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How YouTube Is Transforming the 30 sec TV Commercials.

Television being one of the costliest media, TVCs longer than 30 seconds is beyond the reach for most of the marketing companies. Also, it becomes necessary for marketers to go for more number of ads (of shorter duration) and different advertisements,  to be heard and be visible in the cluttered media environment. Not only this, due to lack of creativity, often there are no engaging stories, which actually deserve more than 30 seconds of story time.
However, this is changing. All thanks to Youtube Video Advertising Format, where advertisers can showcase commercials much longer than 30 seconds, generally called as Ad Films. Not only this, the advertisers pay only when consumers watch the ad, and ads of more than 30 seconds duration are easily skippable.
Below is compilation of some of these ads. Most of these ads, depict emotions to a great extent. As we humans, are indeed very emotional and would like to see what comes next if there is an emotional discourse. However, humor and other creative ad appeals which are engaging enough can also work wonders.
One other key difference in these ads (ad films) and television ads is that, the ad posted on digital format are often make which an objective in mind that it would go viral. Thus, the film has a storyline, which people would like others to see. The advertisers pay for the initially viewership buildup, anticipating that  through this process of video seeding  the video would be shared by the viewers later. The concept is to pay for the initial viewership and reap benefits of free viewership when they video's go viral.
Though this concept is no more new (companies started exploiting it from 2012), it is still working as there is less clutter. Not only this, some videos are directed so well or the story is so engaging that the viewers can't resist from sharing them on Facebook, Whatsapp, Twitter etc.
I am sure you will enjoy watching some of the best of such ad films posted below. If you have something to say, do leave a message in the comment box below. HAPPY VIEWING. 

Kindle Paper White- The Joy of Reading

The Emotional....Disconnect (Khud Ko Kar Buland...

Measuring Brand Performance!

While measuring how a brand or advertising is performing in the marketplace, we use a number of different terms or concept. Though they all look sound so very much alike, each one this is different and measures something different. At times, the way it is measured is also very different. These brand matrices are then compared through longitudinal  market research study to understand how the brand and advertising is performing. Its not this simple, or limited to these measures only, but definitely this can be considered as a "wide angle" bird's eye view. There are some other terms (types of brands) stated here, which may not be of direct relevance in measuring brand performance.

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I am sure you you can do a little search and understand what each of the term means and how it is different yet related to each other. In future course of time, we may explain this here as well.

Marketing Communication Basics: Promotion Mix Elements, Media Type and Medium

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Different Revenue Models for Content (Information/Platform) Providers.

Every business or even not-for-profit organizations have costs associated with activities they do. Businesses having primary focus on providing information, entertainment, or other services, such as, social networking (E.g. Facebook), blogging (Blogger), micro-blogging  (Twitter) also have huge costs. There are generally three ways in which such firms usually cover-up their costs and earn profits. The money can be raised either through advertising (selling ads), or through subscription based fee (Watssapp) or through donations (Wikipedia). Often, many businesses use more than one way to raise their top-line.   Selling ads is however the most widely used method, probably as its most acceptable to users.  How many of us would really be willing to pay even half a dollar (Rs. 30) to watch the latest song of YoYo on Youtube, not many. However, we would not mind if we are shown a 29 second ad, without an option to skip, before the song starts.

Therefore, advertising becomes the backbone of such businesses. These businesses do whatever it takes to get more and more advertisers and more advertising money from every advertiser. This often requires them to target the customer more precisely, and thus they try to enter more and more into our life. This is a very critical topic, so we will talk about it sometime later. Facebook and Google are the biggest companies in this sphere.   

Different Revenue Models for Content/Platform Providers 

WhatsApp, is one such successful* business whose founders, Brian Acton and Jan Koum have however looked down at advertising based revenue model and criticized it. Now that WhatsApp is a facebook property, we may see changes in its revenue model in future.

However, I’d like you read this wonderful note, Brian and Jan motivate you to read, while they ask you to pay $1 for WhatsApp yearly subscription.   

Why we don't sell ads

“Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need.”                                                                                        – Tyler Durden, Fight Club

Brian and I spent a combined 20 years at Yahoo!, working hard to keep the site working. And yes, working hard to sell ads, because that's what Yahoo! did. It gathered data and it served pages and it sold ads.

We watched Yahoo! get eclipsed in size and reach by Google... a more efficient and more profitable ad seller. They knew what you were searching for, so they could gather your data more efficiently and sell better ads.

These days companies know literally everything about you, your friends, your interests, and they use it all to sell ads.

When we sat down to start our own thing together three years ago we wanted to make something that wasn't just another ad clearinghouse. We wanted to spend our time building a service people wanted to use because it worked and saved them money and made their lives better in a small way. We knew that we could charge people directly if we could do all those things. We knew we could do what most people aim to do every day: avoid ads.

No one wakes up excited to see more advertising, no one goes to sleep thinking about the ads they'll see tomorrow. We know people go to sleep excited about who they chatted with that day (and disappointed about who they didn't). We want WhatsApp to be the product that keeps you awake... and that you reach for in the morning. No one jumps up from a nap and runs to see an advertisement.

Advertising isn't just the disruption of aesthetics, the insults to your intelligence and the interruption of your train of thought. At every company that sells ads, a significant portion of their engineering team spends their day tuning data mining, writing better code to collect all your personal data, upgrading the servers that hold all the data and making sure it's all being logged and collated and sliced and packaged and shipped out... And at the end of the day the result of it all is a slightly different advertising banner in your browser or on your mobile screen. Remember, when advertising is involved you the user are the product.

At WhatsApp, our engineers spend all their time fixing bugs, adding new features and ironing out all the little intricacies in our task of bringing rich, affordable, reliable messaging to every phone in the world. That's our product and that's our passion. Your data isn't even in the picture. We are simply not interested in any of it.

When people ask us why we charge for WhatsApp, we say "Have you considered the alternative?" 

The above article has been sourced from: http://blog.whatsapp.com/245/Why-we-dont-sell-ads

*I consider WhatsApp successful because its founders were able to sell this business at a whopping US$19 billion to Facebook.

Brand Identity Vs. Brand Image