By Mukta Malhotra

Media planning is fast becoming a tight ropewalk. With technology changing so fast, media planners and media-buyers are finding a plethora of delivery channels at their doorsteps. And it has become all the more challenging to balance these media options and work out a winning media combination for clients. There are now 100-odd channels to advertise in and online advertising is throwing open a cornucopia of advertising options. So, it is time media planners redefined media planning concepts such as reach and viewership.

Exploiting opportunities
One potential medium that is proving to be a challenge to media planners is Internet. For, the Net is more complex as a medium. The Net could be described as a medium that can offer as much as five lakh channels. That means the Net is going to be a problem of plenty for the media planners in the new age.

The very nature of highly measurable and quantifiable advertisements on the Net calls for specialised media planning skills. And quite a few media observers feel that the role of a media planner in the context of online advertising agencies will be confined to deciding the target audience and devising the know-how for exploiting opportunities in advertising on the Net. And media planners have already begun grappling with emerging media such as interactives and adnetworks, whose numbers are growing by the day.

Lucrative business
What are these adnetworks all about? They provide measurability, enable media planners to track and monitor effectiveness of advertisements and help them chalk out and change advertising strategies. Essentially, an adnetwork offers a whole gamut of services for web-publishers, website owners and web advertisers. Adnetworks offer advertisers a host of services which include media planning, advertisement targeting, advertisement tracking and reporting.

These adnetworks tie-up with service and content-providers and offer media planning solutions to advertising clients. Sure, it is a lucrative business to be in and right now there are at least six adnetworks in India. How lucrative is their business? Margins of adnetworks hover over 40 per cent. As the concept is yet to catch on, some of these adnetworks end-up settling for lower margins, something between 20 and 40 per cent.

Elsewhere in the world, margins of adnetworks are higher, they even go up to 50 per cent. No doubt, adnetworks are attracting talents. A measure of lucrativeness is the number of clients these adnetworks are getting every month.

With Internet research being crucial for adnetworks, many of them have either tied up with marketing agencies or have opened their own research departments. For instance, Media Turf plans to open a research and marketing division, while Intercept has tied-up with market researcher MODE.

Emerging interactives
Interactives too pose a challenge for media planners. In India, these interactives started with the splurge in advertising in dot-coms and now they are graduating to providing end-to-end solutions which include writing, creating and designing websites. It is here that O&M is aiming to become a full-fledged virtual agency.

Media planners find their job daunting with the number of those advertising agencies opening their own interactive divisions increasing. Cyber Leo, an interactive division of Chaitra Leo Burnett, is offering online advertising consultancy, web branding, web designing and offline advertising strategies. Says Kinzal Medh, vice president of the Mumbai-based FCB Ulka: "Depending on how our business evolves, we might turn our interactive division into a separate company." Today, nearly all top agencies have their own interactive divisions.

Why are interactives becoming popular? Margins in the interactive business are high and they could be anywhere between 30 and 50 per cent.

Other challenges that are unfolding before media planners are the new advertising options such as WAP-enabled devices and interactive television. The real challenge is to make adnetworks diversify in a bid to deliver targeted advertisements on WAP phones and interactive television.

WAP opportunities
It is here that media planners need to understand what wireless application protocol (WAP) is all about. WAP is an advanced intelligent messaging service for digital mobile phones and other mobile terminals. This is a new advertising opportunity and opens up the frontiers of m-advertising.

The logic: if m-commerce will have to happen, then m-advertising will also have to happen. Since wireless content will be appearing on WAP phones, there would be a revenue model which would include paid m-commerce mobile device sales transactions, sharing of revenues with the owners of wireless networks, paid vertical content and advertising revenues.

Truly, mobile advertising is making the job of media planners both challenging and interesting. For, m-advertising is expected to complement Internet and interactive television advertising. M-advertising will enable advertisers to create tailor-made campaigns targeting users depending on their locations and needs. In short, m-advertising will bring about the concept of location-based advertising. The idea behind location-based advertising is to reach out to a customer at such a time when he is more likely to buy.

However, there are critics who say that locating a person may not be a necessary indicator of his mood to purchase. And there are others who are raising the bogey of intrusion into the privacy of individuals.

The question before media planners is how fast these m-advertising alternatives will pick up. This will depend on how soon WAP-enabled phones will hit critical mass. For attaining critical mass, WAP-enabled phones need to go a step further. Now, it is only text that is allowed on the screen and most advertisements tend to look like diminished versions of the Internet. And speed of access and the type of screen are other important factors that will determine how soon WAP-phones will attain critical mass. Says B Venkataramanan, group media manager of Hindustan Lever: "For the kind of products we have, we would like to have a screen that is able to give colour pictures and promotion lines along with the text."

Media planners need to understand well whether there will be a major shift in the mind-set of mobile phone-users and how long would it take for the users to get used to it. According to industry observers, it could take another one and a half years for advertising on WAP phones to catch on.

It is necessary that media planners realise that advertising on WAP phones will be driven by the initiatives taken by wireless content publishers such as dot-coms and telephone networks such as Orange to make m-advertising attractive.

What are the economics of all these new media? Incremental cost of general packet radio service (GPRS) will be lower. This GPRS technology is already in India and BPL is working towards it. On the other hand, the function of WAP phones is limited as far as digital messages are concerned. For, they do not allow video displays.

The ITV opportunity
Interactive television (ITV) is another medium that will keep the media planners splitting their hairs. Thanks to the convergence of television and information-computer technologies, ITV has become possible. What is this medium all about? An user will be able to toggle between the ITV and Internet content. Users can interact with the television by chatting, playing games and exchanging instant messages. Viewers will be able to instantly link from television programming and advertising to related content on the web. ITV will not only enable searching the web on the same screen, but also interacting, downloading a program and storing requests for songs.

Thanks to this ITV technology, it will be possible to send house-specific advertisements. Says T V Shivkumar, executive director of Saatchi & Saatchi: "It will be possible to show different advertisements to two residents of the same building in an area depending upon their personal profile and status." This kind of segmentation will be possible from the information available on viewers and such information can be obtained from the profiles of users culled from cable operators. The situation right now is that there are too many small cable operators and most of them do not have info on their customer profiles. So, the whole system needs to be streamlined. Says Shivkumar of Saatchi & Saatchi; "For proliferation of ITV in India, cable networks have to become consolidated."

Media planners should wait for some more time before they can take advantage of adnetworks and interactives. For, it would take some time before skills are honed for interactive advertising. Fragmentation and unbundling will be possible through ITV and this will require advertising networks to extend their brand franchises and deepen their relationships with consumers. If advertising on ITV takes off, adnetworks will be required to deliver digital advertisements.

Automated teller machines (ATMs) are another medium media-planners have to understand before they draw up their schedules. Since ATMs are yet to attain a critical mass, media planners have to wait before they fall in line with consumer profiles.