Urja Interactive

Leave alone brands – I wonder if companies will exist as we know them today?

Ranjeet — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 06:04:29 +0000

The power to publish and be heard is THE revolution. A revolution as important as the invention of the wheel, as the development of the printing press … No more is there a divide. Everybody is equal. Irrespective of age, experience, knowledge or place, anyone and everyone can speak their mind, they can air their opinions, AND … also promote and sell their services or products to an entire world.

This capability to reach and touch masses of consumers and producers directly, are throwing up opportunities of Crowdsourcing and there are murmurs that agencies are not needed any more as all ideas will come from the crowd – free or at the very least at very low cost. Taking this aspect of Crowdsourcing further what stops the world from changing into a ‘peer to peer’ world. Where individuals make and sell services to individuals on as large or as small a scale as they choose to.

And the big question is – what is the role available to marketers, organisations, agencies or any entity that profits by ‘organising’ resources? In other words what is the value proposition. In yet other words – what is the raison d etre.

Of course there exists value propositions – we just have to find them and express them in all dimensions above and beyond 360 degrees.

Driving Revenues with email marketing

Ranjeet — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 07:09:53 +0000

Before I need a 4th social platform, I need a 4th type of relationship.

Priya — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 09:19:14 +0000

So Google’s launched a new social platform. Again. There’s a mad rush among the clued-in, fully connected, always online folk to get on this shiny new train. Again. Once on, they can quickly see and start worrying about how many, or how few ‘circles’ they’re in. I’m sure the experts are writing their very first blog posts on how to plus-size your career using Google + . So far so predictable.

But once you’ve experienced the UI and admired the slick feedback functionality and played around with those circles for a bit, you’ve got to wonder, now what? Who do you put in these circles? Because let’s face it, how many different types of relationships do you have that don’t already have their designated social network. Looking at the hundreds of suggestions that Google is helpfully offering I can’t see a single person who I ‘want’ to be connected to, who isn’t already a connection on one or another platform.

Professional contacts = LinkedIn. Friends/Family = Facebook. Interesting Strangers = Twitter.

Like parking spaces and good men, all the worthwhile connections are taken.

To successfully begin my Google Plussing, I’d have to be that person at the party who moves everyone to the other room just as they’re sitting down for a chat? I can’t be that person even if I wanted to, because nobody ever listens to me; they’d just go on chatting over my head while I keep gesturing that they should join my new ‘circle’, here. Over here!

So here’s my unscientific and unsolicited advice to creators of new social networking platforms – Before you give me another social networking platform, I need a new kind of relationship. Work on that.

Reposted from here

We build brands and we drive business. Undisputably.

Ranjeet — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 08:59:33 +0000

Thinking hard about what it is about Urja that makes us different and valuable to our clients brought me to this realisation: Our work for brands is measurably successful at driving business for brands. Also unique is that we drive consumer footfall and usage offline to achieve these results from online campaigns.

One of our early engagements was about getting consumers to change their Debit card usage habit and start using it as a shopping card. In 45 days of our campaign, we had tripled the previous month’s numbers. The branding experience was superb plus it drove consumer footfalls to offline stores. In another campaign to raise fixed deposits, we raised over Rs. 140 cr of fresh deposits through a 75 day online campaign.

Before the successes, our clients were only tentative believers. But they were believers all right We worked together to lower their risks by calculating RoI at the lowest level of return as well as at the lowest level of investment and setting up controls that allowed us to stop, start or change course at very short notice. Plus we worked on a hybrid costing model and the agency was incentivised for high performance.

We believe in our clients, we believe in consumers, we believe in Digital and we believe in miracles . We understand that the mindset of measurment and control is what marketers need to venture further into the digital space. Having run at least a thousand online campaigns, we have a number of case studies like these two and have distilled our expertise to a concentrated form. That’s what makes us succeed driving business even as we build brands in the digital space.

We all need icons.

Priya — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 11:56:03 +0000

Over the past couple of months we’ve been overhauling newsletter and catalogue design templates for one of our key clients. Newsletters are always interesting to design, since they have to be fresh and familiar month on month, both at the same time.

Icons are a great way to create familiarity and predictability of content. But, while most icons are designed to be visual cues to navigation or simplified signage, what we are trying to create here goes a little bit beyond. We’re trying to create a brand identity for a brand that doesn’t really exist as a tangible thing in the offline world (It’s a loyalty program that brings many different merchants to a single platform, but has no outlet of its own. All brand experiences are digital or through call centres.)

What these icons convey are not just directions for use, but also key brand benefits like “earning points”, “getting rewarded’. They’re creating a simplified brand voice that customers can relate to at an instinctive level.

The Changing Idea of the Big Idea

Priya — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 06:48:19 +0000

If you are in advertising you will have heard some variation on this theme at least once today: the media landscape is changing, traditional advertising is dying, print is probably already dead. (I’m not buying arguments to the contrary. When was the last time you saw a great print campaign that wasn’t a scam?)

Now here’s the flipside: The Big Idea is evolving into something that’s an exciting new beast. And like all evolution, it’s meant to adapt to the changing environment. So, now the Big Idea needs to be fitter, stronger, more relevant contextually (to be able to adapt to many different media jungles). The idea needs to be a cultural juggernaut; it needs to become a meme.

I am a true blue copywriter who still thrills at the sight of a well written headline. But when I’m getting briefed by a client, I no longer think automatically in terms of headline + visual. Where once I was trained to generate ideas that brought out the product/brand message through words and pictures, now ideas are much more intangible.

