As the content consumption over the digital medium surges ahead, the advertising models are going through a massive overhaul as well. In a country like India, where the number of bilingual population is pretty high advertisers must choose the language medium carefully in order to reach the target audience.
A session catering to the same was held at IAMAI’s 13th Marketing Conclave held at Mumbai yesterday. Featuring veteran industry speakers like Sony Pictures Network India EVP and head of digital Uday Sodhi, The Times of India (digital) COO Puneet Gupt, Jagran New Media CEO Sukriti Gupta, Google India Industry Director Vikas Agnihotri and DB Digital CEO Gyan Gupta was moderating the session.
Most of them shared experiences about creating numerous advertisements for the same product or services which echoes with the sentiments of people from different regions of the country. They further stressed on the language by which the ads are delivered.
According to them, the CTR (Click Through Rate) is much higher in the ads created in indic or regional languages. This would not be hard to imagine as the penetration of data or internet is no longer accessible to the urban population only. To cater to more audiences in the rural areas, advertisers must think of marketing their content through regional languages which connects it to the people. “As consumers go beyond English the marketers must adopt it too,” said Sodhi.
The same can be found in the sectors of animation and gaming as well. Animated kids content which has the highest number of consumers in the subcontinent has also shifted its focus to being more regional. While these kinds of content are still less in regional languages, the theme has certainly changed. For example, Green Gold Animation’s Chhota Bheem has become a household name for kids while the scenario used to be much different a few years back. Similarly, IPs like Motu Patlu, Mighty Raju and Shiva have been quite successful. Even video content creators like Videogyan have resorted to regional languages.
The panel also stressed on the point that reaching out to different regional audiences in their native way has a prospect of better ROI. The marketers must choose the regions carefully and further choose the dialects in order to fragment their target audience’s preference. Hence, replicating the international models would not be a wise choice when reaching out to audiences in a country like India which has numerous languages which have further dialects.
Sukriti Gupta stressed on analysing the data which is available in the consumption patterns as it would assist the advertisers in knowing the habits of the consumer. The panel also pointed out the fact that the advertisers are already aware of the growing trend of indic language promotions because they have a bilingual audience who use English and one more language. They go for English as the medium, as it is both easy and risk-free.
According to the panel, there will be a tsunami of content online soon. Heartland centric content will be the king as internal testing has shown that indic content if curated well, works better than the English ones.
The same is true for the gaming industry to some extent. A game called ‘Demonetisation – The Game’ grabbed eyeballs of the consumers right after the country scrapped old currencies. While the game may not have done well still it was definitely spoken about. Same goes with the other small mobile games like Nazara Games’ Chhota Bheem Himalayan Adventure or Playizzon’s Being Salman. Even games based on Bollywood movies do pretty well. Hungama Digital CEO Siddhartha Roy said that the game for the movie Krish has regular players even though it was released with the movie few years ago. While in that case, maybe the stars of the show whose gaming avatar brings in more audiences but the game theme being regionalised also plays an important role.
To conclude the session, the panel asked marketers to be more vigilant about how they approach their audience. American Statistical Association (ASA) data shows that increasing the availability of content in local languages could increase the internet penetration by 24 per cent. This area definitely needs more focus in the coming years. More reach translates more potential audience and hence more buyers. Yes, it might be a risk for the marketers but if successful, it will also yield a much sweeter fruit.