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Tag: PG Aditya

  • 4th Indian Creative Women Portfolio Evening 2023 is back!

    4th Indian Creative Women Portfolio Evening 2023 is back!

    Mumbai: To provide women and non-binary creatives a platform for visibility in the Indian advertising and design industry, Indian Creative Women (ICW) has partnered with DDB Mudra Group and D&AD for the fourth edition of Portfolio Evening, sponsored by McDonald’s.

    The event aims to create a diverse creative leadership pipeline in the country and will provide an exclusive opportunity for applicants to have their portfolios reviewed by a panel of senior creative talent from the industry. Two winners will earn an all-expense paid trip to the D&AD Festival in London.

    Call for portfolios is now open with the virtual event scheduled for Thursday, 7 December 2023 and the in-person event is slotted for Friday, 8 December 2023 at the Omnicom House, Mumbai. Application deadline is Monday, 4 December 2023.

    Some of the eminent jurors for this year include FCB India CCO Swati Bhattacharya, Ogilvy India CCO Harshad Rajadhyaksha, Ladyfinger CCO & CEO Tista Sen, PG Aditya, CCO Talented, Clemenger BBDO senior art director Huei Yin Wong,  Amazon sr creative Melbourne & New York Palak Kapadia.

    With limited seats on a first-come-first-serve basis, the event is open to all creatives with an average experience of 0-6 years, including students and freelancers. Applicants who have taken a career break are also encouraged to apply.

    Indian Creative Women founder Sakshi Choudhary shared her thoughts, “Despite the growing focus on DEI in the industry, there’s still not much action on ground. Indian Creative Women is committed to making the Indian ad & design industry more diverse through actionable solutions. Portfolio Evening, supported by D&AD, our local long- standing partner DDB Mudra Group, and sponsored by McDonald’s, serves as a key initiative to nurture a pipeline of strong female talent. It’s time our industry accepted the influence women bring to consumers, brands and the business of creativity.”

    Speaking on the sponsorship, McDonald’s India managing director Rajeev Ranjan said, “As a proud advocate of creativity and diversity at workplace, I am immensely thrilled to witness the transformative journey that Indian Creative Women (ICW) is forging in the advertising and design landscape. At McDonald’s India, we value the pivotal role women play in improving the quality of business outcomes not only by bringing in diverse perspectives and brilliantly executing unconventional breakthrough ideas but also by leveraging and shaping consumer trends and narratives.  Women today represent a significant economic force. The success of our communities in many ways depend on the success of our women associates. The ICW Portfolio Evening is a testament to the brilliance and untapped potential of female creatives across India. We are honored to support ICW in celebrating and elevating the voices of women who are the architects of tomorrow’s most compelling stories and campaigns.”

    McDonald’s India CMO Arvind R.P. said, “At McDonald’s India, we actively foster an inclusive environment, where diversity is embraced as an advantage. The power of diversity and inclusion is especially vital when it comes to fuelling creativity and innovation. In light of this, we are committed to supporting initiatives like ICW that are working to create a more inclusive and equitable advertising industry. This is a unique opportunity for talented women to learn from and make a difference in the creative industry, and we are happy to be a part of this initiative.”

    DDB Mudra Group CCO Rahul Mathew shared his thoughts “We’re excited to partner ICW for yet another edition of Portfolio Evening. This is an important initiative to help the industry move forward. And to have D&AD and McDonald’s join us in this journey makes this edition of the Portfolio Evening, bigger than ever.”

  • Swiggy’s whacky Instagram campaign – Voice of Hunger

    Swiggy’s whacky Instagram campaign – Voice of Hunger

    MUMBAI: Taking interactive campaigning a new level, popular food delivery app Swiggy has recently launched its new social media campaign ‘Voice of Hunger’ challenge on Instagram. The campaign has been conceptualised in collaboration with Dentsu Webchutney and used the newly launched feature of Instagram voice notes in a creative way.  

    The campaign will constitute 5 challenges in which the participants will have to recreate the shape of food items like a Kebab Skewer, a Nacho, Pancakes and many more, using the voice note feature. Whoever completes all 5 stands a chance to win a year’s worth of food vouchers from India’s largest food delivery platform, Swiggy. This is apart from daily prizes for each challenge. Day 1 of the Challenge was a Kebab Skewer, which garnered close to 10,000 entries with voice notes, and the brand’s follower count is already up by 2,000 courtesy the challenge.

