The New New Thing

E4m today concluded this two part series (part 1 and 2) on Digital Marketing and Advertising Agencies in India. They spoke to Quasar Media, Interactive Avenues, Webchutney etc. about the industry and their opinions on the year ahead.

As a stakeholder in the industry, these are the key takeaways from the report.

• Digital would grow (Captain Obvious ;)). But at what rate? No one knows for sure. Number varies from 23% to 43% to 50% to 70%.
• Publishers and as a result, inventories are rising. Yet again obvious. But what about the quality of publishers? Would these home-grown publishers attract traffic? And what about traffic from non-frequent users? Will the job-seekers, matrimonial-alliance seekers visit these publishers?
• Advertisers are still not using digital as a medium. Everyone is skeptic of the sucess of the medium. Everyone seems to be waiting for ever elusive sucess story.
• Everyone seems to be confused about the direction that digital business will take. Everyone is speculating. Everyone is repeating what has been said by bloggers time and again. There is no thought-leadership in the industry.

All said and done, digital as a medium is still under-estimated and not really understood by the advertisers. I strongly feel that digital marketing industry needs to come together and evangelise the medium itself. More importantly, we need thought leadership from agencies. Thought leadership in terms of the direction industry would take, understanding of the medium and finally, innovation. No one wants to see the same search engine ads, flash movies etc.

BTW this article tells us that most agencies in India dont even have a proper web presence. And I am talking about agencies taking lead in the digital medium. Interesting days ahead for the medium :)

P.S.: We at Creativeland are hiring for the digital division. Please help spread word.

There exists a silent, underground network that has reached the cult status already - The Mutual Admiration Society.

The idea is fairly simple. You scratch my back and I shall do the same to you. Or in simple words, you promote me and I promote you. Lot of people join this society because they need some sort of approval on their actions and thoughts. You dont have to make sense. You dont have to create anything of value. You just have to sound good, be loud, scratch someone’s back and wait for the response.

This society manifests itself in even better manner on the Internet. Internet has made publishing fast and easy. Everyone with a computer and an Internet connection is now a publisher. Needless to say a lot of noise is added to ever diminishing signal.

Few unwritten and unspoken rules of the MAS society could be

1. Thou shalt be loud AND secretive.
2. Thou shalt not have less than 500 friends on Facebook, more than 500 connections on LinkedIn and follow more people that who follow you on twitter. (BTW you can follow ME here. :D). And yes, flaunt these everywhere.
3. Thou shalt have 2 page long signatures with links to every single word you ever wrote on the Internet.
4. Thou shall have a blog and would repost and reproduce content from other members of MAS popular bloggers. And thou shalt pimp the links on facebook, twitter, orkut, signature and every other imaginable place.
5. Thou shalt at all times adhere to these rules and make them more inclusive with time.

What other rules can MAS have? Can someone also point to few members of this underground revolution that is sweeping over the online world? Obvisouly, I shall keep you behind the anonymity veil.

P.S.: This post also marks the beginning of a new category on my blog - People Watching. Its an attempt to observe people and make interpretations. After all, the great Yogi Berra said …

You can observe a lot by just watching.

This is the first friday update of the year. And I will make sure that this gets posted on the first friday. I have missed the last two updates on some pretext or the other. This year, since blogging and personal branding is one of the focus areas, I will make sure that these regular posts get their share of attention.

Indian Politics

• Omar Abdullah is the new J&K CM (via ET). National Confrence is back in power in J&K. About 60% excercised their right to vote in an election that was being watched by everyone, especially after the recent Mumbai attacks. Scary thing however is erosion of Congress share in both votes and seats. By the look of things, we are heading for a hung assembly in 2009 when we go for general elections.

Personal

• The New Google Reader. I use Google Reader to read my share of news releases, blogs, media etc. As on last count, I track more than 350 sources. Obvisouly it was getting very difficult to manage the feeds. This week, I reorganized and retagged my reading lists. More than just increasing categories, I put things in perspective and re-aligned them according to my interest areas. If someone is keen on the OPML file, do let me know.
• Sunday meetings. Nalin and me have been thinking about this for quite some time now. We propose that we will meet up with people regularly and just talk about anything under the sun. From politics to governance to sports to policy to movies to world affairs, we would just talk and try to get more opinions. We dont know how would the group proceed and what shape would it take, we just want to meet people and experiment. Someone wants to help us get more clarity on this .. ?

This year looks promisnig. I plan to do a lot of exciting things this year (here is a small list of things that I want to do in 2009). Lets see how it turns out. Did you make any resolutions this year .. ?

May the new year brings along loads of luck and happiness your way.

Flash of insight.
People still dont use twitter as a social network to connect with their friends and talk about the party last night. They use it instead as a PR tool for their blogs, generating traffic to their blogs and ego massages.
And till the time twitter would remain in the hands of these “experts” and [...]