#NAMA Video: Mahesh Murthy & Tushar Vyas On Digital Advertising: Kickbacks, Niche Content, Payment Cycles

At MediaNama’s #NAMA conference, Tushar Vyas, General Partner (South Asia), GroupM and Mahesh Murthy, Founder of Pinstorm discuss the evolution of online advertising in India – changing in the mindset of advertisers, challenges regarding payments from agencies to publishers, monetization of niche content, social media marketing, mobile advertising, and a lot more. This session was moderated by Sandeep Amar from Times Internet Ltd. Some pretty sharp questions towards the end.

A key issue regarding the lack of incentive for creating niche content was highlighted, given the long payment cycles for publishers which sometimes go beyond a year, moving beyond lead generation, CPC and CPM, websites forming cartels. The conversation covered questioning whether large media agencies, used to kickbacks from TV Channels, are open to investing in digital because they don’t get kickbacks from the large digital publishers like Google, YouTube and Facebook, who are transparent, and don’t give undeclared “agency commissions”, discussion on display rates, expected increase in digital advertising.