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Aug 25, 2006 – Ybrant Technologies is an e-marketing solutions provider, which delivers support services and software tools for enterprise e-marketing. With more and more people spending time online, e-marketing has evolved into an effective channel to reach consumers.

The co-founder and chairman of Ybrant, Suresh Reddy, spoke to Pragati Simlote of CyberMedia News, on the emergence of the e-marketing space and his company’s market plan for India.

How big is the Internet advertising industry worldwide?

Internet advertisement forms around five per cent of the total ad spend and is expected to increase to eight per cent by 2010. The e-marketing industry as opined by experts is all poised for a giant leap. According to the IAB&PWC, Internet advertising revenues in the US totaled over 12.5 billion for 2005 increased nearly 34 per cent over 2004, which is of 9.6 billion. The Internet advertisement in the US is estimated at $ 15 billion for the year 2006. Forrester Research forecast Internet based sales to touch $329 billion in 2010.

How has e-marketing as an industry grown overtime?

Online advertising has been growing steadily since early 2003 and is on track to surpass the $10 billion annual spending level for the first time in history. Research firm eMarketer predicts that more than $12 billion will be spent this year, double 2004 levels. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers said Internet advertising revenues for the second quarter were $2.985 billion, up 7 per cent over the first quarter of this year.

What would be the future trends in this space?

The concept of eMarketing is picking up globally. More and more advertisers are spending their ad budgets on online than offline. Forrester Research forecasts says, “the marketers will spend $26 billion in 2010 on online display ads, email, search, and classified ads will represent 8% of all advertising spending, rivaling spending on cable/satellite TV and radio.”

Over the years, Internet has evolved as a medium for lead generation since the online usage has gone up significantly. With the technology sophistication, effective targeting can be achieved for an online campaign. Internet has emerged as one more channel over TV, Print, Radio, hoardings, etc for marketers to reach out to consumers / potential consumers. Technology being the backbone of e-marketing acts as a powerful tool to track the campaigns. Campaign mix can be optimized using tracking.

What are your views on the Indian online market? What kind of market exists for the company here?

The Internet advertisement is seeing traction in Europe and China due to large online population. The numbers of Indian markets are not available with us. The Internet advertisement in India is at a nascent stage. The level of sophistication in systems and processes for undertaking an e-marketing campaign is low in comparison to US markets. Having said that, there is a large online population on internet in India and this would drive the marketers to look at it as another medium for reaching out to target consumers. We expect good growth in Indian markets for using Internet as brand management and lead generation for company’s products and services.

What kind of solutions do you provide?

Ybrant Technologies delivers support services and software tools for enterprise e-marketing. We have ready to deploy platforms in the e-marketing space. We also customize these platforms in the e-marketing space to meet the requirements of our customers ranging from developing and maintaining new applications to implementing third-party software. We also offer custom software solutions in the e-marketing space and creative services for marketing products and services of our customers.

We also specialize in providing electronic communications that maximize customer response and increased ROI. In addition, we offer solutions to help leverage best practices to market using email and follow CAN-SPAM 2003 compliant methodologies.

We also offer proven strategies to drive more qualified visitors to web sites of our customers by optimizing them for search engines. Our SEO services include web site and competitor analysis, keyword analysis, content development and optimization, link building strategy, and paid search management.

What are your target segments and where do you see untapped opportunity lying for e-marketing?

Internet has become another media channel for marketers to market their products and services along with TV, Print, Radio, etc. The advantage of Internet marketing is its trackability. We offer software tools and services that enable company to manage their marketing campaign, ensure trackability and also optimize their ad spend depending on its effectiveness. All the marketers looking at using Internet as their marketing medium would be our target customers. We expect the banking, leisure and entertainment, insurance and auto industry to be the early adopters for e-marketing.

How big is the company in terms of employees and clients and what are your expansion plans?

We presently have 140 clients in the US like Yahoo!, CapitalOne, Vayan Marketing, AdDynamics and SEOInc. In India we have clients like HCLInfinet, India Times, AmulGreetings, Infrawire, Digital Nirvana, Citibank, Suraj Diamond, and Fab Mart. Currently, we have an employee strength of 175 people but it plan to expand our India operations. We have moved into a new facility, which can accommodate 500 people on round the clock operations.