Tag: GroupM

’17 IPL buzz doubled, Virat sliped six spots & Voda had most engaging content

MUMBAI: Maxus, the global media agency of GroupM, has analysed the social conversations that happened around IPL Season 10. This study has been done by Maxus Mesh – the marketing command center and dialogue engine that reads environmental signals in real-time.

The key highlights of the report are as follows:

* This was most buzziest IPL season ever with more than six million mentions around the event. This is more than 2X as compared to 2016 buzz levels.
· KKR was most popular team this year followed by the winning team Mumbai Indians

· Dhoni was most popular IPL player this season followed by Gautam Gambhir and Rohit Sharma. Virat Kohli who was leader in 2016 edition slipped six spots on popularity board.

· David Warner is the only (non-Indian) player to be amongst the top players in both IPL 2016 and IPL 2017.

· Vodafone had most engaging and liked content this IPL season.

o The cute ZooZoo films and the old couple ad went viral and was the most shared story this IPL season.

o Also the highest views amongst the official sponsors of #VivoIPL2017.

· As expected, the Title sponsor – Vivo emerged as the most buzziest brand this IPL season. The brand hashtag #Vivoipl was also most recalled hashtag this IPl season.

· The mood and sentiment around IPL was very action oriented. There was great enthusiasm amongst the fans and this reflected in Maxus Kaleidoscope (Mood Measurement Proprietary Tool).

· Mumbai is most buzziest city followed by Delhi and Bangalore. Surprisingly, both Delhi and Bangalore teams disappointed the fans back at home.

May 25, 2017
Maxus’ Lindsay Pattison to lead change initiatives across GroupM

MUMBAI: GroupM, the world’s leading media investment group, today announced the appointment of Lindsay Pattison as Chief Transformation Officer (CTO). She will lead change initiatives across GroupM and its agencies, and with other WPP companies will create tailored and flexible models that serve clients better in the extremely competitive business environment.

Pattison will lead a number of change programs to support group and agency structures, talent and leadership development, culture and diversity, as well as WPP’s horizontality strategy. She remains a member of GroupM’s global executive committee, reporting to Kelly Clark, global CEO of GroupM. Pattison also continues as CEO of GroupM agency Maxus and will perform both roles.

In her new role, Pattison will also focus on senior talent development to ensure GroupM and its agencies have a strong bench of diverse leaders who can help clients win in a very challenging marketing landscape. She will support WPP’s horizontality strategy by helping deliver the best of GroupM to key clients, together with other WPP companies, regardless of the client’s entry point to the group.

“Clients need us to think differently and work smarter,” said Clark. “Lindsay will help us deliver on those challenges. I’ve worked with her for many years. She’s a force, and holds the respect of clients and colleagues. She will make a huge impact with her smarts, energy and warmth.”

WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell said: “GroupM and its agencies are key to WPP’s horizontality strategy. Lindsay will play a crucial role in accelerating our delivery of new and innovative service structures for clients.”

Pattison was named global CEO of Maxus in October 2014. She was previously Global Chief Strategy Officer and UK CEO for Maxus during a period in which it was the fastest-growing media agency worldwide. Her prior experience includes roles at Young and Rubicam, PHD Media and Sony Ericsson. Lindsay was named to Ad Age’s 2015 class of Women to Watch and served two terms on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council focused on the Future of Media. In 2016, she launched ‘Walk the Talk,’ an initiative to help senior women at Maxus to thrive and progress in their career, a program now being adopted globally by WPP.

“When we look at the broader business context, the transformation we are experiencing is profound,” Pattison said. “The WEF calls it the ‘fourth industrial revolution,’ a technological revolution and one that requires two key skills to succeed: collaboration and agility. New thinking is required across the board, and I’m delighted to take on this new transformation role.”

May 18, 2017
GroupM launches Motion Content Group to meet demand for new economic models

MUMBAI: GroupM, the world’s leading media investment group, today announced the launch of Motion Content Group (Motion), a new global content investment and rights management company, to meet the ever-growing market demand for new economic models for premium content across the entertainment and media marketplace.

