Sri Lanka WebAds – A new way to advertise
View(s):Mobile Video Marketing – the latest trend in online advertising, beating the good old newspaper and TV advertising is now catching on in Sri Lanka, after a cyber platform for a virtual trade/business video directory was created for the first time by an IT specialist and a lawyer.
Gayendra Wickramarathna, an IT specialist cum a Social Media geek, as well as an innovator with many ‘first times’ and novel innovations to his credit since his very young days with his friend, Wineendra Weeraman a lawyer has redefined the words ‘Virtual Advertising’, by conceptualising SriLanka WebAds Portal (SLWA).
“We recently launched Sri Lanka’s 1st ever Virtual 4K UHD Video Advertising E-Commerce platform, going a step further by amalgamating a 360 Degree Four Dimensional Spin-View of a customer’s product. This in fact is a rarity amongst the world’s E-Marketing platforms too,” Mr. Wickramarathna says. SLWA takes Sri Lankan business ventures to the world, he adds noting that mobile data traffic is increasing at a huge rate, even in Sri Lanka, and a new study from Cisco confirms that by 2020, video will account for a staggering 75 per cent of that traffic. That’s up from 55 per cent in 2015. The statistics for North America are even higher, coming in at over 77 per cent.
The study predicts that by 2020, there will be more than 11.6 billion mobile connected devices, exceeding the world’s projected population at that time (7.8 billion). That’s going to have a huge impact on video traffic.
Video is set to have the highest growth rate of any mobile application in the next five years, which is why a ‘Mobile Video Marketing’ strategy is essential for brands, Mr. Wickramarathna says. “India is far ahead than Sri Lanka. Sri Lankans are too slow in getting on board the bandwagon, which leaves them way behind world standards and thus becoming losers. Very high infrastructure rates – politically motivated – are another stumbling block.”
SLWA holds the largest amount of categories which are very explicitly depicted in Hi-Rez photos for any e-commerce site in the world and its layout is unorthodox, he adds noting that the Home and Garden section has all the subjects included for businesses who would want to advertise their products relating to Home Building, from a Septic Tank to a Granite Tile.
Mr. Wickramarathna insists that the government should drastically reduce the charges for ICT related tariffs, so that more entrepreneurs could capitalise on this and earn more revenue thus generating more cash flow amongst citizens and the government via taxes.
Mr. Wickramarathna has won awards in Photoshop as well as photography and represented Sri Lanka through ICTA at the 1st Manthan Awards, held in New Delhi, which is South Asia’s largest IT Awards. A ‘Tech Nut’ living in Japan for many years, Mr. Wickramarathna says his next step will be to host Blue Ray videos with a higher quality than 4K which still hasn’t even come to Sri Lanka’s TV standards.
Mr. Wickramarathna’s recent trip to USA enabled him to purchase modern equipment at BandH Photo in New York, which is the largest photo retailer in the world.
SLWA has many social media platforms where a client’s profile cum documentaries are uploaded and linked back again to a website that a client has. Mr. Wickramarathna leading in the field of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in Sri Lanka has another exceptionality, where he makes a ‘Thumbnail’ of a video of the client appear in the 1st few Google Chrome search pages, when a surfer searches for a certain name of a trade or service.
SLWA is linked to Google pages too. This novel concept is the first time in Sri Lanka and maybe a very few in the world, if at all, Mr. Wickramarathna says. “We are ranked top most in Google and YouTube the world’s largest search engines, with many years of interaction with them. It is not just a run on the mill dingy little website as in the case with all websites wrongly structured and highly charged in Sri Lanka, but an intricately linked up-market portal competing if at all with only a handful of such platforms worldwide and suited more for corporates and ones who understand the real value of a website for business promotions. Only one or two websites in the whole world offer 4K UHD videos and SpinViews integrated. It is not just a website that we offer, but a full video documentary of the client and project it universally through the World Wide Web. Taking forward the intuitive instinct of Mr. Wickramarathna’s propulsive gaze into the future, we take on the ‘Global Marketing’ aspect for the client and concludes Mr. Weeraman, by reiterating – ‘cheap things no good – good things no cheap’.”