, bills are viewed on the screen etc. With a result the overall need of printing is becoming lesser and lesser. So now our focus has shifted to showing our consumer multiple applications in printing that can add a different flavour to their normal activities. Be it printing directions to a place or printing 3D images, the idea is to break out of the ordinary and into lesser explored territories. EE: What are your thoughts on experiential marketing in the space of digital imaging? The comparative landscape has shifted from the traditional competitors to competitors from different categories. These are the categories that we could’ve never imagined could pose a threat to us. So there is a struggle to retain the consumers who are now increasingly being enticed into newer domains such as instagram and similar others. Therefore, it is imperative for us to provide a stronger gratification to our clients and create higher exit barriers. So we have to let them experience things they could never imagine a camera could do earlier. With features such as advanced low-light photography, cinematography, high optical zooms etc. we try and ensure we create an experience for our client that no other platform can provide.
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A few weeks after her wedding, international pop sensation Katy Perry was heard quoting, “The press is just not your friend when it comes to a marriage, that’s why we didn’t sell the pictures of our wedding, and we got offered millions of dollars for them, millions!”. Well, our wedding photos may not excite the paparazzi as much, but we do have something common to Katy-Russell- The grandeur of an Indian wedding. And who does a popular celebrity couple first approach to plan out their most magical day- someone who knows weddings like the back of his hand. Hence, Chetan Vohra of Wedding Line came as a strong contender in this category. Interestingly though Vohra declined the offer due to differences over moral principles. And the wedding did not even last a year. But that’s another story. Former Executive Vice-President at Wizcraft, a premier event management firm, Chetan Vohra left his job to start a venture of his own in the year 2009. His company Line Communication has come a long way since then. In conversation, he lets us in on his business sensibilities, his vision of success and the inside scoop from the industry. You were with Wizcraft at a pretty senior position. You were obviously earning big bucks and doing world-class events. What was it that you set out to achieve by forming Line Communications? Firstly I’d like to clarify, when you’re working for someone else there is almost always a limitation on how big the buck gets. So, yes the number one reason I ventured out was because I wanted to be the highest beneficiary of my hard work. I joined Wizcraft at a fairly young age, I had big dreams and ambitions and was fortunate that the roles and responsibilities I was given allowed me to learn a lot about the events industry. I moved my way from the bottom up and whilst in the executive board I soon realised I had pretty much seen it all. It couldn’t get any bigger or better. Also as an individual I wanted to challenge myself because I could see myself getting too comfortable. Fortunately, I had age on my side so I decided to move out, wipe the slate clean and challenge myself to create what I had envisioned. You started out four years back. What has been a pivotal factor in helping you gain popularity? How did you market yourself as a new brand people should have faith in? I took comfort and inspiration from the success stories of people who left large organizations to start something of their own. I had the experience and the exposure but the time I decided to start out the market was in a particularly bad state. Therefore, it was decided that as an organization we are not going to chase numbers. We decided to position ourselves as a brand that could not be categorized as a ‘ME TOO’. So we marketed ourselves as a communications business as opposed to simply an event planning firm, and immediately we came into picture as competition to the larger sharks in the market. It wasn’t only about light, sound, decor and stage. We wanted it to be about the ‘touch and feel’ of our brand. Our idea was to go into the market and say ‘we understand what you want, we’ll tell you how to do it more cost-effectively, in a more fun way, and somewhere down the line lets try and innovate’. We landed our first contract from Fiat with the launch of the Punto. How much of your events business is ‘corporate’ and how much of it is ‘social/weddings’? When we started off, we pitched ourselves for fifty percent corporate and the other half for weddings. But over a period of time we have come seventy percent in favour of weddings. I love the corporate side of it since I am from that trade but the drawback with it is that the company has fixed budgets and there would be fifty approvals to take before a cost is finalized. Weddings, on the other hand, seldom work on a fixed budget. You negotiate budgets on a one-on-one basis and, frankly, there are no limitations on the spend. So, well lets just say that once you’ve tasted blood theres no going back. That being said, with weddings there is a business side to it and