Advertising's Past, Present—and Future

In a recent article I read, the CEOs of two high-profile ad agencies—the mammoth BBDO (Andrew Robertson) and the upstart Crispin Porter Bogusky (Jeff Hicks)—address the future of advertising in an interesting Q&A session.

One's from a HUUUUGE agency, the other is a small, agile upstart and they're both proud of some brilliant campaigns and creative work for their clients.

CMO asked Andrew Robertson of BBDO and Jeff Hicks of Crispin Porter + Bogusky to each talk about one of their favorite recent campaigns. Coincidentally, they both picked Internet companies. For eBay, BBDO created the "it" campaign to get consumers thinking about the site as a place to buy just about anything; for Google, Crispin created a mock SAT test and brain-teasing billboards to recruit top computer scientists.

The answers in the Q&A are not too surprising in some senses, but this one really caught my eye:

The Agency-Client Relationship

Robertson: What do agencies and clients have to do? Invert the order in which work is evaluated. People usually ask, "Is it on strategy? Is it saying the right thing?" Then they ask, "Does it have the right personality and tone? Is it part of a sustainable campaign?" Finally, they might say, "Is anybody going to pay any attention?" We need to make that the first question. If we’re sure people are going to get engaged, then we can ask about whether it’s on strategy or communicating the right message.

Hicks: We have a diagram that’s a circle. It has four steps: find out where you are, decide where you want to be, make a plan to get there, and then execute. As a brand, you’re always somewhere in this circle. If you believe the process is over, it is over.

Our goal is to be a place that continually attracts really passionate people. And we want to be engaged with clients that have great problems and are willing break the mold a little to solve them.

Oh and in case you're looking a nice place to get some good advice on email marketing but don't know where to start, this is a great article. Not only does it answer a fair amount of questions even some seasoned marketers are still clueless about, it gives some good advice that should be heeded:

Marketers must first establish an e-mail communications plan that meets its business goals by addressing user needs, and then optimize that plan with best practices. Over-e-mailed customers don't have inbox space for even the best executed e-mail programs that don't provide them value.

Wondering what your customers value? Ask them! Surveys, offline anecdotes, and, of course, tracking response to different types of e-mails tell marketers what e-mail content, offers, and even style users like. One large consumer goods company learned through surveys and e-mail data that its customers most value humor in e-mails. It took this insight to heart and now has a 0.5 percent opt out rate to its e-mails which incorporate tips and product information with cartoons.

This is going be be my last post for about a week, because I'm shifting to Bangalore and probably won't find the time. Please bear with me and come back in a week! Or bettter still, subscribe to my RSS feed. If you're new to RSS, go here for a quick explanation.

When Virtual Worlds Collide...

I recently wrote about something most gamers have been predicting for a while: the emergence of a Metaverse in the near future, where we'll have one large virtual world similar in size to the Internet but with different realms.

Looks like my friends and I are not wrong - even a contributing editor at Wired agrees that virtual worlds will come together in the near future.

Within a decade, then, the notion of separate game worlds will probably seem like a quaint artifact of the frontier days of virtual reality. You'll still be able to engage in radically different experiences - from slaying orcs to cybersex - but they'll occur within a common architecture. The question is whether the underpinnings of this unified metaverse will be a proprietary product, like Windows, or an inclusive, open standard, like email and the Web. (The Open Source Metaverse Project is currently working on such a nonproprietary platform.)

The technology for such an amalgamation of worlds exists today - but a neutral platform will need to be built first. In my opinion, bringing it all together is a Herculean task not even someone with Microsoft's deep pockets will be able to do - it has to be a neutral organization, backed by a board of corporate stakeholders like Blizzard, Microsoft, Apple, ICANN, Sony, Nintendo and the other biggies out there who'll put this new world to its best possible use.

