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Tag: PointNine Lintas

  • Vikas Mehta appointed Mullen Lintas CEO

    Vikas Mehta appointed Mullen Lintas CEO

    MUMBAI: Creative agency of the MullenLowe Lintas Group, Mullen Lintas, has appointed Vikas Mehta as its new CEO. He will operate out of the company’s Mumbai office.

    Mehta takes this role from Virat Tandon, who was recently elevated to the position of group CEO, MullenLowe Lintas Group.

    Mehta comes with an experience of nearly two decades and has spent over 12 years with the global MullenLowe Group, working in multiple countries across the Asia-Pacific region. He started working for the company in India in 2013 and played several roles including group chief marketing officer, head of the digital and president—group marketing services. His last assignment was to set up the omnichannel creative agency, PointNine Lintas, which he ran as CEO until its merger with Lowe Lintas, announced last week.

  • MS Dhoni asks audiophiles to #JusBol for SoundLogic’s new ad

    MS Dhoni asks audiophiles to #JusBol for SoundLogic’s new ad

    MUMBAI: PointNine Lintas has conceptualised and executed a multimedia campaign for the launch of SoundLogic’s new voice assistant wireless audio range.

    As the omnichannel agency of the brand, PointNine Lintas designed the entire campaign leveraging SoundLogic’s partner-evangelist, Mahendra Singh Dhoni. The new campaign, #JusBol, emphasises how easily you can manage all your chores with just voice commands.

    As the voice assistant-enabled audio segment is still nascent, one of the prime objectives for the agency was to build awareness about the category and highlight the product’s utility. To achieve this goal, PointNine Lintas built a digital-first omni-channel strategy.

    The campaign started with the first-ever flash sale in the audio equipment category on Flipkart. To celebrate Mahi’s birthday, SoundLogic is giving away a personalised gift from him along-with the product during the flash sale. The agency has created a go-to-market plan that will unveil over the next few weeks. The mix includes films, video content, social media conversations, retail merchandise, e-commerce partnership and PR.

    PointNine Lintas CEO Vikas Mehta said, “We are delighted to help SoundLogic create its first major marketing campaign in India. It’s a singular campaign that maps the entire user journey from awareness right upto commerce. Mahi’s upcoming birthday presented a great topical opportunity for us to offer something exciting to his fans and a limited edition range was born. Flipkart has been an invaluable partner in agreeing to do a first-ever flash sale for our products, giving us a great platform for the brand to make a debut.”

    SoundLogic is amongst the first voice assistant products to work on a Bluetooth technology making it platform and OS agnostic. Coupled with an attractive price point of Rs 1,299 onwards, it allows a much larger group of Indian audiences to have the first taste of smart audio devices.

    SoundLogic CEO and co-founder Sagar Gwallani added, “With this campaign we want to communicate how user-friendly SoundLogic’s voice-assisted range of audio products are. As the campaign is all about giving commands to the voice assistant, there cannot be any better choice than Captain Cool, who is known for his leadership qualities on and off the field.”

    The campaign revolves around the idea #JusBol. Vikas explains the idea further, “Most of our audience is not yet familiar with the concept of voice assistants. We needed to simplify the proposition down to something they can easily relate to and yet be compelling enough for them to try out. People are used to speakers playing sound (a speaker, speaks!); but here is a range of audio products that also listen. With this range, your speaker just got smart enough to be your assistant. Your voice is its command.”

    SoundLogic was founded in the USA in 2006 and has presence across various markets including India, UK, Europe and Australia. The brand entered the Indian market in 2011 and soon became one of the fastest growing brands in the audio and electronics industry providing consumers with innovative products at affordable prices. Introducing innovative gadgets, SoundLogic has an array of gadgets and gizmos for daily lifestyle.

  • PointNine Lintas forays into mar-tech via Probitec

    PointNine Lintas forays into mar-tech via Probitec

    MUMBAI: Omnichannel agency PointNine Lintas has announced its foray into marketing techbologe (mar-tech) and launched the beta version of its first product, Probitec Deemed as the world’s first technology platform for activation management, Probitec is an end-to-end solution for executing and monitoring on-ground programs for consumer engagement.

    Announcing the go-live, PointNine Lintas CEO Vikas Mehta says,  “A few years ago, we saw the wave of ad-tech sweeping the advertising business. The action is now shifting towards (mar-tech), and we’re really excited about the possibilities it presents for innovations and inventions. Until now, agencies have primarily viewed their business model as ‘service providers’. At PointNine Lintas, we are committed to an equally strong focus on developing products that can add value to the marketing ecosystem. Probitec is a fine example of that, because it offers a platformic solution to a decades-old problem of transparency in the activation business.”

