Key Digital Advertising Trends in India

With a look at the overall digital advertising spend and categories, let us analyze the key digital advertising trends as shared by the FICCI-KPMG India Media and Entertainment Industry Report 2015. The key trends related to top digital advertising categories are as follows:

Figure 10.15 Online Advertising Spend India (IMRB)

Source: IMRB International Estimates

1. Share of search and display advertising is dropping: As depicted in Fig. 10.15, though search and display advertising are at the top, their percentage share in the overall portfolio has continued to drop since 2012. The prime reason for this shift is attributed to the changing preferences in consumption from desktop to mobile, wherein display specially has a disadvantage. According to the report, the web-page views through laptops and desktops are declining at 13 per cent year on year, while the views on mobile and tablets are increasing at 39 per cent and 7 per cent, respectively. Also, specifically for the display segment, there has been a shift to rich media as consumers prefer formats which are visually rich and appealing.
2. Strong growth recorded in mobile advertising: According to the report, mobile advertising numbers grew by a record 260 per cent since July 2013 which is by far the fastest in the world.Figure 10.16 shows the strong growth in mobile internet penetration in India which is the main driver behind the growth in mobile advertising. Mobile-based transactions are crucial for digital start-ups since owning a mobile is becoming cheaper by the day and a mobile provides the most personalized medium along with advantages like availability of location-based data, customer usage behavior, etc.
3. In-stream video ads gaining strong impressions: With the growing popularity and acceptance of YouTube ads and in-app video ads, video advertising has grown at a hectic pace and from 2012 to 2014. It has outperformed all other online ad formats with the highest CAGR of 56 per cent. With short promotional videos in trend for both movie content and advertising, video ads are a very engaging medium not only to promote multiple product aspects as short bursts, but also to develop thought-provoking long-form video content which normally would not be screened in television (because of price and viewability factors). Figure 10.16 Mobile Internet Penetration in India (KPMG)Source: KPMG in India Analysis
4. Social media-promoted content gaining importance: With an overall spend of ₹ 495 crore in 2014, social media-promoted advertising formats like sponsored/promoted tweets and posts, text links and videos have gained prominence. Each social media platform offers a distinct advantage like LinkedIn being the best for B2B marketing, Twitter for real-time promotion, Facebook for customer engagement and promotions, etc., making social media a very important mix for advertisers.
5. Native advertising gaining prominence on mobile: Native advertisements by definition are ads which are created in a format similar to the medium itself. For example, a sponsored post in Facebook typically looks similar in styling, content, and design to general Facebook posts, thus giving such an advertisement more of a chance to be discovered by a ready potential audience. Native formats also give an opportunity to advertisers to gather specific details for a particular audience on a platform which helps deliver real-time promotions based on geo/user/device-specific knowledge which the mobile ecosystem can provide.
6. Increasing use of remarketing across platforms: Increasingly digital marketers in India are adopting remarketing as a successful way to convert prospects who have visited a firm’s website, mobile site, and applications. Remarketing essentially involves targeting prospects to convert them into leads by sharing messages related to the products and services they had accessed on the website earlier. It also helps to re-target products which prospects might have abandoned on e-commerce carts on website. This is all possible through the advancement in algorithms which are smart enough to follow a customer throughout their buyer life-cycle on multiple platforms; the retargeting abilities are provided by multiple advertising tools.
7. Programmatic and real-time buying gaining traction: The rise of algorithms is also supporting marketing ecosystem players to buy and sell advertisements in real time in a programmatic manner which not only helps reduce cost but make the whole exercise highly targeted and RoI driven in nature. Though Indian companies had not adopted programmatic in a big way earlier, its adoption is bound to become much more mainstream, given its global adoption and success.

India Digital Marketing/Advertising Tools Landscape

In the last section of this part, we would look at the overall digital marketing tools landscape in India across all key digital marketing areas.

Figure 10.17 showcases the most popularly used digital marketing tool brands in India across areas including e-mail, sms, social media, search, digital, mobile VAS marketing.

Figure 10.18 depicts the most popularly used display advertising tool brands in India.

Figure 10.19 shows the most popularly used mobile commerce tool brands in India.