Motion will invest and partner with the world’s leading talent, producers and distributors to fund, develop, produce and distribute premium content. It will also consolidate and diversify GroupM’s content investments and operations to-date, as well as utilize GroupM’s & WPP’s worldwide network of relationships and content expertise for scale and competitive advantage.

Motion also supports WPP’s ongoing strategic focus and investments into content, which has seen notable strategic investments into companies such as Imagine Entertainment (24, EMPIRE), The Weinstein Company (DJANGO UNCHAINED, THE KING’S SPEECH), Media Rights Capital (HOUSE OF CARDS, 22 JUMP STREET), MediaPro (MIDNIGHT IN PARIS) and All Def Digital, Russell Simmons’ digital venture.

Richard Foster, currently the head of GroupM Entertainment, has been appointed CEO of Motion Content Group, which will be headquartered in London and Los Angeles. Motion incorporates GroupM Entertainment’s team and resources, and the full slate of programs it has partnered to develop and produce.

Award-winning content funded by GroupM Entertainment has been distributed into markets around the world through partnerships with over 100 leading producers and more than 20 of the world’s leading distribution companies. Motion invests its own funds into content deals and partnerships and is therefore a separate but complimentary offering to the substantial amount of branded content work undertaken by GroupM’s agencies on behalf of their clients.

Motion’s global reach, investments and partnerships will help support the editorial ambitions and commercial requirements of producers, networks and platforms, in order to help drive contextually safe, high-quality environments for advertisers.

“With new content companies such as Netflix and Amazon growing rapidly, the competition for premium content is heating up across the globe. WPP is investing in Motion Content Group to strengthen our content creation and distribution capabilities, to help meet evolving viewer needs, and to help advertisers continue to reach consumers in high quality content environments,” said Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO, WPP.

Kelly Clark, GroupM CEO, said, “We have always used our global scale and reach to find innovative approaches that strengthen the media ecosystem for advertisers and media partners alike. Motion is a major commitment by GroupM to expand on these efforts.”

Richard Foster, CEO, Motion Content Group said, “Our objective is to help create and support editorially and commercially vibrant premium content for the benefit of our content partners and advertisers. We will achieve this by continuing to invest into the content industry and lead the development of new models, commercial content structures and partnerships with media networks, platforms, talent, producers, and distributors.”

May 17, 2017
Digital ad investment will surpass TV in five more countries: GroupM’s Interaction 2017

MUMBAI: GroupM has published Interaction 2017, a state of the union assessment of digital advertising worldwide with forecasts on technology developments, media marketplace trends and evolving consumer behaviors informed by experts from WPP’s worldwide network of communications, marketing and data companies.

The report offers in-depth insights underpinning digital advertising growth forecasts in 46 markets. Topics covered include ad fraud and marketplace integrity, fake news, privacy, ad blocking, artificial intelligence, augmented and virtual reality, video competition across platforms, live video, advanced television, streaming and on-demand audio, and much more. In the report, GroupM’s global chief digital officer Rob Norman and Futures Director Adam Smith, also share views on media pricing, the consolidation of economic value in media among a small group of companies, and media consumption and ecommerce trends.

As reported in its “This Year, Next Year,” worldwide media and marketing forecast, GroupM predicts that digital advertising will capture 77 cents of every new ad dollar in 2017; TV will capture 17 cents. Despite challenges around standards, measurement and supply chain integrity, digital advertising continues to grow rapidly as marketers follow consumers to the media destinations where they spend their time, and increasingly transact for goods and services. Digital investment has already surpassed TV in ten markets* and another five will cross this bar in 2017 (France, Germany, Ireland, Hong Kong and Taiwan), GroupM predicts.

As the competition for consumer attention and advertiser investment escalates, people worldwide are spending more time with media. On a population-weighted average, the overall time spent with media (the ‘media day’) grew by nine minutes to eight hours in 2016, but time spent with online media grew by 14 minutes. This is attributable to the greater access to media that mobile technologies provide. Mobile similarly contributed to the growth of adult internet users to 2.34B in 2016.