An open source metaverse seems to be the best way to go, with no clearly defined ownership - but the money needs to come from somewhere, as do the 'realms' or 'mini-worlds' and that can happen only if those biggies mentioned earlier provide support. A Herculean task, no doubt, but possible? Yes - with perseverance. If you're thinking of starting on this, let me know :)

Good management requires continuous learning

While reading an article titled "The Wisdom Fallacy: Why Management Is Really Like Math" I found myself nodding my head a lot - even though my skills in mathematics have a lot to be desired :) Robert May, the author of the article, says the only way to get better at management is to learn more about it, like maths. Its true; just like mathematicians, most managers don't learn all they need to be good managers on the job - they have to read a lot about management techniques, study different examples, study other managers (their peers and bosses), build on their people skills and store those "people interaction techniques" in memory and recall them whenever needed.

An interesting quote from the article:

Why will people accept advice on a subject, from someone that has studied it in depth, if that subject is programming, but not if it has to do with raising their children? Why, in some areas of knowledge, do we equate studying with mastery, and in other areas we don't? I'll call this the "wisdom fallacy" - that people believe wisdom has no correlation with knowledge for some subjects, when really it does.

In my work experience, I think most people lump management into the second category. I have never heard anyone say "I am not a very good manager," or even "I don't think I would make a good manager." Yet they will regularly opine on management, and explain their management theory in detail to you. But, by definition, some managers have to be the worst, right? And haven't we all worked for managers that we think knew very little about management? What is going on? Why is management something that nearly everyone thinks they do well?

So true. How many times have you heard a colleague claim he or she is good/an expert on a subject that they haven't spent years studying and don't read about? Or see designers and visualizers who draw illustrations and paintings for clients but don't read articles on the net or visit online portfolios and galleries or do some research on styles and typography?

Most of the managers I know however, are the "on the job" types - people with good instincts and good learning abilities, but they don't apply them to learning "management techniques" and rather depend on learning through experience and mistakes. Which is not a bad thing at all, but it tends to leave them with a false impression that they're always doing the right thing. I'm guilty of doing this myself - doing work I haven't been trained to do or even studied about, and learning on the job and then believing I actually did some good work to be proud of.

Our brains have cognitive filters for some things. We tend to automatically ignore facts that contradict our religious or political views. It's not intentional, our brains just have a lot of information to process so they throw out contradicting information subconsciously. Don't let that happen in your role as a manager. Seek out contradictory information. If you think you are doing a good job, don't look for evidence to support it, look for evidence against it.

The Greatest Business Leaders of the 20th Century are American?

Apparently 7000 executives surveyed by Harvard Business School's Anthony J. Mayo and Nitin Nohria for their book, In Their Time think that the top 50 greatest business leaders of the 20th century are American entrepreneurs who built their companies from scratch. The list doesn't have any surprises, with the founders of some of the best known companies in the world there, including only one woman: Estee Lauder.

But what is saddening is that this is another example of people with blinders on - I know these companies have multi-billion dollar market capitalizations and probably have high brand recall among Americans, but there are no Asians on that list! So are these executives saying that Japan, Korea and India have no business leaders worthy of being on that list? Or are they just proving the alleged axiom that American people don't know anything of what's happening outside their own country?

I'm sure all these men are/were brilliant individuals and overcame huge struggles to achieve what they did. But I'm also sure there are others in the world who deserve to be on that list. I'd really like to know the survey methodology, because it's just unfair to call this the "Greatest Business Leaders of the 20th Century". It's like calling a sports event the "World Series" with only Americans playing.

This is the list:

1. Samuel M. Walton | Wal-Mart
   
2. Walter E. Disney | Walt Disney
   
3. William H. Gates III | Microsoft
   
4. Henry Ford | Ford Motor
   
5. John P. Morgan | J.P. Morgan Chase
   
6. Alfred P. Sloan Jr. | General Motors
   
7. John F. Welch Jr. | General Electric
   
8. Raymond A. Kroc | McDonald's
   
9. William R. Hewlett | Hewlett-Packard
   
10. David Packard | Hewlett-Packard
    
11. Andrew S. Grove | Intel
    
12. Milton S. Hershey | The Hershey Co.
    
13. John D. Rockefeller Sr. | Standard Oil
    
14. Thomas J. Watson Jr. | IBM
    
15. Henry R. Luce | Time-Life Publications
    
16. Will K. Kellogg | Kellogg
    
17. Warren E. Buffett | Berkshire Hathaway
    
18. Harland Sanders | Kentucky Fried Chicken
    
19. William C. Procter | Procter & Gamble
    
20. Thomas J. Watson Sr. | IBM
    
21. Asa G. Candler | Coca-Cola
    
22. Estee Lauder | Estee Lauder
    
23. Henry J. Heinz H.J. | Heinz
    
24. Daniel F. Gerber Jr. | Gerber Products
    
25. James L. Kraft | Kraft Foods
    
26. Steven P. Jobs | Apple Computer
    
27. John T. Dorrance | Campbell Soup
    
28. Leon L. Bean | LL Bean
    
29. William Levitt | Levitt & Sons
    
30. Howard Schultz | Starbucks
    
31. Michael Dell | Dell Computer
    
32. Robert W. Johnson Jr. | Johnson & Johnson
    
33. James E. Casey | United Parcel Service
    
34. Herbert D. Kelleher | Southwest Airlines
    
35. George Eastman | Eastman Kodak
    
36. Philip H. Knight | Nike
    
37. James O. McKinsey | McKinsey & Co.
    
38. Charles R. Schwab | Charles Schwab
    
39. Frederick W. Smith | Federal Express
    
40. William Wrigley Jr. Wm. | Wrigley Jr. Co.
    
41. Gordon E. Moore | Intel
    
42. Robert (Ted) E. Turner | Turner Broadcasting
    
43. J. Willard Marriott Jr. | Marriott Int'l.
    
44. James E. Burke J | ohnson & Johnson
    
45. David Sarnoff | RCA
    
46. William E. | Boeing Boeing
    
47. Walter A. Haas Sr. | Levi Strauss
    
48. Henry J. Kaiser | Kaiser Industries
    
49. Walter A. Haas Jr. | Levi Strauss
    
50. Clarence Birdseye | Bird's Eye Foods
    

Branding Challenges for Enterprises

I came across several well written and articulate pieces on branding over the past few days, thought they are "must read"s for anyone even slightly interested in marketing…


The ABC’s of Great Brands
This talks about three defining characteristics of a brand (Attributes, Behavior, Circumstances), and how a little clever manipulation of them can result in amazing results. The article illustrates this with examples, so its not just theory and seems to have actually worked for a couple of companies. An excerpt:

What constitutes a great brand? By applying the concept of an Appreciable Brand Triad ^TM , we were able to define what attributes, behavior, and circumstances are, and if executed correctly, how they enable the foundation for brand greatness. We postulated this theory by citing two brands that have achieved both financial and brand success (SW and Home Depot). Although the dynamics of the plotted points on the Appreciable Brand Triad TM are in constant motion, their general locale suggests three things: an intelligently designed business model, proper positioning of ABC’s, and flawless execution. Taken together, the opportunity to formulate or re-design a Great Brand resides in the hands of business leaders each day.

What Branding Challenges Keep You Up At Night?

From CMO Magazine, this is a summary of challenges faced by Branding Executives from Fortune 500 companies, which they placed into six categories:

Creating relevance
The pendulum has swung from consumers valuing premium products to products that are simply "good enough."

Protecting the brand
Misbehaving senior managers. Poor product quality. Many marketers worry that the corporate reputation—and thus, the brand—will become tainted.

Reaching target consumers
Highly fragmented media and products such as TiVo are causing marketers to rethink old techniques.

Nurturing employees
Companies are only as good as their frontline people. Taking care of employees is paramount to creating a leading brand.

Competing and partnering at the same time
Partnering with mass merchandisers that have their own private-label brands while competing against those same merchandisers' brands can create a challenging business environment.

Implementation of programs
Marketers have little room for errors and virtually no opportunity to make a second impression. Everything must work well out of the gate.

