Category: Media and Advertising

Integrated Marketing Communication is the future: John Zeigler

MUMBAI: The world is changing and it is the right time to understand the change and make a difference believes DDB Group Asia Pacific, India and Japan chairman and CEO John Zeigler.

He along with Tribal Worldwide Asia president Jeff Cheong are in India to meet clients and converse about cross-pollination between Singapore, India and Sydney to help the region. The visit was planned to meet more talent from the region and get some collaborative work across the table informs Zeigler.

It can be recalled that early this year DDB Mudra acquired 22Feet, a Bangalore based digital agency. The agency is aiming to get some great pieces of work out very soon. Cheong is of the opinion that, “India is a talent pool when it comes to technologists and the acquisition of 22Feet has helped us reach greater heights.”

Zeigler who believes that ‘Integrated Marketing Communication is the future,’ also thinks adding human touch in advertising campaigns creates magic. “Creativity is our birth right, humanity is our inspiration and technology is our canvas,” says Zeigler proudly, while elaborating the mantra of the various innovative campaigns the group has done.

The ‘Sorry, I spent it on myself’ campaign done by adam&eveDDB for Harvey Nichols and Heineken Ignite, an experiential campaign launched at the Milan Design Week by Tribal DDB Amsterdam are just a few innovations done by the group to take the message beyond just advertising. “It needs to be about creating influence,” says Zeigler.

In India, the ‘Push the pin’ campaign for Jaago Re before the 2014 general elections allowed users to voice relevant issues from their respective constituencies. Apart from that, the 52 week long campaign for Big Bazaar is a first of its kind marketing communication in the country wherein each week a new TVC is being launched focusing on various products offered.

After its consistent good performance, the network in India is now taking the next step of collaboration and integration within the system.

Given the new order of business and marketing challenges, increasing conversations and demands from a wide spectrum of collaborative and integrated solutions, the DDB Mudra Group, with its 10 agencies and operating units (DDB Mudra West, DDB Mudra South & East, DDB Mudra North, DDB MudraMax – OOH, DDB MudraMax – Experiential, DDB MudraMax – Media, TracyLocke, 22feet Tribal Worldwide, RAPP and DDB Remedy) have re-constituted its executive board.

The new board will see the addition of five more members taking the total toll to eight. The members include: Madhukar Kamath, Sonal Dabral, Anurag Bansal, Sathyamurthy Namakkal, Aneil Deepak, Deepak Nair, Mandeep Malhotra and Rajiv Sabnis.

“We are investing in people who will bring with them different kind of aspects and perspectives to the board,” says the group CEO and MD Madhukar Kamath on the backdrop of the various high management appointments.

Apart from this, the group has also created a group creative council and a strategic planning council. The creative council will consist of Aneil Deepak, Brijesh Jacob, Rahul Mathew, Sambit Mohanty and Vipul Thakkar while the strategic planning council will have Aditya Kanthy, Amit Kekre, Pradeep Ramakrishnan and Ramraaj Raghunathan.

The two councils will be headed by Dabral. “We have formulated the cross-section of talent and it will help us better our work,” he says while adding that soon the group will launch its own creative awards which are as of now tentatively named ‘Bernie’ on the group’s founder, the legendary Bill Bernbach.

The executive council will meet once a month over video conferences and on quarterly basis in either of the offices or at an offsite.

“It is the age of ‘influence’ and we believe in leading the change,” concludes Kamath.

July 28, 2014
MG Parameswaran elected AAAI president

MUMBAI: FCB Ulka Advertising advisor MG Parameswaran has been elected as the president of Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI) for the year 2014-2015. The announcement was made at its Annual General Body Meeting held on 25 July.

Publicis Communications CEO south Asia Nakul Chopra has been elected as vice-president of the association.

Other elected members of the executive committee for the ensuing year are: Nagesh Alai of Interface Communications, Sam Balsara of Madison Communications, Rana Barua of Contract Advertising, Aegis Media India’s Ashish Bhasin, Kunal Lalani of Crayons Advertising, Dentsu Creative Impact’s Rohit Ohri, Pranav Premnarayen of Prem Associates Advertising & Marketing, C V L Srinivas of Group M Media India, Vivek Srivastava of Innocean Worldwide Communication and R K SWAMY BBDO’s Srinivasan K Swamy.

Immediate past president, Arvind Sharma, will be the ex-officio member of the new AAAI executive committee.

The AAAI is the official, national organisation of advertising agencies, formed to promote their industry interests so that they continue to make an essential and ever-increasing contribution to the nation.

July 25, 2014
PSI crosses border with ACCA

MUMBAI: PSI, an international arm of Posterscope, was entrusted with the duty of creating a high impact outdoor campaign for Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) internationally, in South Asia.

