Advertise it 'Smart'

Amagi Media Labs, a known name in the arena of Smart Advertising, is promoting city level advertising for brands in various sectors. With an idea to offer better visibility at lower budgets, Amagi plans to reach 400 million consumers by end of 2012. K A Srinavas, Co-Founder, Amagi Media Labs, in an interaction with Gunjan Piplani, discusses about their soon to be patented, Smart Advertising platform.

Gunjan Piplani (GP): How do you define Smart Advertising?

K A Srinivas (KAS): 'Smart Advertising' is about spending marketing dollars smartly - with minimum wastage. We enable our advertisers to focus their TV ad spends only in regions that they are interested - on national TV channels. Their ads will be shown only in those specific regions, and they end up spending a fraction of the national rate. For the same budget, they can now advertise a lot more on mainline TV channels by focusing on specific regions they are interested in - this is what we call as 'Smart Advertising'. For example, a regional FMCG brand in Gujarat can now advertise on a movie channel like UTV Movies or a news channel like IBN7 only focusing on Gujarat - their ads will be seen only in Gujarat and their ad rates on these channels will be a fraction of the national rate charged by the channels. Our Smart Advertising platform enables such micro-targeting on TV. 

GP: How has smart marketing and advertising revolutionised various industries?
KAS: New media has brought a lot of awareness about targeting - what we are doing is bringing targeting to the 'traditional media - especially TV'. With Smart advertising on TV, a huge number of businesses who have never been on TV have been able to advertise on premium TV channels at fairly low budgets - almost as low as a radio spot. Less than 95 per cent of our clients are first-time advertisers on TV and we have more than 700 of them! Typically, advertisers focusing on only one region will see a saving of 70-80 per cent compared to national rates on the same channel. 

GP: What are your specialised services for various brands? What modes of advertising are you working upon?
KAS: We focus on providing 'targeted TV advertising' on national TV channels - ie. regional brands can advertise only in specific regions even on pan-India national channel. Towards this, we provide everything from media consulting to TV creative services to media delivery - all focused on TV. 

GP: Who are your clients?
KAS: Our clients are regional consumer brands (SMEs) in FMCG, food & beverages, pharma, apparel brands etc. We have more than 700 clients across India who have leveraged our platform till date.

GP: How important is localised advertising? How has it been helpful for brands?
KAS: Close to 40 per cent of the advertising we carry out is local. We focus on regional brands which are interested only in specific regions and help them maximise their reach and effectiveness of their spends by targeting TV for them. 

GP: How are concepts generated? 
KAS: We closely work with our clients to generate concepts and in quite a few cases with their agencies as well.

GP: Do you plan to bring more strategic ways of making advertising more strong? Kindly elaborate.

KAS: We are looking to increase the number of choices available to our customers both in terms of TV channel options and in terms of regions available for targeting. We work with 15+ TV channels across news, movies, music, lifestyle and entertainment and reach out to more than 150 mn people across India. We expect to reach close to 400 mn people in a targeted fashion by end of this year.