The Digital industry has grown from mere 30mn users to over 100 mn. With this growth marketers are evolving and now know how to use the digital medium for their brands, though there is still scope of improvement with this adoption, as some marketers are still dubious on selecting advertising on digital or mobile. The marketer today is on the web consuming content and is engaging deeper to meet every touch-point of a customer on various digital mediums. However, brands seem to be hesitant in exhaustively leveraging this medium for advertising themselves. With generation Y virtually living their lives across gadget technologies of e-smart phones and tablets, there is an era arriving, eventually, that is ready to surpass the entire cycle of desktop and laptops as they already have access to tablets. We can relate to this on the similar skip cycle that happened when our generation directly embraced mobile phones vis-à-vis pagers. Such is the fast pervasive pace in which our digital world is moving.
Today, dramatic evolution of technology is changing the way consumers are adopting new age 
devices at a rapid pace, thereby providing brands with the challenge to effectively tap the entire spectrum of mobile, tablet and digital platforms. Earlier till 2006 the marketing techniques were, essentially, to select few horizontal portals and do some rich media ads. Marketers found them good enough as most of the consumer traffic used to visit a particular site for all the required information to be up-to-date in news, finance, auto or entertainment. But over a period of time the consumer mindset has an eagle’s eye view to understand that the requirement now is much wider! For e.g. if consumers need information on cars they will go to vertical portals related to cars. If someone needs bank or insurance related information they would visit a webpage on finance and not a horizontal site. Hence it is very important to know where your target audiences are and then advertise accordingly. Thanks to smarter technologies like ‘Retargeting’ that not only helps extract details of users who have shown interest in your product but also lets you get details of those who haven’t bought or those who landed on your website or Brand page.
Essentially the three main platforms of digital medium are-
•Social Media- Facebook and Twitter have played a significant role in driving the overall digital spends and not having them as part of your outreach will hamper your marketing strategy in a big way. A quick comparison throws interesting facts on how time spend by marketers on making their TVC is significantly higher than a Facebook advertisement. Some of the largest brands taking notice of this fact, has ensured that the true power of social media and digital advertising is in fact effectively utilized to target the right set of consumers.
•Mobile- Today, mobile has not only replaced viewing content on the web but it has replaced camera, mp3 players and gaming device too. The power of mobile is yet to be exploited completely in India. If we analyse, the biggest of the digital and social media companies started as desktop services but over a period of time moved to the mobile medium as the consumer transforms at a much faster rate than what we assume. The world has moved to all kinds of apps, be it news, games, entertainment or social media. The below data shows Facebook usage on smartphones:
•Video- When Google bought YouTube in 2006 the entire world had a question mark on watching video content online, but the reality seen today is that consumers not only view video on desktops or laptops but even on their smart phones and tablets. In fact technology has transformed lives to the extent that consumers can now watch a 2 hours long movie online, without any buffering, due to an increasing broadband bandwidth. Hence it is very important for marketers to be present where their consumers are. But why will a user engage with the communications which he or she has seen a thousand times on the television? It is very important to have a communication which is specially created for online, as it will draw more attention from the user as they haven’t seen it anywhere else. Hence we see that viral works well on digital as we like to share something that is unique and not seen by all.
Authored by: Pritesh Patel, MD- India & Middle East- Komli Media
