• Non Client based Architecture: No Download of Application necessary

Available for 3G and 2G

Available for both Packet and Circuit Switched Network

Available in Daily,Weekly and Monthly Packs

More than 120 Channels Available

BSNL subscribers can send ‘TV to 51010 to receive  more information

Given this scenario, Widgets may well prove to be a godsend. For those of you not familiar with widgets, these are nothing but HTML code GUI applications that delivers tailor made information, graphics, games, video & audio, quizzes, productivity tools and other non-static content to web pages (Orkut, Facebook, MySpace etc), desktops, and even mobile phones. The can be customized and distribute free of cost.

Widgets are a Serious Marketing Opportunity and brands can use them strategically to form direct relationships with customer. Best of all,  they are like free advertising as they  get your content/message onto peoples webpages and desktops at  just the cost of the efforts invested in design and content. Their viral nature also means that a properly executed widget can reach the massive massive number of social networking audience. Simply put, Widgets pull rather than push and that’s sweet music to a marketer’s ear.

Widgets are not for advertising brands alone. Some even argue that they are worth more to websites. For a site owner, it means leveraging the sites existing content to acquire new customers at a minimal cost while also widening the website’s reach to all corners of the web. Reducing the dependence on SEO, every widget served acts as a back link to your site.

Notwithstanding their enormous potential, there remain sceptics who feel the today’s Internet users are just too desensitized to background noise and peripheral distractions on web pages for branded widgets to register. Then there is also the possibility of widgets being used for fraudulent purposes like what happened with the Facebook ‘Secret Crush’ widget which did nothing but install adware.

No matter what, the fact remains that widgets are cheap and easy to design and if executed properly, they can turn into refrigerator magnets, ever present on your target audience’s computer screen.

Some Basic Best Practices

Ensure Utility and Usability – The first and last rule in designing a widget is ensuring that they have utilitarian value. There is no reason anyone would want them if they don’t fulfil a need or serve a purpose. Design and ease of use are equally critical.

Extend Branding, But Subtly – Discretely apply branding to widgets to highlight your brand or message. That said, be very subtle about it as it may turn off potential users.

Promote and Distribute – You must seed your widget to ensure their widest possible adoption. Promotion and distribution are absolutely vital.

Draw Traffic to Your Site – Try and draw users to a site website where in you can increase engagement. For websites owners, this means getting the user to repeatedly visit your site.

Track and Nurture – Use analytics to monitor your widget’s progress. This could also prove insightful.

A Few Examples

Cinecurry Audio Widget – Broadcasts the latest Hindi, English, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Kannada chartbusters

Cinecurry Movie Review Widget – Allows users to listen to audio reviews of the latest Hindi movie releases

The bottom-line: The best widgets contain compelling content, are easy to use, and satisfy a clearly defined and identified consumer need.

UK Consumer Media Time Spend Vs UK Advertisers Media Ad Spend

From the above representation, it is interesting to note that despite the fact that consumers in the UK spend most of their time on the Internet and their mobile phones, advertisers allocate only about 10 percent of their ad spend to the Internet. What’s more surprising is the fact that the mobile medium commands a negligible portion of the ad spend. There is little doubt in my mind that these figures are reflective of the Indian scenario, bringing us to the question, are Indian advertisers waking up to the almost limitless possibilities of the mobile marketing medium?

Considering that there are close to 300 million mobile subscribers in India, the potential and possibilities are decidedly huge. Having said that, mobile marketing has thus far been limited to a loop back mechanism for offline print or TV campaigns using short code or IVR numbers. I was therefore encouraged to see some new mobile media channels during this conference including Bluetooth based Branded Content Downloads, Advertisements along with SMS Alerts, Bulk Voice Dial Outs, Advertising on WAP Sites, Mobile Communities, Branded Mobile Applications. Nothing caught my fancy more than the concept of Ad Ring Back Tones (AD RBT) and I foresee a host of operators and solutions providers working towards making this as a feasible media.
What is the role that mobile plays in a marketing campaign?
Most marketing campaigns today focus on messaging or response capture, using loop back short codes or voice portals, rather than branding and persuasion. There are also a lot of campaigns which make use of bulk SMS push and using various opt-in SMS alerts, ad providers push the advertising messages across. A lot of the time we confuse the Mobile value-added services (VAS) revenue numbers with mobile advertising and think the industry is big. In reality, the industry is very small and is crowded by a number of tech services companies providing mobile SMS gateway services, lots of database sellers and very few true mobile media vehicles or service providers.

How does the mobile complement other media in a campaign? Can it be used as a standalone medium?
While it can indeed be used as a standalone medium, almost a 100% of the campaign today use mobile as a complimentary rather than standalone channel. The primary reason for this is its present day capability and use as a messaging device rather than a device on which people consume digital media. Once mobiles graduate to media consuming devices we will see rich media creatives and campaigns getting delivered on a stand alone basis on mobile devices. Rest assured, once mobiles graduate to media consuming devices, we will see rich media creatives and campaigns getting delivered on a stand alone basis on mobile devices.

