Category: Brand

  • One for the elephant

    आप ट्यूब says Google Translator when I asked for a translation to celebrate the launch of You Tube in India. This will give you the details including the content partners that has the likes of NDTV, Zoom, UTVi, Bindass etc. I’d written earlier about the other video sharing sites. This launch should be a huge blow to all of them unless they can really do some differentiation.
    All this attention for India had already made me feel very globally wanted 🙂 and then I read this in the morning about Yahoo India launching a different kind of search – Glue. What is different? Lets try an example – Aamir Khan. Unlike say, a Google/Yahoo search which gives you links, and you can make it images or videos or blogs etc at a button click, what the new Yahoo Search does is give you not just the links, but also quick facts, videos, images, (boring?) Yahoo Answers , LastFM top tracks ( :p you didn’t expect those ). Interesting, don’t you think, even though it would be significant only for celeb entities and not for people like moi? Of course, Live Search does give some images, but this goes beyond that. And for now, i think, it happens only in India, and so we’re no longer glueless in search (okay, i shall refrain) 🙂
    I had this sense of deja vu, which i thought was because of a blog platform experiences of a similar nature, but I was wrong. A bit of search in my Favourites pointed me to this. Not surprisingly, from yahoo themselves, and a while back. Okay, this one doesn’t throw up Radio (Yahoo Music? for international version), but hey, its got Wiki, and you can customise your search. Take it for a spin and see if you can discover more.
    I have a suggestion, considering that you’re looking at search, and the world is going social, how about including one of my fave Yahoo acquisitions del.icio.us also in this new search page? Think about it, if i have searched for some stuff on our currently used example Aamir Khan, and if i found it interesting, I’d have bookmarked it. Of course, while privacy settings do exist, a lot of this kind of content would be public. Which means that the search might also throw up (through the del.icio.us links) some interesting but not so well known links about Aamir. In addition, Yahoo also gets some mileage for Del.icio.us.
    But meanwhile, sigh, all this for the 9% broadband penetration. The elephant had better get a move on, if all this interest is to be sustained.
    until next time, a search engine for soulsearching 😉

  • Bubble 2.0

    This could be called a misleading title, since it doesn’t have anything to do with the doomsday messages for web2.0, but working in a tabloid sometimes has its effects.

    I’d written earlier on how a few of yesteryear brands were staging a comeback of sorts. Cinthol was one of them, and I’d written how the website just wasn’t happening. Well, according to this, they’ve just done a revamp.

    I’m not going to get into the review of the site, this captures it well, though a bit harshly 🙂 , since i thought the execution by Interactive Avenues was decent, if not great. To begin with, lets take a look at the rationale – “Godrej wanted us to create a platform where the youth could find out about Cinthol’s brand values and which they would find entertaining enough to continue their interaction with the brand. In simple words, ‘take the real life freshness and energetic Cinthol experience online’.”

    While I agree that the digital medium is definitely worth every praise it gets, and the youth does connect to it in a major way, does it mean that every brand, irrespective of its category, mode of distribution, value proposition to the user etc jump onto it, without a real clue on the tangible gains that can be derived?

    Back to Cithol, this is only Phase 1, according to the article, tie ups with Yahoo, rediff, Zapak etc will generate site traffic. No social media for now. Phew! Assume (for now) that they have content in place, how much of an impact does a communication of brand ethos online and a few games have on really buying the soap/deo offline? I’m really not convinced about ‘Dude, that flash game was cool, let’s buy the soap’. Unless the idea is to start a dhobi ghaat, there is a limit to what community building can be expected to achieve.

    Meanwhile, there’s another bubbly player, according to this article. Even though the article says that the site design is not exactly excellent, at least in the case of Surf Excel there is a possibility of finding a tangible connect between stain removing methods online and buying the product offline. But they seem to have gone to the other extreme by forcing users to give addresses, and thereby standing a good chance of er, staining the relationship.

