Five imperatives for online industry’s growth in India: George Gallate, global chairman of Euro RSCG 4D

George Gallate, global chairman of Euro RSCG 4D, spoke exclusively to domain-b on the sidelines of the IAMAI's fourth conference on digital marketing held in Mumbai, about what the industry needs to do to come upto speed in India. Dhruv Tanwar reports.

Excerpts from the interview:

How quickly and how well do standards need to evolve in this country?
I fundamentally believe that you need to determine to an Indian standard, what your norms should be, and then you need to rigorously apply standards as quickly as possible. (view video)

I think for the benefit of your industry, you need to clearly establish what it is that a publisher should give and expect, and the same for an advertiser and what an agency does in that role. The need is to very clearly establish that, and then move those standards on as your industry evolves.

As far as the ad networks go, we run with an agency based model in India. The network is pretty much made up of people rather than systems, which is the basic reason why we need the standards. How do you see this evolving in let's say, about a year or two years?
Digital as an environment is absolutely measurable. Human ware can't really be the future of the industry. I would say that given India's leadership in programming and infrastructure that you need to get these ad networks online and data driven as quickly as possible, and as you say, in doing that you'll also be in a situation where there is higher integrity in the delivery of the whole thing.

Human ware involvement is not that helpful at the data volumes you're talking about.

Given our broadband penetration levels currently - as these mushroom and boom over the next three to five years, assuming that the government's roll out plans do fall into place - how do you see this advertising network, both with and without standards, evolving?
The question is excellent. Bandwidth and penetration are the two primary criteria as to what an advertiser can really plan around, and therefore agencies and publishers. I believe that there is a need for, particularly in fast emerging markets like India, to be able to serve advertising content and content in general, at two levels - one for a lower connected consumer and one for a consumer or business with higher bandwidth. So, I think you are going to need to run a parallel system for a period of years to be inclusive enough across the whole of the industry. And the standard should take that into account as well.

As far as India goes, as the broadband grows, in this country of 23 plus languages, is there going to be some fragmentation on the basis of language? And how is that going to impact brand building initiatives of advertisers?
I think we can take a leaf out of the book of the traditional advertisers. During high end customisation for the key language groups, we need to be doing the same thing online. As we go to mass in an online situation, you'll quickly see content going from one or two languages with a heavy reliance on global advertisers for English, to being as you say, across many many more of the language groups.

As the internet becomes universal or much broader in the Indian context, we need to as an industry be representing all of those groups.

(Also See: The time has come for online video advertising) 
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