ITV

Tag: Dan

  • WATConsult, ActionAid India launch #JoinTheDots campaign against child sexual abuse

    WATConsult, ActionAid India launch #JoinTheDots campaign against child sexual abuse

    MUMBAI: WATConsult, a digital agency from Dentsu Aegis Network has announced the launch of ‘The Alter Project’, a dedicated vertical for public service campaigns fronted by brands and institutions with a thoughtful campaign created in partnership with ActionAid India, an agency working with vulnerable communities since 1972 to further social and ecological justice.

    The #JoinTheDots campaign has been created to highlight child sexual abuse and aims to prevent the incidence of abuse as well as encourage adults to address such violence with a call to action to See, Listen, and Act. Boomlet Media, a content marketing agency, also came on board as supporting partner for this campaign.

    WATConsult founder and CEO Rajiv Dingra shared, “Social good has always been at the core of our growth philosophy with our teams fearlessly picking up issues that needed a voice to transform the social order in the country. The last year at WATConsult, we saw bold campaigns that dealt with subjects such as girl child education, rights of transgender people, youth suicides, child trafficking, organ donation, and such others mobilising stakeholders through unique ways. It’s time for brands to step forward and champion mass movements for the public good. Just like its logo, The Alter Project, through its collaborations with brands and its campaigns, will lead to a new wave of dignity, equality, and inclusion. We invite brands to associate with The Alter Project by WATConsult and write the new narrative together.”

    Elaborating on the campaign, ActionAid India executive director Sandeep Chachra said, “ActionAid India remains committed to working for the protection of children, especially girls, from discriminatory practices of sex-selective abortions, trafficking, and sexual assault. Over the years we have worked with allied organizations, the administration and policymakers to bring change on the ground for the protection, nutrition, and education of children. Children’s vulnerability will remain till children in all contexts are recognized as equal citizens. In the family, this calls for children being listened to and their interests being considered as equal, if not of paramount interest. Through the “Join the Dots” campaign, we want to help adults see, listen and act in the best interests of children.”

     

     

  • Digital suffers due to lack of common metric system: Ashish Bhasin

    Digital suffers due to lack of common metric system: Ashish Bhasin

    MUMBAI: Dentsu Aegis Network, one of the biggest marketing agencies in India, released the third edition of its annual Digital Report recently predicting a wholesome 31.96 per cent CAGR growth of digital advertising in India. An exhausting and thoroughly researched report, this initiative by DAN is probably the singular attempt being made by any agency in India. Therefore, it was definitely a proud moment for Ashish Bhasin, the chairman and chief executive officer for DAN South Asia. In an exclusive conversation with Indiantelevision.com, Bhasin reveals how working on this report serves the larger goal of maintaining a leading position in the market and how other marketers can learn from the insights revealed.

    Talking about the launch, Ashish Bhasin proudly says, "We are very excited and very happy with the way the whole report has come out. What's very clear to us at DAN is that there is no business that is not going to be affected by digital. And as leaders of digital communication and advertising in India, we see it as our responsibility to make sure that authentic research on that is available, which, unfortunately, has not been revealed in India so far."

    Bhasin is of the view that creating such reports serve the dual purpose of driving the cumulative growth of the digital ecosphere as well as preparing the team within the agency for opportunities and challenges forward. He notes, "We forecast the trends and lead the markets towards those trends. Now, that we know what the market is thinking and what our clients are aspiring, we have already started building capabilities in those areas which other agencies haven't even thought of."

    The report reveals a number of key marketing trends that will rule the digital industry in the coming years. Most important of them being the three Vs – voice, vernacular, and video. As far as the voice part is concerned, DAN made a fine move by launching the report on Google's voice assistant Alexa. Video is already a stronghold for the agency as many of its campaigns have already been bringing national and international honours.

    Asserting on the need for viable vernacular content, Bhasin shares, "In the next few years, around 200 to 300 million more people are going to be on the internet. Now, from these, very few will be coming from the metropolitan cities as the penetration there is very good. The people will be joining from tier 2 and tier 3 cities, all the way down from rural areas."