    I personally think that brands have to take a long look at their objectives before they ride the bandwagon.

    until next time, daily soap

  • Printing Concerns

    This post suggests that its not not just Jaipur and Goa that’s going to have changing times, the Gulf too might have TOI spewing out the intricacies of their version of Page 3. Considering the ever growing number of my brethren there, maybe they should consider a Malayalam edition? 😉

    Meanwhile, The Economist has an article on the newspaper scene in the US, where a lot of the old mastheads might soon be out of circulation, while web only entities like the Huffington Post are flourishing. Thankfully, Bush hasn’t blamed India for the decline, yet. The article also goes on to say that while the majority of players are suffering there are some who are bucking this trend. But there’s no arguing that the web, which is seen as a major contributor to the decline, is here to stay.

    Meanwhile, they have another article, which talks about the print industry in india, for which PwC predicts a rosy future, thanks to rising literacy levels. But we have to keep in mind (as the article says) that it is an industry that survives on ad rates as opposed to circulation and pricing, and the IRS figures anyway show at best a single digit growth, if at all there is a growth. Also, English dailies are more of an urban phenomenon, it is unlikely that future growth will come from rural areas, because the audience may not be monetisable, and the vernacular dailies would be taking a large share of the advertising pie already. Which only leaves the urban areas, where the medium itself would face stiff competition in future from Television, radio and the internet, especially since the last one provides much better measurement metrics.

    So I, for one, would like to know the details of PwC’s study that claim that the print media in India will rise from 149 billion rupees ($3.6 billion) in 2007 to 281 billion rupees in 2012. I am also not sure why a scenario like the US would not be replicated, at least in urban India. For those who say that the broadband penetration in India is a pipe dream, we must not forget the other medium called mobile, thats growing at a blistering pace.

    until next time, stop press?

  • Rediffined

    Just noticed the rediff homepage has had a small makeover. The Get Ahead section which used to be at the bottom of the top set of tabs, has now been promoted to one of the tabs. And the entire bottom space has been taken over by  iShare. And if I’m not mistaken , Q & A, Rediff’s version of Answers, has also been promoted.

    The other thing i noticed is a ‘Compare Mobiles’ at the very top. But that did not impress me much because while it wasn’t just limited to mobiles, and included DVD players, microwaves and a host of other things including gaming consoles and automobiles, the interface is not as good as say, Compare India.

    Meanwhile, had written earlier about how I thought Rediff was getting increasingly active in the video sharing segment. The change above also points to the same pattern, and the overall attention to user generated content. This assumes greater significance if you consider this story, which predicts a You Tube-India launch a couple of days from now. With rediff’s equity and reach in the Indian market, and You Tube’s cutting edge tech, this will be an interesting locking of horns, especially since YouTube is quite popular in India already.

    And talk about coincidence, the banner that was playing at rediff when i was checking it out happen to be from an entity called MyPopkorn. According to their ‘About Us’ section, thay have professional content from television, movies etc and in genres like news, romance, comedy etc. Where do they fit in this new ecosystem of video sharing?

    until next time,  web killed the video star? 😉

  • Citi Zen

    There are a couple of Citibank ads that started appearing late last year. I haven’t been able to find it anywhere on the net, finally got one of the storyboards here.

    This one shows a ‘home’ scenario where a woman complains to her husband about how his brother (Amar) has brought his financial planner to meet their father. The husband is very happy that his brother has become responsible, but the wife feels that the brother is eyeing their business. Later, the father says that since Amar has become smart in finance, and should handle their new factory. While the brother is happy with it, his wife is shown fuming.

    There’s another office scenario where a junior is shown to become smarter and is offered a new project, while a colleague warns his senior that he is trying to leap over him. The ads are only meant to convey that after using Citibank’s services, a person becomes smarter in his finance. I’ve seen a few comments on the net which don’t appreciate the execution/storyline of the ads, but i have a different view of it.

    Set in the context of a corporate/domestic life that has an abundance of back biting and ‘success at any cost’ mantras, and product and brand communication that has no qualms about accepting it that way and portraying it too, it shows a person who’s confident enough about his own skills to not feel threatened and is magnanimous enough to be happy about another person’s growth. To me, that’s a value statement in itself, and a refreshing one at that. I really don’ t know if it is by design, even if it is not, I (also) read it that way.

    until next time, efficacity

    Meanwhile, the cola wars are back, its Youngistan vs Thums up. Catch the video here (courtesy this)