Standalone Branding options today on mobile:

• Branded Applications/Games/Content delivered through Blue tooth, MMS or GPRS
• Voice Portals with interactive features.

Some of the new trends which may become industries in themselves are:

• Mobile Ring Back Tones (RBT’s): These are ads which will play instead of the normal ringtones. What sets them apart is the fact that operators can earn additional revenue streams from advertisers and can choose to pass on the benefits to consumers.
• Video Ring Back Tones (RBT’s): This is again an interesting concept which can be used by operators to push video advertising content to users video enabled phones. The success of this video ring back tones is ultimately dependent on bandwidth availability on the last mile.

Having spent the last 1 year in the industry, I feel there are a few things missing before mobile marketing and advertising can really shape up as a big industry,

We need to Break to walls: MSO operated WAP sites have little meaning in today’s context. The Internet and mobile browsing experience should become interchangeable and we need more aggressive internet pricing for mobile.

Make it Simple: Industry needs to keep the jargons out of it and make it simple for advertisers and marketers to understand this space. We need to agree on some basic terms, terminology, metrics and ground rules.

Develop an Eco-system: No industry can grow without its participants sharing issues, concerns, successes and failures. I have seen far too much of IP and confidential stuff in my interactions with different mobile marketing companies over the last one year.

Summing-up, I am glad there are increased efforts from various sides to bring industry people together. That said; let’s not make these opportunities mere selling opportunities, but rather forums where we share ideas and work together towards making it a multi billion dollar industry.

In addition to being engaging, interactive, measurable, portable, and possibly viral, online video ads can deliver more product information to a specific targeted audience. A Bain and Company study found that video ads generate more revenues as companies can experience a 1.39 percent to 5.83 percent increase in direct sales from video ads than display ads. Another study by Google’s digital marketing firm DoubleClick found that large sized, in-page video ads got higher click through rates compared to non-video ads. Furthermore, the study found that large in-page video ads got higher interaction rate (2.45%) than the non-video ads (1.30%). Given all this, what does the future hold for online video ads?

Downsizing their earlier projections, eMarketer puts the US online video ad spend in 2008 at $505 million and expects it to nearly quadruple by 2011, reaching $1.9 billion. eMarketer also estimates that while only 2 percent of total Internet ad spend will go to video in 2008, that share will rise to nearly 10 percent by the end of 2013. According to David Hallerman, a senior analyst at eMarketer, the online video ads will really take off after 2011 when the distinction between television and Internet video will be so blurred that advertisers will start channelizing more of their marketing budgets towards the Internet medium. Hallerman also expects advertisers to begin rewarding users for watching online video ads. These could include coupons, games, content or ways to personalize the ads.

Types of on-line Video Ads

In-Stream Video Ads –The in-stream video ads are similar to the offline T.V. ads in the sense that they appear either before, after, during or in-between streaming video content. In-stream video ads are further classified as

• Pre-Roll Ads – Ads that appear before the video starts
  

A Pre Roll ad before MSNBC’s News Video

• Post-Roll Ads – Ads that appear at the end of the video

An example of a post roll video ad on YouTube

• Mid-Roll Ads – Ads that appear in-between the video
• 

An example of a mid roll video ad

• Overlay Ads – These are ads that appear at the bottom of the screen when a video is playing. When a user clicks the ad, another video (ad) plays in the same window, overlaying the original video which is automatically paused. The user can close the ad anytime and return to the original paused video.

An Overlay Ad on YouTube

In-Banner Video Ads (Clickable and Playable Video Ads) – These are essentially video clips embedded within a banner. Ideal for targeting a large audience, in-banner video ads usually have play and pause controls and can be programmed to either autoplay or play on user input. While a lot of marketers embed T.V. spots, it is recommended that you produce material that is more targeted and interactive. In-banner videos have been known to draw more clicks than plain image and text banner ads.

We recently launched Hello campaign using this inventory and counting the response, users click more than banner images.

Another example of an In-banner Video Ad (Below)

In-Text Video Ads – These are video ads that are triggered when the user rolls his/her mouse over highlighted or double underlined words within the text of the web content. While they allow marketers the opportunity to deliver highly targeted video ads, users also benefit by receiving appropriate information on their topics or areas of interest.

Example of an In-text Video Ad

Some Best Practices for Online Video Advertising

Define the Purpose – Before starting off, it is important that you pinpoint what you want to achieve through the ad. For example, promoting brand awareness, increasing brand likeability or a particular call to action. This will then help you appropriately tailor the message and creative content.

