Ericsson Brand: Ericsson Campaign: ''Join me for dinner tonight'' Agency: Enterprise Nexus Subtle humour and subdued sensuality in product-oriented advertising	Cadbury India Brand: Cadbury Dairy Milk Campaign: Kya Swaad Hai Zindagi Mein Agency: O&M An out-and-out slice-of-life commercial, necessitated by Cadbury's need to extend the product to adults		Channel V Brand: Channel V Campaign: Quick Gun Murugan Agency: In-house Told the world and even reminded us that 'we are like this only'
Air India Brand: Air-India Campaign: Air-India Maharaja Agency: HTA The mascot created by Bobby Kooka that not only reflected the mood of the nation and its glorious history, but did better than the brand itself	Raymond Brand: Raymond Fabrics Campaign: The Complete Man Agency: Enterprise Nexus Elevated the brand to a 'way of life', taking aspirational advertising to a new high		Gujarat Co-op Milk Marketing Federation Brand: Amul Butter Campaign: Outdoor Agency: DaCunha Assoc. An eternal take on what is topical, with a twist that has become the brand's signature
Bajaj Auto Brand: Bajaj Campaign: Hamara Bajaj Agency: Lintas Reflected the mood of the nation, taking pride in our own identity, and had a memorable tune	Titan Industries Brand: Titan watches Campaign: Gifting Agency: O&M Perhaps the only commercial in Indian advertising to have made music-Mozart's 25th symphony-a brand signature P.S: Music by A.R. Rahman		Hindustan Lever Brand: Surf Campaign: Lalitaji Agency: Lintas A perfect personification of the middle-class, value-seeking Indian consumer, Lalitaji was an ad persona who found instant empathy
Mirc Electronics Brand: Onida Campaign: Onida Devil Agency: Advertising Avenues Perhaps the only brand in India to have used a negative emotion, envy, to its advantage by the end of the campaign, though, the devil had been overused	Tisco Brand: Tata Steel Campaign: We also make steel Agency: HTA The larger than life imagery of corporate philantrophy; what it means to be a good corporate citizen		Hindustan Lever Brand: Liril Campaign: The girl under the waterfall Agency: Lintas The ad that said no to bathrooms, brought in a fresh breath of life into an otherwise boring product category

Indian advertising: towards accountability

The Coming Of Age Of Indian Advertising

Structurally speaking, the Indian advertising industry is up there with the best in the world. Every major international advertising name, from WPP, to the Interpublic Group, to Grey, to Omnicom, to Publicis has a presence in the country, often through a marquee Indian agency in which it has a majority stake. Much of this internationalisation has happened in the nineties. Subsequently advertising agencies have also transformed themselves into 'marketing communications' specialists with a finger in media buying, public relations, direct marketing, design, events, and the like. Advertising is still the largest piece of the pie, but as the economic engine sputters marketers are discovering the benefits of below the line activities like merchandising and sales promotions.

However, the Indian advertising industry will really have come of age when it starts understanding the consumer. That process has already started with the 'creative function' of advertising coming out of what some call the ''clutches of the South-Mumbai social class''. Agencies themselves are hastening this process by investing in research aimed at understanding why we behave the way we do (upstream consumer research) as opposed to downstream market research (how we behave). Next step: measuring the effectiveness of advertising and challenging the commission-based revenue model. Accountability, here we come!
-Shailesh Dobhal

Studying Eyeballs: Online Behaviour

With a mere three million internet connections-21 per cent of these at home-and a total of eight million internet users, India isn't, at the beginning of 2002, a great online market. It has the potential to be one, but then, as some cynics point out, a country with a population in excess of a billion can lay claim to anything in terms of potential. Whether this potential will be realised or not is a function of several variables: pc-prices, and thus, pc-penetration; the cost of access; and the vernacularisation of the net. Still, there's enough information being gathered of the Indian internet user to hazard a simple identikit exercise.

Penetration holds the key to the future of the net in India

To begin with, the Indian internet user is, thrice out of four times, a male. In the metros, He accesses the net mostly in the office. However, across urban and rural areas, the cyber cafe emerges as the most popular place of access (32.3 per cent of users). E-mail, as has often been pointed out, is the killer app, with almost everyone (92.4 per cent) using it.

But other applications, like downloading music (41.3 per cent) are catching on. The average net-user in India accesses the net five times a week and spends a total of 7.4 hours (spread over these five visits). Weekends account for just 1.7 hours of surf-time, perhaps a function of the fact that most people access the net from their place of work.

Last word: English is the lingua franca of the net in India with just 9.5 per cent of all sites visited being language- sites. Expectedly, there is a strong correlation between vernacular print readership and language net usage. But with the country's two largest newspapers being in Hindi and Malayalam why is it that no Hindi or Malayalam site of note exists?
-Vinod Mahanta

MEDIA HABITS: URBAN & RURAL

URBAN
» Reach of print: 49.4 per cent of urban adults
» Television penetration: 81.6 per cent of urban households
» C&S penetration: 43 per cent of urban households
» C&S viewership (at least 1 hour a week): 39.6 per cent of urban adults
» Radio listernership (at least 1 hour a month): 23 per cent of urban adults
» Cinema-going habits (at least once a month): 17 per cent urban adults
» Internet usage (at least 1 hour online a week): 0.8 per cent of urban adults

RURAL
» Reach of print: 17.4 per cent of rural adults
» Television penetration: 42 per cent of rural households
» C&S penetration: 8.8 per cent of rural households
» C&S viewership (at least 1 hour a week): 5.9 per cent of rural adults
» Radio listernership (at least 1 hour a week): 26.6 per cent of rural adults
» Cinema-going habits (at least once a month): 11 per cent of rural adults
» Internet usage (at least 1 hour online): Negligible

The Mobile Community

Cinemas are a great place to observe how well Indians have taken to mobile phones. In most cinemas in Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore, young movie-goers message furiously on their phones for the duration of the motion-pic, their fingers dancing over the keys in the dark with an ease that tells of many thousands of messages sent. Today, there are around five million mobile phone users in India. And everyday, there are around one million SMS (Short Messaging System) messages that traverse India's cellular networks. There are also value-adds galore: news through SMS, net-banking, the ability to surf the net a WAP-enabled phone, instant messenger add-ons, even the facility to make cinema-reservations. India may not have a cellular market as large as China's; Indian cellular subscribers may not behave the same way Japan's i-Moders do; but there are definitely the signs of a mobile community emerging.