However, GroupM’s data shows that for now, TV is still king with advertisers when global data is aggregated. TV’s share of advertising investment was largely stable at 42% in 2016; GroupM predicts a share decline to 41% in 2017. TV rode a five-year peak share at 44% from 2010-2014, with only minimal share shedding since then.

Still, linear TV demographics continued shifting in 2016, with the loss of the 16-24 year-old demographic remaining one of its biggest challenges. Though the global population of 16-24 year-olds only decreased 1% 2014-2016, the average “tonnage” of the 16-24 linear TV audience shrank 16%, with some markets reaching numbers closer to 30%. GroupM clarifies that some of this loss is exacerbated by TV’s other big challenge – the inadequate measurement of TV’s total audience across platforms. GroupM continues to advocate measurement improvements to better evaluate television across all devices in markets across the globe. The absence of close substitutes means that for now, those advertisers seeking this young adult TV audience can be willing to bear price inflation in proportion to its rising scarcity.

In the report, GroupM also examines the coalescing of economic value among six global companies who hold the lion’s share of digital ad spending, with Google and Facebook at the forefront. GroupM notes that these companies have very different business models than the owners of linear TV, and they also attract different advertisers. Advertisers accounting for 90% of TV advertising revenue represent between 30% and 40% of the revenue earned by the digital giants. The other 70% of their revenue comes from a combination of small and local businesses, often ones that trade in digital products or services. This bifurcation among classes of advertisers is subject to change as television becomes more data-fueled and targeted (more like digital) and as video content on digital platforms continues to be enhanced with greater quality (more like TV).

“Google and Facebook attracted the vast majority of incremental digital ad investment growth in 2016,” said Smith. “In 2017, the industry will be watching closely to see how Snapchat or Amazon may creep into Facebook’s and Google’s value chain, and if the stronghold that ‘BAT’ (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) has in China can expand to international markets.”

Interaction 2017 also looks at consumer purchase behaviors. In 2016, ecommerce totaled USD 1.874 trillion, globally, fully 20% more than the USD 1.558 trillion logged in 2015. GroupM forecasts 18% growth for ecommerce in 2017, surpassing the two-trillion mark to USD 2.205 trillion. On average, online shopping per user is projected at USD 869 in 2017. The U.K. remains home to the most active online shoppers, predicted to average USD 4,000 per user in 2017. Combined, Amazon and Alibaba represent more than half of all e-commerce (excluding the travel category).

“Last year, we were cautious in our estimation of the rate of change, but this year we are less so in the face developments in hardware and software technologies that are advancing us from the information age to the intelligence age,” said Norman. “To help shape our thinking and speculation in this year’s Interaction, we invited more than 20 partners** to discuss AI, augmented and virtual reality, video competition, advanced and data-driven TV, streaming and on-demand audio, the Google/Facebook digital duopoly, live video, ecommerce, marketplace integrity and fake news. The result is both one of the most comprehensive pieces on the state of digital we’ve ever written and also a springboard for marketers to think long and hard about their future. We invite debate that will undoubtedly ensue.”

(* Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, United Kingdom.)

{** Amazon, AppNexus, comScore, DoubleClick, eMarketer, ESPN, Facebook, Google, Hulu, IAB, IBM, LinkedIn, NBCU, Pandora, Pinterest, The New York Times, Snapchat, Turner, Twitter, Vox Media, YouTube.}

May 2, 2017
Sony Mix’s ‘Media Ke Surtaj’ season 2 ends amid fanfare

MUMBAI: The Grand Finale of the second season of ‘Media Ke Surtaj’ was held on Friday at Bungalow 9 in Mumbai. Organized by SPN’s music cluster channels, Sony MIX and Sony Rox HD and hosted by RJ Salil.

A Karaoke competition amongst media professionals, Media Ke Surtaj, brought out hidden singing talent among media agency professionals. The audition rounds were held across Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore in agencies like OMD, Carat, Lodestar, Initiative, Publicis, Madison, ZenithOptimedia and GroupM between March 15 to 24, 2017. Elevated levels of enthusiasm and participation were displayed among all the participants and 180 contestants were shortlisted for Friday’s finale.