    LinEngage, the consumer engagement division of PointNine Lintas, has led the product development of Probitec in collaboration with technology partner, TalentBridge Technologies – a Bangalore based technology firm.

    Served as a mobile app, Probitec is a unified platform where field staff, activation agencies and clients can access relevant modules to collaborate, train, manage and monitor assignments simultaneously across multiple geographies around the country.

    The app helps in talent assessment and hiring for field staff including promoters, training through interactive sessions and multimedia materials for execution, geo-location tracking of on ground initiatives including live audio-video streaming, real-time monitoring and a live dashboard reporting for clients and data capture and database integration for the entire activity. 

    PointNine Lintas national director of consumer engagement Sriharsh Grandhe adds, “Clients have echoed how there is very little control on an activation program once it goes live. Technology can aid in improving monitoring and measurability of activation programs that gives better control and greatly improve its performance and effectiveness. Probitec has been designed to achieve this by mimicking a typical activation program workflow with the aim to improve management of activation projects. This can be more effective for the larger and complex projects.”

    Probitec derives its name from ‘probity’ (Latin origin ‘probus’), which means adherence to the highest principles and ideals. It aims to set a new standard in transparency for the activation business, while making the entire process more collaborative and efficient. The development cycle for Probitec lasted about 15 months including rigorous testing. User testing in live environments has been carried out in over 125 towns and villages spanning five states. The beta version continues to be tested for further enhancements, and is currently live in 200 villages in the state of Tamil Nadu.

    Early assignments include brands for an auto-lubricant major, a leading foods company, an entertainment network amongst others. PointNine Lintas is in talks with several large activation clients to create custom-builds of Probitec for enterprise level integrations.

  • PointNine Lintas announces new leadership team

    MUMBAI: PointNine Lintas, the newest independent agency from the MullenLowe Lintas Group, announced the first set of names in its leadership team. It’s a lineup of senior domain-experts that will work with the CEO, Vikas Mehta. All teams of PointNine Lintas will be co-located in offices in Mumbai, New Delhi (NCR) and Bangalore respectively.

    Ameer Ismail has been named Chief Growth Officer, Sumanta Ganguly takes on the role of National Director – Digital Marketing and Transformation and Sriharsh Grandhe would be National Director – Consumer Engagement. Along with Vikas; Ameer, Sumanta and Sriharsh will work with clients to build bespoke agency solutions geared to maximize return-on-marketing-investments.

    Speaking of the lineup, Vikas Mehta said: “The biggest challenge in getting an omni-channel model right is the ability to bring multi-disciplinary expertise together upfront. This leadership team is made up of seasoned practitioners. It allows us to bring multiple disciplines to the table right at the start and offer clients, a customised agency team that’s built around their brand opportunities. This is in sharp contrast to the administrative structure most agencies follow for their verticals. We are lucky to have experts like Ameer, Sumanta and Sriharsh within the organisation, to be my co-founders at PointNine Lintas.”

    As Chief Growth Officer, Ameer’s mandate would be to work with clients towards creating growth strategies and build full-service agency teams. Commenting on his vision and role for PointNine Lintas, Ameer Ismail commented: “I believe a truly omni-channel agency is imperative for today’s market. We will be amongst very few agencies that kick start with such a deep and diverse capability line-up. To exploit the full potential of our offering, my role as Chief Growth Officer will be to create a dynamic strategy that will ensure PointNine Lintas works with some of the best brands and develops into one of the most significant agencies in the country.”

    The consumer engagement practice for PointNine Lintas; including activation, experiential and shopper marketing; would be led by Sriharsh Grandhe. His mandate will be to author go-to-market programs built around physical and digital consumer-journeys. Sriharsh would also be involved in developing the agency’s product –stack of mar-tech offerings.

    Commenting on the role and responsibility at PointNine Lintas, Sriharsh Grandhe said: “Over the last two years at LinEngage, a considerable effort has been made on creating effectiveness for our clients and we have successfully demonstrated reach-to-conversion ratios as healthy as 35 per cent. We have worked closely with a few of our longstanding clients to experiment and continually improve on engagement KPI’s. At PointNine Lintas, the goal would be to take these models to even more touch-points to create greater business impact.”

