1. ASIAN SCHOOL OF BUSINESS MANAGEMENT BHUBANESWAR TOPIC OF RESEARCH : INNOVATIVE PRACTICES IN ADVERTISMENTS SUBMITTED BY: SUMIT KUMAR SINGH PGDM/12-14/57

2. ABSTRACT: Gone were the days when advertisement was limited only to banners, newspaper ads,TV adds. Advertisement these days is not limited to only a few medium, instead it is exploring new medium for itself everyday. With the use of new technology available, companies are really using them to advertise and stand out from other companies. With the no of web users reached to 2 billion (approx.), web 2.0 is looked as the medium with most potential. Companies advertise themselves on social-networking sites, blogs, video sharing sites & web applications. We are about to see a dynamic shift in the way advertising is done. Viral advertising is one type. There are other technologies which are under testing and which are going to revolutionalize the advertisement in next decade. This is what is going to be the main focus area of this paper. INTRODUCTION: As we all know, Advertisement is the activity to attract public attention to a product or business . It can be done using various mediums .It can be print advertisement in paper , radio advertisement, video advertisement in television and many more. Advertisement and innovative practice goes hand in hand. The main purpose of advertisement is to attract the attention of the recipient .The same can not be done without innovation. Its consumers tendency to pay selective attention. People do not listen to or notice everything that they hear & see. To make an impact on the recipients mind, advertisement should have something that makes it stand out from the crowd, to get in notice of the recipient. With the use of technology available the advertisers are making it sure that their message through advertisement is noticed. LOOKING BACK: Advertisement is not a new phenomenon. It is being there since 4000 BC. But we will talk only about recent history. The main medium for advertising in the 19th century was the technology then available. Primarily it was done as posters and banners for advertising in a smaller region. For a larger coverage, advertisement in newspaper was done. Later when radio becomes common, advertisement on radio was the most innovative way to attract public attention as it was easier to say what u want to convey instead of printed advertisement. Television becomes common only in the second half of the century. Invention of television and it becoming a mode of entertainment for public, opened gates of opportunity for advertisers. They can now present themselves in a better way through video. The scope of innovation in videos made it the most sought after medium for advertisement. It was also the medium for most innovative advertisements. The end of previous century saw a drastic change in the way advertisements were done. With the usage of internet becoming common a whole new world opened for the advertisement industry. 3. CURRENT PRACTICES. Today we live in a world full of gadgets. We have a lot going all around us. We are open to various sources of media . Technology has changed a lot about how advertisements are done, how the message is conveyed. Advertisers do not follow the general conventional way to advertise, instead they use the technology around us to advertise. Some of the technology advancement that has changed the advertising industry are as follows: ADVERTISEMENT USING PRINT MEDIA: Even though a lot of other medium for advertisements have been invented, print media is still an important medium for advertising product and services. With the technology advancement in the printing devices as well as the computer processing speed, it is now easy to print adds which attracts public towards it. With the use of software such as coral draw & Photoshop, one can use his innovation and draw almost anything he imagines and can convey his information easily. So the scope of innovation in print media have increased with the advent of new technology. 4. ADVERTISING USING INTERNET: WEB BANNERS: Web banners are used on high traffic websites, where the banner is shown as soon as the page loads as a part of page. The banner could be a promotion or service being offered. Banners also have a link attached to them to the respective website which carries further details about the advertisement in the banner. 5. SEARCH ENGINE ADVERTISEMENT: Search engine advertisement is one of the most effective way to advertise .The reason behind it is that advertisement related to the string which is searched in the search engine are shown . Google's text ads, which consist of a 25 character headline, two 35 character lines of text, and a 35 character display URL which is only 130 characters in total became the new way to advertise on the web. Type a few lines on keyboard and only pay for the people who click. Pay-per-click search advertising is, relatively speaking, a cinch from a creative point of view. Almost anyone can create a Google AdWords ad. 6. WEB 2.0 ADVERTISEMENT : World wide web has become the ultimate source of information. There are around 2 billion internet users worldwide and they are growing day by day with great pace. Web 2.0 is not the conventional internet that it used to be in the previous century. Web 2.0 includes social networking sites, video sharing sites, Wikipedia, blogs, web applications. It has immense opportunity for advertisers. Web 2.0 is the place where the product is promoted by the consumers as word of mouth. Be it a social networking site such as facebook, orkut, MySpace ,video sharing site such as YouTube , bookmark services such as del.icio.us and Stumble Upon, social news distributors such as Digg and Mixx , and other social sites with user- driven content such as Twitter, FriendFeed, SezWho, Yelp, flickr . All advertisers have to do is to upload a video/print advertisement and if it is good enough, it is promoted by the users