Category: MAM

MUMBAI: Wieden+ Kennedy (W+K) has bagged the creative duties of The Park Hotel and will handle the account from its Delhi office. 
 
As part of its new mandate, the agency will be responsible for recreating the overall brand of the group along with the launch of its two new properties – The Park, Hyderabad and The Park, Kerala.
 
Says W+K managing director Mohit Jayal, “We met the client and understood their requirements that are needed to develop the brand. We are planning on the details of the campaign that is expected to break in the next two months.”
 

MUMBAI: Bloomberg UTV has appointed Manoj Padmanabhan as VP sales. He would be reporting to Bloomberg UTV business head Deepak Lamba.
 
UTV Global Broadcasting Ltd CEO MK Anand confirmed the development.
 
Under his new role, Padmanabhan would be responsible for the ad sales of the channel and will look at revenue monetisation.
 
Prior to this, Padmanabhan was Ten Sports director ad sales. He was also part of the core team when Zoom was launched.

MUMBAI: Indian TV guide company What’s On India has joined hands with Ormax Media to create a learning initiative on promotional strategies for television channels.

Ormax Media has been mandated to create specialised planning tools and techniques that will allow TV broadcasters to use the What’s On India TV guidance channel more efficiently. 
 
Says What’s On India CEO Atul Phadnis, “Internationally, a TV guidance channel is used by TV networks to distribute a host of messages to TV viewers, and most importantly to promote their channels and programmes. However, we realise that a TV guidance channel is a very different medium than other media currently being used by television channels, including outdoor, print and conventional television. In India, Ormax Media will be taking on the role to enable broadcasters to use our channel better. We have also licensed certain critical templates and planning tools from our TV guidance partners across the world to enrich this process.”
 
Ormax Media director Shailesh Kapoor adds, “The context and the uniqueness a channel like What’s On India brings with it, demands that it be used differently in a TV Network’s marketing and promotional plans. This difference will apply to various aspects of promo planning, like campaign period, types of innovations, day and day-part scheduling, recency and interactivity. Eventually, the purpose is to deliver an efficient eyeballs generating plan to the broadcasters advertising on What’s On India.”
 

MUMBAI: BBDO India has roped in Arindam Sarkar as vice president, strategic planning. 
 
Prior to this, Sarkar was senior planning director at Ogilvy Delhi where he was responsible for taking care of the Coke portfolio and the Max Life business.
 
Meanwhile, BBDO India strategy planning director Sangeet Pillai is moving back to the US after completing a successful two-year stint with Omnicom‘s youngest agency.

MUMBAI: Classmate, ITC‘s Education and Stationery Products, has roped in Yuvraj Singh and Soha Ali Khan as brand ambassadors for their entire product range.
 
Says Chand Das, chief executive of ITC‘s Education & Stationery Products Business, “Classmate aspires to be the most trusted student education and stationery brand. Both Yuvraj Singh & Soha Ali Khan are vibrant icons for the youth of today. They have believed in & pursued their own ‘big ideas‘, and today, both stand tall in their professions with multi-faceted personalities.”
 
The company recently expanded its portfolio with the launch of a range of stationery products such as pens, pencils and geometry boxes.

MUMBAI: In the wake of a multi-agency pitch, Maruti Suzuki has signed Denstu Creative Impact as its creative partner for its newly-launched multi purpose vehicle (MPV), ‘Eeco‘.

“The size of the account is close to Rs 300 million for a year,” informs Maruti Suzuki chief general manager marketing Shashank Srivastava. 
 
Backed with their national and international resources, Denstu Creative Impact showcased a powerful understanding of the product during the pitching along with new and innovative ideas. “We, thus, went for Denstu as our creative partner,” says Srivastava. 
 
Apart from Denstu Creative Impact, the other agencies that pitched for the account included Capital, Creative Impact, Percept Hakuhodo and Lowe Lintas.

Says Srivastava, “The campaign is a 360 degree plan that includes print, TVC, OOH and the internet. While the print ad is already out, the television campaign (TVC) will be launched next week.”
 
Lintas Media Group is the media agency for Maruti Suzuki.
 

MUMBAI: The Advertising Standards Council Of India (ASCI) is in the process of reviewing the Tata Sky complaint against competition brand Airtel Digital TV‘s “Dil Titli” commercials.

As per the Tata Sky grievance registered with ASCI, the advertisements are mislading since viewers are led to believe that Airtel Digital TV has superior picture quality because of MPEG4 or DVBS2. 
 
However, Tata Sky states that the claims are to be held in falsehood as MPEG technology is only used for compressing a large number of channels within a given bandwidth.

Says Tata Sky chief marketing officer Vikram Mehra, “While MPEG 4 is definitely superior to MPEG 2, 8it has nothing to do with picture quality. The technology is only used for compressing a large number of channels within a given bandwidth.” 
 
