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Click on this image to see the full-sized picture of this Ad. This ad is apparently running in Mumbai right now.

See Adv Agency folks? You CAN communicate something without asking women to sell their soul with gleeful smiles.

The Telenor Teledoctor service has certainly sparked a lot of interesting discussion on the web, some of it has some valid points but others are just emotional rants or coming from lack of information. Time to put some balance and analysis on this.

For starters, the Teledoctor service is a value-added service created and managed by E-Health, whose CEO is Dr. Zakiuddin Ahmed. All Telenor is doing is providing their pipes… this is much like Telenor Picshare, which is a service by PixSense over Telenor’s pipes.

Their services’ core market is people out on the edge - in rural communities - who have limited access even to basic healthcare / preventive medicine knowledge or support. I dont think anyone really expects this service to help in the diagnosis of complex diseases anyway, so the most we can expect these doctors to do is either help in cases where they can immediately recommend some off-the-shelf medicine (lets say for high fever etc.) or recommend that the person calling see a specialists for tests.

Therein lies the problem though - because the people out on the fringe need to also have access to those medicines or specialists to be able to see TeleDoctor as a valid first step.

But the service aside, it is interesting to see why the service has sparked such emotional discussion on the topic. My guess is it all started because of the hyperbole-ridden way in which Telenor chose to describe the service (see below). Consumers / Communities / Bloggers hate hyperbole, because they prefer a person-to-person conversation:

Telenor TeleDoctor will revolutionize the medical industry by eliminating any doctor patient barriers that might exist due to language, lack of education, lack of mobility, etc.

"Revolutionize the medical industry" Hah, yea right. Lets see what discussion sparked on this.

Read the rest …

Via The Post:

ISLAMABAD: Etisalat Co authorities of United Arab Emirates having the majority shares of PTCL have ordered investigation on matters relating to the wastage of the huge amount of money on publication of wrong advertisement from PTCL.

A few days ago an advertisement was issued to the newspapers with reference to its new packages from Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited that was prepared by an advertising company, Interflow. The aforesaid advertisement was prepared for newspapers of both Urdu and English languages. Yet during the preparation of Urdu version, the details of basic plus package, value plus and value plus details were registered in the part of basic plus as a result of which tens of thousands of readers became victim to misunderstanding and got misguided instead of any help or facility for the advertisement.

This is interesting to note that PTCL authorities accorded approval to the aforesaid advertisement prepared by the advertising company and the same was exactly published in the newspapers due to which a heavy amount of money was wasted. According to sources, Etisalat authorities on knowing the real situation have ordered investigation while PTCL authorities after the indication of the matter have started negotiations with the advertising company for republishing amended/corrected advertisement.

Via the Next> blog:

If we really wanted to be remarkable in our lives, we would choose to take an alternate, less-trodden, hard path away from this cycle.

Someone up the ranks in the online advertising industry - where the air is sufficiently thin and brain functions are sufficiently paralyzed - must have thought it would be a great idea to do geographically targeted advertising on online websites.

What they forgot to think through was that that scheme only works when the website itself has sufficient localization.

Because otherwise, just when contextual internet ads had begun to seem relevant, we were just thrown back in the stone ages.

Let me give you some beautiful examples to prove my point:

Question: HOW ON EARTH is it a smart idea to put out ads for online dating websites for techcrunch readers? How on earth is someone coming to techcrunch.com ALREADY LOOKING FOR good marriage websites?!

How is this going to give them good ROI?

A couple of more examples below:

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This rant i’ve been saving for a long time. This is for all the ad executives out there. In what universe do you think if you take the video out of a TVC, you still retain the same message? How? Why? Somebody please explain this to me!

Case in point: Mezan cooking oil, with their TVC slogan claiming, ‘Har cheez mezan mein ache lagti hai’.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Ez9rMEaBlJ8

Watch the ad once. Now close your eyes and listen to the ad. What part of the ‘audio’ tells you that mezan is actually a cooking oil? Now imagine listening to it, non stop, in your car while you are driving to, or home from work, and what would you hear? A public service message telling you to maintain balance in your life? Or maybe a teaser of something to come?

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A few days ago the Sheraton Hotel and Towers was the venue for the First International Conference on MCommerce in Pakistan.

I wont write about the details about the details of the “international” conference for “Pakistan” (?!) but one interesting part of this was that Amaana tried to recreate the environment that Twitter creates during conferences.

At the registration booth, everyone’s phone number was taken and an SMS sent by Amaana to them.

Throughout the conference, all the participants could speak to each other by replying to that SMS — the message would be broadcast to all the participants there.

Sounds like an interesting way of promoting themselves and establishing the concept of cellphone interactions and transactions on the ground.

I’ll be speaking at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad, Wednesday April 9 on the Future of Advertising. Two other people from the adv industry will be speaking there.

If you’re interested in finding out why and how the traditional forms of media and advertising are about to die a very rapid death, and how corporations can look to now to reach targeted audiences, feel free to show up. If you’re curious to see me present [Update: are interested in seeing an alternative presentation style] come meet me there, it should be fun. Here’s the details:

Venue: Dept of Admin Scs, QAU, ISB
Date: Wednesday April 9, 2008
Time: 1030am-1pm

I think new media might have an answer to the rants I used to have last year - that it is hard to find out the truth of people or fact-check them during business transactions, or when hiring them.

The key takeaway from this video is What is your personal brand and what are you doing to build it - some food for thought

You’ll have to excuse the language in between but this presentation makes some very sharp, hard hitting points.

I think this is important for both camps (Marketing, Engineering) to understand - when both understand the importance of this in creating value for consumers / clients they will invariably move closer towards each other.

The days where Marketing and Engineering poked fun at each other are gone, because turns out both of them were wrong - what is needed now is for both to focus on getting to the goal in the middle. Marketing needs to know that value comes from product utility, and Engineering needs to really figure out what user experience design is in terms of what will actually make people talk about your product or exclaim in happiness the first time they see it.

Note: CDF is an experience-design firm.

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