Taking Indian Online Ads Industry Higher! How?

Posted by Abbas ||

March 23, 2009 ||

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Retail Industry

Indian business houses spend about 1-1.5% of the total ad budget on online media. With internet population as high as 50 million and almost 5 times that number of mobile users, the online ad spending looks relatively small.

What’s the best approach when it comes to attracting Indian businesses to advertise their business online? One has to know the Indian culture, customer behavior and advertisers mindset, etc.. to answer that question correctly.

Travel and Matrimony businesses are the ones which are contributing the most and driving the numbers up year after year. To know why other segments of the industry are not doing good its important to know why are the ones which are doing good, are doing so!

Indian corporate has become much more mobile than it was 5 years ago. Most of the big corporates have their offices in all Indian major cities which requires key employees to fly-out to different locations frequently and the easiest and fastest way of booking tickets is online.

Spending power and the dropping travel prices was another reason why the travel industry took off.

On the other hand the online matrimony solved a fundamental problem by simplifying and digitalizing the entire process. This not only made the business more accessible from any part of the country but also offered a HUGE choice of potential brides and grooms which was never possible before.

Both these business solved several problems and make their offerings more accessible.

Travel and Matrimony are just a small part of Indian business industry a huge chunk is made of the retail businesses which do not have any online presence. It’s not just about businesses but even Indian customers are not comfortable shopping online.

Given the situation of Indian market there is no online advertising product which addresses the issue. Most of the online ad solutions available are impression based or adword-like products which are more suited in countries where retail industry has huge online presence and customers like to transact online, thus advertisers see a favorable ROI in such online advertising models.

As long as an online ad product that does not justify advertisers investment with ROI in terms of sales and more cliental Indian retail industry will always lack the motivation to advertise online as the only reason for advertising will be for branding purpose.

The bottom line is the online industry in India needs to innovate and offer customized solutions to attract the offline business to advertise online and drive the online traffic to offline businesses. A product that figures out how to achieve this will be a huge success in markets like India.