    Speaking about the campaign Swiggy AVP Marketing Ashish Lingamneni said, “There are very few things for a marketer that match the thrill of a properly executed UGC campaign. We’re hoping this hits the right chords, literally. By innovating with the voice note feature on Instagram, we're excited to offer our audience a creative way of interacting with Swiggy and expressing their love for food, winning a year's worth of food vouchers in the process.”

    Dentsu Webchutney executive creative director PG Aditya managed to squeeze in a couple of words: “This is by far the wackiest use of Instagram yet. Watching adults blabbering gibberish all day on voice notes has been nothing but a blast. The first 12 hours of the challenge saw close to 10,000 entries. We like our inboxes like we like our excitement: overflowing.”

    So far, #SwiggyVoiceOfHunger has seen participation from social media influencers like Rohan Joshi, Srishti Bansal and TheFilmyKudi with several surprises planned around the challenge.

  • Airtel India’s adds new twist to ‘save’ its fans

    Airtel India’s adds new twist to ‘save’ its fans

    MUMBAI : Airtel India and digital agency Dentsu Webchutney gave avid Instagrammers a makeover after they converted them into detectives with the launch of the telecom operator’s #T20VillainHunt. The villain, in the context of this unique campaign, is anyone and anything that hampers a consumer’s viewing experience.

    The #T20VillainHunt was released on Instagram as a two-part series. Users were encouraged to find hidden clues within a given story to reveal the T20 Villain. The users had to make an innovative use of Instagram’s ‘Save to Collection’ feature to do this. If they cracked the clues and saved the images in the right order, it revealed the face of the villain in their profile’s ‘Saved’ folder.

    Dentsu Webchutney  executive creative director P.G. Aditya said, “We are always looking for the next novel hack on social and Instagram never disappoints us. We’ve got a fair amount of experience when it comes to Instagram hunts but this is for the first time that we deployed the use of the ‘Save to Collection’ feature to create, what I believe is our toughest hunt yet,”  

    Dentsu Webchutney senior creative director Ashwin Palkar says, “While all the grids had to come together seamlessly to set the plot of the story on Airtel’s profile, the selection of the correct grids after cracking the clues, had to form the villain’s face and reveal their identity in a user’s ‘Saved’ folder. Hiding something in plain sight was definitely our biggest challenge”

    And while solving the clues was a meticulous process, it didn’t discourage Airtel’s detectives from hunting down the villains. Within 3 days, over 250 fans correctly cracked the code to what was another truly innovative use of Instagram.

    Users can head to the Airtel India’s Instagram page to access and give the #T20VillainHunt their best shot.

  • Dads are uploading pictures with kids on LinkedIn

    Dads are uploading pictures with kids on LinkedIn

    MUMBAI: If you’ve got any father as a connection on LinkedIn, you may have noticed that they might have changed their display picture in the last few days from the typical LinkedIn corporate mugshot to adorable pictures of them with their kids. 

    It’s no coincidence. Hundreds of fathers across the world’s largest professional platform are doing the same. Reason? To show their professional circles that their life goes way beyond their profession. We’re talking about high-level professionals across some of India’s biggest companies in telecommunication, OEMs, online fashion retail, automobiles, technology, news and media, food delivery, financial services – to name just a few.

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    The notion that a successful professional man is usually not as devoted a family man, has become a belief of the past. Today’s young dads manage to toggle between work and dad-mode with ease and have even branded themselves: as #PenguinDads-as an ode to the male emperor penguin, which is considered the most devoted father in the animal kingdom. And our own #PenguinDads on LinkedIn haven’t missed out on the opportunity to let their connections know that their most important job is the one at home, with their little ones. A refreshing, much-needed point to be made, indeed!

    Dentsu Webchutney Bangalore senior creative director PG Aditya says, “Often, being successful at your profession is the biggest defence mechanism used by men to bail out of being involved and available at home. We wanted to show that it’s entirely possible for both sides to co-exist, through stories of those who do it already.”

    The initiative, in fact, was started by Flipkart, as a follow-up to its ‘Penguin Dad’ campaign, whose heartwarming lead film has become a major internet sensation. Now, its changing the face of LinkedIn India.

  • Dentsu Webchutney urges us to rethink the way we look at grades

    Dentsu Webchutney urges us to rethink the way we look at grades

    MUMBAI: Dentsu Webchutney, the digital arm of Dentsu Aegis Network, and KAEdu- an educational consultancy company, have collaborated to introduce the progressive report card: a triumphant redesign of the linear school report card, that calls for a paradigm shift in the perception of school level education in India today.

