Sumeet Singh, National Head – Marketing & Communications at Info Edge, is responsible for all online and offline marketing, brand strategy as well as corporate communications for a assortment of brands like Naukri.com, Jeevansathi.com, 99acres.com, Shiksha.com, Brijj.com. As the Head of Marketing, her role includes budgeting, strategizing, planning and managing TV, print, online, outdoor advertising and direct marketing campaigns. Prior to Info Edge, Sumeet was the founder Executive Director of The Indus Entrepreneurs, Delhi and simultaneously also served as the Executive Director of the Indian Venture Capital Association. In an exclusive interview with AlooTechie, Sumeet Singh discusses how Info Edge looks at digital marketing for their brands.

Naukri has done a lot of initiatives on TV as well as on print. How does the digital medium figure in Naukri’s plans to reach out to consumers?

We use online as an acquisition medium by mostly doing search advertisements. So for us, branding is TV and performance is internet. Though it has been changing with the advent of Facebook, because the kind of database it (Facebook) now has in India, it gives us a very rich targeting parameter.  I won’t say that we can look at it as a replacement of TV yet, but somewhere it can be used as an effective brand building tool.

Do you think that brand building is possible on internet?

I don’t think it is impossible, but credibility as a brand comes when you are on TV. A lot of portals are regularly seen on TV recently. Considering the present status of TV and internet penetration in the country, I don’t think we have yet reached the UK standards where internet spends have surpassed all spends in all other mediums. I would rather say that online complements TV very well because of the kind of innovations that are possible on internet.

So, according to you, should a consumer facing internet business exercise brand building on TV and performance on internet?

It depends on the kind of business you are in. In our business, there are job seekers who are visiting the site and obviously, if you are a portal, your target audience is anybody who is online, because those who are not online can’t use your product. Secondly there is the recruiter segment that pays us to list their jobs on Naukri. So for a brand like us, it is imperative to go on TV so as to reach the critical mass. Everybody in India knows about Facebook and email, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody is consuming content online. Hence it becomes very important for a player like us to reach that stakeholder who doesn’t spend too much time on the internet. Similarly, for JeevanSaathi.com, we know that parents are also very important in every marriage and it becomes imperative to reach out to them.

Ecommerce and Classifieds have been advertising most on TV these days. For a classifieds site, it is very important to reach those buyers and sellers and get them transact on the site. The same stands for ecommerce businesses as well, and the reason is that most Indians who are online, are using the medium, but not consuming it. So I would say that for these businesses it is important to reach the mass through TV, but at the end of the day it depends on the kind of business you are in.

With new engagement forms such as videos coming up on internet, what are your thoughts on visual brand building exercises on internet in India?

We are still experimenting with video. We have done regular video activities through networks like Vdopia and others and have tried a little bit of YouTube as well. But, being performance marketers, at the end of the day we always look for clicks, or at least somebody who can recall seeing our ads while cricket on internet. But we have not seen much of these happening.

A lot of us are also using our TVCs as video ads on internet. But the recall for ‘Hari Sadu’ will be on TV and not on internet. So, if we do a lot of viral and exclusive content as video on internet, it might work well. The last time we did a tactical TVC from Naukri was in last January-February, and it was called ‘Jobs are Back’. We launched it on YouTube a week before putting it on TV, and we got one lakh views, and that was very encouraging.

There are two kinds of apps. First, there is the app that I would do for a Naukri or a Jeevansathi for various kinds of phones. I think that is very much required because we are seeing a lot of usage happening on phones. If you have a service on offer, in today’s economy, you should have an app. In Naukri, we have your app and by December 2011, we will launch other apps.

And then there are apps on social media, which are not direct business apps. These are something which needs to be planned well. There are a lot of these and even Facebook is discouraging the usage of apps these days. Here you need to have a killer app to get the viral effect going.  

Mobile is being held as a great medium for brand communication, but still, very less amount is spent on the particular medium. What is your take on this?

We are doing mobile advertising and the last time we have done SMS was three to four years ago with JustDial. We don’t do SMS anymore. Rather we do ad networks, which is display and we do AdWords on mobile. Mobile as a medium is also evolving and nobody knows what will work well. Currently we are pushing our Wap sites and when we have apps tomorrow, we will push that as well. So the new marketing vehicles for us are mobile, social media, apps and video.

How do you see the importance of social media for promoting your brand in India?

We are using this in two ways. Today, by social media, everybody speaks about Facebook and Twitter. So we have pages on both these channels. In some channels, all our products are there whereas on Twitter we don’t have all our brands.

We are doing Facebook in two ways. We are using that as a digital brand advertising platform and apps on the fan page. We have fan pages of Naukri and Shiksha and very recently we have added other portals as well. We are actually seeing engagement happening.

People speak about number of fans on their brand page, and we all know that fans can be bought. So should the ‘number of fan’ determine the brand’s success on social media?

Personally, I strongly feel that it is not at all about fans. For a lot of brand managers, it’s competitive. Like if one’s competitor has 5 lakh fans, may be the other competitor would be happy with one more than that and therefore these agencies have evolved who are just buying fans. I strongly believe that a brand page has to have engagement and activity. But irrespective of whatever the number is, the critical mass has to be there on the page, which will give the viral effect to the activities done.

Internet is said to be a measurable medium. What is your take on this? Have we overdone the measurement quotient and made this medium hard to understand for the brand marketers?

Has digital done enough to educate the traditional marketer? I don’t think so! Traditional marketers are used to traditional measurements and hence the education should come from the brand manager or the planner who is actually planning the media spends. Unless I start understanding CPC and CPM, it will be very difficult for me to put money there. Facebook has done that education. In India, there are a lot of marketers who do not want to do online advertisements bit are happy spending for fan pages on Facebook. That is because they understand the platform. It is not always about measurement, rather the education. As the younger workforce is coming in, we will see more adoption for this medium as a marketing platform. And that is why a lot of digital agencies are now doing workshops to educate the fraternity.

What answers do you seek from your digital advertising agencies and digital media partners while promoting your brand on internet?

We don’t work with any agencies because when we started doing online, no agency in India was doing that. I remember Sanjeev (Bikhchandani) and Hitesh (Oberoi) starting Google ads with their credit cards. Now we have a very well-built experienced team. From publishers, our expectations are more on the front of optimisation, servicing. We are well aware of nuances like click-frauds, giving four banners on the same page and counting them as four impressions etc. We hope publishers are careful with all these when we are partnering them and these are the kind of checks that we want our publishing partners to have.

How do you see Naukri’s digital spends moving this year - in terms of growth and focus?

Overall, we will do about 70 to 75 per cent of our marketing spends on internet. Rest will be TV, events and a little bit of print.

How do you see your marketing objectives aligning with what the online medium offers from two years down the line?

I am very sure that digital will grow. And it is very encouraging for advertisers like us to note that the usage is going up. Time spent on consuming content on the internet is going up. For all of us in the internet space, when penetration and usage increases, we all are going to benefit from this.

Are we going to use display as a brand building activity on the internet? We will continue to do a little bit of display. Now, I can’t confidently say that digital will replace TV, but it will be a medium that is not ignored.