General Motors (India) bets big on digital promotion

General Motors India is reportedly planning to pump in Rs 1 billion in media promotions for the Indian subcontinent.

According to the reports, the company targets to earmark 10 per cent of this towards online digital medium and mobile promotion. The company will spend Rs 65 million on the four-week television campaign. GM India has also booked around 300-400 spots per day on news and business channels and on some GECs.

Adgully had a conversation with Pradeep Lamba, Account and Media Director, Quasar, which is the designated digital Ad agency for GM India and asked on how they plan to use their spends, he says, "Overall, General Motors spends around 10-15 per cent on the marketing, whatever the budget would be. We plan campaign in two ways ' complete tactical campaign and compete full-on campaign, to support the sales. And, besides this 24/7 hour search continually take place."

Is this spend pertaining to a specific campaign and in that case how long will this campaign run, to this he explains, "All the campaigns are either to create awareness or support sales. Campaign duration depends on the kind of product is being offered to the customers. For e.g. If a new variant of a car is coming then the campaign will run for 3-4 weeks, and if a new variant of car is being launched then the campaign will run for 6-8weeks."

Allocating 10 per cent of the marketing budget on online for any company is decent or it should be more, to this Lamba replies, "Yes, it should be a very minimal budget, 10 per cent is nothing in these days wherein we have huge number of online users available, and which is growing each day. And, we can tackle them through different interactive routes like ' mobile, search, display, innovation, and video. In fact, there are multiple ways available to reach our paragons in a very effective and interactive way. So, considering 10 per cent, I think should be 20 per cent or so which hopefully by 2012 will happen wherein all the bigwigs will spend more than 20 per cent of their budget on online marketing."

The creative work for the campaign has been done by W+K and the media buying is done by Madison.