TechGazing

Interview with Vikas Gulati, Vice President of Marketing, Asia Pacific for Sprice.com, Europe’s leading real-time travel search engine, which expanded its global footprint into India recently.

Q. How big is the online travel market in India to justify your expansion to this country? What does Sprice mean to this sector?
The Indian online travel market which is expected to cross US $ 2 billion mark by 2008 has changed the old paradigm, providing customer a sophisticated online retail and shopping experience, and simultaneously enabling access to fragmented travel supply market.

While the Internet has significantly reduced the cost of distribution for travel suppliers, finding the most suitable package including the best hotel to stay in at the best price has become more complex for the travellers. Sprice.com addresses these concerns by introducing a real-time deep search technology, which offers travellers up-to-date information from different travel suppliers on air fares, hotel rates and traveller reviewed hotels from India on a single interface. Continue reading »

Journalists and Communications have always had a close relationship; with the recognition of Blogs as an important form of media in society, the time has come to connect news sources and these independent publishers too.

PR and Corporate Communications have had a close working relationship with traditional journalists and media companies for a long time now. However, the media landscape is undergoing a change with the emergence of blogging as a new and independent form of media.

Being early days, PR and Bloggers have not yet got a total handle on how to engage with one another. For instance, bloggers are in the need of news and information which may be different from the what a newspaper would seek, but not always. This means PR has to send releases drafted differently, and arrange interaction with people who may not be the spokespersons in the traditional sense. The CEO or Marketing Head may not satisfy the blogger as much as the Product Manager who is more hands-on and will speak with greater passion and authority than even those higher up in the organization. Continue reading about this unique service

Advertisers in India seem to be a harried lot. Even as they get bigger budgets to spend on digital media, there is little to guide them on where and when to spend their money. The options all seem to come around to a handful of websites, with little market intelligence on how to get a bigger bang for their buck.

In such a scenario, will Yahoo’s Behavioural Targeting (BT) offering, now available in India, change things? Will it mean advertisers signing cheques assured of better performance of their ads, and Yahoo’s smile getting bigger all the way to the bank? Read on to know more about what BT is all about and if it will work in India

YouTube may be big, but it seems a lot more is waiting to happen in the online video segment; it may well be the big story of the next couple of years. But while the Bulls may be riding on the future of video, the sentiment is still bearish on another front: how do you monetise video on the net?

Current formats of ads like pre-roll (where an ad plays before a video starts) seem to be intrusive and a turn-off for viewers. Who wants to be forced to see an ad before the actual video starts? Banner and text ads on the site tend to get missed as attention is on the video itself. InSkin, invented by Patrick Knight, may have resolved the debate by being able to frame the video player with an interactive ad, positioned in the consumer’s line of sight.

I got an opportunity to interact with Patrick, also the company’s Founder and CEO, at AdTech, New York recently. Excerpts of our chat: Continue reading »

Fastrack, one of India’s leading youth fashion brand, recently took a conscious decision to embrace social media. Reason? Its keenness to participate in the emergent marketing environment where the consumer is a co-creator, where insights and participation from influencers bring tremendous value and insights for any brand.

This campaign is being managed for them by Delhi based consultancy, Blogworks. To understand the why and how of this campaign, TechGazing chatted up with the Simeran Bhasin, Marketing Manager, Fastrack. Excerpts: Continue Reading

Guy Kawasaki posted this on his blog on August 15, 2007 for the first 200 people taking the offer so I am sure it must be over long ago. But I am writing this as an interesting case of promoting his site Truemors.

The deal was/is as Guy says: “If you install Truemors for Facebook, invite ten friends to install it, and post a few truemors, I will send you an autographed copy of The Art of the Start. You might wonder how I’ll know if you installed Truemors and invited ten people. The answer is that I am going to trust you.”

The offer was open to the first 200 people, giving a shipping address in the US. Wonder what the results were? Have sent Guy a query. Watch this space if the reply comes back.

Indyarocks.com says it is an online and mobile based social networking site for connecting Indians across the globe. It allows members to build and leverage their network of contacts in incredibly powerful ways. It is a place where you can invite, connect, share, speakout and have fun.

All promising, but will the cash registers jingle for this new kid of the social media block in India? The site’s founder Kalyan Manyam certainly thinks so. Here’s an exclusive interview with him on how brands must look at Indyarocks to reach out to the Indian youth. Continue to read the interview

The next buzz in town may well be about mobile phones as your medium to deliver advertising. This may mean another complexity to a media planner’s spreadsheets but, if it takes off, it could well address a lot of needs for advertisers. Read on…