    But not many agencies are creating vernacular advertisements. "At best, they take a Hindi or English ad and translate it into other languages. That might be better than putting an English ad into a vernacular setting but it is not good enough. You have to start building the ability to create advertisements in local languages because that's where your audiences are."

    Bhasin also lauds the effort of the Indian government in starting initiatives that are augmenting this influx of larger population on digital platforms. He says, "I think digital is going to be key to governance, forget anything else and thus, the infrastructure for digital needs to be created and administered by the government. At the moment, there are between 400 and 450 million Indians who are on the internet. This is a large number but the more exciting part to me is that in the next two to three years we are probably going to see something like 200 to 300 million more people coming on to the internet. And that can be possible only if the government helps put up the right infrastructure, which they have been very good at so far."

    While the pouring in of new online customers is a positive sign, the digital ecosphere still faces the absence of a unified metric system to measure and evaluate the impact of online content. Sharing his thoughts, Bhasin elaborates, "I think that is the single biggest problem that digital advertising in India faces today. For a medium that is so measurable, we don't have an agreed common metric like Broadcast Audience Research Council is for television. The medium suffers because of that. If we are to get that right, I think that will make a huge difference."

    However, he is optimistic that this challenge will eventually be solved. He says, "We need to have common industry-accepted viewership parameters and I am hopeful that these metrics in the next couple of years will be in place. I believe that in the next two years, as an industry, we collectively will evolve a common metric system as not having that is a big disadvantage."

  • SBI Life Insurance, WATConsult launch India’s first-ever programmatic digital OOH campaign

    SBI Life Insurance, WATConsult launch India’s first-ever programmatic digital OOH campaign

    MUMBAI: SBI Life Insurance, for its ‘Main Se Hum Campaign’, has launched the first-ever programmatic digital out-of-home (OOH) campaign in India. Planned by WATConsult, the digital and social media agency from Dentsu Aegis Network (DAN) along with DAN’s Programmatic Arm – Amnet, this innovation aims to help the brand in reaching out to newer audiences & build a programmatic connect thereafter.

    Exploring New Year as a topic, the campaign is being executed across major establishments in Maharashtra and Delhi-NCR. Google’s marketing platform in partnership with Lemma Technologies, has helped the brand serve this digital inventory across OOH touch points and also plans to re-target audiences on mobile through the beacons installed at each location.

    WATConsult founder and CEO Rajiv Dingra said, “With this activity, SBI Life adds another innovation with us with the key objective of testing Digital OOH, extend further reach for their "Main Se Hum" campaign exploring New Year as a topic to leverage and programmatically retarget with relevant brand messages. Well, this is the first-of-its-kind initiative in India and will surely open more dynamic avenues for the brand in the coming future.”

    SBI Life Insurance chief of brand and corporate communications Ravindra Sharma said, “For a long time marketers have been trying to bridge the gap between offline and online audience, to holistically target consumers. Using the existing advertising ecosystem, the programmatic digital out of home campaign (DOOH) successfully bridges the offline to online audience gap, by simple yet intelligent application of technology.” He further added, “At SBI Life we take great pride in being the early adopters of upcoming technologies and are extremely thrilled to start 2019 on an innovative note. We believe this will mark a transformation in the evolution of digital marketing.”

    AMNET in association with Lemma Technologies ran this DOOH campaign as a RTB (Real-Time Bidding) campaign on Lemma’s platform which had Google DV360 participating as demand partner. “It’s an innovation in the outdoor industry to connect outdoor media to a centralised platform based on advertisement standard & protocols. Such standardisation gives DOOH inventory more visibility to direct and programmatic demand,” says Lemma Technologies founder and CEO Gulab Patil.

    AMNET vice president Salil Shanker said, “This is a revolution in outdoor industry to connect DOOH screens to a digital advertisement ecosystem. At AMNET, we believe in driving innovations to our partners and with success of launching programmatic radio in India, now we are thriving to launch DOOH inventory through programmatic.  The new platform offers advertisers with innovative solutions to connect with the right audience with right messages at the right time along the consumer journey. While the lines are slowly blurring between digital and offline, in the short term this step will surely help SBI Life in getting that extended reach through offline impressions and a possibility to re-connect audiences in digital world to help close the loop. The standardisation gives more simplicity to manage all media channels through a single lens.”