also an emotional side. And between me and my partner, Arpita, we have tried to strike a balance between the two. What are the marketing strategies that have worked for you? I am not a big protagonist of advertisements. I think our most effective marketing strategy has been word-of-mouth. In the experiences space it is usually others experiences that define the credibility of an events organizer. Social media has also spread our name across the spectrum to quite an extent. You claim to conceptualize tailor-made intellectual properties for your clients. But sometimes when you start something new there are big chances of it going bust. What has been your experience? The easiest thing to do is to follow someone else’s shoes. There have been some great guys who’ve come up with extremely interesting off beat ideas. For example, one might say that he’d like to do a music festival and puts in a lot of effort to conceptualize and execute. But someone from the outside may think that ‘hey, this is so simple I like music and I can do it too’. So if it has previously been done at a beach, he would now do it on a mountain or someplace. But it is this ‘Me too’ syndrome that leads to the disaster that usually comes from it. Besides, planning, hard work and execution there is also the investment. In fact, every IP today requires years and years of ploughing of funds. Then there is also the boredom factor to look into. As the competition increases the novelty slowly begins to wear off. So there may be several fantastic ideas but you need to to dwell upon them and ensure they are feasible in the long run. The other thing we’ve noticed over the years is that the target audience is being underestimated. People are now traveling abroad extensively. They are increasingly being exposed to new and innovative stuff so they don’t want to settle for anything substandard. Therefore, besides having a good idea you should also be able to deliver it to the expectations around it. How critical is ‘thinking’ in the business of weddings? I feel ‘thinking’ is important in every business. In our case, weddings have a very high level of personal involvement. You have a person who is possibly ready to spend his life’s savings on just one day. This fact leaves little room for error. So you are forever working with this thought at the back of your mind. Also, each family member will have their own individual inputs to give and you are supposed to carve an event around that and deliver it successfully. What do you have to say about the integration of technology at events? I think in the events business when you talk about innovation people have a general tendency to follow trends. A couple of years back the in-thing was to go green and today all the talk is about Technology. Technology is great, but there is positive technology and there is negative technology. For example, in lighting, everything has become LED today, in sound, the crude speaker technology has been replaced by relatively sleeker versions of sound systems. But a lot of times people market technology saying its expensive and needs to be imported, so essentially the west has found a big market in India for suckers. We should try and use technology that is sensible and not prohibitive. While we can make great use of technology, it is often used for the purpose of ‘show’ and I think thats just plain silly. How do you measure ROI? It is important for me to know that what I have delivered to my client has translated into more than just a sumptuous meal. It is that 5 hours of captivity of the client that we are trying address. I measure ROI with the feedback I get, the compliments, complaints, the email of gratitude post the event. The events industry strives on a dependency factor. We aim to be the trouble shooters. If someone is in a crisis or wants to avoid a crisis at his show then he should come seeking us. The wedding business is people driven and for someone who has put in a lifetime’s savings into his child’s wedding he should be given his money’s worth. At the end of the day its value at every step that matters. The brand name will follow. I know that if I’ve been in the business 25 years, I will be a known name. But I want to have value associated with my name. We don’t bribe. We also have a very high attrition rate. The reason being that we have an ideology and a strong set of principles and it is imperative for those who work for us to have the same vision and ethics. What has worked for you? Line communications as a company is very strong in its consultancy approach. We have played on our corporate communications skill to position ourselves as an in-house talent to conceptualize an idea and deliver it to you. We let our clients know that we want their phonebook and not their wallet. And yes we do charge them a fee but that fee is for our time and service but no fluff. Every individual for us is the same. It doesn’t matter if hes rich or poor. If hes called you hes probably heard about you from somewhere and it is our responsibility to deliver to his expectations. We try to make our fee flexible. We say ‘you tell us how much you want to spend and we’ll make you spend it well. After all, if you don’t want to buy a Mercedes, you don’t ‘have to’ buy a Mercedes. You can buy yourself a Toyota and be as happy’.
