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Tag: mass media

  • Crypto platforms ramp up ad spends this festive season

    Crypto platforms ramp up ad spends this festive season

    Mumbai: As the market pins its hope on the festive season for a hike in sales, the crypto exchange platforms too aren’t lagging behind in wooing users to invest in the digital asset class. In an evident change from last year when the platforms were cautious and muted in their approach, they are all set to make the most of the opportunity this year, with an increase in ad-spend across all media.

    Apart from the digital, crypto brands are also opting for mass mediums such as TV and print as they plan an advertising salvo. The fledgling industry is trying to mark a dent in the market with promotions and marketing activities involving audio-visual podcasts and even full front-page displays in leading dailies.

    One such platform, which has been investing heavily in print is CoinSwitch Kuber, which claims to have onboarded as many as 10 million users already. The brand has come out with full front-page ads in leading newspapers in the last few days. “Print is always a viable medium. While digital media enables us to target a certain set of audiences, print has the accessibility to the most basic audience group which finds credibility in the print news,” said CoinSwitch Kuber chief business officer Sharan Nair.

    The brand is also constantly connecting and engaging with local newspapers, media, and prominent ‘finfluencers’ (finance-influencers) on social media platforms to reach its target set.

    “Traditional media can make audiences search and engage with them on the website, while digital media through apps can be used to continue re-targeting the interested segment,” said Havas Media India managing partner – South Saurabh Jain, highlighting that crypto platforms need to focus on “building the top of the funnel first” to attract new retail investors since the penetration of this category is currently low. Jain recommends a 65 per cent spend on traditional media and 35 per cent on digital display plus programmatic spends in this phase, as the threshold costs associated with traditional media remains high.

    A recent study by Havas Media Group India also highlighted how print remains one of the most trusted mediums to influence brand perceptions on critical factors like quality, price, and trust, despite the short-term interrupted circulations and de-growth of newspapers during the initial wave of the Covid-19 pandemic.

    “Especially for new-age categories like crypto exchanges who are in their next phase of growth in India, it becomes even more crucial to target beyond the early adopters of this digital world by associating with traditional mediums like television and print,” added Jain. “Building trust will be key as a lot of uncertainty and risk has been associated with cryptos in the past. So, print will definitely be a viable medium to build credibility and trust.”

    CoinSwitch Kuber is also planning to reach the audiences via emerging OTT platforms. It has already been working with Amazon Prime Video, and SonyLIV, and has partnered with Disney+ Hotstar for the current edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL) which resumed on Sunday. “Considering the huge traction we witnessed after the last IPL campaign, we are looking to promote crypto assets through upcoming sports events as it perfectly captures our target group, which is – upwardly, young and tech savvy-mobile Indians,” added the CoinSwitch Kuber chief business officer.

    On the other hand, crypto trading platform Mudrex is completely targeting digital. The focus of the brand’s marketing campaigns for the coming months is primarily through influencers and creators on different platforms across the social spectrum.

    “We believe the demographics of the investors and traders in the crypto market are such that the digital medium is best able to reach the target audience,” said CEO and co-founder Edul Patel. “At Mudrex, we usually associate with influencers who have a deep interest in cryptocurrencies and believe in the idea of smart investing and trading in the crypto market.”

    Cryptocurrencies have gained traction over the past few months, and the subsequent interest from the investor sentiment, leading to rising trading volumes despite the regulatory uncertainty. As the brands try to cash in on this crypto gold rush ahead of festivals, there is also a need, however, to create more awareness and to share knowledge on the finer aspects of the virtual currency. And that is what CoinDCX is aiming at, through ‘DCX learn’ during the festive season.

    “We have always tried to find fresh ways to entice and educate new investors through our marketing efforts. One of our main objectives is to raise awareness about the cryptocurrency business and urge Indians to consider it as a viable investment option,” said CoinDCX head of brand and communication Ramalingam Subramanian.

    The brand has recently come out with a campaign #BitcoinLiyaKya, which was in line with its direction of raising investor awareness and CoinDCX plans to build on that. “We are offering coupon codes of Rs 100 worth of bitcoins to everyone who signs on the exchange for the first time to raise curiosity among prospective new users. This encourages them to learn more about crypto, and interests them to enter the space,” explained Subramaniam adding that the brand is also looking to form new brand alliances to enable the users.

    According to the crypto platforms, the interest in dealing in the new asset class is definitely increasing among Indians.

    To put it in perspective, India today ranks second in terms of crypto adoption worldwide, ahead of countries such as the US, UK, and China, according to the 2021 Global Crypto Adoption Index by blockchain data platform Chainalysis. This is chiefly led by crypto adoption in the smaller towns of India. Currently, active crypto users in the country are around 15 million with the number of blockchain startups going up to over 300 in the current year.

  • Ethos eyeing television as a part of mass media communication mix

    Ethos eyeing television as a part of mass media communication mix

    BENGALURU: Indian chain of luxury watch studios Ethos Limited (Ethos) is looking at television commercials as a part of its mass media communications mix during the next fiscal. The company is considering business news channels such as NDTV Profit as well as some niche channels. Ethos is an authorised retailer of over 65 luxury watch brands.

    The company plans to up by around 50 per cent its media spends revealed Ethos associate director Manoj Gupta to www.indiantelevision.com. “We will start in a small way, and gradually up our presence on television,” revealed Gupta.

    Industry sources peg Ethos spends between Rs 7 to 10 crore per year, this includes contributions from the major brands that it sells. At present, Ethos uses print, outdoor and in-house quarterly publication Ethos Summit, besides the digital online medium, which has seen more than three lakh unique visitors per month to its portal claims Gupta.