    The agency’s strategic think tanks used human-centered design thinking to first identify the inherent biases in the structure of the report card as we know it – reflecting a societal preference and pre-occupation with ‘mainstream subjects’ like languages, mathematics and science-based subjects – that have traditionally been considered true markers of a child’s intelligence, employability, and life-long success.

    Dentsu Webchutney’s research teams found that as our knowledge about childhood development has expanded, the need of the hour is to prepare today’s scholar base for an emerging world in which they will hold a host of jobs that don’t even exist as yet. Research has further indicated that success in these areas will require a preparedness that goes much beyond traditional academic preparation, to that which hinges on a healthy emotional, psychological and social development of the child. More and more educational institutions are seeing the need and merit for a curriculum which supports all rounded development with every subject stream becoming equally important. The creative development of the progressive report card stems from this fundamental insight.

    Introducing the concept, Dentsu Webchutney senior creative director PG Aditya mentions, “Design, for all its disruptive qualities, has not been applied to schools beyond the inclusion of interactive boards. We’ve gone one step further to apply it to the heart of the most important success parameter of a student: the report card. No parent, teacher, or school administrator is going to see a report card the same way again.”

    In partnership with KA EduAssociates, the progressive report card shares a rich design story. The circular design of the report card nudges parents to distribute their attention equally to all subjects. The circle symbolises unity and equality and draws from a well-established theory of perception.

    Dentsu Webchutney creative director of design Ashwin Palkar says, “We’re fortunate to work in an industry where diversity and creativity is valued. Our goal is to reach education boards to drive mass adoption. We want to reduce any friction that exists between bright, independent futures of children and dogmatic beliefs around academics of their parents.”

    The team has also released a website- www.theprogressivereportcard.com, through which interested parents and schools can sign up to be part of the initiative. The idea also has an ‘open-source’ side to it: schools that wish to customise the progressive report to their curriculum will receive an instructional design kit which helps them achieve the same.

    So far, the progressive report card has been piloted across schools in eight states and aims to replace the traditional report card in at least one school in every Indian state, during the academic year 2018-19.

  • Swiggy finds you a food partner this ValenDine’s Day

    Swiggy finds you a food partner this ValenDine’s Day

    MUMBAI: Matching in the modern-day is all about choosing a partner (by face) and hoping it clicks. This Valentine’s Day, among all the roses and right-swipes, Swiggy and its digital agency partner, Dentsu Webchutney, came up with a novel approach to finding the perfect match.

    Swiggy AVP of marketing Ashish Lingamneni says, “Food is one thing that nearly every Indian loves, in his own different way. However, there are so many people out there who would have similarities in which they order and enjoy their food. As India’s top food delivery service, we see these similarities on a daily basis. So we thought, what could we do with India’s greatest talking point — food?”

    It is with this intent that Swiggy created My ValenDine, an opt-in platform, which uses interested Swiggy users’ order history, and matches them based on their favourite food and preferences. On Valentine’s Day, users come back to the microsite to find who their ValendDne’s matches are. 

    Dentsu Webchutney Bangalore creative director PG Aditya adds, “The insight came from one of the seemingly bigger challenges of modern dating and it’s not a match if you have nothing in common. Food is the perfect talking point as everyone has a particular food they love, and a particular way they love their food. With Swiggy’s user data, we have found a way to use this to bring people of similar tastes together.”

    The campaign was launched on 11 February on myvalendine.swiggy.com, where registrations were open until Monday night. Interested users had to register before the deadline with their name, phone number and a link to their Facebook profile.

    The site hit immediate success on Sunday, with close to 1000 registrations within the first few hours, despite limited promotion. “Food plays a far more important role in our society than just filling our tummies”, Lingamneni continues. “This is just one of the innovative ways in which the team has been exploring the things food can do.”

  • Dentsu Webchutney promotes mental health awareness

    Dentsu Webchutney promotes mental health awareness

    MUMBAI: Dentsu Webchutney has revealed Project Re-Search, an initiative started in November to measurably increase mental health awareness in India, starting with its first campaign, Beyond the Blue Whale.

    The campaign turns a Google search for the Blue Whale Challenge and its associated terms to a search for mental health difficulties in children, instead. This undercover search campaign has been active since November 2017, attempting to divert traffic from all ‘Blue Whale Challenge’ related searches, to relevant topics around mental health.

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    Late 2017, the Blue Whale phenomenon had become a media sensation and misinformation about it was everywhere. And even by the time the challenge faded, few were aware that the challenge’s vitality was linked to poor mental health in children.

