The ‘Smart’ World of Mobile Video Advertising in India!

You are playing a cool game on your latest tablet or a smart-phone and suddenly a video pops out of nowhere. Your reactions: 1) You simply skip the video or 2) You go through the whole video if you find it interesting. And if it’s interesting enough, you think of going for the advertised product. A few people, just like you, either skip the video or go for it. When the target audience views the video, half of the job is done for the advertiser and when the purchase is made, the objective of advertising on this platform is achieved. But like you can see, mobile advertising does get a mixed response as a few of the people find ads popping out a bit inconvenient and disturbing and a few find it helpful. So how is the mobile video advertising scenario in India? Well, if we go by the facts and figures, it’s booming like anything and is set to touch Rs 430 Crore in the year 2014. Interesting, isn’t it? And to make this more interesting, we have got one more fact for you. India stands second in mobile advertisements, right behind the United States of America! And we seem to be catching up sooner with the USA.

There was certainly a disconnect between what industry felt about the potential of mobile advertising and what brands thought about incorporating mobiles in their marketing strategy. May be this is the reason that spend on mobile advertising has been just 10- 15% as compared to spend on digital marketing. But this has changed dramatically and mobile advertising is the ‘new cool’ in the industry now. Marketers are more than willingly investing in mobile advertising as marketers feel that m-commerce is opening up as an instrument for financial inclusion and mobiles will act as a key to a potential explosion in advertising.

So what has really helped mobile video advertising in India?

India has been the mobile first market as compared to the other nations, which means that we Indians access the internet on our mobiles first as compared to the other nations where desktops/laptops are preferred. Interestingly around 40% of the mobile users in India have mobile as their only internet access point.

The mobile advertising market has evolved from a stage of mobile internet being used for email access to being used for social media, to now being used for accessing various kinds of content like NEWS, sports, entertainment etc. With India’s app developer base estimated at 250,000 and expected app downloads to be around 8.4 billion by 2016, Indian mobile users are heavily consuming apps.
The handsets are cheaper and more accessible now. Also the relatively cheap data plans have helped to this. The introduction of 3G has helped in faster streaming of videos, which make it more convenient for the target audience to watch the video with more convenience.

So who are the big players in mobile video advertising? Automobile giants like Maruti, Yamaha, Honda …FMCG brands like Coca-Cola, Pepsico, Unilever and telecom players like Nokia, Karbonn and Micromax… are really investing a lot in mobile video advertising.

From the current scenario, no one can deny the major role that mobile video advertising will play in the near future. It’s all set to touch the skies and give its viewers the best of the unimagined worlds.

Stay tuned for a lot more engaging stuff that’s coming your way soon!

Dr. Kavita Chordia

Last updated: November 26, 2024

Dr. Kavita Chordiya experience covers almost 10 years of teaching. She holds the variety of other crucial positions like Chairperson for Labour Laws, Member of the Syllabus Review Committee of SPPU, Paper Setter, Moderator, Examiner, Ph.D Guide, BSE Resource Person. She is Author of many books in the field of Management.