While the IAMAI Digital Marketing seminar promised much with a “Wake up and smell the coffee” theme, a majority of what was said was a repetition of what we have heard before: some reasons for why the Internet in India is growing, reasons for why it isn’t, and a blame game between advertisers, media planners, agencies and publishers. Some impetus came in the morning session from Madison CMD Sam Balsara, who was more bullish on the mobile than the Internet, though he said that Indian agencies have been slow to adopt the power of the mobile. “The Internet”, he added, “competes for attention with Out Of Home (OOH) and other media. The OOH agencies have put up two screens outside the Madison office to demonstrate its effectiveness to media planners. What about the Internet agencies or publishers?”.

Outstanding Dues and Service Tax
Raj Nayak, CEO of NDTV Media mentioned that his company has outstandings of 150-365 days (via agencyfaqs...I missed half of the first session), and it must be an even bigger problem for smaller agencies. An issue raised at the gathering after the conference was of the impact of the 12 percent service tax being levied by the government on agencies, which it is felt will adversely impact the pace of growth of the Indian Internet Industry.

More after the jump

Another interesting issue was raised by Dinesh Wadhawan, MD and CEO of Times Internet who mentioned that viewership on the Internet goes down during the weekends. The overwhelming call was for advertiser education - for more workshops for traditional agencies and advertisers instead of seminars for the Industry. As Rahul Nanda of Webchutney put it: traditional agencies just don’t get it. They don’t understand the audience, the interactivity or the medium. Easily the strangest comments of the day came from Avinash Kaul, SVP (Strategic Planning and Marketing Services) for NDTV Media: during his tirade on the lack of initiative from Internet advertisers and publishers compared TV and the Internet, saying that the TV programming changes during the day while websites remain the same and hence don’t offer as much to advertisers. I do agree with the assessment that something needs to be done about increasing distribution, which channels spent a lot of money on, for TV.

On Content and Creating Passionate Users
I asked the advertisers about what they’re focusing on - are they viewing the Internet as just another channel like TV and Radio and hence allocating some perfunctory spend on it with a mass market approach, or is this about understanding their consumer and creating passionate users (a niche market approach)? Lloyd Mathias, Marketing Director of Motorola said that they view the Internet as a medium for both approaches…though I don’t think many have done the latter. Rohit Sharma, COO of Zapak also said that the Internet is about brand building, not lead generation. In a similar vein, Madhavan of HT Media asked about the cost of effective advertising, and why any advertiser would gravitate towards the medium if most content is going to be similar to 20th century mass media? No answer for the content bit, but it was said that advertiser is interested in advertising online if it is at 30 percent of the cost of advertising elsewhere, and 60 percent as effective.