Three Lessons for More Effective ROI
One of the acronyms I've had a love/hate relationship with over the years, Returns On Investment is something that every branding and marketing executive needs to fight with and continuously measure at all times; this is an interesting article which can be summarized in plain english to:

Prepare for a journey - Its going to take longer than you think :)

Focus on strategic insight - Approach ROI as a measurement tool to understand how strategies and tactics can be improved

Measure smarter - Make the testing and measurement of long term activities more important than short term tactical activities (So true! too often people just don't keep the big picture in mind when looking at ROI of branding and marketing efforts)

Get started with an improved planning process, some new analysis or testing, a pilot project or a shift in your approach to measurements. Basically, continually bring in improvements and new tweaks

An excerpt from the article:

There’s one fundamental principle that keeps ROI at the top of the agenda: Companies must make more money than they spend. Executives need to have greater confidence that marketing can deliver on this promise. It does not mean that every marketing dollar will be measured in terms of incremental profits. Nor does it mean that long-term profits must be sacrificed for short-term profits. It just means that the additional discipline in understanding how marketing initiatives ultimately drive profitable customer behaviors is key.

On an unrelated note, I also came across this article that kind of hit where it hurts:

Ten Reasons Young People Are Afraid to Start Their Own Business

• Don't Have the Skills
  
• Don't Have the Self-Confidence
  
• Don't Have the Ideas
  
• Don't Have the Money
  
• The Deck's Stacked Against Entrepreneurs
  
• Couldn't Handle the Failure
  
• Don't Know the Process
  
• Don't Have the Time
  
• Couldn't Handle the Stress
  
• Couldn't Handle the Loneliness
  

Guilty of a few of the above. The author of that article has really tried well to prove those points wrong (Do read the aricle), but a couple of them just don't get solved by his answers. Here's hoping I get started soon though :)

Entrepreneurship and Insightful Advice

Is it just me or is getting advice and help on starting your own business a whole lot easier these days? Maybe I’ve just been reading quite a few insightful articles and books :) Quite a few of the points I’ve read not only apply to young entrepreneurs but could also be very useful to middle and top management in medium to large sized organizations; at the end of the day they need to achieve their goals as well, but often lose sight of strategy when dealing with the routine of mundane daily activities.

Anyway, I thought I’d share a few of these great articles with you here:

Death by Risk-Aversion at headrush.typepad.com

Ignore the strange typography style :) and the content of this article makes a lot of sense. After all, who hasn't been stuck in mediocrity during some period of their life?

So add one more skill to our career advice for young people: be willing to take risks! Perhaps more importantly, be willing to tolerate (and perhaps even encourage) risk-taking in those who are managed by you. Of course I realize that this is much easier said than done.

Do read the article, it gave me a perspective on my own management style and helped me realize that I've not taken too many risks in the past either, just because of thinking "If this fails it'll get us in a lot of trouble" and not looking at a proposed solution objectively.

Entrepreneurial Proverbs at radar.oreilly.com

A bit too long, but this article cover starting out, paying attention to the idea, choosing the right people to work with, building a product or service and most importantly, money matters.

A few of the points that stand out:

Great things are made by people who share a passion, not by those who have been talked into one -- a corollary of the last; you can spark a passion in someone, but you can't do it without some fuel to catch. Better to wait, and find the person who is already inclined to believe in your cause. You may talk someone into co-founding a company with you, but will they stick with it through ups and downs if they had to be persuaded that hard?

and this one..

Build what you know -- this is the most basic advice of idea generation: scratch an itch you have yourself. To make a great company, stop and ensure that your need is broadly felt, and that your solution is broadly applicable -- not everyone spends their life in front of a computer, remember.

Even the comments in the one are great, don't forget to read them too!

Top Signals of Success for Software Entrepreneurs at onstartups.com

Also a bit long, this one highlights some of the common characteristics of successful entrepreneurs the author has encountered. My favorites:

You are a realist: You tend to look at most things objectively. You see them for what they are. You have ambitions, but not unrealistic ones. When in contentious situations, you’re usually the voice of reason. You keep things in context and tend not to over-react.

and this one:

You work hard: You’re an over-achiever. You’ve never been satisfied delivering the “minimum”. Though you understand the importance of work-life balance (you read about it in a book somewhere), you’re not frequently able to pull it off. When in a group setting where work is divided you somehow always do a disproportional amount of the work.

All of the points highlighted in the article are important, but in my opinion these two are the most.

The Second Education

I'm going through another large change in my life, which involves relocation and a new job; feeling a little nostalgic I was going though the soft copies of the transcripts of some of the sessions I had as a trainee at Synapse - from being a Trusted Advisor and Managing a Project and learning how to Do What Needs to be Done. But the one that really got me a little nostalgic is this one, which Gourav handed over to us way back in 2002. This is just one of the brilliant sessions we had back then, which unfortunately the new people at Synapse have no clue about. Take a little time off and read it slowly, maybe it'll make sense to you too.

