The local advertising landscape in emerging markets

Abstract

This paper is a research work conducted on the local advertising landscape in emerging markets, with India being a case in point. It starts off with gauging the macro picture and the potential business that local advertising in these markets holds. The second part of the paper gets into more specific aspects of analyzing the local advertising landscape in India and the ecosystem. This section looks at meaty details about various players/entities in the ecosystem and fine-grained inferences about them, which were arrived at through primary research, by conducting interviews with key stakeholders of relevant businesses/advertisers, advertising agencies and publishers and through consumer surveys. Based on the primary research conducted and inputs from secondary research, the last section of this paper identifies gaps and opportunities that exist in the local advertising industry currently and goes on to propose a viable business model to capture value from these opportunities. As it panned out from the research work, there is a sizable opportunity to provide advertising services to businesses that work with relatively lesser advertising budgets than such that would interest advertising agencies. However, these businesses are present in huge volumes and increasing in number in emerging markets, which are well worth tapping at an aggregate level. Through the primary and secondary research data, it has been gathered that online and mobile media provide a great platform to be able to aggregate these businesses effectively through simple, easy to use automated advertising platform. As a case in point, the business model looks at how an online service provider like Yahoo could use the opportunity in emerging markets by suggesting a new paradigm of serving personalized ads to users in the local context and increasing user engagement to generate and keep local content up-to-date. This model is extensible to other forms of digital advertising as well. The reason this concept is more relevant to local/hyper local advertising than online advertising in general is because users are more likely to take immediate action on these ads, if they were personalized to users preferences. Further, the last section provides details on the go-to-market strategy and how this platform can be researched and further extended.