The event was massive and the audience swayed and cheered all along the event. The winners were selected in two categories namely, the Popular choice and the Critics’ choice. Each category had two sub-categories, i.e, Solo & Duet. The video of each participant’s audition is up on display up on www.mediakesurtaj.com for an audience poll. The voting closed on April 7th, receiving a tremendous response with overall 32000+ votes being registered. The popular choice category winners were selected based on the maximum votes received. The jury for the Critics’ Choice Awards included the masters of the industry including music composer Ajay Singha and singer Ash King, among others.

Ecstatic at the win, the Popular Choice Solo winner, Pankaj Dobhal from ZenithOptimedia, exclaimed, “I had not expected to win a singing competition my entire life. Doing something beyond your daily routine feels great and I would like to thank everyone who voted for me and had faith in my voice.” With all excitement, Critics’ choice Duet winners, Craig Viegas & Prachi Kalkar, GroupM said, “Singing has always been our hobby, never knew that it would get us such a big reward. We would like to thank Sony MIX for this initiative and giving us such a great platform to showcase our hidden talents.” Apart from these, Popular choice Duet category winners were Ashish Rane & Neelam Shridhankar from Carat Media and the Critics’ choice Solo category award was bagged by Gaurav Chopra from GroupM.

The winners of the popular choice category won prizes worth INR 20,000/-, and the critics’ choice category got an all-expense paid trip to Dubai for 2.

Talking about this innovative programme, Sony Pictures Networks India (SPN) Max Cluster & Sony Mix senior EVP and business head Neeraj Vyas said, “I feel, for most of us music is an integral part and one of the key drivers in our daily lives. Hence, we decided to use this musical platform to encourage media professionals to showcase their hidden talent while they get a break from their daily routine. We at SPN were elated with the first season of Media Ke Surtaj and extremely overwhelmed with the response received in this second season as well and will hopefully expand to new horizons soon.”

April 24, 2017
GroupM Dialogue Factory’s Katgara moves out, co-founds marketing solutions co

MUMBAI: Group M Dialogue Factory Business Group Head Farhad Katgara has moved out.

Farhad has been part of the advertising and marketing community for over 16 years. He started his career as Assistant Manager (Production) with Resources & Beyond, a support agency for Lintas, McCann Erickson, Tata Nova, Seventy and many more in 2000. He was also associated with various event companies like Showtime India Pvt Ltd, LIVE 1 Entertainment, CATPRO Events, Rams Relationship, Seventy, Cineyug Worldwide and Leo Brunette where he has successfully planned and executed events. His last stint was as Business Group Head at Group M Dialogue Factory in March 2017.

Farhad has also successfully planned and executed events and activations for brands like HPCL, Mumbai Police, Lakhme Fashion Week, Smirnoff, Launch of Fiat Palio, Samsung Blue I & True I, Axe Deodorants and many more. During his career, Farhad has built and developed large teams providing brand development support through, events, sales promotion campaigns, visual merchandising and product merchandising.

With years of experience in live concerts, corporate events, awards and corporate shows, Farhad has co-founded Resources Go Beyond, a result based Integrated Marketing Solutions provider.

Resources Go Beyond is looking at coming up with three IPS this financial year. The first one is a Horror Short Film Festival slated for May 2017 in Mumbai.

April 10, 2017
Brand safety on YouTube: GroupM partners OpenSlate

MUMBAI: GroupM, the media investment management unit of WPP, announced it is partnering with OpenSlate to enhance brand safety on YouTube media buys. OpenSlate is a social video analytics company that maintains data about all ad-supported content on YouTube. Their data platform scores YouTube content for quality and brand safety, and provides advertisers with deep contextual insights.

OpenSlate will provide clients of GroupM’s agencies additional controls and content safeguards to support their YouTube media buys. This solution will enhance brand safety in both reservation media, including Google Preferred, and in auction-based inventory bought through AdWords or DoubleClick Bid Manager. Using independent data from OpenSlate, GroupM clients will be able to better define the type of content that should be excluded from their YouTube media buys. OpenSlate will also provide clients with contextual reporting that highlights exactly where their campaigns run. GroupM clients will be the first to access these Google-supported services from OpenSlate for Google Preferred campaigns.

