Less is More: Cliché but may be true

I must tell you that I am not a digital specialist but definitely a digital enthusiast. So treat this piece like an outsider’s view or may be a well-wishing outsider’s view. This is based on my observations about ‘selling digital as a medium to the virgin advertisers’ (virgin: those who have not used digital as a medium in their media plans). I have experienced this across markets, India as well as developed markets.

So imagine a typical situation that all of you must have gone through at some point of time in your professional life. The guy (or gal) who runs the traditional media business comes to you and says my client wants to do digital (actually it’s him/her who has been pushing the client) so we need to do a digital ‘gyan’ session. And then you swim through the gazillion digital media scene presentations you have on your desktopand whip out a tailor-made deck for the virgin client.

Scene 2: the media scene presentation. The gel applying, spikey haired digital specialist walks into client’s office. He either wears cool stuff or he is very clumsily dressed. He is not comfortable in Hindi or any regional lingo. (OK! What I am saying has actually nothing much to do with the point I want to make. It is just a set up)

And then the enlightenment of the virgin client takes place. We tell him all the exciting stuff like how if FB was a nation, it would be in the list of top 5 most populated one. How social networks are overshadowing the real lives of people. How every few seconds a blog is been created, how we can laser target the audience with the medium, how the medium can help you drive business in the form of leads etc. and how it can measure things till the last T,the concept of long tail, exciting case studies from (where else) USA, the context, intent and search marketing, mobile and its immense opportunities, the latest ‘in’ thing in the form of augmented reality… the works. We have become masters in doing this job.

By the end of it the lesser mortal client is totally impressed and thrilled about the enlightenment and is ruing for the fact that he has been missing it all this while. He makes fair requests, about sharing 1. India specific case studies 2. More importantly possibly from his category itself. I have rarely seen this request been fulfilled. Nothing stops us from having readymade, single slide, few ‘Indian’ case studies across the categories.

The excited client now wants to explore the digital. Because he spends more time on facebook/ Orkut (depending upon his age), he wants to be present on FB. So while presenting we got him all excited about the effect of social media and stuff but forgot to tell him the fairly limited available options on FB.

Then he wants to talk to the young working executives from Bangalore (as we told him, we can do laser targeting with internet). Alas we have to kind of disappoint him to tell him the limited options of site that lets you do that and definitely not his favorite FB. Also where we can reach this targeted audience it will be with about 70-80% accuracy. Then as and when campaign goes online, you get a call from your client, how come I don’t see my banners? Yes of course, we forgot to tell him about the # impressions we bought and the potential SOV we will maintain.

Another classic stuff! Because we told them the power of viral by sharing some of the exceptional global cases, the client wants to make his/her ‘not so happening’ TVC into viral and you wouldn’t know where to start to explain how stupid that idea is.

Then there are complex tables and innumerable numbers that we share in the form of post buys. We get a lot of questions from the client on the same and mostly nothing comes out. The typical question that is asked by the client is: so did we do well on the campaign? What are the industry benchmarks?

So effectively what started as the most exciting thing in the life of the client ends up at a very lame note.

There is no denial to the fact that internet provides the kind of measurability that other media can’t even dream about. We can’t put internet as the same pedestal as other media as it is far more than a traditional medium that can potentially be interspersed with advertisements. However managing client’s expectations is critical and so giving away the entire potential of the media could potentially be detrimental. So may be potentially underselling the medium might help.

Remember the client has not gone through evolution process of the digital medium that the digital experts would have gone through. Also, he/she is likely to evaluate the digital medium in the context of the other traditional medium and may be its alright to do that at the initial stages of the learning curve. (note: this applies to the virgin clients only)

Instead of carrying the huge burden of the technology, interactivity, measurements, targeting, conversions etc. and trying to deliver on all fronts why can’t we start with a simple premise that digital offers reasonable (e.g. Yahoo! is the second largest English media vehicle after TOI in India) and targeted reach. May be add a CPT argument to this depending upon your other media mix. Barring TV and radio, it will be comparative and may be competitive.

Similar arguments could also be created for SEM. Though there is much more to digital than these two parameters but it potentially is a fair starting point. YouTube didn’t have so many videos overnight (a bad line instead of saying the clichés of Rome wasn’t built in a day) let the client evolve on the digital front to go to the next level. Or may be walk him/her through the process and you are likely to have a far more digital savvy client at the end of few months. What do you think?

Mr. Vidyadhar Kale is a client leader for Vodafone at Maxus Global with over 15 years of experience in multiple media markets.

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