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Dooj Ramchandani, Co-founder at Blink Solution, the Bandra-based interactive digital agency, is a very busy man. We met him while he was shuttling between completing a client delivery and strategizing on how best to urge people to vote for their #KFC25 campaign, which has been nominated for a prestigious Webby Award this year. In between the ensuing chaos, we got him to talk about the latest event fad in India – projection mapping. Excerpts from the interview follow. If you were to pitch Projection Mapping to someone in a sentence, what would it be? Projection mapping is as simple as taking any real-world object and transforming it virtually. Take this pillow (points at one lying nearby) for instance. You can map it, project different visual patterns or maybe a 3D animation and make it look like things are coming out of it. Since this is your stronghold, can you take us through a few applications of this technology? There are plenty of things you can do with projection mapping. But the reason why you should use it is because the experience is great. You can create something visually stunning that’s out of this world. In terms of functional applications, you can use a piece of real estate, like your retail outlet, to come alive. We recently created a 15×15 room with a couch, a lamp and a wall with the Royale texture for Asian Paints. Then we created 8 different sets of the entire room and we had mapped the sets to it. Using an iPad app we created, the visitor with a click of a button could change the entire look of the room. We took something like paint and made people experience it in an innovative and intuitive way. You can even take a product and make it more dynamic with mapping, rather than displaying it as a static object. Like with Puma, we took a life-size shoe and 3D mapped it in a way for interesting video content to play on different parts of the shoe. Through this we could highlight different aspects of the shoe. So this is something that isn’t possible for you to do on, say, a video billboard where all you have is a flat screen to work with. Take us through what goes behind creating a projected experience. There are various steps involved. First we identify the object that we are going to map. Then we take into account a few technical details such as dimensions, distances, etc. After this we move into content creation where we decide the content we want to be projected. Finally we come to the execution bit where there is installation work involved. Great. Now tell us this, what’s a great occasion to use visual projection mapping? I think it will fit into any place. Concerts and gigs definitely because these events are all about experience. Along with that you can also tap into retail spaces like malls and stores. What challenges do you face when trying to sell ideas featuring such technology? We operate as an interactive agency and we try and understand the challenge that the brand is facing. Then we come up with solutions that answer to those challenges rather than force-fitting technology into it. However if we think we can fit tech in an intuitive way to address the problem, we’ll use it. Now coming to the challenges. Cost is always a challenge. You have to prove that there is an ROI for whatever you’re doing. But I feel if brand managers believe in using it, then it isn’t a problem. Sometimes there is the novelty factor that motivates brands to say ‘yes’. But it may also make them apprehensive about the fact that it hasn’t been done before. But such technologies actually justify the investment behind them. I recently heard of a real estate brand that used the Occulus Rift to take potential customers through a virtual reality tour of their property. I mean when you’re selling property worth crores, you shouldn’t worry about spending money on an experience. If your customer has a good first impression, your chance of a conversion just shoots up. Are we level with the west in terms of the work being done in this space? Personally, I think in comparison to what has happened abroad, India is not right up there but I feel we’re catching up. However we shouldn’t be too harsh on ourselves because most of the tech we use is launched first in the west. So they have more time to work with it.
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Mr. Vijay Karunakaran, CEO, InGage Technologies was sipping coffee with his wife Mrs. Vanitha Venugopal, a former Mobile Technologist at Motorola, when she seeded the idea of an Augmented Reality (AR) mobile application for the upcoming Rajnikanth starrer Kochadaiiyaan. Immediately possessed by the idea, it took them no longer than a week to pitch it to Rajni’s team and get a go-ahead. What resulted is India’s first 4D Augmented Reality application that has been lauded for its design and detailing. ‘Superstar Rajnikanth boasts of a very strong brand value in India and abroad. In the US especially, you will find very staunch supporters. This app was our contribution to our beloved star,’ says Vijay proudly. ‘When u go watch a movie, the shot is fixed by the cameraman, whatever he has shot is what you see. But what if you wanted to see a particular angle? You can’t do so in the theatre. So what we did was capture Rajni’s photorealistic image and used it to render the superstar real-time to make him come alive in a fan’s home environment through their smartphones.’ The result was a 4D application that InGage rolled out exclusively for Karbonn phones. Fans can download the Augmented Reality app and use their camera to shoot any physical object. The camera sees and processes, and a virtual model of Rajni’s Kochaadaiiyaan avatar comes alive in that physical setting. One can make Rajni fight or even recite a dialogue just as in the film, and as bonus can also view the same scene from any and every angle thanks to the high quality render. The app wins because it’s not made to only run on high-end phones, but also smartphones that cost between INR 4000 – 8000, which approximately 80% of our population possesses, a first for its kind. It is another feather in the cap for Mr. Karunakaran, who has worked on brands such as Tropicana, Nike and Adidas in the past. We move past the app and ask him to opine on the state of AR in our country. ‘I think AR is very widely and loosely used in our country. Most of the Indian AR apps are rather gimmicky. When you think of AR, you imagine a cool object that can interact with you. Currently, only a few companies can do that.’ He asserts. On a brighter note, Mr. Karunakaran believes the technology’s potential is unbelievable. ‘So far, we have only skimmed the surface. AR can be used anywhere there a simulation required. Industries that could do with cool visualizations can benefit immensely from AR. A few industries I can think of are real estate, construction and education. Before a building is built, we can simulate models of how it will look like, to aide learning, we can make a simple drawing book experience come to life with a mobile device. Imagine if a child draws an elephant and it comes alive on your device screen, walking around and making sounds. It will help the child learn better,’ he explains. And what about marketers? Do they know what they want from AR? ‘Well, some of the guys who have approached me think that Modi’s hologram projections are AR (laughs). I think we still need to spend time showing people what AR actually is, and what it can do. In fact, I’ve done a couple of projects free of cost just to show the potential of AR. I believe it will help in educating people and convince them about the immersive nature of the technology.’ What next for InGage? ‘All the things I mentioned in the applications section. AR based medical simulations, educational tools and architecture visualisations are on the cards. And like I said, we go beyond tricks and gimmicks. We just create a beautiful, memorable experience.’ It does sound like exciting times lie ahead for technology junkies. Augmented Reality is here.
