Radio offers maximum reach, especially in a city like Mumbai, where people spend half their day commuting. For retail brands, radio plays the role of a very important low-cost medium as they get tailored catchment area and have the opportunity of targeting well.

exchange4media Staff Jul 8, 2013 12:00 AM

Growing our business is paramount; the reason we cluster emerging markets the way we do is because we see them as a driver of growth for our business. The Indian market is growing and we want to grow disproportionately within the market, we are set to grow at a rapid pace. Even if the rate of growth in the market place drops in terms of GDP growth, our ability to grow is definitely there. India is our fastest growth market.

exchange4media Staff Jul 5, 2013 12:00 AM

Increase in creative content and better technology is required for better impact of outdoor advertising. Thus, the drawback of absence of sound and motion, that limit the target audience for the hoarding, can be done away with. Another difficulty in using outdoor advertising is lack of clearly stated norms for display of hoardings. These norms should be specified so that multiple hoardings are not placed at the same time in the same location. This may dilute the impact of the various hoardings placed in that area.

exchange4media Staff Jul 5, 2013 12:00 AM

In India, you still have a market where 45 per cent of the revenue is in newspapers. And you still have a mark where television delivers massive simultaneous reach in some of the higher spending internet markets. So, the big pillars of brand communication actually remain more intact in India than in other parts of the world and distribution infrastructure, specifically organised retail, exists to a much larger degree in India than in other parts of the world.

exchange4media Staff Jun 28, 2013 12:00 AM

Every advertiser has their own understanding and need of media. OOH has often been used as a primary launch medium to break a campaign, or even before that, to create teasers. It’s not a choice, but a compulsion for every advertiser to include OOH in their plan; else they lose out on the large traveling population during their long timeshare of the day. But the share of spend on OOH in the plan outlay has to also grow.

exchange4media Staff Jun 27, 2013 12:00 AM

FM radio needs to get out to more people as part of pop culture, not merely similar streams of film music that it is perceived to be now. The future need has to be to generate loyal listeners, not the current trend of listeners flirting with a station for the duration of a song then going somewhere else. Loyalties are not happening. This is a unique Indian phenomenon. On the whole, the general RAM numbers are encouraging. The quantum of listenership of FM radio in India seems high, but in reality RAM is not an accurate assessment of the industry success and traction.

exchange4media Staff Jun 26, 2013 12:00 AM

"The sad truth is agencies today have lost the edge to use gut feel and stick to numbers which in a creative business can be a contradiction in terms."

exchange4media Staff Jun 26, 2013 12:00 AM

Television today is actually struggling. If you look at youth, how much television are they consuming? Youth today have a lot of options. Hence, television has the challenge of bringing these audiences back and the only way it can do that is by involving him in his favourite device – mobile. They need to integrate mobile very actively with the content on television. It is no longer an option for content on television to not do anything on mobile.

exchange4media Staff Jun 24, 2013 12:00 AM

Social engagement is going to drive brands. What you do with social is build brand love, advocacy and mindshare in a powerful manner. If you can start to marry your top-of-the-funnel engagement with your bottom-of-the-funnel performance marketing activity, it will get very exciting. Moving from spray-and-pray mass communication to highly targeted, ROI-oriented communication, you will see a much more sophisticated and financially aligned marketer.

exchange4media Staff Jun 21, 2013 12:00 AM

In almost every developed market research plays an important role. However, in India, unfortunately we have still a little way to go before we have a common currency. The sheer diversity of our geographical spread and the dynamics of the industry make it extremely difficult to have one. I don’t think this is going to be feasible or a plausible action. However, a simple matrix for evaluation of a campaign could work to at least inform a client of its effectiveness.

exchange4media Staff Jun 17, 2013 12:00 AM

Radio is also a social media. Any media which allows you to come together, interact, comment and participate in a discussion is a social media. Internet by itself is not social media; applications like Facebook make it social. Similarly, radio also has certain elements that drive participation, social interaction and communication. In that sense, I do not see that radio and social media are competing.

exchange4media Staff Jun 14, 2013 12:00 AM

The beauty of social is it tells where people are right now, so with the help of analytics we can predict where they can be. The advantage to marketers is that they can give consumers what they want, before they know they even want it. The process of connecting the right consumer to the right product at the right place, which earlier normally took three weeks, now takes 500 milliseconds; that is a game-changer, that is the power of social.

exchange4media Staff Jun 14, 2013 12:00 AM

Unless you are passionate about this medium or want to know about this medium, you will not learn. There are not enough data points or studies to show what works and what does not. There is lack of syndicated research and common measurements that you can get for some of the other mediums. But at the same point, I am optimistic about this medium.

exchange4media Staff Jun 5, 2013 12:00 AM

The current internet penetration at 10 per cent offers huge potential for growth. At the same time, there is an increased complexity due to different OS, devices and languages. While this lends obvious attraction to an advertiser, it will be a challenge to understand these complexities and offer consistent experience across all these variables and derive optimum value from all these options.

exchange4media Staff Jun 3, 2013 12:00 AM

We will expand to markets where it makes business sense to us. The business sense works in two ways – the market itself is an attractive market and from the auction point of view it makes sense. Sometimes some markets are important from a geographical proposition that we give advertisers. For instance, Punjab is an important market, UP is a potent market, Kerala is an important market.

exchange4media Staff Jun 1, 2013 12:00 AM

I accept there is a roadblock for broadcasters when it comes to carriage fees and all of us are bleeding. We have discussed this with the multisystem operators and we are getting 35-50 per cent discount on carriage fees as compared to last year. Post the first phase of digitisation, we have been getting this discount and are expecting the same discount in the second phase as well. The discount from both the phases will give major savings to broadcasters.

exchange4media Staff May 29, 2013 12:00 AM

<strong>(Christopher Slaughter)</strong> Digitisation is the largest single movement for commercial priority and consumer choice taking place anywhere in the world. Given the size of the Indian market, the sheer ambitiousness makes it the biggest thing in the pay TV industry. It will bring in greater transparency and the latest technology to the broadcast sector.

exchange4media Staff May 29, 2013 12:00 AM

We need more Aggies and Paddys to take Taproot to the next level... We are very greedy when it comes to work, we treat everything like an opportunity, we have no personal or social life, we compromise that for work. Once we get the brief, we are very excited to see it in some media form. We still behave like a small kid when he sees a new toy; this whole domino effect is what gives us the edge.

exchange4media Staff May 24, 2013 12:00 AM

Social media to a large extent has democratised ‘content creation’, therefore, creativity is no longer limited to select agencies and their talent. Brands can throw challenges at the community and harness the power of the crowd. Thus, if a brand is looking for music or jingle that is targeted at a certain region or community, they can leverage social media to create and distribute their brand message.

exchange4media Staff May 23, 2013 12:00 AM

Elections have become an exceedingly important part of radio’s revenue plans. The election spending in the 2009 general elections were healthy, but the latest Assembly elections in Gujarat have been much, much higher. We believe that political parties have seen the impact of radio. More than anything else, radio provides them the opportunity to talk of multiple facts, and attack each other in a rapid, flexible manner.

exchange4media Staff May 20, 2013 12:00 AM