“Long gone are the days when advertisers could simply rely on reaching audiences in carefully curated programming environments. Most brands today have scaled their advertising on digital platforms like YouTube, where most content is user-generated, but their needs for mature and safe ad products and environments persist,” said GroupM North America chief digital investment officer Susan Schiekofer.

“Although it is not possible to eliminate all risks in user-generated media, our clients’ hard-won brand reputations must be protected with the best efforts possible. We appreciate that Google is enabling our work with OpenSlate to provide our clients with better brand safety controls, and we believe it’s essential that all digital platforms carrying ad-supported user-generated content do the same.”

“Our initial focus is to use OpenSlate data to better ensure that GroupM’s ads run only in content that flexibly matches the brand safety parameters established by their clients,” said OpenSlate CEO Mike Henry. “Every client is unique and each has different brand values and tolerance for risk, which GroupM agencies can accommodate through their use of OpenSlate’s data and tools. Over time, more transparency about where ads are running on YouTube will strengthen the ecosystem and help advertisers better understand the role that YouTube content plays in campaign performance.”

This new solution will initially roll out in the U.S. and U.K., and plans are under way to adapt it to additional international markets.

March 31, 2017
Starcom India appoints Lalchandani as VP – buying

MUMBAI: Starcom, a part of Publicis Media India, has, in a significant development, appointed specialist Navin Lalchandani as the vice-president of its media buying operations.

Starcom, a renowned media communications agency, partners with the world’s leading marketers and new brands, including Airbnb, Bank of America, Kellogg Company, Kraft Heinz, Novartis, Samsung, Visa and more.

Lalchandani moves from Carat Media Services, Denstu Aegis Group and will steer media buying operations for all offline media, namely television, print, radio and cinema across the Starcom offices of Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore.

Starcom India Group CEO Mallikarjun Das says, “Navin is talented and versatile and comes with the rich experience of having bought media for some of the largest marketing organisations such as Mondelez, L’Oréal and Vodafone. Navin brings in an amalgamation of buying skills spanning across media and has the smarts to work in Starcom’s data-predicated media product. He will drive a buying culture that is about best-of-class in rates, rigour, fair play and trust.”

Lalchandani says, “I believe in long-term, sustained partnerships and this has certainly been the case in my career span. I began my career with media planning for Marico and it has been a greatly rewarding and exhilarating journey since then. The decision to join Starcom was easy, considering its body of good solid work, for marquee brands and its reputation of being a future-facing, high-growth agency. In an age of proliferation of channels and offerings, a sound media strategy makes all the difference to business goals. I look forward to delivering genuine value to Starcom’s clients.”

Lalchandani’s previous spans media buying firms such as GroupM’s Maxus and Madison Media.

March 27, 2017
Sports sponsorship industry grew by over 19% in 2016 in India: ESP

MUMBAI: Numbers don’t lie, and the numbers in the fourth edition of the ‘Sporting Nation in the Making’ India sports sponsorship report speak for themselves. Compiled by ESP Properties- the sports and entertainment programming specialist arm of GroupM, and SportzPower- leading sports portal, the report states that sports sponsorship spending grew by a little over 19%. Spending via sports sponsorship accounted for 11.5% of the Indian AdEx (AdEx numbers from GroupM This Year, Next Year 2016 report) in the Indian market. While media spends contributed to the largest chunk of the pie, followed by ground sponsorship, the total size of sports advertising rose to INR 6400 crore / $941 million, a big jump up from the INR 5363.3 crore / $825 million garnered in 2015.

Apart from an in-depth analysis of on-ground, media spends, team sponsorships, franchises and mobile and social media data, the new report delves deeply into the evolution of technology and its effects on the mainstream digital landscape. Beyond mere number crunching, the report also strives to educate stakeholders on the key developments that could affect their business, offering a roadmap to manoeuvre sponsorships going forward. The major insight of this report is that both Cricket and Non-Cricket held their own trajectory, and together pushed the industry forward. 2016 also seemed like a make-or-break year for some leagues, with some repositioning themselves to garner greater viewership, while others launching with a hungry audience base. Indian Cricket was on a high in 2016, both on the field and off it.