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Sports make lot of sense as a way to enhance corporate image and increase product visibility. Sports Sponsorship in India is pegged at 3250 cr. and is estimated to be 12500 Cr. in the next 5 years. With so much of money involved the sports industry has embraced sponsorship ROI/ROO and statistical analysis as never before. Sponsorships are made for sound business reasons and need for effective data and research to advise that decision is vital. Repucom, a global sports marketing research firm, utilizing the leading technology and facilities for market research, media evaluation and commercial auditing, has created a full-service portfolio for sports marketing research and consultancy. In the following article Repucom’s Senior Vice President – South Asia, Joseph Eapen, provides key snippets from the report along with market data and insights. As you look at the changing consumption of goods, sport sticks out. Sports attract a strong and engaged audience, and certain sports can attract hard-to-reach demographic. Though live viewing drove most of it, now social media is also driving the conversation hard and can be used as the counter on sports. Social media tells the whole story about attitudes of people sitting out there in living rooms, venues and even bars. The relationship between sports and entertainment is inseparable and interchangeable. Need to Evaluate In a country as obsessed with sports (also beyond cricket) as India, Sports Sponsorship Evaluation is the foundation of all relevant information, public perception and to-the-minute statistics. With finances of this magnitude and the fervent passions of an entire nation at stake, a sustained and reliable inflow of premium information and analytics is of crucial importance. The best way to make sure the sponsors understands the returns is to provide an evaluation report detailing the benefits received. It is also good business practice to show evidence of accountability. Evaluation also helps a club/franchise/right owner/sponsors formally review its activities, provides a frame of reference for future projects and aids the planning process. The keys to success lie in bringing a marketer’s sponsorship to life in real and meaningful ways. A key element of the sponsorship decision is determining what success looks like at the outset of a campaign. You can’t start to measure success until you know what success means for you; any evaluation program is therefore a measurement and a comparative tool. It doesn’t also help if key constituencies have a different view of desired results and don’t have a clear understanding of what success looks like before committing money and resources needed to support a sponsorship investment. Other common problems in developing sponsorship programs is spending the majority of marketing dollars on the cost of sponsorship with little or nothing left to advertise, promote and publicize a company’s involvement. And more importantly, in assigning value on a sponsorship, brands should consider the cost of not being a sponsor. For developing strategic and creative sponsorship campaigns, one has to consider all elements in the marketing toolbox. More often than not, public relations, product placement and social media set the stage for future advertising, sales, events, promotions, and hospitality that will drive the sponsorship message home. And all of these need to be evaluated, benchmarked and developed into a KPI scorecard. The key elements of Sponsorship evaluation area as follows MEDIA EVALUATION Sports holds a prominent role in the global media landscape as a means to drive audience, passion and engagement. The need to measure, evaluate and audit sponsorship activations and campaigns across TV, online, radio and social networks, print and mobile devices is vital to arrive at media analytics, focused on the impact of sponsorship in various broadcast and other media environments. Media evaluation and audit involves constant surveillance on sporting ventures, cutting-edge media monitoring and analytics to determine the nature, impact and presence of sport sponsorships for individual types of sports, across multiple broadcast environments across various cultures, geographies and investment markets. Combining updated and intensively-verified information and valuable industry insights from experts, media evaluation and analytics incorporate extremely comprehensive and accurate market analytics on in-stadia, print, online and on-air broadcast networks; maintaining exclusive databases containing exhaustive details, press bytes, performance benchmarks and competition analytics that allow unrivalled access to brands, signage points, teams, stadiums, sporting meets and sponsorship bodies. Add to it the use of all emerging social media channels to constantly track properties and monitor sports assets, giving the clients a hawk-eye insight into the chaotic