Indiantelevision.com Team

(1 June 2009 9:50 pm)

MUMBAI: The days when on-and-off-air promotions could count on the audience set to “find the entertainment brand” are long past. Today, audiences are a slippery bunch, hiding in new and constantly changing places. Therefore, mOcean managing director Kevin Aratari believes that marketers need to seek out their target set through multi-platform promotions that will help them create brands leading to finally selling their product (channels).

Speaking at the Promax0BDA India conference, Aratari said, “Today viewers are provided with multiple choices of entertainment. This ranges from movies and gaming to blogs and user generated content. Thus, marketers need to take advantage of all these platforms and attack the target group to build direct relationship with the audience.”

Advertisers believe that while even today a major chunk of the marketing and promotion activities remain concentrated on television, almost 30 per cent of the ads promotions produced and created go completely avoided. And this avoidance could be either passive or active.

“Therefore, we need to accelerate multiple engagement systems that push the product beyond the television space to create a touch-and-feel factor.”

Aratari suggested that developing co-branded campaigns through on ground initiatives is an excellent measure to attract audience engagement wherein the viewers can actually interact with the “content”, leading to the channel promotion. “This not only generates loads of curiosity for the channel show, but also helps the viewer understand the channel itself,” he averred.

According to the Nielsen Company, which conducted a survey in 2008, the heaviest internet users and television viewers are one and the same wherein adults in the 35 to 54 age group were found to clock the most simultaneous internet and TV usage minutes.

“This means that the internet, supported by viral marketing, is another very cost effective medium to engage the viewer continuously. And hence can be used very effectively for brand building,” Aratari affirmed.

“Also, with the explosion of social networking today, it is definitely a supreme medium to engage the youth, who have the least attention span,” he added.

Aratari further stated that one of the very effective means to draw audience attention is by building an emotional connect with the “product buyer” which can be accomplished by building online games that reflect the essence of the show.

“Games always create an emotional connect with the players. And therefore if marketers can engage the viewer with the particular content beyond the television space through gaming (online), they are sure to help improve the audience-channel stickiness,” Aratari concluded.