He stated the group now reserved nearly $850-900 million of its advertising money on search domain alone (Google in particular). For record, WPP spends close to 27 percent of its clients’ ad spends online and Sorrell revealed the figure would soon touch one-third of their total business.

According to one industry estimate, users spend nearly 9.5 hours consuming different media. Of them, television accounts for almost 34 percent of the total time spent whereas Internet takes up nearly 30 percent; the rest is spent on magazines and newspapers. Sorrell though, does not wholly subscribe to this set of numbers. He feels the total time consumed by online media is around 20 percent, whereas users in India pass 12 to 14 percent of their time on the Internet. He qualifies, however, that the numbers are increasing rapidly.

According to the president (global sales operations & business development) of Google, Nikesh Arora, online advertising will largely be driven by the need felt for ‘instant gratification to get information’. He noted during his speech at the event that users perform almost 2-3 billion searches every day. If there was roughly five exabytes (one exabyte is nearly 40,000 hr of TV program) of info five years ago, the same number is expected to have risen to 80 exabytes.

In other words, search is now a must to unravel the flood of data pouring. He predicts that almost 30 percent of all content across the globe will get digitized in the coming five to ten years. Users will then increasingly turn to the Internet for buying and communicating. This will make online advertising a far more fruitful and powerful platform than it is now.

No surprise that by 2014 online advertising is projected to grow nearly four-fold! The relevant figures in India, in spite of low penetration of the Internet (just about 40-50 million active users) are equally encouraging. This can be attributed to young audiences who are increasingly surfing on their cellphones. They are turning to sites like Twitter and Facebook for socializing.

In the context of this rapidly evolving scenario, the Internet advertising industry is set to propel itself on fast track. Currently worth Rs 7.8 billion, it’s expected to scale Rs 28.5 billion by 2014, according to KPMG and the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI). The study reveals that currently Internet advertising in India accounts for just about 3.5 percent of the advertising spends. The figure will almost double (nearly 7 per cent) by 2014, it is expected.

Around 30 percent of the advertising budgets globally are set aside for online properties. For example, Ford has shifted nearly 25 percent of its marketing spend to online media. The UK has achieved distinction of becoming the first ever country where online ad spend now exceeds that of TV. Around 6 percent of the overall online spends is spent on mobiles (largely because of the rise in mobile apps), close to 43 percent on search (essentially Google) and about 34 percent on display ads.

Now Google, Microsoft and Yahoo let them buy ads in those split milliseconds – between the fleeting moment when a user punches a site’s Web address and the fraction of time in which the page actually appears. Termed real-time bidding, the technology lets advertisers examine visitors one-by-one and accordingly bid to serve ads to them instantly.

Practically speaking, say a user has just searched for leading golf club brands on eBay (It’s testing a system from a firm AppNexus for over a year). It can essentially track the user’s activities almost in real time, thus deciding where and when to display near-personalized ads for the relevant product (golf clubs, in this case) throughout the Web.

If eBay notes that the person got a driver at some other website, it can immediately update the ad to begin showing tees, balls or perhaps a package vacation to a popular golfing destination. If a woman customer is shopping, it could modify the ad’s color or the entire presentation.

According to marketing experts, it makes sense to arrive at such key decisions as close to when the advertisements run, as possible. This helps overcome the problem with online advertising that the choice to show them something is made much in advance of when they are actually displayed to the users.

Compare real-time bidding to billboard ad. In the former, billboard space gets auctioned off literally second by second. It’s tailored to each viewer. The vice president (product management) of Google, Neal Mohan, claims: “Information can change dramatically even throughout the course of a day. The more precise you can be in terms of being able to act on it as soon as you get that information, the better it will be.”

Q What was the purpose for creating a women centric ad channel, can you highlight potential clients/market segments?

With more and more companies from various industries especially FMCG, Consumer Durables and Retail moving a chunk of their marketing efforts online, we felt a need to create a women channel with a significant set of publishers to reach out to Indian Women online.

Q Can you take us through the websites within this channel and are they bifurcated into sub-categories?

We have aggregated women centric inventory and segmented it into Eva – Fashion, Eva – Home and Eva – Health collating sites which focus on fashion, style and accessories; family, cooking, parenting and children; health, hygiene, nutrition and exercise respectively. The channel includes some of the most popular sites in India including IndusLadies, IndiaParenting, SanjeevKapoor.com and Evesindia.com among others.

Q On the strategic tie-up with About.com & its contribution to Eva as a platform?

The Eva Channel has also forged a strategic alliance with About.com for exclusive inventory on its Web site for India. About.com is a Web site focused on delivering high quality, credible content, on a broad range of topics that are personally relevant to its users. The women channel of About.com generates millions of page views per month, and receives a significant traffic from India. This would be an attractive proposition for advertisers in the FMCG, consumer goods, healthcare and other industries who are looking at targeting women consumers through the internet.

Q Any international websites on the list?

We are in talks of adding international publishers as well. However, currently we have about.com as of now

Q What type of inventory does Eva provide?

Currently the inventory largely consists of banner ads. However, we would expand this with other options including Video as and when the opportunity arises.