  • Impact of assembly elections on TV ad spends

    Impact of assembly elections on TV ad spends

    MUMBAI: “Bad officials are appointed by good citizens who do not vote.”  We’ve all heard that every citizen must cast their vote because it’s the very essence of a country’s democracy and also their right. However, a lot of people choose to turn a blind’s eye. This could either be due to lack of awareness about getting voter ID cards ahead of time or just sheer boredom to go out, stand in a queue and getting inked. 

    Election time is fairly interesting because we get to see so many different and new ads during this time. The ruling party is gushing about its achievements whereas the opposition party criticises the existing regime and the changes they intend to bring if elected. Brands on the other hand, often come up with some tongue-in-cheek advertisements that talk about the importance of voting and so on. Today, with digitisation, availability of low cost smartphones and low data costs, digital and social media has become the front leader of all marketing mix. Bands and political parties are sure to leverage the medium to reach a large set of audiences where traditional media kind of seems to fail. 

    India’s 2014 election was the world’s biggest exercise in democracy, with a price tag to match. Indian politicians spent around $12 billion on their campaigns, which, in terms of expense, makes these polls the most expensive since the US presidential elections hit the $7 billion mark.

    The next General Elections will take place in 2019 which is promised to be a game changer in the way political parties spend during elections. If we’ve learnt anything from the 2014 elections where BJP spent Rs 714 crore and Congress spent Rs 516 crore, 2019 election is set to break all major records. However, before we enter 2019, The Indian Assembly Elections are scheduled between November-December in the states of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Chattisgarh, Telangana and Mizoram.

    In order to understand what will be the impact of Assembly elections on ad spends this year and which brands or categories will advertise the most, we bring to you industry expects’ views: 

    MediaCom national director for buying K Srinivas Rao thinks that advertising on elections, especially state elections is majorly driven by local retail advertisers or semi-corporate advertisers with a B2B advertising objective.

    Local/retail advertisers majorly depend on news channels for their advertising and hence are most likely to go big during elections. Retail players do long term deals keeping in mind the election time which gives them a leverage to get the best value from the channels. Election time is generally seen as the time when news channels expect an upside in revenues on the back of specific programming and its sponsorships. We have typically seen around 10-15 per cent upside in revenues for the national channels during elections. However, this number grows many times on the respective local news channels in which the elections are being conducted.

     

     

    Dentsu Aegis Network chairman & CEO South Asia Ashish Bhasin thinks that election ad spends are not that significant because the total size of the market is Rs 65000 crore whereas election ad spends contribute to only Rs 2000 crore. 

    The government/political ad spend goes up during elections, especially before election silence starts. Digital and mobile play a vital role during this time as all of them want to reach the younger user/generation. The 2014 general election was the first one where digital was used in a big way and it will be pertinent in the next elections as well. News channels become more active and advertise the most during this time because advertising follows eyeballs and people who follow elections, tend to switch on those news channels for election coverage. Other than the government and political parties, there is no significant change in the advertising spends because brands advertise according to their consumer cycle and the need of their category.

     

     

    Havas Media Group CEO – India and South East Asia Anita Nayyar is of the opinion that automobile, FMCG, e-commerce brands and e-wallet sectors are expected to advertise the most during elections along with digital and mobile which will play a major role in political advertising.

    According to the PTI report, the government spent nearly Rs 1,286 crore in 2016-2017 on ads about government policies, schemes, projects and events, through various media. The amount spent by the advertising agency for 2016-17 was 8.15 per cent higher than Rs 1,188.85 crore spent in 2015-16. The decibel level of marketing by government and brands will only go up in the coming months. While political advertising is an important arm of the Indian adex, it is very sentiment-driven and dynamic. If the government is stable, there is positive sentiment leading to brands spending more on advertising.
  • iProspect appoints Vishal Shah, Asad Khan as senior directors

    iProspect appoints Vishal Shah, Asad Khan as senior directors

    MUMBAI: iProspect India, the digital performance agency from Dentsu Aegis Network, has appointed Asad Khan and Vishal Shah as senior directors to lead the SEO practice at the agency.

