Second Comment on CTR: CTR's are always important. You should be interested in knowing if site A has more CTR than site B. Engagement can be there in the banners or on the page where your banners are leading me to. I agree, CTR is not the only evaluation metric. http://brandstreet.wordpress.com/2007/02/26/vie... read this if it helps explaining my POV on CTR.

I agree to the fact the digital medium allows for greater engagement. But it does not mean it should only me used for engagement purposes only. For example, in a B2B scenario there may be a very little scope for the same. So, I think ite better to stick to brand objectives rather than touting engagement everytime someone talka about digital medium.

As a marketer, being a fan of one medium or the other does not help. Best is to remain media agnostic and see how your brand objectives can be achieved more efficiently.

Hope am making sense

[…] My top-of-the-mind views: Idea Cellular is promoting ‘Idea Rocks India’ as India’s ‘first online singing contest’, but instead of creating their own website, they have hosted the contets on an MSN microsite. Maninder points out several reasons why the brand, and the property, are being shortchanged in this execution. To, me, this is another example of how agencies and brand managers do not benefit from the digital medium in spite of spending money on…. […]

Yes, I agree with you, Indian marketers and agencies keep doing wrong things on the internet, because the numbers don’t yet add up for the right things.

The concept of 360-degree marketing hasn’t covered the internet as a medium in India, and for most brands, it’s purely because of reach (engagement is all about mindspace, and currently, TV gets you more of it than any other medium available). The critical mass that is necessary in order to do online brand-engagement exercises simply does not exist yet. So when HUL wants to spend money on brand-building, they’ll do roadshows in Indore rather than build and promote a skincare website. This will change, but not today or tomorrow.

Cheers.

Rajesh

What makes it even worse is that the people who are supposed to understand it — digital content owners, digital marketers and digital agencies — are still stuck in the reach/ frequency paradigm, probably because the numbers (in terms of billings/ commission) simply do not add up for targeted, engagement-centric campaigns.

Every time I try to do a targeted engagement-centric online/ mobile campaign, I first have to say “no” to an avalanche of “but what about reach?” silliness.

This happens so often that, sometimes, I end up wondering if I’m totally deluded in thinking that digital media must be about more than reach/ frequency.

From views to engagement to purchase is a journey that marketers in India have so far been able to avoid given that the primary vehicles of media consumption are still print/ television.

Brands that do indeed see the opportunity to begin early and ‘engage’ over ‘views’ would be rewarded, but the approach is different and very few brand managers even understand this - like someone said the other day “No one loses her/ his job because of it yet, so it doesn’t matter.”

R

[…] As I expected, the discussion quickly turned to how marketers expect too much from digital media. […]

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