Goafest: The rise of new media

PepsiCo and Reebok-Adidas are cool and television advertising drives their sales every year in double digits. However, Scott Goodson, founder of New York-based advertising agency StrawberryFrog was approached by Microsoft to make a marketing campaign for traditionally perceived un-cool software on accountancy. Instead of using television and print media for airing advertisements, he made a campaign titled Ideawins that spoke about new business developed by local people and branded it with Microsoft's product. The Ideawins website led to 1.5 million downloads of the software in one year, which was three times their original target of sales.


In India, traditional media like television and print account for over 80% of the total advertising industry. However, advertisers in India are slowly realising the potential of digital advertising media led by the Internet and mobile.


Hemant Malik, marketing executive, ITC said, "ITC has committed just 1% of its advertising budget to the internet. With the changing relevance of new media in consumer's life I am sure this percentage would go up."
Pearl Uppal, director advertising sales, Yahoo India, said, "The Yahoo India front page reaches more people than many of the top daily newspapers in India. Yet Yahoo ads cost much less than what the space in print media costs. However, Indian advertisers haven't woken up to this phenomenon yet."
Some of the international advertisers like GM Motors have committed as high as 50% of their budget to the online media.


Goodson added, "The big change that has happened lately is that a lot of marketing dollars for the new media in the US have shifted from being part of technology budget or corporate communication budget to being a part of the marketing budget. New media has grown and is now being seen by clients as not just a technology but a strategy tool."


StrawberryFrog, which has expertise in delivering new media marketing campaigns, expects a billing of $15 mn in 2008. The digital advertising industry in the US is growing at a faster rate every year, its growth this year is 34% as compared with 27% last year.