Indiantelevision.com Team

(3 April 2008 8:00 pm)

GOA: How do we deconstruct the value in advertising? In other words, is there any value at all in advertising today? If yes, can it be measured or quantified?

These are some of the questions that panelists at a session called "Kaun Kitna Paani Mein – Deconstructing the value inherent in advertising" discussed and debated here and today.

As if to remain impartial, Mudra Group MD and CEO Madhukar Kamath, who moderated the session, aptly defined this debate as "a pantomime between clients and media agencies."

"Marketers and ad agencies have a common shared goal, which is to make the product or service acceptable to the consumer. However, since there is no appropriate metric, the value in advertising cannot be measured," said Gupta.

A lot of money changes hands in the chain, and if everyone accepts this money as his/her own ("this is my money"), the confusion regarding value does not occur.

According to GroupM COO South Asia Vikram Sakhuja, ad agencies are required to give the best bang for bucks, and herein lies the real value. "We're very illiterate to understand this value, which is very simple and can be defined as the RoI of the client," he says.

For Lowe India chairman and chief creative officer R Balakrishnan, agencies add value by providing solutions to clients' problems. This also involves maximizing the delivery of services.

However, he also admitted that "it is difficult, in a sense impossible, to understand the clients." Terming advertising as a "refined form of lottery, a game," he also added, "To understand the value, what is more important is how we use the money, rather than how much."

NDTV Imagine CEO Sameer Nair said, "We, broadcasters, are the vehicles to take the agencies' solutions to the consumers. Since we are in the business of providing solutions value to the consumers, our main goal is to target a large homogenous audience."

Nair also said that although media is a creative business, there is a sad communication gap between the broadcaster and the agency. To do away with this gap, he called for co-operation between media owners and creatives.