    The digital practice for PointNine Lintas would be led by Sumanta Ganguly. His mandate would be to place platforms, technology, devices and ecosystems at the heart of marketing programs in the early stages of brand development. Speaking of his role, Sumanta Ganguly says, “Digital is no longer the purview of communication alone, today it’s leading the discussion of business transformations. We are at the crossroads of design, data and platforms, and will continue to focus on digital transformation stories for a larger set of clients at PointNine Lintas.”

    Ameer, Sriharsh and Sumanta will retain their divisional responsibilities for GolinOpinion, LinEngage and LinTeractive respectively. Explaining the rationale behind this choice, Vikas adds, “One of the big reasons why full-service is preached more often than practiced, is because every skill-set comes with its own administrative layers. For example, when you need a PR expert, you also inherit the administrative layer of a PR agency. In a day-to-day working scenario, this becomes a major barrier to collaboration. We’ve made a conscious choice to cast our best minds as both, ‘practitioners’ and ‘managers’ making it easier to collaborate seamlessly.”

    The agency is planning more additions to the leadership team, which would be announced in the coming days.

  • PointNine Lintas launched, Vikas Mehta named CEO

    MUMBAI: MullenLowe Lintas Group has announced the launch of its new independent full-service agency in India, PointNine Lintas. It would offer omni-channel marketing capabilities including creative (on and offline), PR, activation, experiential, social, media and digital transformation; all under one roof.

    PointNine Lintas will commence operations on 1 August, 2017.

    The existing marketing services of the Group will be aggregated under this new agency and will operate as its divisions. These include GolinOpinion – PR, reputation management; LinTeractive – digital marketing & transformation and LinEngage – activation, experiential & shopper. These divisions will come together to offer full-service horizontal offerings to clients of PointNine Lintas, while continuing to retain their vertical offerings for existing clients. The new agency has a roadmap to further expand its capabilities by adding new offerings to its service stack, including creative, media, technology and platforms.

    Announcing the new agency, Joseph George (Joe), Group Chairman and CEO, MullenLowe Lintas Group said, “We made our intentions to go full-service clear four years ago. While the list of companies and industries pursuing full-service (under different labels) has grown tremendously in this time, the approach to it remains more or less the same. PointNine Lintas is a fresh take at an agency model that’s multi-faceted at its core. So far, only holding companies have seen some success with this approach, but it’s restricted to a handful of very large global clients. An agency network doing this would be a first, and we believe it could broaden the base of clients who can tap into it.”

    Along with Lowe Lintas and Mullen Lintas, PointNine Lintas would be the third independent agency of the MullenLowe Lintas Group in India. Vikas Mehta, currently Group CMO and President, Marketing Services for MullenLowe Lintas Group, has been named CEO of PointNine Lintas.

    Vikas has been with the MullenLowe Group for over a decade in various local and regional roles in the APAC region including Managing Director – Lowe Viet Nam and Regional Growth Officer – Lowe Asia-Pacific. He moved to MullenLowe Lintas Group India in 2013 as the country’s first agency-CMO. In 2014, he took an additional mandate to rebuild the group’s digital business by relaunching LinTeractive. Since 2015, he’s also been President of the Group’s Marketing Services divisions. Prior to his management stints, Vikas was a planner and he authored strategies, papers and case-studies that have won over 50 international awards for marketing effectiveness. Major ones include Effie (India, Singapore and APAC), Asian Marketing Effectiveness Awards, APAC Tambuli Awards, WARC Asia Prize for Strategy, 4A’s Jay Chiat Awards, among others.

    Speaking of the appointment, Joes said, “I have worked closely with Vikas the past four years and I am absolutely certain that he is most qualified to deliver on this ambition. Not just because of his subject matter competencies required for a multi-service agency, but also for his passionate, stubborn and informed belief in ‘full service’ being the only way to go!”

    Vikas said, “We have gone from the age of communication to the age of experiences. While the market has evolved at a furious pace, the agency models haven’t. The opportunity to take the Lintas pedigree and build an agency for the experiential economy is an inspiring one. Hyper-bundling is our biggest priority as a network and I’m grateful for the challenge to build a new agency that’s hyper-bundled from day zero”.

    PointNine Lintas will work on an operating model that’s designed to evolve, much like the OS of your preferred device, to reflect the accelerated pace at which the marketing landscape is shifting. In fact, the name PointNine reflects exactly that; a philosophy of ‘forever beta’, by choice.