world of popular commercial sports. All these is used to build data into extensive databases that deliver analytics and insight that allow comparative media equivalencies across brands, signage locations, teams, stadiums, sports and markets. We’ll design outputs based on specific objectives, including competitor analysis, portfolio benchmarking, stadia rating, best practice knowledge, and much more. The outcome of Media Evaluation is the universally accepted measure called Quality Index (QI) developed by Repucom – is used to measure the quality and duration of sports fans’ exposure to sponsorship elements such as on-screen graphics, branding on apparels, courtside signage and courtside branded assets such as cups and coolers etc.. RESEARCH & ANALYSIS Social Media Measurement, Syndicated Sports Studies & Fan Research are the heart of the whole process as the ultimate focus is to deliver intelligence and analytics on viewer behavior and sports-fan access for major sporting events. There is almost always a massive buzz of feedback, reviews, expectations and analysis from sports-fan around major sporting events and tournaments that happen in the public sphere, from broadcast media to blogs and social media networks. If it’s pure, uninterrupted fan support that you are interested in, then these fan reviews and crucial, allowing brand owners, agencies and federations to build greater brand recognition, marketing opportunities and commercial awareness. To close the loop, it is imperative to study an understand sports markets through Fan Research to identify and tap into exclusive catchment areas of each sport, asking the right questions and gathering unique insights about the sports, and their stars who are constantly in limelight. By systematically gathering, collating and analyzing crucial data on sports and sports brand, the studies can accurately report brand impact, reach and value in key markets. Continuous studies, fan interviews, market surveys and monitoring brand associations with individual supporter bases to deliver accurate and highly customizable brand insight form a knowledge base for clients. Clients use these databases across policy meetings and board congregations to accurately estimate emerging trends, fan reviews and reactions and even gauge future business opportunities. Sports Studies, with their unique market and brand insights, and their sophisticated analyses, also allow firms to accurately rate, profile and monitor public perception of specific sporting franchises and events, and thereby estimate endorsement values, advertising rates and brand impact. Popular large studies available are SportsDNA & SponsorLink, covering 30 countries in a continuous manner. It covers all sports and associated sponsors/brands in their respective markets. The studies also allows clients to add specific/custom questions related to their brand and it associations. Apart from these syndicated studies, bespoke research are conducted during, in and post tournaments, leagues and events and a KPI model and scorecard is developed for tracking ROO. CELEBRITY DBI (Davie-Brown Index) Celebrities posit massive exposure and associative brand-recognition to any brand they endorse, and global celebrity evaluation services are instrumental in breaking down the DNA of popular stardom, and find out what is it that makes celebrities such global phenomenon. Instruments like Celebrity DBI undertakes brand evaluation and assessment, delivering accurate analytical data and maintaining extensive databases on stars and their stardom across the world. Global and local clients count on these measurement to deliver data on an international basis that tracks various celebrity endorsements, market impact on specific demographics, market reach and brand recognition. The Celebrity DBI is an independent index that quantifies and qualifies consumer perceptions of celebrities. It’s the only global celebrity evaluation service designed to provide superior brand-relevant insights. The Celebrity Index employ superior research methodology that allow them to go deep inside celebrity catchment areas, and deliver research data filtered through age, market, gender and income levels, to name but a few. Be it an international rock star or the next Diaego Maradona, celebrities all over the world have an immense capability to influence consumer habits for a multitude of products, and celebrity evaluation services provide updated, relevant market intelligence to identify key markets that account for maximum celebrity brand impact. The list of celebrities (over 5500 worldwide) tested can also go beyond Sportsmen, Film stars, Musician’s etc. The recent wave of Celebrity DBI in India covered Arvind Kerjiwal, Narendra Modi and Rahul Gandhi, measured on all the 8 factors of the study – Appeal, Aspiration, Awareness, Breakthrough, Endorsement, Influence, Trendsetter and Trust.
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