Chetan Asher, CEO, Tonic Media
Social, email, mobile are all important and you can’t club all of them into one slot and expect an agency to do it along with TV and print. However, in digital, one part of the campaign feeds clearly into the next part, and if clients experiment a little they can earn great gains.
Chetan Asher is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Tonic Media, a leading interactive digital agency. Chetan has built the agency from scratch and spearheaded growth of its various divisions, expanded the client base globally and built a robust team. Chetan started out as a writer but his interest in marketing started with the thought, “I wanted the written content to reach a larger audience base”.
Before starting TonicMedia, Asher also worked at Indiatimes.com, as part of the 8888 mobile division, and worked with the Times Group brands to tap mVAS opportunities. In conversation with exchange4media’s Gopal Sathe, Asher shared his views about the future for digital marketing.
In conversation with exchange4media’s Gopal Sathe, Asher discusses the new age digital.
Financial services are a data driven sector, and for these companies, going digital was a very logical step. It’s measureable and you can consume data effectively and easily. If someone needs to apply for a financial product, what you’re buying is not a physical product, but has always been a virtual product. After all, you’re not buying the piece of paper, but rather the idea that it represents. This fueled growth early on.
Today, more sectors are able to gain benefit online, particularly through social media and blogging was very important towards this. As an advertiser I can reach out to the smallest blogs today and the content is in sync with what I’m advertising for, so instead of having to target user behavior, I go to the places where their intent is already clear.
Q. What are the possibilities presented by the rapid growth of mobile internet users?
Mobile is not a single medium, it has a lot of different aspects. There is a lot of buzz about smartphones and tablets but how many people are actually using them? The larger market is still people using low-end phones and not accessing the mobile internet. We in India still need to address these people with direct calling and SMS marketing, but it depends on the product and target group.
Going forward, we need to look at the new technology as well, but this will still vary from brand to brand. For a MakeMyTrip an app would clearly work, while for others it might require a mobile site first.
People need to start looking at mobile as another internal element and participating in the first steps there. Going forward the whole concept of mobile should go away, become the same as the internet instead of an app-centric approach. This will make campaigns device agnostic, so that everyone is able to access them.
Q. What is the role of digital independent agencies, particularly as mainline agencies start to adopt digital too?
World over, independent digital agencies have managed to do more engaging work than global agencies that don’t understand the platform. Digital is very different and ever evolving, and everyday there is something new. Today we’re talking about social and foursquare, a month later you’re talking about something else altogether.
That’s why smaller agencies can adapt better – they don’t have to follow any global dispatch. Today Facebook is the face of social but tomorrow if another platform comes, a smaller agency can make the transformation for the clients and adapt to the medium effectively. There aren’t so many permissions and processes which get in the way.
On the minus side, independents have a hard time to convince the brand to work with them. If my offline media is being handled by XYZ, why should I give my digital to a small independent agency? A lot of co-ordination and creatives must be shared, and the thoughts of the offline agency have to be followed, which is hindering the innovation in the digital space in India.
However, today digital is not just an additional thing anymore, but rather gets a lot of effective results. To engage with the medium effectively, brands need look beyond the comfort of the network agency.
Q. What is, in your view, the big problem with the way we are looking at digital today? The industry is growing at good rate and also now people are being open to invest good amount of money from their advertising budget in the digital medium. However in order to make full use of the digital space, advertisers need to move out of the CPC (Cost per Click) and CPM (Cost per Mille/Impressions) models and starts using the potential of the medium to its fullest. This is what the industry lacks at present.
Q. So is the problem that there is too much data being analyzed, but not used effectively?
The problem is not the amount of data, but rather that the different measurement formulae mean that you can’t calculate the best formula for one brand against another. The whole CPA, CPL model is hurting the social media space, because social media is more of an engagement tool, and that should be the measurement criteria. But today brands are looking at acquisitions, how many people liked their link, how many followers they have acquired. It’s a very negative approach to doing things, because clients have been demanding models like cost per fan which is not really the right measurement, it is abusing the medium by doing that. It becomes a numbers game which can be mixed around without delivering engagement and become a race for gathering users and fans and makes the medium suffer.
We’re not applying the right measurement tools to the right platforms. On the company website, you need to see the time on the page, while on a branding campaign, the impressions matter. Socially we need to see how much engagement we’re building, and even if it is with a small set of users, it can be very valuable. Instead though people are just looking at how many people are there on the page, and not whether they are becoming brand ambassadors.
Q. If the main advantage is speed and adaptability, then does a digital agency make sense either? Why not a mobile agency, and a social agency, and a mail marketing agency?
Digital is itself very large; social, email, mobile are all important and you can’t club all of them into one slot and expect an agency to do it along with TV and print. However, in digital, one part of the campaign feeds clearly into the next part, and if clients experiment a little they can earn great gains.
For McDonalds, we handled the digital aspect of their campaign. We built their website and interacted with them to try and expose them to other aspects like social media. We were able to convince them to get a full digital platform, and got them to engage with users on social media and let that feed into e-commerce as well, building a strong and comprehensive presence in the online segment.
