Online Ads Severely Hit Traditional Media

Alarmed by how much Nepalis were spending on digital advertising, especially on foreign media, the Nepal Rastra Bank issued a directive a couple of years ago, saying advertising on social networking sites and the internet in general is illegal, and anyone found doing this will be booked by law. The NRB said sending payment abroad and receiving payment from abroad will be termed illegal. 

However, it had to find a solution to address this issue because online advertising, especially on Facebook and Google, was becoming very necessary for online entrepreneurs. Therefore, it allowed the commercial banks to issue prepaid dollar cards capped at $500 per year. The response was so overwhelming that just in the first year of Dollar Card launch, Nepalis spent around 275 million rupees advertising on online media, especially foreign media like Facebook, Google, etc. The current data is not available, but it can be estimated that it is a lot more than that. 

Internet advertising 

Whether you are a website owner, a blogger, a vlogger, an e-commerce owner, a business owner, a content creator, or a marketer, you will have to use internet advertising to build traffic and engagement to your website, blog, or vlogs, and drive sales of your products and services. You cannot build traffic to your website by advertising in newspapers, right? You cannot generate sales on your online stores by advertising on TV, right? You will need to advertise on the internet to generate traffic to your websites and drive sales on your online stores. Therefore, you will have to choose online advertising instead of traditional advertising.

Even when you have offline business, you might have to promote your products and services online because more people use the internet than traditional media like newspapers, radio and television. There are a lot of online advertising platforms, homegrown as well as foreign-based, and as an advertiser, you will have to use the platform that has the most users and get most views. That’s the reason why Facebook and Google are popular advertising platforms not only for people around the world, but also for Nepalis. 

Facebook, the most popular social network, allows both business-to-business and business-to-consumer transactions. You can reach a lot of people across the globe very quickly, and conversions can happen immediately. Advertising on online media is also relatively easy. First, you define the purpose of your Facebook ad campaign, create ad creative, then set a budget, choose ad targeting, and voila, your ad will go live. Measuring the success of your campaign is also easy: you just check your dashboards, and you can see everything you need to know.

Well, Facebook is not the only ad platform you can use for your business and other things. You can use other social media or even search engines like Google. Just like on Facebook, you can run an ad campaign on Google, where you can run Pay-Per-Click advertising and pay only for the engagements on your ads. This makes your ad campaign cheaper, while also improving conversions on your ads. There are also other nuances involved in internet-based advertising, but the basic thing is easy and you can do it yourself and do not have to go to an ad agency to run your ad campaigns. 

Now compare this process with traditional advertising, advertising on radio, television, and newspapers, is it easy? Is it cost-effective? Do you actually get sales? The Advertising Association of Nepal estimates that the advertising industry in Nepal is worth 5 billion rupees. There is no data on how much of the total ad spending is on traditional media and how much is on internet advertising. However, it is estimated that online advertising is growing. The market is so competitive that if you are not doing paid advertising, you cannot generate any sales. However, the traditional media cannot reach everywhere. How does a Kathmandu-based business reach Jumla by advertising in newspapers or even on TV? 

Home-grown online media

Well, the business can try advertising on home-grown online media, but how likely is Jumli to use home-grown media compared to watching YouTube or checking Facebook? Advertising on foreign online platforms is growing so fast that advertising agencies are trying to put pressure on Nepal government to make laws that would stop average Nepalis from directly advertising on international advertising platforms, and only allow them to advertise through an agency. 

However, we need to remember one thing: one dollar is all you need to advertise on Facebook. If you have to advertise on it through a local ad agency, you might end up paying over 1,000 rupees for the same ad. Of course, we need laws, but the laws should also be in favour of the common people.

(Ghimire is a freelance writer and blogger.)