themselves. You must have seen videos and posters which initially have some funny content and their end means is to promote a company or product. A company can have its own social networking sites page. There it can promote its product, can update upcoming products, company can get feedbacks directly from the users, users can post questions and complaints about the products. In this way company can get in direct touch with customers. The best part about advertising on web 2.0 is that its free of cost or incurs a minimum cost. 7. ADVERTISEMENT USING T.V. T.V. is the most favorable medium for advertisement. Everyone spends an hour or two of his/her free time watching TV. The strongest point of advertising on TV is that there (most times) the target audience is known. Say for example a company willing to sell mens product would like to advertise in the shows which are mostly watched by men. Same applies for woman and children. Hence there the company have an advantage of directly advertising to their potential customers. With the advent of new technology both in hardware and software of computers and video cameras. The quality and innovation has increased in TV. advertisements. A television advertisement can be made using only graphics and animations instead of a video. There can be a mix of video and animation so as to attract the audience. For example: a very successfulzoo zoo campaign by Vodafone. 8. PRINT MEDIA: 1. Your advertisement is not only advertisement. There are other advertisements too and maybe your competitor also advertises in the same space. 2. Add space can be expensive. 3. You are not paying for sending the message to potential customer only but to all the people who read it. TV: 1. Limited length of exposure. Most ads are 30 seconds or less. 2. For getting in notice of enough number of viewers the add has to be repeated again and again. WEB 2.0 : 1. Web 2.0 has become oversaturated i.e. everyone is using web 2.0. these days . 2. The level of privacy decreases by Web 2.0. When we create a socialnetworking account ,out personal information becomes public which bothers a lot of people who are not comfortable with it. WHAT FUTURE HOLDS: There are a few innovation practices which are either just started or are in pipeline which are going to change the way advertisement is done. A few of them are as follows: ATTENTIVE BILLBOARDS: Attentive billboards are the billboards that are capable of more than displaying a advertisement. Attentive billboards use technologies that can predicts things such as demographics, number of people viewing it, gender of people. They use sophisticated technologies such as face tracking sensors which can detect whether the person is looking towards the billboard or not. Devices such as dubbed eyebox2 ,a camera that can monitor eye moment up to 10 meters away can be used for further enhancing the capability of billboard. It is good enough to know that whether a person is looking towards the billboard or not. It can also track severalpeople at once and determine their gaze from 4 metres away to within 15 degrees. 9. The main features that can be imbibed in attentive billboards are as follows: 1. Ability to predict the gender of the viewer using low cost camera. 2. Realtime detection 3. Support for simultaneous multiple object detection. 4. Ability to count the total no of objects. IN-GAME ADVERTISING: It refers to using computer and video games for the advertisement purpose. This process is currently followed but not on a very large scale. It is estimated to grow to $1 billion by 2014.In game advertising is mainly done to target the male 18-34 demographic who are neglecting television as they are fonder of computer and video games. In game advertisements can broadly be of two types: 1. STATIC IN-GAME ADVERTISEMENT: In case of static in-game advertisements, the advertisements were put while programming and once the programming of game is done, the advertisements cannot be changed after that. 10. 2. DYNAMIC IN-GAME ADVERTISEMENT: Instead of fixed advertisements as in static in-game advertisements, dynamic in-game advertisements can be changed remotely by the advertising agency. MOBILE ADVERTISEMENT: Mobiles will be the most effective medium for advertisement. The total no of mobile phones in world is 5,000,000,000. Advertisement using sms , mobile browser is already in existence but the coming decade is going to see a great change in advertising using mobiles as medium. As new technology such as 3g and 4g have already started in almost all parts of world, the speed at which data transmission takes place in mobile phones have changed drastically. Watching and sharing videos directly from mobile is common practice these days. As mobile users are not willing to pay for applications and games, application provider and games provider have started making them available for free and they imbibe ads within the application. This way they are able to advertise every time the user starts playing. The advertisements asks for internet connection during starting up, as soon as it is provided to the application, it downloads advertisement in real time and display it on the application screen. This kind of advertisement methods are going to be followed in the next decade. With the increase in data transfer speed, interactive advertisements consisting of rich media, animations and videos will be delivered directly to the mobile phone. Hence will be able to target larger no of people. OUT OF HOME ADVERTISEMENT: Out of home advertisement is the advertisement that reaches the customer when he is out of home. Here we will focus on digital out of home advertisement only. There have been various technological innovations in out of home advertisements which will determine how out of home advertisement will be done in the coming decade. We already have discussed about billboards. There are other ways to advertise too in out of home advertisement techniques. Some of them are as follows: 1. LCD SCREENS: The availability of inexpensive LCD screens with built-in media players has influenced companies to add interactive video messages in Point of Purchase Displays. The displays allow consumers to get additional information at the moment of decision on a product or service. Lcd screens have already started to make their presence felt. Be it fitness club, food junctions, malls we can easily see their numbers and penetration increasing day by day. 2. FOGSCREEN WALKTHROUGH SCREEN: The fog screen is produced by generating a dry foggy layer using ordinary water on which the image is projected. Hence it is possible to walk through a image which is floating in thin air, that even without getting wet. This kind of presentations attracts the public and hence are a good medium for advertisement. 