The framework of this essay is taken from an article by Madan Birla, the president of WorkLifeweb.com. However, this essay has been altered, edited and rewritten significantly from the original.

We live in a complex, interconnected world, but where we find ourselves in our lives is not by chance. The relationships, health, job satisfaction, leisure- everything that goes to make the life we enjoy, are all a result of the choices we have made. These choices are inevitable. But since we don't have time to examine and evaluate every choice from scratch, we make choices that are influenced by a previous history of what we know, how we feel, and the feedback we get from our environment. We all have a script of internalized messages from the environment (what communication experts call a 'Frame of Reference') and we often live our lives based on that script. If society's definition of success is money and all the things that money can buy, then most of us are likely to internalize that definition of success and it will become the driver of our choices.

But we can choose to reject the definitions of society. And find a way to create our own balance of life. Finding the Balanced Life can possibly be thought of as a Four-Step Process:

1. Visualize the balanced healthy state that reflects all human needs on the Physical, Intellectual, Emotional and Spiritual plane. Make this picture richer by gaining knowledge about yourself and the world.
   
   
2. Become aware and Identify the root causes of imbalance in your life - internal and external. What is preventing you from living your life according to the picture you have in your head?
   
   
3. Develop a personal action plan to address the deficiencies that prevent you from getting to the life you want to lead. Get abilities that you need to take you where you want to go, overcome shortcomings that hold you back, conquer fears and anxieties that plague your mind.. .
   
   
4. Take action in the external environment to implement the plan. This will be the real test of your will ...
   

Most humans have the same needs. Recognition and Esteem 'I want to be known as somebody'. Power 'I want to have the money, social status and opportunities to be able to do what I want to do'. Love and sexuality 'I want to belong to somebody' and I want someone to belong to me. Mutual support, affection, shared experiences, group membership 'I want to be with people I like and enjoy spending time with'. Identity and Self-Respect 'I want to be somebody to myself'. Respite and relaxation 'I want to have fun and enjoy myself'. Spirituality "I want to have a sense of meaning and coherence in life'.

These are not a collection of isolated components, but one integrated whole. And expansion in one component cannot compensate for a missing component. The ceiling to personal happiness is set by the component of lowest satisfaction.

And Happiness will not result from what happens to us but what happens within us after what happens to us.

Apologies if this seemed a little preachy - but really, go back and read it again. Everybody I know has had quite a reaction to this essay, for obvious reasons. Let me know if you did.

Thinking in Web 2.0 - in simple english

I came across two very interesting articles last week, but didn't find the time to blog about them; the first is titled "Thinking in Web 2.0: Sixteen Ways" by Dion Hinchcliffe. In this very interesting article, he's discussed some of the basic things people who are looking to build or create a new web service need to do to be competitive on the web. Some of the are quite basic, but overall he's made it sound a little complex, which is why I've summarized what he's trying to say in plain english:

• Set clear, measurable Goals; this one is pretty much standard for everything but its amazing how few actually do it.
  
  
• Link Everything; make sure its accessible and 'shareable'
  
  
• Let People Own their Data; loosen up permissions, let people do whatever they like with their data
  
  
• Data is more important than looks and features; something I'm not completely comfortable with, but seems to be true - take a look at Craigs List (an extrememly popular site) to see what I mean
  
  
• Share everything; encourage users to use your service in various ways, even ways you didn't plan on
  
  
• Stick to the web; sure, you can extend the platform, but take good care that the Web is given foremost preference
  
  
• Respect the Experts AND the Noobs; different types of people need different features at different learning curves - support both
  
  
• Encourage collaboration; let people add, write comments, edit and basically tinker with whatever you provide
  
  
• Take utmost care of personal information; your users will trust you with the info - don't abuse that trust
  
  
• Use Standards; your application and data should be somehow compatible with everything esle out there, and adhering to standards is the best way
  
  
• Keep it Simple. Let users control how they want to see data, let them share and tag and blog and do whatever they are used to doing on the web
  