Keep it Short – Considering the short attention spans of the online audience and the need to respect their time, it is important that you keep your video ad brief. Lending support to this is a recent study by eMarketer that found that the online video audience prefers shorter ads.

Add Authenticity – Try and make your ad look real and believable as people are somewhat tired of the packaged ads served offline.

Entertain – Make sure that your video ads are entertaining as marketing to today’s online generation is more about advertainments than andvertisements. Ads that work best are those that don’t look like ads all.

Engage – Make your ads interactive and try to get into a dialog with your audience, eliciting their feedback. Video contests and review, rating and sharing options are some very basic ways to install interactivity.

Target Precisely – The internet allows for more accurate user and media targeting and it is imperative that you make the most of it to better reach your target group. Have your ads placed next to contextually relevant content and choose the right sites based on demographics and psychographics.

After launching a Bollywood-related portal, Cinecurry.com, in January 2009, Percept Knorigin, the digital arm of Percept Holdings, has now come up with an online travel search engine, ChalBabaChal.com.

ChalBabaChal.comwill enable people to get flight details, search for hotel deals and find out the availability of train tickets. Online travel search is 3-4 per cent of the $2 billion online travel market in India.

How will ChalBabaChal.com function? After entering essential details in the domestic flight search, the search engine immediately crawls the websites of major airlines, such as Kingfisher and Jet Airways, and presents the required details.

Similarly, for the hotel search, ChalBabaChal.com crawls the websites of various online travel agencies (OTAs), such as Travelocity.co.in, Expedia.com and TravelGuru.com to retrieve details about hotels.

Percept Knorigin claims that ChalBabaChal.com is capable of searching details of about nine lakh hotels, across 20,000 destinations in 118 countries.

Although the search engine shows important details of flights, hotels and trains, but consumers cannot use the portal for online bookings. For this, they are redirected to the airline or hotel site.

On the revenue model, Viraj Malik, managing director and chief executive officer, Percept Knorigin, tells afaqs!, “In the flight search, we will earn revenue as a commission from the airline companies. In the case of hotel search, Percept Knorigin will share revenue with OTAs. Apart from revenue-sharing arrangements, ChalBabaChal.com will also be monetised by hosting ads.”

The flight search will have two revenue models. The traffic routed to the airline companies’ websites will either be monetised on the basis of volume of consumers redirected or the number of consumer acquired by the airline company.

In case of hotel search, wherein the traffic is routed from ChalBabaChal.com to an OTA to the hotel site, the revenue earned by the OTA from the hospitality for hotel room booking, will be shared with the travel search engine.

Other travel search engine players, which also function on similar models, include Ixigo.com, Sprice.com, Kayak.in and Zoomtra.com.

In 2008, Percept Knorigin earned 50 per cent of its revenue from the digital advertising services business and the rest from its ad network named AdChakra, claims Malik.

He says, “We are eyeing to earn additional revenue by creating our own online properties. Although the revenue will not be significant from our own online properties for the next two years, but the sites created by us will help the company to feed the ad inventory we will get for AdChakra.”

The company is planning to launch an auto search engine soon and an education related site as well. It will soon announce its entry into the mobile value-added services space.

Bangalore-based digital marketing agency Percept Knorigin Solutions has launched CineCurry.com, a movie portal that offers news, reviews, celebrity profiles, photos, audio and video songs, and trailers. According to the company, CineCurry.com currently covers movies made in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam languages.

CineCurry.com also offers social networking features to its users who can share their opinion on movies, celebrities and generic trends in the film industry and also network with likeminded people. Users can also upload audio and video files that they want to share with their network of friends. They can also create fan clubs and invite interested members to join them.

“Our community section allows hard core cinema enthusiasts to connect, discuss and share cine related stuff online. This enriches the user experience of our visitors compelling them to keep returning to our site,” Viraj Malik, CEO, Percept Knorigin, told AlooTechie.

CineCurry.com has partnered with companies like Zoom TV and Lehren who provide movie related content on the site. Besides, the website also has its own editorial team that writes reviews on movies.

Launched in December 2008, CineCurry.com is currently being managed by a 10-people team. “The team composition is still very technical and on the editorial side we have a very small team,” said ,” Viraj Malik.

Advertisements are the primary source of revenues for CineCurry. The company is also working with film production houses for customised online marketing solutions for their projects. “We are also looking at other monetisation avenues like merchandising, on-demand content, digital music retailing and content exploitation through mobile VAS (value added services),” informed Malik.

Percept Knorigin is promoting CineCurry.com through referrals and search engine using SEO (search engine optimisation) and SEM (search engine marketing). The company is also looking at cross-promotions with upcoming movies and events. There are also some social applications in the pipeline.

According to the company, launching a full-fledged mobile version of CineCurry and introducing digital music and movie retailing services are among the top priorities for the future.