With an aim to reinforce ACCA’s presence and the gamut of work it does, it has ventured into the outdoor turf, globally. PSI owing to its extensive reach across borders implemented a highly effective outdoor campaign which was built on a sophisticated media strategy.

The brief was to harbor impactful presence in student dominated locations and city centers. PSI tapped its resourceful network of outdoor in South Asia and working in tandem with a renowned media players there, captured the key cities of south Asia impeccably. The campaign was implemented in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad for duration of two months. Further to ensure impact large formats like billboards, gantries were used. The campaign reaped high amount of visibility and success.

Posterscope regional director APAC Haresh Nayak said, “We are particularly proud of this campaign given that it was done in South Asia Our strong international alliances and expertise in these markets was the key to this campaigns success. We are committed to ACCA and are happy to be associated with them”.

July 23, 2014
SBI selects Global Advertisers for outdoor promotion

MUMBAI: Global Advertisers has once again won the account of State Bank of India’s outdoor mandate.

Despite tough pitching against the media agencies, the OOH agency got the deal on the basis of best rates, innovation and widest range of premium inventories. The agency’s mandate is to promote Systematic Investment Plan (SIP) of SBI pan India, covering 21 cities.

In order to create awareness and increase the number of investors for SBI, Global Advertisers engaged its finest hoardings and bus media at the strategic locations in all cities.

“We are driven by the philosophy of quality service and assured returns for our clients. At Global we conceptualised the campaign keeping in mind the high visibility for the brand and the existing competition level. The campaign aims to help potential investors in SIP by guiding them about the market risks and benefits,” said Global Advertisers MD Sanjeev Gupta.

He further added, “We are glad to meet the expectations from our client, being the top brand in the banking sector. SBI showed deep faith in our approach and the impact of our campaign is out for everyone to look at.”

July 23, 2014
Indigo Consulting appoints Harshad Hardikar as COO

MUMBAI: Indigo Consulting which is a part of the Publicis Groupe, announced the appointment of Harshad Hardikar as its new chief operating officer. Hardikar is the former senior VP, e-commerce & CRM at OgilvyOne India.

Hardikar will be working closely with the agency’s managing director Vikas Tandon to help strengthen and grow its business nationally and internationally. Hardikar comes with over 17 years of experience in the industry. He is credited with launching India’s first coalition loyalty programme, iMint (now Payback).

In his previous role as senior VP, e-commerce & CRM at OgilvyOne India, he led the agency’s ecommerce and CRM practice nationally, managing clients’ needs end to end. Prior to this, he worked for Rediff.com, heading the company’s online sales division, Rediffshopping.

Commenting on the latest appointment Tandon said, “FY 2014 has been a great year for us, we are once again ready to shift to a higher gear. Not only are we seeing great organic growth, our international business as a regional COE for Leo Burnett Asia Pacific is seeing phenomenal traction. From a service bouquet point of view, after establishing our Mobile and Social practices, we are now investing in e-commerce and CRM capabilities. This is the ideal time for Indigo Consulting to expand its top management and leadership team. Harshad’s blend of expertise in our focus areas, and experience in driving revenues and P&L is exactly what we need to fuel and drive our journey in the next gear. I am very excited to have him on board and look forward to working with him in scaling up the company.”

Hardikar added, “I am very happy to become a part of this large family. Indigo already is a company with a great reputation and highly respected for their creative and technology capabilities. What really attracted me in this opportunity is the vision Vikas has, to grow this company further. I am sure with my experience of managing 360-degree digital work; I will be able to contribute to a greater success for this company.”

In addition to Hardikar’s appointment, the agency has also roped in Rimjhim Ray as AVP strategy and client services and Hanisha Vaswani as business head for the agency’s Delhi office.

Ray joins Indigo Consulting from Tata Consultancy Services, where she headed the company’s social media strategy department. In her new role, she will be responsible for steering the digital initiatives of key accounts, while also helping expand the agency’s portfolio.

At her previous stint at Edelman, Vaswani was responsible for devising brand building, content, and engagement strategies for clients such as HP, GM, GE, Shell, Juniper Networks, and the 1st Indian Grand Prix. At Indigo Consulting, she will be responsible for bringing in new business as well as managing the existing accounts of the agency’s Delhi office.

July 21, 2014
DDB Mudra Group launches Bernbach Fridays

MUMBAI: DDB Mudra Group has announced the launch of Bernbach Fridays, a tribute to a man who is the Father of Modern Advertising, a brilliant advertising mind of the 20th Century and DDB’s founder the great Bill Bernbach. The sessions take place on the last Friday of every month at the DDB Mudra Group office, and so far a total of four successful sessions have already taken place.

The maiden session of Bernbach Fridays saw DDB Mudra Group’s very own Chairman and Chief Creative Officer, Sonal Dabral. Having over 2 decades of experience in the field of advertising, he shared his life journey with the audience. Right from his NID days to his first job to how he helped Ogilvy Singapore become the hottest agency in the region and the No.1 creative office of the WPP global network and also his experience as a TV host and a scriptwriter in Bollywood. He inspired and engaged the DDB Mudra Group employees which was the perfect kick-start to Bernbach Fridays.