    So far, its media planning has been done in-house. Ethos is having discussions with a couple of media buying agencies in Mumbai and will chalk out its media buying plans’ once it picks a suitable partner. While most of its creative work is done in conjunction with the brands, a lot of the work is done by a Delhi based creative agency Scribbles.

    “The average price of a fashion watch in India would be between Rs 15,000 to 20,000, a premium watch would cost about Rs 1 to Rs 1.25 lakhs, while a luxury watch would cost Rs.7 lakh upwards,” informed Gupta.

    Ethos estimates the size of the fashion, premium and luxury watches at Rs 1500 crore and expects it to grow to Rs 4,000 crore over the next three years. The company has 41 outlets in 12 cities of India, of which about eight sell fashion watches, about seven luxury watches. It also has single brand watch stores for brands such as Rolex, Omega and Swatches.

    Ethos generated a revenue of Rs 210 crore, last year and Gupta is confident of a 25 to 30 per cent growth in revenue this fiscal.

    Gupta was in Bengaluru for the launch of a range of core and professional Rolex watches, earlier launched at Baselworld 2013, one of which costs Rs 44.68 lakh.

  • A new formula to ‘Engross’

    The biggest threat for advertisers is rapidly climbing as the rate of ‘ad avoidance’ crosses the 70 per cent threshold across all media, among both active and passive avoiders. What’s more alarming is the fact that ad avoidance is higher in rural India than in urban areas.

    As this trend is expected to go even higher, Intellect, a part of the Lintas Media Group in association with Hansa Research Group released the findings of a study titled ‘Engross, a media engagement and ad avoidance study.’

    Lintas India Pvt. Ltd director media services Lynn de Souza addressed a gathering of media planners, owners and clients, alerting them of the implications of this growing menace for the industry.

    “We have all been battling with ad avoidance for a while,” says de Souza. “What we certainly didn’t expect were such high avoidance levels, even in rural areas, and even on the internet. That is clearly a reflection of the consumer’s overall disapproval of the enormously high and growing ad clutter levels and is an issue that media owners should seriously take on board. In an attempt to reduce per unit prices they often simply increase the inventory on offer in an ad sales package, which results in high clutter, and high avoidance of the very ads they are trying to get more of!”

    What emerged as a result of the findings, de Souza said, was not that this group of ‘heavy media consumers’ disliked advertisements altogether, but instead they choose to avoid the growing clutter that they perceive to be dominating the media landscape. Encompassing all mass media including TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, outdoor and internet, her advice to fellow media experts, was that flooding the environment with an overdose of brands will ultimately lead the consumer to turn away from advertisements.

    With specific reference to television, this will pose a big ‘risk’ to the so-called burgeoning branded entertainment industry, which is just beginning to bear fruit in India. What’s more, the changing technological media environment will aid passive ad avoiders to quickly become active in doing the same.

    Spanning two months, October and November, Intellect engaged Hansa Research to update its biannual ad avoidance measures. This year the study included an understanding of how various consumer segments engage themselves with different genres of mass media, including sport, news, movies, education, fashion, serials etc.

    Besides narrowing in on an urban sample size of 1,073 respondents (SEC A, 15-40 year olds, students, housewives, working people) across Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Hyderabad, the study also captured the behaviour of the rural audiences. The Bharat Barometer (Intellect’s joint venture with ITC’s e chaupal network) was used to estimate the same measures by contacting 892 people in rural UP, Maharashtra and AP. These included 606 e chaupal Sanchalaks and 286 rural women.

    On having conceived the study, Initiative senior vice president Premjeet Sodhi said, “We are still discovering new nuggets of information each time we analyse the findings. This study is directly applicable to the media planning needs of our various clients who focus on the key youth, housewife, and working segments, and also provides us with data on the ‘upper market’ rural audiences which the industry has never had at such a detailed level earlier.”

    Focusing on two verticals within the framework of a consumer’s media interaction – content and ambient design. The former drives engagement while the latter generates avoidance which has greatly risen from last year across media. Based on the content vertical, the study highlighted the degree of engagement taking four main factors – Content, Relevance, Interactivity and Personalisation (CRIP score). Thus, Intellect has devised 305 CRIP scores across 61 genres and five target groups to be used by media planners to improve media selection.

    Speaking about the method used to administer the study, Intellect associate VP Julius Augustine says, “The most important part of the study was the development of the statements that would measure engagement across the four parameters of content, relevance, interactivity and personalization (CRIP).

    “We needed to measure engagement not just at the media but also at the genre level. Hence, part of the questionnaire was self administered, guided by the interviewer. The respondent had to place all the genres simultaneously on an engagement scale at the same time for each statement separately. Hence, if needed, the respondent could go back and change his ratings as each new medium was presented (For example, he began to compare news on TV with news in dailies) till he had rated all genres to his or her satisfaction.”

    Using the CRIP score which is synonymous with engagement, Engross concluded that the more engaging the content the lower the ad avoidance (except for magazines). More specifically, the more consumers are engaged with a particular genre, the less likely are they to avoid ads in that genre.

    Some of the findings also revealed data that would provide a ray of hope for the umpteen news channels, as news on television has emerged as more engaging than in newspapers.

    However, the biggest challenge for advertisers comes from ‘student’ consumers, as regardless of the degree of engagement with a particular genre, the level of ad avoidance remains high.

    In this day and age when media clutter is commonplace and every brand attempts to adopt newer ways to ‘break through that clutter,’ the essence of creating engaging content somehow gets displaced. All in all the core aim of seducing the consumer also gets blurred!