  
• Make the benefits of your service obvious and easy to understand. Personal incentive to use your service will be your biggest seller
  
  
• Be Agile, use agile technologies; the last thing you need is a tool that makes you wait for weeks for a critical bug fix or feature addition

There are a few more points over at the original article, but this more or less summarizes the others too. Of course, as Russel Beatie pointed out, you also need to make sure you have a sound plan to make the money roll in :)

[offtopic] The BlankNoise Project - A salute

I read about the BlankNoiseProject a few days ago, and it got me thinking; not only is this a great medium of expression, it also will help women know that they weren’t alone when incidents of eve-teasing or harassment or lewd comments being passed occurred.

I’ve been told of various incidents so far by female friends, and I don’t want to go through the details because it’s just too aggravating; the more I think about them the more I get angry and despair that I wasn’t around and didn’t kick that guy’s ass. Also, I assume everybody else on the blog-a-thon must be writing about similar incidents. So, to make a little interesting reading for you, I thought I’d highlight a few triumphs of my friends who’ve dealt with such incidents and looking back even laugh a bit at them.

Maneesha Singh, in Mumbai: She was walking down a crowded railway station when a man pinched her. Not the one to be intimidated, she grabbed the guy and this is what happened next:

Maneesha: [One HARD slap!]

Maneesha: Kar kya rahe hai aap?

Guy: [quiet, completely taken aback, shaking a bit]

Maneesha: Samajthe kya apne aap ko, huh?

Guy: [quiet, cringes, pretend to be drunk, wants to get out of there immediately]

Maneesha’s hand is now hurting a bit because of the force she put into the slap and (as she tells me) she’s run out of dialogues - so she just leaves him there and walks away.

Maneesha Singh (again), in Mumbai: She’s at this disc with some of her friends, slightly tipsy and she sees someone who looks like her ex-boyfriend standing a little far away. So she goes up to say Hi, but the guy isn't her ex and is someone she doens't know. He says something... stupid. Well, Maneesha doesn’t remember what exactly happened next, but it involved a very hard punch and the guy bleeding from his nose.

Neeta Shenoy and friends, in Bangalore: A big band concert is happening, large crowds walking on MG road and some idiots are trying to take advantage of the crowds by touching and groping women they pass by. But, Neeta and her friends came armed: They carried safety pins in their fists, and went about poking every person who attempted to grope! After a lot of ouches, I hope those morons learnt a lesson.

Neeta Shenoy, in Bangalore: 17 years old, On a bus with her dad, Neeta's trying to get some sleep and a shady character next to her tries to get fresh. She catches him, slaps him hard and shouts at both him and the conductor. Loser gets unceremoniusly thrown out of the bus.

Neeta Shenoy, in Goa: She went to the market to pick up some fruit and a couple of village idiots started cat calling and whistling. Not to be bothered, she went up to the morons and asked them what their problem was. Then after a sound tongue lashing and public humiliation, walked away and got on her bike.

When she came back and told me I wanted to go back to the market to ..umm.. ‘talk’ to those guys too, but she said it wasn’t worth the effort, and that there are better things to do with our time. And I really admire that attitude – the ability to shrug off something as demeaning as this and put it down to the attitudes of a bunch of stupid men.

---

There are a few more I’ve heard from friends but don’t remember the details, will check with them and write more. Till then, ladies, remember there are simple ways to get back – from sharp retorts and rousing people around you to physical assault and pins. Better still, if you have a camera phone, take a picture and hand it over to the nearest police station. And talk to the men in your life – not only will they be there for you, they’ll also help you understand that all men aren’t the same, and the good ones usually outnumber the stupid.

Indian Call Centre Worker's Info to go into a centralized Database

The register reports that a delegation of European unions will tour Indian call centres next week to investigate an industry scheme to register the country's call centre employees in a biometric database.

Apparently this is a NASSCOM initiative to try and tell EU and other countries that outsourcing security concerns don't need to be worried about a lot.

Launched in January by an Indian trade body representing employers, the National Association of Software and Service Companies (Nasscom), will store biometric, personal, professional and educational details of workers in IT and outsourcing industries.

