There is a famous saying in Advertising circles ‘Half of my ad dollars are wasted.. The problem is I dont know which half?”. Well if we take this statement to be true Yahoo’s You campaign is wasting about 50 million dollars given the fact that its a 100 million dollar campaign. Now before I start the analysis of why I think yahoo has lost its mojo by going all out on its new avatar Id like to state that Im not a big fan of ads for online portals and least of all ads on TV and above the line media.

I believe best products and content sites are those that spread via word of mouth. So Id much rather like people talking about Yahoo’s new look via blogs twitter updates etc rather than see ads on TV that say nothing much but irritate with a seriously elongated “youuu..”

So now that my bias is established Id like to go and an analyze a new advertising initiative in which Yahoo has tied up with Airtel DTH and announced India’s first skin integration innovation on its EPG screen. What happens here is the ‘Electronic Programming Guide’ screen on Airtel digital TV is now completely integrated with Yahoo India’s homepage. So TV customers find a ‘Fill your home page with all the things that make YOU’ when they log onto to the EPG screen. When they push the red button on their remote controls they are taken to an info page on Yahoo India’s new home page.

To get a sense of how this looks please have a look at the screenshot below:

This is being powered by Networkplay which recently got into DTH advertising by tying up Airtel DTH. So while Networkplay might be a doing a good job of ad sales for this platform question is does this really work and translate for any online views or branding for Yahoo?

TV To Web Impact?

This new form of advertising directly questions on the impact of TV to web. Would this be like TV ads? Or would this fall into a lower bracket?

Airtel has a reach of about 1.3 million households and thats a decent number but the question still remains how does one calculate ROI on these ads? Based on how many click the RED button on the remote? I guess so as thats the only action that confirms an action taken. It would be interesting to have access to statistics of this campaign as it would give insights to other advertisers as to how many people actually get curious and check out the information on the background.

Also once they check it out does it translate to any web centric views for Yahoo. After all if in online ads clicks are counted which go directly to the Yahoo page and earns yahoo ad dollars I dont see why one wouldn’t question a similar kind of impact from DTH. But as its difficult to track it wont be a metric. Another interesting statistic to know would be the per impression cost on DTH vs Web and also the per action cost i.e. Red button in this case while a click in the online case. A comparison would give us insights into the Web vs TV bias of advertisers even though the end result is the same.

Source: WATBlog.com