Trends'14 | Adgully talks to the 'online' people of what's in vogue in 2014
While numerous employees enjoy an extended New Year break, the rest of the world gradually sets into the new working calendar. In the next issue of our 2014 opening special, we at Adgully talk to officials from the various digital media platforms, a (relatively) new member in the media space. Even as the world goes gung ho about ‘Digital’, addressing its tremendous share in media business across categories in the year(s) gone by, we get the people in the business cite a few trends they foresee in the year ahead. We also get the new ‘go-to’ shopping hotspots – e-commerce portals to share their insights on the same. Edited excerpts below:
Mobility and access everywhere, Content and role it can play in terms of driving engagement and social platform , Data for better decision making and audience planning and finally, integrated approach to media. In terms of mobile growing and evolving in 2014, there is de-coupling of internet from PC happened this year and data on mobile / handheld devices are reaching tipping points. The key driver will be data environment in mobile like video, App, WAP and browser based access.
One of the biggest trends which will overwhelm the digital marketing industry is ‘Programmatic Advertising’. It is expected to grow manifold in the upcoming year, as more and more marketers are moving beyond traditional advertising and exploring innovative mediums like display, social, mobile, etc. to reach out to their target audience. There are various tools like ‘Real-Time Bidding’ and ‘Remarketing’ which will be leveraged to the maximum as they deliver focused advertising and allow marketers to connect with the right consumers at the right time. In digital advertising, every penny that you invest, counts. The concept of ‘Performance Advertising’ will be one of the highlights of 2014. It is a process in which, the purchaser pays only when there are measurable results. Some of the common forms of Performance Advertising are: CPM - Cost-per-Mille,CPC - Cost-per-Click and CPL - Cost-per-Lead
A major trend that one would observe in the coming year is ‘location – based advertising’ on smart devices. With the number of users of smart devices increasing rapidly, this facet of the digital space will see a 100 per cent growth year-on-year. I also consider that as the digital medium goes beyond PC’s to smart-phone and further, ‘device – wise’ or multi-screen advertising will take a new route and gain high growth. Also, as global practices in the domain are driven by content, I believe that ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ - SEO and social media would now essentially walk together. Lastly, ‘performance – based’ campaigns will be in the limelight with almost 60% of the business focusing on this.
Ashutosh Lawania, Co-Founder, Myntra.com
I believe 2014 would see mobile as a platform growing and enhancing the E-commerce business. Mobile will surely increase its reach and will be all set to grow more in coming two years. Also looking at this penetration, some more niche categories would choose E-commerce in their media mix. We can expect a lot of innovations happening in terms of technology which would enhance the business even more.
2014 will be the tipping point year of e-commerce. We will see very aggressive consumer push and branding by different players, which will help in increasing a numbers of new users by at least three times. We expect the number of online shoppers to go up to over 30 million in 2014. Better infrastructure in terms of logistics, broadband and internet ready devices will be also fuelling the demand in e-commerce. We expect that mobile commerce is going to grow rapidly and will contribute to over 35% of traffic and more than 25% of revenues. On the user experience front, we see a lot of personalization and behavioural targeting emerging in 2014.
I feel more women should continue to go online which should bode well for e-commerce. Mobile platforms (including tablets) should continue to see tremendous growth; all retailers would have to offer a seamless mobile experience and an increasing emphasis on personalized shopping experience for the customer, be it on website, email, or any other communication.
Yashish Dahiya, CEO & co-founder, Policybazaar.com
Online shopping in the coming year(s) will gain much popularity owing to the convenience it offers. The convenience of online shopping is unmatched and one key reason for shoppers being motivated into online purchases was the ability to compare brands, styles, prices, colours from the wide assortment and multiple brands at a click of a button.
Secondly, with lowered barriers of entry we will see a lot of smaller companies entering into the fray. E-commerce industry will see a change from web to mobile in 2014. Mobile commerce will become more important than web, as most of the companies have shifted to ‘m-commerce’ and rest will also follow suit in the coming year. Brands will embrace new channels and approaches to global expansion. In 2014, it will be less common for brands to take a single approach to selling their products online. Brands will also launch new stores on global marketplaces to take advantage of these marketplaces’ sizeable audiences and understanding of local consumers’ needs. Seeing the success of online shopping festivals, online retailers will need to plan for key online shopping dates in every market.
In terms of profitability of the industry and consolidation in the industry, I believe e-commerce is capital intensive due to inventory and infrastructure requirements, and therefore overall profitability can only come with some minimal scale. We need a reasonable size of internet savvy user-base for e-commerce to be successful, and that might still take some time. Globally, we have seen sizable e-commerce companies take more than five to six years to be profitable. Given the gestation period, India will see significant sized companies to be profitable in the year(s) to come. However, a few players who might succumb to consolidation will mostly be the smaller ones. Also, the transition will likely be due to too many existent players and overcrowded state of this market. To retrieve their investments, consolidation will be the only way out. However, the same will not qualify for category leaders.
In my opinion, E-commerce will bring those brands closer to the consumers which were previously inaccessible or not easily available. Secondly, the online world would open a direct channel between consumers and brands/retailers; they will provide the consumer with a world where resolution / problem solving is faster. There will also be more consolidation of business with clear leaders emerging in terms of specific categories. However, some challenges in the e-commerce segment that would need to be addressed in 2014 would be aspects like delivering the products at a given time frame, the need to have better logistics services from courier companies, better management of return and areas that cause dissatisfaction and above all, garnering more consumer confidence in shopping online especially for high ticket items.
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