Indiantelevision.com Team

(29 May 2008 4:30 pm)

MUMBAI: With an incremental rise in the "advertising clutter", the only prime way to beat ad avoidance is to integrate advertising with content, said Lintas Media Group chairman and CEO Lynn de Souza.

Speaking at the Promax/BDA India 2008 conference here today, Souza said: "There is only one objective that all advertisers want to attain…grab the consumer attention. Hence, the media space keeps getting bombarded with new ads every single day. However, advertisers need to understand that it's not them who decide what the consumers need to watch but the consumers themselves."

Advertisers believe almost 30 per cent of the ads that they produce or create go completely avoided, and the avoidance could be either passive or active.

"If the viewer switches to some other channel when a particular commercial pops on to the screen, it means the viewer is actively avoiding the ad. Again, when the viewer gets indulged in some other activity while the commercial is still running on screen, it means he is passively avoiding the ad."

de Souza believes that the answer to getting in touch with the right audience set and beating ad avoidance at the same time lies with content integration.

Since it's the content that attracts the "interested" eyeballs, integrating with the right medium brings in more interactivity thereby creating more "sense of relevance" for the audience.

To explain her statement further, Lynn cited the example of Idea cellular.

"Idea did not have a big budget but it had to fight with huge giants like Airtel and Vodafone. Thus, to reach out to the targeted audience quick and fast, we integrated the advertising procedure for Idea with the content of all the serials from the K-series. This means, whenever any of the characters in the serial made a call to some other character of that serial on his or her mobile, the ring tone that would buzz would be that of Idea's. For example, suppose if Tulsi of
kabhi Saans Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi made a call to Ganga, the ring tone that would play on Ganga's mobile would be that of Idea's caller tune."

Lynn stated that post the application of this strategy alone, the "brand identification" of Idea cellular had "become 6.6 times more."

On an average each viewer in India confronts at least 300 ads per week, confirmed Lynn. "Thus today integration has become an absolute necessity for advertisers if they do not want to lose the effectiveness of their ads."

Lynn finally ended her session stating that as per advertising
research experts, today ad avoidance in India has crossed the 70 per cent mark. Hence to engage the consumers back, advertisers need to engage them using the CRIP score, where CRIP stands for Content, Relevance, Integration and Personalisation.