You, too, brand professional, can be outsourced
"India is poised to become the outsourcing powerhouse for advertising," Devina Joshi reports from New Delhi. Her feature tells a familiar story to anyone who has observed how business processes and IT services have been outsourced to low-cost economies for the past generation.
The low-cost economy, assuming a reasonably state-of-the-art telco and web infrastructure and an employee based sufficiently prepared for training, gobbles up a large proportion of technology-enabled, repetitive, rule-governed functions. The classic cases have been IT services, such as data processing or systems integration, but also business services that require human involvement such as call centers, financial analysis, or even the reading of x-rays.
The Business Standard enthuses about how India-based ad firms are now serving wide Asian markets as well as occasionally European programs. The article particularly notes Accenture Interactive -- following the classic global outsourcing paradigm -- which "has digital marketing and experienced design capabilities in the U.S. and Europe that collaborate with ad production and development centres in Costa Rica and India. The company's global clientele has reduced costs by 40 per cent through this model."
One has to consider the source (Business Standard), which may be predisposed to see a rosy future for the Indian ad services industry. But, on the other hand, we cannot be surprised if digital marketing, especially, won't follow the patterns of other data-driven, rule-governed business processes. And that means that low-cost centers will have an advantage in the global market -- and the global market is growing, disproportionately faster, in south and east Asia.