The second speaker of Bernbach Fridays was Shreedavy Babuji, of DDB Mudra West, who presented an extremely interesting project she had worked on. The project was a documentary covering the various aspects of an age old folk art form of India – The Truck art. Titled ‘Horn Please’, the documentary focuses on origin of truck art and its evolution since then. The documentary has been accepted at festivals across the world and is getting tremendous reviews everywhere.

The third and fourth sessions of Bernbach Fridays saw Varun Thakur – stand-up comedian and E Suresh – Founder of Studio Eeksaurus, respectively. With a good mix of personal stories, observational humour and impersonations, Varun was an act that no one could miss. E Suresh, also the founder of Famous Studios, shared his eventful journey in the world of animation.

Sonal Dabral, Chairman and Chief Creative Officer at DDB Mudra Group said, “Our instincts and craft as creatives gets honed everyday by just observing and assimilating life happening around us. Which means the more we are aware of our world the better advertising professionals we become. That’s where curiosity comes in. The desire to know as much as possible. Desire to find out the answers. Desire to be acquainted with as many subjects as possible. Curiosity and creativity are never far apart. Without curiosity, we will never be innovative. There will be no growth and nothing will change. To fuel this curiosity we have launched “Bernbach Fridays”.”

The main aim of Bernbach Fridays sessions is to celebrate advertising by creating curiosity. The audiences at DDB Mudra are always ready for something new, therefore these sessions will see speakers from different fields which would include Fashion Designers, Chefs, Film Makers, Scientists, Directors, Musicians, Artists and so on.

You can view the sessions here:

Varun Thakur – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8X715bm1P0

E Suresh –https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfdgXn4Nirk&list=UUXZ6ZNX6CZDAytIwNXZlNkA

July 21, 2014
HSBC appoints L&K Saatchi & Saatchi as its communication partner

MUMBAI: HSBC has awarded its communication mandate to L&K Saatchi & Saatchi for the re-launch of its premier offering in India. HSBC Premier is the group’s premium financial services product, offering exclusive banking services to high net worth individuals.

The agency will be taking forward the globally integrated campaign for the re-launch of Premier. The agency’s Mumbai office will handle the account.

The new positioning for HSBC premier is ‘Personal support, for your Personal Economy’.

L&K Saatchi & Saatchi CEO and managing partner Anil Nair said, “We are extremely pleased to work with HSBC in India. HSBC has given us the mandate on the ‘premier’ business which is very challenging and exciting. We look forward to creating interesting work in collaboration with the HSBC team in India.”

The campaign took an inside-out approach for the re-launch, starting with HSBC’s own relationship managers to better understand the real challenges that their clients face.

Extensive research, consultation and interviews with both relationship managers and clients revealed the insight that high net worth individuals across the world have one major characteristic in common: they each have their own individual, highly personal economy.

Interconnected to all aspects of their lives – whether home, family, work, experiences or passions – their personal economies are always with them, always changing and needing care and attention in order to grow.

July 21, 2014
Percept restructures; gets Shiv Sethuraman as CEO

MUMBAI: Percept has gone ahead to consolidate its diverse strategic business units to a single holistic entity called Percept One. The agency currently stands at having revenues of worth Rs 1,250 million. Along with this the agency has also appointed Shiv Sethuraman as CEO of Percept One, with effect from 14 July, 2014.

He will be responsible for leading business development and integration of all marketing communication (marcom) services, creating opportunities for synergy within and across the marcom businesses of the Percept group, attaining profitability and revenue growth organically and inorganically, as also paving the roadmap for the overall marcom business of the Percept group. Sethuraman has a challenging mandate of driving a 30 per cent year-on-year growth with a target of achieving revenues worth Rs 2,750 million by 2017.

Previously, the marketing communications services business of Percept spanned three separate verticals, namely creative services, media services and other marcom services. The creative services vertical encompassed advertising, brand marketing consultancy and communications, corporate identity, strategy, creative, design and packaging and integrated marketing communication consultancy services.

The media services vertical spanned media planning and buying, out-of-home media, retail media, rural media and digital media. The third vertical included a host of services including experiential marketing, sports management and marketing, incentives, conferences and exhibitions management, event management and marketing, celebrity endorsements and talent management, entertainment branding and marketing, branded entertainment, brand activations and promotions, public and media relations and social media marketing.

Sethuraman has had a remarkable two decade long career in the media and communications domain. He has handled dynamic portfolios spanning global brand development and business acquisition and served as country head in Europe and also in India.