    But India’s adults were still contributing to 57 per cent of the overall search volumes for all ‘Blue Whale Challenge’ keywords on Google, searching for it about 1.4 million times per month. And because its news was so sensationalised, page 1 of search results barely showed content about its links to mental health.

    Project Re-search began as an initiative to use the attention that the Blue Whale Challenge was receiving, and direct it to mental wellness (which as per Google data- Indians search little for), where it really belongs. It’s doing this by identifying the top 22 Blue Whale keywords and targeting ads only to users above 18 years, searching Google with these keywords.
    Color of Grey Cells founder Anushma Kshetrapal says, “Project Re-search uses the Blue Whale Challenge as a wake-up call and aims to direct an adult’s invested concern in it towards some of the oft ignored mental health difficulties that could have made our children vulnerable to it. The hope is that adults ‘re-searching’ through this initiative take their first step towards learning about issues we’ve ignored as a society for far too long”.

    The ads led users to a landing page which introduced them to these mental health stressors that the Blue Whale Challenge could have been feeding off. Along with another ‘Google Search’ for each of those conditions built into it as a CTA (Call to Action) turning every Google search around ‘Blue Whale’ to a search for mental health instead.

    Considering these were complex mental stressors (Anxiety in Children, Depersonalisation, Social Engineering and Bullying), they hadn’t organically received a high volume of queries, despite having several credible results. The ads have received an 8 per cent CTR  (Click Through Rates) — almost triple of the Google average. And Google’s data shows searches for 6 out of 7 mental health related keywords have gone up at least by 15 percent and up to 100 per cent.

    Commenting on the initiative, Webchutney senior creative director PG Aditya adds, “Post the Blue Whale Challenge, we had to ask ourselves: where now from here? What is the right takeaway for parents and adults from this? And how do we equip ourselves when say, the next avatar of a Blue Whale surfaces? The masses hadn’t received that information from the large institutions that drove the sensation around Blue Whale. And we decided to take it upon ourselves to change that.”

  • How to create effective social influence?

    MUMBAI: Today, a social media user’s newsfeed comprises brands, influencers & publishers, all battling to create what marketers hope are ‘like-worthy’ pieces of content. And, to stand out, several brands have recently taken the influencer-marketing route, but Dentsu Webchutney is of the opinion that even this is slowly hitting a saturation point.

    Influencer marketing itself is riddled with disorganized logistics, confusing operations, lack of clarity about success metrics amongst other issues. Webchutney Influence aims to solve these problems for both brands and content creators.

    “Over the last year or so, we’ve noticed a pattern of brands across categories working with an extremely limited circle of content-creators: mostly the top tier publishers and creators. Unless these circles expand, the nature of content created, will not either. Webchutney Influence has been making inroads into doing just that… by working with Instagram creators who are known more for the quality of their work, with a smaller but focused loyal fan base, and other smaller publishers on Facebook to co-create and distribute content effectively. And we aim to economize this model to scale”, says Dentsu Webchutney creative director PG Aditya.

    “We realized that while brands had warmed up to collaborating with these ‘micro-influencers’ in spirit, it was usually way more convenient for them to partner with larger names, unfortunately at the content’s expense. Which is why the team at Webchutney Influence also works as a quasi-talent management hub. It is important for influencers to not feel that their content quality was being compromised, while you, the brand can reap the benefits of a user’s undivided attention,” says Dentsu Webchutney CEO Sidharth Rao.

    But how does a brand ensure that the influencers and publishers recommended is the right fit for them? Dentsu Webchutney senior vice president Gautam Reghunath clarifies: “Webchutney Influence has spent quality time handpicking publishers & content creators who command a high resonance with their audiences, and mapping their audience demographics to that of our brands before we actually recommend a collaboration. Plus, we’re a creative agency at heart. Understanding a ‘brand fit’ is something built into the team’s DNA.”

    Reghunath also touches upon the changing culture of the agency itself. “It is the new normal at Dentsu Webchutney to see a social influencer and our own creative & influence teams brainstorming on how the next series of brand creatives should be. To be honest, we’re just keeping up with the way social media is evolving – right from tweaking the way we brief our creative partners to re-imagining who these creative partners are. Webchutney Influence is as much about reach as it is about creativity,” he adds.

    Webchutney Influence has already executed campaigns with brands such as Flipkart, Mach City, Quikr, Canon India, Rentomojo and Reliance AJIO across Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.