    With more than eight years of experience, Khan has chiefly been responsible for expanding business for the Southeast Asian & Oceania markets and leading strategic planning for e-commerce portfolios. His core strengths lie in formulating data driven integrated search strategies using an agile marketing approach. 

    On joining iProspect, Khan says, “I’m happy to join the iProspect family. The agency’s belief in maintaining an open and transparent work environment, unrestricted access to knowledge and collaborative approach towards decision making is what gives them a competitive advantage and a clear path to continued growth. I'm eager to work with the team and help them grow the business.”

    Shah, who has worked across domestic and international markets for more than eight years now, has been instrumental in strengthening core organic search offerings as per technological advancements and market evolution. His ability to plan, execute and deliver in complex brand ecosystems has helped him successfully play the strategic lead on several enterprise clients. 

    “With a worldwide presence, iProspect has been successful in driving digital performance in every corner of the globe. 20 years of rich digital experience has led the agency to the position that it enjoys today. I look forward to the new set of learnings at iProspect,” adds Shah. 

    On the new appointments, iProspect India CEO Rubeena Singh mentions, “Reinvigorating the team with new talent is crucial in driving business performance. Both Asad and Vishal have rich experience. With them leading the SEO teams, we hope to strengthen our service suite and accelerate our growth in the next phase.”

    Prior to the move, both worked at Performics.Convonix as associate directors.

    Founded in 1997, iProspect India offers brands an entire spectrum of result-oriented digital marketing strategies. This includes paid and natural search, performance display, content generation, structured data & feeds, conversion optimisation, data & insights, social media management, lead generation & affiliates, videos and mobile services.

  • Dentsu Aegis Network removes Kartik Iyer & 3 seniors following sexual harassment allegations

    Dentsu Aegis Network removes Kartik Iyer & 3 seniors following sexual harassment allegations

    MUMBAI: Amidst the ongoing #MeToo movement, where several allegations regarding sexual harassment and sexual assault have come to light, the media and entertainment industry isn’t left behind.

    Recently, Dentsu Aegis Network’s (DAN) Happy mcgarrybowen came in the limelight for similar accusations against its CEO and other senior executives. The agency network had last week launched an investigation into the allegations.

    Following the controversy, DAN has removed Happy mcgarrybowen CEO Kartik Iyer and MD Praveen Das from their positions. Additionally, Bodhisatwa Dasgupta, senior creative director, Happy Creative Services and Dinesh Swamy national creative director, iProspect India have also stepped down from their respective positions following harassment charges.

    In a press statement issued by Dentsu Aegis Network, the network announced: “Dentsu Aegis Network has always believed in providing a safe environment at our workplaces which is free from any kind of harassments. We have a zero tolerance policy towards any kind of harassment at our workplaces. Mr. Kartik Iyer (CEO) and Mr. Praveen Das (MD) have stepped down from their respective positions and responsibilities at Happy Creative Services. Additionally, Bodhisatwa Dasgupta, Sr. Creative Director, Happy Creative Services and Dinesh Swamy, National Creative Director, iProspect India have also stepped down from their respective positions.”

  • Isobar India bags digital mandate for Colorbar

    Isobar India bags digital mandate for Colorbar

    MUMBAI: Isobar India, the digital agency from Dentsu Aegis Network, has been appointed as the digital partner for Colorbar, one of India’s leading beauty brands that is positioned in the premium segment.

    Isobar India won the account following a multi-agency pitch and will manage the brand from its Delhi office.

    Colorbar head of digital marketing Jayati Modi says, “We are very excited to partner with Isobar. With its global expertise in the digital space, Isobar brings an unparalleled value to the table. We’re looking forward to working together, innovating together and growing together. We are sure that with them by our side, we will be able to build as strong a presence in the digital space as we have in the retail industry.”

    Isobar India executive vice president Gopa Kumar adds, “We are really excited to partner with Colorbar. It is one of the leading players in the fashion and beauty segment. We are looking forward to creating exciting digital-first experiences for the brand Colorbar as the primary mode of communication for this category.”

    Isobar is a global full-service digital agency known for its significant innovations in digital marketing communications.