Opinion: Riding the crest

It was a welcome shower of entries at this year’s CIDCA. We at Campaign India were thrilled to see more than 220 companies or agencies sending in more than 670 entries. That sent the average to over three entries per agency, showing a remarkable increase over the previous editions of CIDCA, probably the oldest awards to honour excellence in digital marketing in India.

 

When you see a bulk of the entries, a few lessons stand out.

 

Much of the work around digital is still around chasing the numbers. Getting a million views, shares or likes is no guarantee that the audience is engaged with your brand beyond those few seconds when they saw your work, or shared it. In many of these ads, as casual conversations with consumers showed, people love the idea, but forgot the brand. If digital was all about one-to-one marketing and being relevant to your set of consumers, a certain segment of digital work is already losing the plot.

 

Second, in the quest to go viral, brands come up with beautiful stories, but with little or no connection with what the brand stood for all these years. One is not sure if this bout of viral can be beneficial in the long run, or even in the short jog.

 

If a formula works, everyone wants to repeat it. Travelogues seem to be the in-thing and many brands seem to be taking a fancy for that. Celebrities make a killing with the digital medium too. So everyone from Ranveer and Deepika to Salman, Amitabh and even Rajni Kanth are in huge demand. Not sure how this proves the superiority of the digital medium to other audio-visual media. 

 

Having said that, execution does matter. If you apply the same old formula but execute it with a stroke of brilliance on digital, and you might have made a lasting mark. The awards ceremony being held tomorrow in Mumbai will shine the light on that.