11. 3. HOLOSCREENS: A holographic screen or holoscreen is a display technology that uses coated glass media for the projection surface of a video projector. When the projection of image is done on the display, the image seems to be displayed on free air as the projection surface is not visible. It is another way to catch attention of people. WEB3.0: The next big wave in web technology Web 3.0 also known as semantic web is on the horizon. Some of the key components of web 3.0 are browsing habits, browsing methods, more intelligent information and openness of the Web. The key components included in web 3.0 are as follows: 1. FROM BLOGGING TO MICROBLOGGING: A blog is a web site that is a assembly of ideas, thoughts, photos or other content which a person is willing to share. Blogs are broadly categorized in two ways: a. Personal blogs which consists of any topic including family, hobbies, sports, other activities. They are most popular in nature. b. Corporate blogs are blogs in which the main purpose is the promotion of products. 12. Blogging is important to grow your visibility and therefore enhances the marketing efforts. Although blogging will be one of the most effective marketing strategy but web 3.0 has starting making shifts in the way blogging is done. Not everyone is interested in reading the whole story these days due to lack of time availability. The smart way is to write the key points with the link of main blog in less than 200 characters. The good thing about micro blogs is that they can be updated from anywhere. One can update it via sending a text message only. Twitter is one of the best platforms for micro blogging. 2. VIRTUAL REALITYWORLDS: Virtual reality worlds are 3-D, Web-based communities that allow interaction among users and devices by way of the Internet. There are a variety of uses of virtual reality. The whole intent is to convince you and your mind that everything is real and you are actually there even though you are behind a computer. 13. The different things that can be done in a virtual environment are as follows: 1. You can arrange a meeting with a person that is far away physically. 2. If u need to visit a doctor. Go to the virtual clinic, turn on your camera and you are in business. If you need some test runs, the doctor can order the nurse to your home or send you at- home testing supplies. 3. Instead of attending rock concert,check some shows in virtual world. You can get some avatars performing live and in a few cases live feeds of real rock concert. 4. Want to buy something? Go to virtual stores,meet the salesman; select the product and the product will be shipped to your home. 5. Want sales leads? Visit one of thousands of networking locations typically labelled as networking lounges Virtual reality sites are the best place to advertise in the current changing scenario. Create virtual stores, service centres which can help in promotion of product. www.Secondlife.com is one of the best websites for this purpose. Other available options are: www.ActiveWorlds.com www.entropiauniverse.com www.There.com www.Kaneva.com www.Worlds.com 14. VIDEO ADVERTISEMENT: We can still see a craze towards videos across the world. Everything has been transferred from text and audio to video. Everyone wants to see things rather than reading and hearing them.Entertainment factor, ease of use and almost everything is availaible . Due to these reasons the video industry iis growing day by day. A major shift has taken place from physical dvd viewing to on demand viewing. People do not have time to go to DVD shops and buy DVD,insead they turn on their computer and watch something there. People can easily find videos for almost everything such as comedy, home viseos ,concerns ,other genre of videos on the internet . One can sit in front of computer and watch videos availaible on internet for hours. Due to all these reasons you tube is getting famous day by day. Also one can easily find various TV soaps, movie clips on you tube which he may have missed to watch. Also due to the expansion in the bandwidth the quality of videos have also increased, now one can easily find high definition videos on YouTube which one can directly watch. So you tube has become a very attractive option to advertise and is growing further by coming up with innovative ideas . One of the main reason why YouTube is so popular is because most of the content is user generated. So the quantity of content already available on you tube is vast. And its increasing day by day. There are various ways to advertise on YouTube but the main 2 ways are: 1.VIRAL VIDEO: Prepare a video which has some ingredient of general public interest such as comedy or any current affair and present it in a way that people like it. Once it is being uploaded, the rest would be done by people itself. If the video be good enough ,it will be a instant hit and will be recommended to see via word of mouth. 2.ADVERTISE BEFOREVIDEO: One can also prepare a small advertisement which will be shown before any hit video. This way your advertisement will be noticed by the people watching the video.