The Indian 2009 general elections saw some amount of activity in the internet and mobile space. Recently I had written about Indian language display ads doing better than English ads, politicians taking the net seriously and e-LK Advani.
Krishna Byre Gowda Kannada Ad
LK Advani spent the most on the net, more than his own party BJP. I was curiously waiting to see if anyone would carry their ads in languages. I did see few ads in Hindi and Kannada (thru Google Ads and others).
We had a campaign from a Bangalore based well known politician+industrialist. We requested his team to give us the language creatives [English / Hindi / Kannada] for a better ROI. We ran the language creatives on the respective language channel. The language creatives had a higher CTR, three times when compared to English 🙂
BJP’s Ananth Kumar Ad in English
I think it is ok to carry English creatives on language channels but not the other way. I saw few Kannada creatives (Google adwords) that were on gmail and Google search results. I think they don’t work well, not sure what kind of CTR they got from these campaigns. It would be interesting to have access to those numbers.
Glad to see more and more advertisers are realizing the power of language creatives but we still have a long way to go.
Mobile Advertising
The mobile space has not yet matured for language ads because not all handsets support languages. I think in India first the mobile marketing space itself needs to mature and rock (we are not that far from that day). Anybody browsing or subscribing to language text (SMS) would surely have a language-ready handset, so that user base can see/receive language ads.
In Bangalore all major politicians spent on mobile marketing (SMS) – all in English.
I think the adaption of language ads on mobile will be faster than the time it took on the internet.
