Online Advertising and Marketers in Pakistan

Advent of internet has introduced a new touch point for Marketers and an unprecedented opportunity to interact with the consumers online, where they plan, live and share their lives.

This opportunity has been bolted the Pakistani Market as well with a sufficient amount of users activating their participation, on the world wide web.

I will try not to put in numbers for the total population of internet users from Pakistan because there are a lot of conflicts with that as well. I will start off with the story of Internet advertising scene in Pakistan when we had 2 TV channels and there wasn’t enough traffic on internet from Pakistan.

The Marketers used to take online advertising as the job of IT department and there was an incident happened with one of my colleague though, where he was asked to meet an IT Manager for Online Advertising. Those were the days when marketers used to take Internet as something very alien. Let me leap out to the current situation, where brands are getting activated online and have started taking this medium seriously, other than few brands which are still reluctant to explore this.

Online Advertising is ramping up but its real essence is not taken into account. In Pakistan Marketers are taking it the way they take print media, where I believe that there is an element of Interactivity which makes print and internet apart.

I think Push marketing and old model of interruption is challenged. New ways of engaging consumers, whether with online advertising or branded entertainment should be considered key by any forward thinking marketer.

Online advertising in this way is an efficacious way to achieve brand’s objectives in many ways. While in Pakistan we still rely on passively targeted ways to reach our consumers where in today’s world, markets are conversations and consumers should be thought of as communication partners. We still get the creative at the 11th hour and are asked to get them animated and paste it on the website.

There is a phenomenon used by the brand managers which is “IF I DON’T DO IT THAN NOBODY IS DOING IT”. We face this every now and then, especially when it comes to clicking on the banners. Just because the brand managers and their friends don’t notice the banners, so nobody else does. But the fortunate thing is that Online Advertising is Measurable and we are backed by numbers to convince them. It also happens when they’re on facebook and consider that everybody else is on facebook so advertise there only.

I believe that the myths should be kept aside and facts should be given priority to take decisions.

Tags: Advertising, brand, campaign, communication, consumers, digital media, engage, engaging the consumers, Entertainment, Facebook, interactivity, Internet, Marketing, measure, Media, objectives, Online, pakistan, push, reach

Category: Marketing, Media