I see a whole lot of possible issues with this:
1) Privacy Issues! Not that I work in the BPO space, but why would anyone want their personal identification data be available to companies abroad? What happens if you quit the BPO industry? Does your database record get deleted? Who do you have to inform? Worse, what if the database gets leaked to unscrupoulus marketing people?

2) Take a look at this:

Indian call centre workers are cheap and poorly protected, which is why so much work has been given to them by European firms. The centres are reputedly characterised by high-pressure, long hours, and a high staff turnover.

Worse still, they have to put up with abuse and condescension from the customers they serve on telephone lines to countries in the northern hemisphere. Yet these call centre jobs are comparatively well paid and highly sought after.

It's bad enough that people at the lower end of the food chain in Indian BPOs have a comparatively hard life - aprt from everything listed on top, they also have to deal with camera all over the work place, intense secuity checks and stupid HR rules - do they really need more measures of security to lock them into an even more repressive workspace?

3) Take a loook at this excerpt from the article:

The Nasscom biometric database of workers was the Indian response to an international news storm initiated by Britain's Sun tabloid newspaper, which engineered a leak of British bank details from an Indian call centre last year.

Unions including Amicus shamelessly exploited the opportunity and helped whip the storm up to the point where Nasscom had to do something to protect its business interests. A biometric database seemed like the obvious solution*. Now this could be the single largest barrier to the unionisation of emerging Indian industries.

As for workers in Indian call centres, they have been lucky to land jobs that are considered luxurious, so telling them that their conditions are rubbish may not wash.

Unless their new-found wealth and power gives them the confidence to take on employers, the only way to help them unionise will be to encourage them to see their place in the global economy. That will mean treating them as comrades rather than enemies. ®

* The adoption of bureaucratic processes from the northern hemisphere has always been the clincher for most Nasscom members in deals for outsourcing business. They have signed up to anything they can, from data protection to formal methods of business.

Need I say more?

Online Marketing in India? and it's set to grow by 300%?

A few years ago if someone told you that online marketing in India was the next big thing to happen to the economy, you'd probably laugh your head off and ask him/her to get a reality check. Well, surprisingly, it actually is.

According to research by the Internet and Mobile Association of India, things are looking up for online business this year.

Rs. 570 crores worth of E-commerce conducted online in India in 2004-2005, to grow to Rs 2300 crores by 2006-2007, an estimated 300%+ growth.

That's a good, healthy amount to hear; while it's nowhere near the amount of business conducted in other developed nations, it means we're getting there. Take a look at the research reports available at the research section on the IAMAI site; they cover entertainment, e-commerce, security and even cyber-cafe usage statistics in India, completely free of charge. Their sample size isn't huge at 3099 respondents for the "The Power Shopper: IOAI Ecommerce Report 2005" but I guess its a good enough indication for the average online marketer's general knowledge.

What also caught my eye was the demographics! Take a look at the image here:

1) 85% of Online Shoppers are Male; note that even a 15% female audience represents a 15 million strong market audience by 2007-2008 (IOAI Estimate: 100 million Internet users by 2007-08).
2) 37% of online shoppers are 'Unmarried' and 47% are 'Married with the kids'. That's something new as well - it used to be the "unmarried category" on top earlier.

In another recent study of online shopping habits in India and across the globe by AC Nielsen I came across more good things being said about the Indian online shopper.

"Online shopping in India is poised for greater acceleration as more manufacturers and providers integrate the internet into their sales model. As PC and internet penetration grows, the key to increasing online purchases will remain in the hands of marketers - instituting online mechanisms for sales and service and incentivizing consumers to use them by passing on the benefits of lower transaction costs to them" says NS Muthukumaran, Director at ACNielsen ORG-MARG and head of Internet Research at ACNielsen in India.

While the report seems to be focused on the retail consumer, I'm sure B2B marketers will find a bunch of interesting statistics there too. I did.

For people like me who've been working on the web and creating, managing and measuring Online Marketing campaigns for a living, I guess this can only be a good thing. Well I hope anyway - its a very nascent area of business in India, and not only is there a dearth of people with the know-how, there's also a dearth of companies who are willing to actually pay well for someone with experience managing both online and offline marketing activities.