BANGALORE, INDIA: Today, Internet marketing has spawned whole new genres of advertising and promotional activities. And one of the hottest methods is search marketing – contextual, which is showing a 214 percent growth over the past two years.

Communicate2, a leader and an early mover in the contextual advertising space in India, is growing at 400 percent year-on-year. It has the largest team of Google Advertising Professionals (GAP) in the country purely focused on search.

With this backdrop, Vivek Bhargava, CEO, Communicate2, shares a few word with Deepa Damodaran – CIOL in an interview.

Excerpts from the interview:

CIOL: How does contextual advertising differ from traditional advertising modes?

VIVEK BHARGAVA: If a person defines contextual or search advertising from Google's point of view, it is either displaying ads next to the relevant content or displaying ads based on what the user searched for on the search query box.

My definition of both search and contextual advertising is much broader. For me, search advertising is related to identifying or finding content and then serving ads on a real-time basis, based on that content. The content could be text, but it also could be audio or video (for example, a video feed being recorded from an outdoor hoarding-car being identified and advertisement being served on the outdoor).

Context also takes into account the target user's gender, their socio economic status, their state of mind, the time of the day, the day of the week, other environmental factors such as Rajasthan Royals winning the IPL. All of the above create a context – if one has the ability to identify this context and serve ads based on this context, I would call it contextual advertising.

CIOL: How do you evaluate the MS-Yahoo bid?

VB: I evaluate the bid positively. I feel that if any partnership gives consumers/advertisers more choice, it is positive for the industry. I believe it is positive for the industry and allows increasing the industry pie.

From a commercial stakeholder of Microsoft and Yahoo point of view too, I believe that this kind of merger would be positive to both companies. A merger of these two companies would allow one to identify more context of the user visit, which in turn would result in better contextual advertising.

Yahoo may be able to help take the Microsoft Office package online, as well help in making contextual advertising enabled inside office programs, which I believe would help in democratising Office in most emerging markets of the world. The growth for Microsoft is in the emerging markets. However, the current method of distribution is a challenge for Microsoft.