Recently Idea Cellular carried campaigns in Karnataka to familiarize people with their brand name which changed from Spice to Idea. Their brand ambassador Abhishek Bachchan was all over Karnataka (hoardings, newspapers) and most importantly online, that too in Kannada. Oneindia Kannada carried this campaign from Ozone Media.
We have always found that ‘language’ text link and display banners get a better response than English when a user is on our language channels. Advertising in language media is nothing new – for ages, advertisers have been advertising in language newspapers and TV channels.
Advertisers are slowly but steadily seeing the importance of advertising in languages in the online space. They are making an effort to have the creatives in the language. In fact, few agencies are giving a free hand to advertising networks to create the language banners.
Brands like Tata Sky, Tata Indicom have started using language creatives on language portals.
Language Advertising in Print
While the cost of advertising online in English and language is the same, it is not the case in print in a few languages. Advertising in language newspapers can be more expensive. This is justified because the advertiser is trying to reach out to a niche segment.
In terms of revenue, newspapers in the four South Indian languages account for about 25% of the total Print advertising revenues. Hindi accounts for 24%.
The market size of language advertising in Print is substantial and we have started seeing this happening in the online space.
English vs Indian Language Click Thru Rate (CTR)
We have seen a better CTR for language creatives when compared to English creatives on our language channels.
- Text creatives: 0.2% CTR for English, 1% CTR for Language
- Display creatives: 0.15% CTR for English, 0.5% CTR for languages
Google Adsense And Languages
Google Adsense today supports English and Hindi. We have seen the returns to be very good in Hindi because Google makes an effort to show relevant ads on our Hindi channel. Even if the match is not exactly contextual we see ads that could be of interest to Hindi speaking people. Yes, there is a lot more work to be done by Google Adsense but at least there has been a beginning. [Update – In December 2014, Google Adsense officially started supporting Hindi]
We eagerly await for Google Adsense to be released in South Indian languages.
Conclusion
Having the online creatives in the language gets a better response for the advertiser. This will help the publisher to monetize much better than the current levels. Ozone Media has recognized the importance and success of language creatives. Ozone is seeing a much better response for language creatives (as are we on Oneindia.com) and is concentrating on increasing language creatives – clearly, it is a win-win for the advertiser, publisher and agency/network.
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[…] Brands would do well if they used localized activation to spread their message (see the analogy of the same for internet) […]