Prior to joining Percept, Sethuraman was associated with TBWA, India in the role of CEO and personally led the Nissan, Adidas and infrastructure/realty cluster within the agency. He kick-started his advertising career with Ogilvy where he cut his teeth on many of the key clients of the agency such as Cadbury, Castrol, Unilever and Shell amongst others. He moved to Ogilvy, Paris in 2001 as global business director and was later elevated to the position of MD, Ogilvy & Mather, Paris where he acquired large global and regional accounts such as Louis Vuitton, Coca Cola – Europe and Europcar and also managed several businesses including IBM, Unilever and Nestle.

Sethuraman said, “Percept has been a pioneer in the entertainment, media and communications space and has set many benchmarks over the decades. With the creation of Percept One we are now bringing together the very successful individual businesses to create an integrated entity. This entity is already 700 people strong and has over Rs 1250 million in revenue, making it one of the leading companies in its space. The mandate and the challenge is to use this size and scale to propel us to a faster growth trajectory. I look forward to working closely with the team at Percept to ensure that Percept One reaches its goals.”

“We strongly believe that Shiv will be able to provide the leadership that Percept One needs to become a strong unified marcom service. His global leadership experience and brand experience will help us achieve the scale and growth targets we have set for ourselves,” added Percept director Ajay Upadhyay.

July 21, 2014
iProspect Communicate2 partners with Google

MUMBAI: iProspect Communicate2, from the Dentsu Aegis Network, is entering into a strategic agreement with Google to become a Google Analytics Premium certified partner. Google Analytics Premium (GAP) offers deeper data insights and quick data processing, allowing brands to optimise their online marketing strategies.

GAP is an analytics solution made with large enterprises in mind. It offers all the features of Google analytics as well as additional benefits like quick processing of higher volumes of data, increase in monthly limits, guaranteed uptime and additional custom variables. It is developed to provide extra processing power, in-depth analysis and 24×7 support.

In order to ensure that brands get a superior and well-rounded experience, iProspect Communicate2 has developed a team of certified marketers who are dedicated to offer complete GAP support in terms of implementation guides, training and audits.

As a part of a global network, iProspect Communicate2 has adapted the latest trends that are being used in the world of digital marketing. These technologies coupled with the power of GAP will help brands reach and supersede targets.

iProspect Communicate2 CEO Vivek Bhargava said, “Lots of companies need an enterprise version of Google analytics and have been waiting for GA premium to be launched in India. Our data led approach to digital marketing has always delivered superior RoI to our clients and I believe this development will further grow our competitive edge in the market.”

July 18, 2014
Maxus wins businesses worth over Rs. 300 crore

MUMBAI: Maxus, yet again retains the title of the most ‘dominant’ agency as per the latest RECMA report, a qualitative assessment for all leading media agencies in India.

It is the fourth consecutive year that Maxus is on the top of the RECMA ratings. Along with this, the agency also won business across 23 new clients, worth upwards of Rs. 300 crores in the first half of 2014. These new clients include Tata Sons, JK Tyres, Kotak Mahindra Bank, Unitech, Paytm, Askme.com, ICC T20 World Cup 2014, Cigna TTK Health Insurance and BML Educorp.

Maxus South Asia managing director Kartik Sharma said, “Over the last 12 months, Maxus has made an effort to become future ready in a digitally charged media environment. We approach planning and investments in an integrated manner with emphasis on new media concepts that brings digital media, content and data together with traditional TV, print and radio. We believe this gives us an edge in the market, helping us delight to our existing clients and bring new clients into the fold.”

“Our ‘Lean into Change’ approach has given us a healthy double digit growth in 2014” Besides their expertise in core traditional media, Maxus today is a full- fledged media solutions agency with expertise across digital, mobile media, data and analytics, branded content and programming. Talent across these verticals are embedded in the network and work closely with core client teams,” added Sharma.

The new approach at Maxus has resulted in several ingenious campaigns like “Power of 49” for Tata Tea, Kotak Jifi, Vodafone Fan Photo and Tata Sky’s innovation around the IPL. Maxus was the first agency to set up a digital command centre for Nestle, where the marketing and agency team to monitor data from various social feeds and take real time marketing decisions. This ensured judicious use of budgets across media with a low percentage of wastage. The approach also helped expand business with new clients across industries ranging from e-commerce, banking and insurance, sports, retail, healthcare, etc.

In 2014, Maxus was part of WPP Team Red (head by MEC Global) that won the Vodafone account across several countries, retaining the account in India. The expertise of a long client relationship with Vodafone domestically brought about great insight during the pitch process.

It can also be noted that this year, Maxus has also brought on board two senior leaders – Navin Khemka in New Delhi to head the North and East region and focus on new business development and Anand Chakravarthy heading Maxus, West and some of their key client relationships. Earlier in the year, Maxus won the digital agency of the year and a number of metals at the Abbys 2014 for their new media capabilities.

July 18, 2014