Contributed by Charu Gupta
I was just checking my mails and found a forwarded link from my friend.
http://india.makemytrip.com/chidyaud/cidiyaudi.html
It was an animated video where a girl was playing game of ‘Chidiya ud” with her brother which we all used to play in childhood. It was great fun watching the video but at the end it turned out to be an ad from ‘Make my trip.com”. Watching the video was fun while the company was able to send its message of “now anyone can fly with their lowest airfares” very clearly to its target market.
This is a kind of online marketing also called as “Viral marketing” that makes viewers laugh and the advertisers smile. Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use pre-existing social networks to produce increase in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral processes. A two-minute animated Interactive advertising agencies like Webchutney, Media2win and Virtual Marketing are shifting focus to create online ad campaigns around animated viral videos and a lot of major brands are falling for it.
Big names like Lenovo, TataSky, Cornetto and Happydent are exploring online marketing beyond placing banner ads on various sites or pasting text on social networking sites. They are eyeing potential customers, essentially through animated viral videos, to create brand equity, eventually targeting an increase in sales.
“Animated viral renders the fun element which the Indian audience is able to relate to. Also, it is something one would like to forward to family, friends and colleagues and also has a higher recall value. By using animation as a tool, we get the freedom to create favourable situations which may not be the case with film videos,” says Webchutney creative director Prabhat Bhatnagar.
