IAMAI discusses road ahead for digital industry

It was time for some "introspection" as to where the digital marketing industry is headed at the fourth edition of IAMAI's conference on digital marketing. The event took place in Mumbai yesterday.

Suman Srivastava of Euro RSCG opened the session on video advertisements by commenting on the huge video tidal wave that was taking place. The biggest example of this is YouTube. " "How to" is one of the fastest growing categories online," he said. 

The issues in video advertising, according to him, include bandwidth problems and issues related to creativity. Naren Nachiappan of Jivox said that 8% of the exposed users interact with video ads according to Double Click data.

Sunil Nair of Nautanki TV pointed out that there is lethargy from the buying side of the business in a proper understanding of video advertising. "The content owners are now taking the responsibility of going to the advertisers. This will mark a paradigm shift in the way online videos will be marketed," he said.
In the session titled 'Adnetworks: What value can they possibly bring?', Anurag Gupta of DGM India highlighted the advantages of adnetworks. These include better reach, ease and cost. According to Aditya Khanna of Tyroo Media, in case of adnetworks, the demand is less than the supply. Ratish Nair of Admagnet stressed on the positives that adnetworks offers. "There is high reach among high quality environment. The other advantages include an RoI based- model, cutting edge technology and evolved targeting," he said.

"Why is mobile advertising still in its infancy?" was the question posed by Atanu Mandal of ACL Wireless in the session on 'Mobile marketing: when are we going to walk the talk?'" According to him, this was because of less behavioural and contextual data of consumers, weak targeting and lack of interactivity in mobile campaigns. Saurabh Vartikar of Mauj said that advertisers faced difficulties in understanding this medium, in segmentation and in business effect, in terms of transparency and efficiency in implementation. Yahoo! India's Vishal Maheshwari's advice was to keep it simple, to enhance the medium and to have realistic expectations.