So what’s my point? There are 3:

1. I’m not so blinded by digital that I think every product must be sold through a “conversation”, but like all arguments, the digital vs traditional divide isn’t all black and white. While conversations may not happen around a detergent, no one can deny that there has been a huge change in how consumers of any media react to that media. People expect to be able to comment on, share, edit and carry with them, the media they consume. No brand can really compete in this market by taking up a mega phone and simply blaring out its message. I’d say the brand needs to tell a story that the consumer can finish in his own head. And that changes the very idea of the typical “advertising idea”. A clever headline + visual, or its film equivalent only takes the brand so far.

2. The idea’s ownership is changing. This is not to be compared with the Brand’s ownership, which is still held by the Brand Custodian (there’s a rant there, but I’ll leave it for another day). Some of the best marketing ideas in the last few months have left me wondering, who thought of that? And this makes clients nervous, they don’t know if they should invest deeply in an idea that hasn’t come through the proper thought channel. What if it doesn’t work? And what if it does? Who will scale it to cover other media?

3. The above is just one reason why, ideas are getting harder to sell. The other reason is, clients find it easy to see and react to a headline/visual or even a film storyboard. Not so easy to react to a wireframe or sometimes just a concept note. Things like brand voice don’t always come through in a concept note unless the client is also steeped in the vocabulary and dynamics of the interactive space.

Agencies that are building capabilities to ideate on their brands, completely free from media and format restrictions, are probably the agencies of the future. Because everything else can be bought – great execution (whether film or web), design, analytics, media. The Idea, on the other hand, has to be cracked.

(This post first appeared on my Posterous )

When Brand meets Digital – a love story in Google

Priya — Mon, 24 May 2010 11:45:53 +0000

This morning Google made available a wonderful new tool to create your own Video story based on searches on Google. Here’s ours…
Now go make your own

Magical experiences for brands

Ranjeet — Wed, 05 May 2010 05:03:12 +0000

The fact that water seeks its own level is a framework that helps me look at the huge increased demand from new markets and consumers for existing and new products and services and understanding the drivers of the global economic growth. Today all information is truly available easily and inexpensively to an increasingly large part of the world. Conncetivity is driving the change. The world and its knowledge is truly pervasive and accessible.

This is one of the important causes of products and services being highly commoditised and innovations more difficult to achieve. Consumers know and believe that things are equal.

Traditional tried and tested branding messages as well as the traditional ways of creating and delivering these messages no more achieve the results that marketers need in creating the differentiation.

To the consumer, branding is jaded and they have stopped aspiring as strongly. Consumers are getting used to and enjoying immersive experiences in their daily lives. Therefore Brands have no option but to follow consumers and offer immersive brand experiences.

These experiences are the crucial moments of truth. Creating and delivering them requires that marketers think more deeply about their consumer experiences and utilise very innovative application of good technology.

To create magical experiences, Interactive agencies need to fuse the creative and the technology for marketing. That’s what a good interactive agency is about: a unique combination of these capabilities under one roof.

How to be a less annoying brand on Twitter.

Priya — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 10:20:17 +0000

Now that Twitter has opened its platform for Promoted Tweets we can all expect to see ads (Twads?) in our timeline. There are people on both sides of the fence here; marketers and agencies are excited by the potential to interrupt conversations and divert attention to their products or services, while Tweeple on the other side of the fence are wondering if they’ll be wading through tons of Promoted Tweets from Café Coffee Day because they mentioned coffee.

Being used to seeing advertising messages everywhere we go, I’m sure we’ll make our peace with this too, but Twitter ads have a huge potential to be annoying as hell. Probably much more than Google or even Facebook ads, since the real estate within Twitter is so narrow.

So can brands be less annoying than they have to? A few early thoughts from a writer’s point of view:

1. A promoted tweet should probably have an incentive for a user. This need not always be a promotion, but should definitely add some value to a conversation. Adapting an ad headline to fit 140 characters will not work.

2. Go local. Geotagging can help marketers create highly relevant messaging. I’m looking forward to specials from my local bookshop.

3. Hey, dn’t talk lyk dis. Twitter is an informal space, but brands are not buddies, so please don’t talk like one. The single biggest annoyance factor of a promoted tweet will depend on its tone of voice. So whether you’re going for witty or knowledgeable or arty or foodie, get the tone right.

4. DON’T SHOUT. You are interrupting a conversation, don’t act like you own the room. Heart icons, caps and other irritants should probably only be used very creatively or not at all.

Twitter plans to show Promoted Tweets in a user’s stream depending on their interest (who they follow and what they’ve tweeted), but the RTs and clicks on the links will determine whether the Promoted Tweet is seen by many, or gets dropped. It’s also worth noticing here that users following thousands of people probably won’t be noticing a Promoted Tweet as much as those who follow fewer people. Less noise on the timeline means the brand’s message has a better chance to be heard.

So what’s a brand to do, to make the most of Twitter? How do you make your brand’s Tweets “resonate”? Your thoughts?

What happens when Brand meets Digital.

admin — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:21:39 +0000

Digital agencies often wonder why they don’t get invited to the grown-up’s table; why digital is often an afterthought, an add-on to the marketing strategy. Yet very few digital agencies offer deep, brand focused ideation. At best they will create tactical messaging, and most of their creativity is restricted to the tools and technologies of the online medium.

So what happens when smart “on brand” thinking combines with the innovative use of digital media?