Utterly Butterly Advertising

For a very long time, my post on Amul: Longest running ad campaign in the world? is one of the most favorite search engine hits. I do not know why net searchers are fascinated with Amul’s ads rather than the usual utterly salacious searches with a dose of butterly. I do not know if it has anything to do with the Amul Star Voice of India reality show currently on Indian television.

Amul: India’s No. 1 Brand

Thanks to Trak.in, I was alerted to this interesting news: Amul is India’s No. 1 brand, followed by Life Corporation of India (LIC), and Nokia.

Leading media, advertising and marketing publication Media magazine, together with regional brand consultancy Asian Integrated Media Limited and global market research company Synovate, has released the 2007 results from the annual Asia’s Top 1000 Brands survey.

About the Survey: Nine markets were included in this fourth round of the survey – China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, India and Indonesia. Synovate interviewed people aged 15-64 years old, with sample sizes per market of 500, apart from China and India, where the sample was 750 across three and four top-tier cities respectively.

Asia’s Top 10 Brands for 2007

Rank	Brand
1	Nokia
2	Sony
3	Colgate
4	Coca Cola
5	Panasonic
6	Honda
7	7-Eleven
8	Samsung
9	Nestle
10	Adidas

You can see the Top 100 Asia brands and the top 3 in each market (country) here (PDF).

Word of Mouth Advertising

A Nielsen Global Survey shows that word-of-mouth advertising is still the most powerful in the world. Conducted twice-a-year among 26,486 Internet users in 47 markets from Europe, Asia Pacific, the Americas and the Middle East, Nielsen surveyed consumers on their attitudes toward thirteen types of advertising – from conventional newspaper and television ads to branded web sites and consumer-generated content.

87 percent of Internet accessing Indians still trust recommendations from others over any other kind of advertising, making word-of-mouth advertising the most powerful tool in the industry today. Let’s take a look at the interesting Indian results:

Form of Advertising Trusted	%
Recommendations from Consumers	87
Newspapers	77
Consumer opinions posted online	73
Brand Websites	72
Magazines	71
TV	65
Email I signed up for	58
Radio	55
Brand sponsorships	52
Search Engine Ads	41
Ads before movies	41
Online banner ads	38
Text ads on mobiles	24

This is amazing – online opinions (on blogs, social networking sites, etc.) are trusted higher than TV advertisements! And what about those ads before (and during) movies? Can this persuade the sponsors to reduce those TV ad break intervals down to zero?