Pranav Bhasin

They have been all over TV for the last 2 months, but if you missed them for some reason, watch them here before you read on: ibibo ad #1, ibibo ad #2

Notice something strange – its an internet company, that too a social network using a mass media platform to advertise, huh. I wonder who is running their marketing, but whatever they are doing goes completely counter to the concept ( of social networking ) that they are selling.

So whats wrong here – a couple of things:

1) Mass Media = Old Media. This is the age of sending specific, targeted messages to people who are interested in listening to them, not blasting people with messages they don’t want to hear. Imagine a joint family watching a movie and one of these ads shows up in the interval – how many of them are the real target audience?

2) Mass Media is for branding. Mass Media is used by companies that want to build brands, like HUL or P & G, who want you to remember the name of their soap so that you pick it over others in the shopping mall. Using a Mass Media approach for intent driven advertising has all signs of failure.

3) Mass Media is costly. Every time your ad runs on TV, it sets you back by a few lacs at least. For a company that is offering a free service, that can be a huge setback in the balance sheet and will make it extremely hard for them to become profitable. Yes, they may get some users, but how long can they sustain by pooling in money from their other businesses.

4) To top it all, the concept of social gaming has been copied from facebook, which is not only going strong globally, but also making inroads into the Indian market. Plus, they have an extremely viral strategy going for them which means that everyone that is on ibibo is probably also on facebook. Which of them is going to stick – the answer seems obvious.

5) Finally, you need to scream when your product doesn’t speak for itself. I haven’t used ibibo games, but my guess is that they don’t have a good product out there which is why they need to burn so much money in marketing to get noticed. Good products, especially the ones that are social, spread quickly through word of mouth ( or mouse ).

What they should do? Here is my advice:

1) Come up with a unique product concept, think about something that has a local zing to it, something that facebook is not going to do. So when you copy farmville, you have direct competition from facebook, but if you choose to do something around IPL for instance, that is something that the nation is already crazy about and can ensure visibility for the product from the word go.

2) Stop burning money in Mass Media for God’s sake. That is for companies that sell soap, not for internet social networks. Instead, spend more time planning an internet strategy that would spread the word – a bit of adwords, a bit of SEO and lots of social media could be the perfect mix.

3) Most importantly, focus on building virality inside the service itself. This is an intensive process and requires depth in product management to pull off. But if you have the money, why not get some good guys who can figure it out and turn the service into one where every new user brings in 10 of his/her friends rather than wasting that money in Mass Media.

4) Specifically regarding social gaming, a neat thing to do would be to have a strategy that lets other sites embed games inside them. That opens up avenues for partnership and several distribution channels which will spread the word far and wide with very little cost.

What is your opinion about their strategy? Any solutions you would like to propose?

One thing I have always marveled at is the ability of watch companies to market their products. Imagine the odds in front of them:

1) The product was invented in 1800s and has reached a stage beyond innovation ( except for the ones in James Bond movies ) – can’t sell watches based on differentiators anymore.

2) Everyone already owns at least one watch – market is already saturated.

3)  New breed of devices and cellphones make it redundant – who needs a watch when you have a cellphone and are on twitter 24×7.

How much harder can it get? And yet they manage to sell watches by the dozen.

But how? Well, look at the rolex ad on the left for instance. It talks about piano, seduction, soul and what not – none of these have anything to do with a watch. But all of these are words that have been carefully chosen to connect with prospective buyer of this watch.

As I looked at a few more of these ads, one mistake that we internet marketers do often became very clear. As internet marketers, we are often too focussed on selling our product by highlighting how the features our product offers are better than the competition. While this approach works for some companies that grab the attention of sufficient early adopters, most other companies struggle and keep adding on feature after feature in hope of selling their wares.

Its time internet marketers start looking at customers and thinking about what would grab their attention about your product. This will not only make them better marketers, but may also give some brilliant insights about the target segment that would have otherwise been elusive.

Last week, we launched a couple of new features related to photo discovery on lifeblob and I decided to run a campaign on facebook to drive some traffic and see how people are responding to the new stuff.

Today, I looked at the reports and I was shocked to see the rampant click-fraud going on in facebook. And based on what I hear from others who have run similar campaigns, facebook seems to be least bothered about putting any checks on it.

Here is a report from the facebook dashboard for the campaign between 6th Nov to 14th Nov. As you can see, the total number of clicks that we got charged for are 4469.

However, my google analytics dashboard for the same campaign only accounts for 2372 visits from this campaign. Where did the rest of them go? And it is not an abberation on one of the days – the graph below will tell you that actual visits are consistently off by almost 50%.

Have you noticed similar abberations in facebook ads? Leave a note in the comments and lets come together and get facebook to do something about this.

Also, pass this link around so that if any of your friends are running campaigns on facebook, they also become aware that facebook is charging them double for what they offer.

Most startups underestimate the power of business cards as a marketing tool.

The death of the traditional business card is the writing on the wall. With linkedin, twitter and other social media tools making networking so painless, who needs a business card anymore. Plus we all have phones with a few GB of memory that carry our contacts and music all in one device. Die business cards, die and save us some trees – that is how I thought till a few days back.

This was until I was looking to contact an aquaintance that I had met in a previous networking meet. I was sure I had saved her contact details in my mobile, but I just couldn’t remember well enough to locate her. Thats when I remembered her “very visually distinct” business card that she had given me and it took me no more than 10 minutes to surf through heaps of business cards I had collected over time to get the details.

And then it stuck me hard – there is something about a business card that does not exist in the electronic media. Its the visual cue, the colors, the distinctiveness, the style, things that get into the subconscious of human mind and make it memorable. A neat business card with an attractive graphic is an amazing tool to get people to remember you. Plus, people never really throw away business cards, so there is always a chance they will be able to find you when they need you. Spend a few more bucks to get a double sided business card and you have enough space to give people a message that you want them to remember about your company – a perfect branding tool.

With the NASSCOM conclave starting in Bangalore tomorrow, I got around today to designing business cards for my company in a way that they strongly advertise our photo discovery service – http://www.lifeblob.com with a memorable message around it. Do you think I did a good job – let me know?