A whole new world of TV advertising

‘Within a very short period of time, TV will become a giant iPhone', was the words of Dean Donaldson, MediaMind's global director of media innovation, while giving a presentation on "convergence collision" in an agency's summit in 2011.

With the advent of TV advertising becoming more popular with the help of internet, advertisers are getting innumerable opportunities to showcase their product through the concept of targeted advertising. The internet is a huge database and TV provides a wide audience. When these two elements are mixed together, the advertiser becomes closer to the success of their advertising.

Companies like SureWaves, Vubites and Amagi Media Labs are the pioneers in giving Indian TV advertising a whole new world.

SureWaves is a media convergence company that is mapping, aggregating and consolidating audiences across diverse consumption markets and consumers for cable television advertising across India, through information and technology tools. 

Rajendra Khare, Executive Chairman and Managing director, SureWaves, said: "Our vision is to become the provider of the all TV properties available in the country. What we do is we provide a larger audience for large advertisers. By larger advertiser, we mean national advertiser. In simple words, we aggregate the audiences for larger advertisers."

"SureWaves is relevent from a channel perspective also because we are using technology in such a way that we reach the larger audience who are niche in nature but very large in size," Khare added.

There are other companies who are bringing a massive change in today's world of advertising on television. Bangalore based firm Amagi media Labs is one of them. They are pioneer in bringing geo-targeted advertising to the India TV media industry. They provide an opportunity to advertise on India's biggest medium viz. TV, spending a fraction of traditional media budget. They do this by helping the clients to advertise only in specific geographies on national TV, thereby completely eliminating wastage.

Amagi brings a bouquet of channels catering to different target groups needed for advertisers. Currently, Amagi's targeted TV offering is available in 100+ cities across India across genres of movies, music, lifestyle, news, sports and general entertainment (GECs). Hundreds of advertisers across India have leveraged Amagi platform for targeted advertising with over a million seconds of ads aired on Amagi.

Baskar Subramanian, Co-founder, Amagi Media Labs, said, "Targeted advertising on TV  is a huge market opportunity. This is the future of TV. In US alone, local cable spot advertising revenue exceed Rs. 30,000 crores. We believe that in India, targeted TV advertising  potential market size exceeds Rs. 2,500 crores."

Mumbai based firm, Vubites, a rival to Amagi is also working towards enabling small advertisers, some with budgets as small as Rs 1- 2 lacs a quarter to create and run their TV ads on prime time TV channels like Times Now, NDTV Good Times, UTV and Aaj Tak.

The concept that Vubites follow is that they provide these advertisers tools to create TV ads for a budget as little as Rs 10,000, a media planning tool to help them choose the channels that suit their target audience. An adveriser can choose just one city, for example Pune or multiple cities such as Pune-Bangalore.

All this is accomplished using an internet IP network that Vubites have established linking us to multiple cable head-ends in India.

Ajit Balakrishnan, chairman and chief executive officer, Rediff.com,which has the subsidiary firm, Vubites, says, " Imagine that you run a tutorial class in Bangalore and not anywhere else. The Vubites system allows you to advertise just in Bangalore and save the enormous cost that you would have had to incur on national TV."

"Many ,many businesses in India, Mobile service operators, real-estate companies, educational institutions are really local business catering to one or a few cities. Our system allows them to benefit from the magic of TV advertising at a nominal cost," he added.

Television advertising is tricky, no matter how well do one knows their brand. The major problem that advertisers face nowadays is to streamline the process of advertising and make ad buys much more effective through targeting.

However, when it comes SureWaves, The SureWaves Spot TV Network's disruptive technology is a combination of cloud-based solutions and expert customer profiling which gives advertisers the flexibility to choose target audiences based on relevant demographics and to restrict ad spend to specific regions alone.

Khare says: "Through its innovative technology capabilities, SureWaves provides real-time data monitoring of ads, which has, for the first time, made cable TV advertising accountable. The absolute control and transparency provides a great advantage for existing advertisers as well as niche brands and location-specific advertisers."

As we enter the age of digital advertising, it is imperative that advertising works more efficiently for all advertisers. Adding to this phenomenon, Subramanian added, "We believe that,at Amagi, we are harnessing the power of targeting onto television, something that exists only on Internet."

Subramanian also pointed out that this micro-targeting, combined with the reach of TV makes amagi a powerful delivery model for regional advertising. This is the Go-to option for brands across the country.

However, even if these firms claim to provide affordable targeted advertising to medium or large advertisers, there are few possibilities in which these firms can find difficulties to deliver the possible results. Experts say that most of the local advertisers do not advertise on TV as a TV advertisement would cost more. These firms need to find the local advertisers and actually try to create commercials for them at low cost. Affordability is a key factor for them.