In December 2009, Tata Sky had registered its grievance against the ads, considered by the Consumer Complaints Council (CCC).

The letter from Tata Sky to ASCI informed that while the first ad, where Saif hunts down his childhood friend, has stopped airing from 30 September across all 89 channels (national nad regional channels, all genre), the second ad featuring a TV reporter is still running on cricket matches. 
 
The CCC decided to uphold the complaint as the advertisement breached chapter 1.4 of the ASCI code. The code states that advertisements shall neither distort facts nor mislead the consumer by means of implications or omissions. Advertisements shall not contain statements or visual presentation which directly or by implication or by omission or by ambiguity or by exaggeration are likely to mislead the consumer about the product advertised or the advertiser or about any other product or advertiser.

MUMBAI: In the wake of a multi-agency pitch, Mudra West has bagged the creative and media duties of Mexus Education, an education innovations enterprise from the Bilakhia Group.

This is the first time that Mexus Education has roped in an agency. According to industry sources, the account size is pegged at Rs 60 million for a year.
 
“Mexus Education is driven by the passion to create an educational model that can create an outstanding learning experience for the users. We saw the same passion being shared by Mudra. Their understanding of our objectives clearly tilted the scales in their favour. We are hopeful that this association will create the ‘Iken’ brand as a global leader in the space of education innovations,” says Mexus Education director marketing Saurabh Saxena.
 
Mudra West EVP Arijit Ray adds, “What Mexus Education is seeking to accomplish is really fascinating. Innovative and interactive learning techniques can really take the quality of education to the next level. We look forward to working closely with the brand team to create a communication plan that complements the initiative.”
 
Mudra West‘s key wins in the recent past include Inorbit Malls, World Gold Council, Femina and Filmfare. The agency also executed campaigns for Big Bazaar, Economic Times and Lavasa.

MUMBAI: Hindi general entertainment channels (GECs) have weathered the recessionary storm and will be posting an ad revenue growth of 24 per cent this fiscal, according to a senior executive of Zee Entertainment Enterprises Ltd (Zeel).

Sports broadcasters failed to crack into the Hindi GEC space despite being blessed with a heavy load of cricket content. “Hindi GECs will end up with an ad revenue of Rs 24 billion in FY‘10, up from Rs 19.34 billion a year ago. Cricket under-delivered this year and failed to eat into the GEC market,” says Zeel chief revenue officer Joy Chakraborthy.
 
The downturn in the market also led advertisers to turn to GECs as they provided safer options of deliveries, Chakraborthy adds.

Another factor fuelling the growth is the rise of Colors, the entertainment channel from the Viacom18 stable. Industry sources say Colors has the potential of ending the fiscal at Rs 6 billion as it has overturned Star Plus to grab the No. 1 spot during the course of the year.
 
“Colors has more than compensated for the losses that could have come from the leading channels whose GRPs (gross rating points) dropped. The knock out of 9X also did not take monies away from the GECs,” says the head of a leading broadcasting company.

Some media analysts are more cautious in their estimates. According to one estimate, the ad revenue pie is expected to grow to Rs 23 billion in FY‘10, up 18 per cent from the year-ago period.
 
Chakraborthy expects the GECs to clock faster growth in the next fiscal with the expansion of the Tam panel into smaller towns and the improvement in the ad economy. “In these new markets, GECs are more accepted and consumed,” he avers.
 

MUMBAI: The Walt Disney Co, CNN and MTV are among the companies that created the maximum social media buzz last year, reveals the latest study by Vitrue.

Vitrue‘s composite index comes from an analysis of online conversations on a number of social networks, blogs, micro-blogs and photo and video sharing sites. The company said that it established the ranking to bring credibility to the space and illustrates to marketers how much interest engulfs their brands.
 
Disney, which in 2008 ranked fourth, jumped to second place in Vitrue‘s ranking, while CNN dropped from second to third. MTV moved up to fourth from eighth a year ago.

For the second year running, iPhone set the social media pace. Rounding out the top 10, the NBA is fifth followed by iTunes, Wii, Appel, Xbox and Nike. 
 
Said Vitrue CEO Reggie Bradford in a statement, “Congratulations to the 100 brands who made the list and the many other who did not, but are also pushing the envelope and opening up their brands to become even more social.

“2009 was the year social media become part of the marketing mix and 2010 will prove to be an even more exciting year as marketers of all types innovate and allow more consumer interaction with their brands and assets.”
 
Other media and telecommunications companies that earned a spot on Vitrue‘s 2009 list are Sony, ESPN, CBS, ABC, Turner, Verizon, Fox News, NBC, Sprint, AT&T, VH1, Hulu and Comcast.