Q What is Eva’s reach & projected growth in the near future?

We intend to build on the existing cluster of publishers under this channel and increase the reach to 8 million by the end of June 2010.

Past research on in-stream ads has shown that up to 70% of viewers dropped a video when they faced lengthy commercials without an option to skip. This number dropped down drastically once the commercial’s length was shortened to around 15 seconds.

The new skip feature will let YouTube recognize & differentiate between commercials that go well with the users from those which are skipped most often, thereby creating a whole new module in which advertising rates will be set according to the rankings received by the ads. “The longterm vision is more of a pay-for-performance model,” said Phil Farhi, product manager at YouTube.

Going down Google’s search ad system grading route, YouTube has decided to grade ads based on data about the target audience and an insight into their reaction ‘skip quotient’ to the commercial. “We’re looking for the signals that indicate whether someone is going to skip an ad,” said Farhi. “We’ll use that as the equivalent of a click-through rate.” This new pricing model will spark new challenges for advertisers translating into better creative/concepts in ads on display.

Alliance:
The partnership between Komli Media and Singapore based Artivision is an attempt to provide revolutionary advertising solutions for online video content publishers in the Indian market. As an extended part of this alliance Neo@Ogilvy and OgilvyOne will look into setting up India’s first online video creation facility; working closely with the Komli-Artivision partnership.

Technology:
Artivision’s ‘Target-Ad’ technology will allow for intelligent placement of adverts in varied types of online video content. Target-Ad is an in-video monetization service that generates smart ad placements which can be adapted in real time to optimize a campaign for better results and viewer experience. Target-Ad uses video content analysis tools to automatically locate IAB standard ad units that will not hamper the viewer’s experience, hence engaging the user without causing a hindrance to the overall experience.

Here is an example of how it works.

Benefits:
Target-Ad has the ability to work with a publisher’s video player effortlessly by adding new inventory in every spot it finds complacent, thereby driving the campaign’s performance while taking advantage of every possible monetization opportunity which increases the publisher’s returns too.

Taking to the digital medium in a bid to create brand awareness, TATA DOCOMO devised an interesting contest that extended its talk time ideologies to the next most frequented means of communication; social networks. The Dietalk contest was a 14 day activity that encouraged participants to engage in ‘diet talk’ (updating your status with a maximum of 15 characters including spaces) on various social networks like Twitter, Orkut, Facebook, Yahoo! Messenger and Gtalk. The contest commenced on October 19th 2009 and participants stood a chance to win either an Acer E101 Winmo handset or an iPod Touch 8GB, with new winners everyday! A jury was set-up to pick 1000 random participants that engaged in ‘dietalk’ on a daily basis, of which two winners walked away with either the Acer E101 or the iPod Touch.

By engaging participants in seemingly routine tasks and adding a daily incentive to the same, the brand was able to rake up an astonishing number of participants making it a successful online campaign. Such was the outcome of the campaign that the ‘dietalk contest’ is running for the ‘Best Brand Use of Facebook’ category at the Mashable Open Web awards.

The campaign revolves around three ads directed by Zubin Driver, CEO, Cell18. These adverts aim at creating brand awareness as well as promoting communication with the specified TG as each video showcases an actor speaking with the youth.

The ‘Pepsi – What’s Your Way’ campaign urges participants to suggest a whacky yet apt response to the tricky situations each celebrity is facing. Each response captures four basic fields of user information: First/Last name, Email ID and Mobile number. The best responses are featured in a ‘Top 10 Ways!’ section and all participants are vying for the chance to win prizes such as mobile top ups, a month’s free supply of Pepsi and the grand prize which will feature four winner’s photos printed on limited edition Pepsi My Cans. The programme is valid until the 20th of December 2009. For more details on the campaign log on to http://www.youngistaan.com

Back to the present, Facebook told developers that it would implement new measures to avoid such instances from recurring. However in a statement today ‘Continued Action Against Deceptive Ads’, the social networking website has mentioned that it has banned two more platform offer and ad networks (names of which haven’t been disclosed) for repeated violations of its policies.

The announcement read:
We recognize that monitoring ads isn’t the first area of focus for an entrepreneur just getting started with social applications. That’s why ad networks that don’t play by the rules should expect to be our first point of contact in our line of enforcement. Our policies are clear. If you’re an ad network and don’t comply with them, you are doing a disservice to your customers, and you should expect your business opportunities on Facebook to cease.

In addition to legal notices that have been sent to many ad networks to mandate ongoing compliance on Facebook Platform, today we are disabling two additional offer and ad networks who have repeatedly violated our policies.

For any advertising-related enquiries, Facebook has set up a Platform Advertising Contact Form.

The all-cash deal will mark Ybrant’s entry into the APAC market. In fact Max Interactive retains its name though it would be part of the Ybrant Digital Network. Max Interactive has been a star seller of banners, search key words and emails, which Ybrant aims at tapping.

Dominic Elfer, the founder of Max Interactive, will join the new digital network in a bid to expand Ybrant’s global presence.

The deal size has not been disclosed.