I was just playing some music on YouTube and a funny thing
happened. Mid-playlist, there came on one of those ubiquitous, unnecessary ads.
I was surprised it was an ad for Santoor. Talc, or some such. But what really
got me was that the ad was in Gujarati. “Yes, I have recently moved to Gujarat,
YouTube, but how did you know that?” was what I was thinking.
I had recently booked flight tickets to Ahmedabad as well as
several other train and bus tickets for my travel last week, and YouTube had,
through its convenient link to Google’s databases, sniffed out my itinerary and
deciphered, quite correctly, that I must be living in Gujarat now. All snooty, futuristic,
uber-modern-digital-marketing aside, “You got it WRONG, YouTube. There were so
many ways for you to get it right, but you didn’t.
I may be living in Gujarat, but that does not
automatically imply that I know the language! As a matter of fact, I don’t!
You
could have used the information you so secretively (or perhaps,
not-so-secretively: who knows what agreements you have both got me to “Agree to” over
the years) acquired from your parent’s coffers to hit me with perhaps an ad of
a product type that suited my travel needs. Clearly I had been doing
rather a lot. Or, if you really wanted to use the Gujarati angle, try hitting
me with, say, a Gujarati brand ad, but in Hindi. I was in Delhi for nearly 7
months. Did you not know that from Facebook?
Even if you didn't, Hindi is
fairly commonly understood in Gujarat. If you were trying to target a lower,
and hence, more massive slab of the SEC pyramid using the regional language to
relate to me better with me (Santoor does presumably target a lower SEC consumer base), you got it wrong anyway for two reasons: that’s not my SEC slab and the Gujarati tongue holds no significance for me.
But,
even if you weren't, you would be providing more of a “value-added” service to
your ad clients by tailoring your technique to select an ad for me that I could
understand. That would be more relevant to me, the viewer, than an ad that I
couldn't understand. If you like, show me an Adani ad; I’ll even take that as “relevant
media placement”. At least, the Adanis ARE from Gujarat. As such, they have
great presence around the city. Supplementing their out of home media plan with
digital reach would contribute to Adani’s brand building effort. I, the target
in this case, am not in fact an immediate prospect as a source of sales, or income for
them. But there’s such a thing as salience, which is the necessary first step
for brand building. You, as a front-runner in the digital marketing space,
ought to be able to provide to your clients this at the very least. With a
Gujarati Santoor ad, you got it all wrong.”
It’s funny. It is. J