ESP Properties business head Vinit Karnik believes 2017 is definitely going to gain momentum in terms of the previous year’s high and opined, “The report insights are the key to devising more refined viewer engagement. Gone are the days of male dominance in sports viewership. The year’s biggest chunk of spectators came from women and kids. This is ground-breaking data for brands to take that much desired leap of faith and traverse new grounds. Cricket continues to be the poster child for sponsorships, and non-Cricket sports still have a fair leap to make to match revenue. However it is interesting to focus on the mushrooming of a very defined health and fitness consciousness within the country. Young digital India is breaking barriers and creating new records especially when it comes to live feeds. Their smartphones are their all access pass to the “insider world” of sports, sportsmen and their strengths and weaknesses. Sports start-ups are trending and the success achieved by league-based events across multiple sports indicates a strong potential to consume sports other than cricket.”

“Viewership data demographics have been an eye-opener in 2016,” emphasises SportzPower co-founder Thomas Abraham, and continues, “Demonetisation disruptions aside, 2016 was a great year for the industry and this year will be even more so. Team sponsorships may have experienced certain upheavals and newer leagues will change the sporting diaspora even more so this year. However, what remains to be seen is franchise sustenance, endorsement rates and the manner in which technology and data influence these numbers. We expect 2017 to only get bigger, not just on the back of growth from the leagues that are now up and running, but also from new kids on the block that are debuting in the year – Table Tennis being a notable one.” Thus, 2016 proved to be apocalyptic for some leagues that had risen out of the woodworks since 2011-12 and they finally culminated in imminent death

Going forward, a lot is in store for sports in 2017. The first two months have already provided an indication to what promises to be an action packed year for Sportainment. Digital and offline are now two sides of the same coin. Looking forward, ESP Properties and SportzPower expect India’s sports market to grow at a faster pace vis-à-vis the last few years, aided by government policy and an increasing demand for recreational sports.

March 16, 2017
Nestle to fund SilverPush & IotPot pilots, ad:tech concludes

MUMBAI: ad:tech, one of the largest digital marketing event, concluded its 7th edition of Digital Marketing & Advertising Conference & Exhibition in India at Gurgaon.

ad:tech 2017 had keynotes from industry veterans and enlightening sessions for the adverting marketing community. The event witnessed a large footfall which included exhibitors, marketers, and industry leaders and an Innovation Zone with the latest disruptive technology in digital marketing.

The second day of the action packed digital marketing event saw keynote from Times Internet’s Gautam Sinha on ‘Re-inventing digital engagement’ followed by GroupM’s Rob Norman who engaged the audience with a dynamic session on ‘Facebook and Google duopoly and the challengers to that’. These introductory keynotes were followed by spotlight sessions on topics like ‘Ecommerce companies as media platforms’, ‘Vernacular on Mobile’ and others.

The second day concluded with the keynote by Bharat Anand, HBS Professor and author-The Content Trap who shared his insights on ‘Reflection of marketing in a digital age’.

SilverPush and IotPot walked away with the coveted ‘The Next Big Thing’ title along with a fully-funded pilot with Nestlé. This year ad:tech brought its global initiative ‘The Next Big Thing’ to India in partnership with Nestlé India with the aim to build a platform that brings entrepreneurs and marketing leaders together and kick start collaborations. This proves to be a great platform for start-ups to prove their mettle by showcasing their indigenous ideas in front of Nestlé and digital media professionals and thereby walking away with a fully funded project.

Comexposium India Country MD Jaswant Singh said, “The 7th edition brought together more than 100 companies from across the globe to exhibit what’s new and what’s next. Over the years ad:tech is developing as a coveted platform for the community to deliver content which is relevant in this fast changing dynamic industry.”

This year’s event witnessed phenomenal additions of companies like IBM, Accenture, Gameloft, Taboola, GSK, SAP, Yes Bank, Maruti Suzuki and Pepsico India,

March 11, 2017