ITV

Tag: Rammohan Sundaram

  • Kshema General Insurance launches campaign to raise awareness about crop insurance

    Kshema General Insurance launches campaign to raise awareness about crop insurance

    Mumbai: Kshema General Insurance Ltd has announced the launch of its national marketing campaign aimed at raising awareness about crop insurance to coincide with the beginning of the Kharif season. The centrepiece of the 360-degree campaign is a TVC which will reach farmers as they start sowing with the onset of the monsoons. The TV campaign will be further augmented by a concurrent campaign in print, digital, and outdoor media. The campaign highlights the importance of crop insurance in creating a financial safety net for farmers when extreme climate events are becoming more frequent and intense.

    The 30-second TVC was developed in-house to forge a deeper connection with farmers, and easy accessibility of Kshema’s industry-first crop insurance plan Sukriti along with Prakriti. The product is available on Kshema’s proprietary platform which can be downloaded from Google Playstore. Any farmer or family member with insurable income can buy this customisable crop insurance starting from Rs 499 per acre and protect more than 100 crops from a combination of one major and one minor peril. All they need to do is download the app, register, geo-tag their farm and pay the premium.

    Commenting on the launch of the TVC, Kshema General Insurance Ltd CMO Bhaskar Thakur said, “I am pleased that we relied on the incredibly powerful imagery of a father-daughter relationship to create awareness about mitigating crop loss and resulting income shock with the help of crop insurance. We chose the emotional depth of the conversation between a father and daughter to convey the importance of protecting farmers from income shocks and building financial resilience. Children can ask the most poignant questions with the utmost simplicity which forces an adult to think. We chose to capture that moment of innocence to carry our message of buying crop insurance to mitigate financial losses caused by perils.”

    The film opens with a farmer working in his field who then takes a break to have lunch with his daughter. She innocently asks her father why he needs to work hard. He lovingly explains he works hard so that everyone has food on their table, and they don’t face any trouble. The daughter exclaims proudly he is there to ensure no one is in trouble but asks with concern who will look after him if he faces any adverse situation. The camera pans to the farmer who now looks worried and then cuts to the visual of Kshema app with the narrator explaining that any farmer can buy Sukriti easily via the app.

    Kshema’s media partner Mudramax is spearheading the campaign and the TVC will be aired on news, music, movies, and general entertainment channels in the country. “We are thrilled to partner with Kshema General Insurance Limited on this groundbreaking integrated multi-media marketing campaign,” said Mudramax president – integrated media Rammohan Sundaram. “By leveraging a strategic mix of TV, Print, and Digital broadcast properties, including a carefully curated set of influencers, we aim to create a cohesive and immersive brand experience that resonates with the target audiences across all touchpoints. This campaign exemplifies the innovative and collaborative spirit of both our teams, and we are confident it will drive significant engagement and impact”.

    The new commercial will also be bolstered by an intensive digital campaign to drive awareness around the critical role played by crop insurance in mitigating risks caused by natural perils.

    The agricultural and allied sectors engage the largest share of the workforce, constituting 45.5 per cent as per the Periodic Labour Force Survey of 2021-22, and contribute nearly 15 per cent to India’s GDP. However, natural catastrophic events are becoming more frequent and intense due to climate change affecting the farming community disproportionately. These natural perils cause not only loss of crop but also livelihoods in the worst cases as 85 per cent of farmers have modest annual incomes.

    Kshema endeavours to support the farming community through these trying times by providing them tailor-made insurance products after adequately mapping and analysing the risk involved.

  • MudraMax elevates Deleise Ross to senior VP & business head

    MudraMax elevates Deleise Ross to senior VP & business head

    Mumbai: Leading integrated marketing media agency – MudraMax – has announced the promotion of Deleise Ross as the senior vice president and head of business. In her new role, she will be reporting to DDB Mudra Group president – integrated media Rammohan Sundaram and lead business operations for West as well as the South division.

    Her extensive experience and calm demeanour have led MudraMax through unprecedented growth. Deleise has been associated with MudraMax for over five years now and has played a significant role in the agency’s overall success. She has worked on a varied portfolio across categories including brands such as Adani Wilmar, Jazeera Airlines, PNB Housing Finance, Nuvama and Relaxo – Sparx.

    DDB Mudra Group president – integrated media Rammohan Sundaram said, “We are seeing tremendous growth in our media business and so structures become important which only helps teams to focus better and deliver better. It is also about leadership attention that teams require when in hockey stick growth phase. My belief has always been to groom available talent from within and we are excited to have Deleise take on larger responsibility.”

    Speaking on her elevation, Ross said, “I’m excited to start this new chapter, as it will help me broaden my understanding of newer markets and businesses. With the cross-category experience that I bring to the table, I look forward to making clearer and more strategic recommendations for the new set of businesses with the expanded team.”

  • 2020 and the debate of TV vs digital video

    2020 and the debate of TV vs digital video

    MUMBAI: It’s been two decades since I have been listening, participating and speaking about the great inflection point in digital in India. Every five years with some growth in consumer usage of the internet, adoption of platforms and growing online shopping, the claim used to only add fuel. Further to tons of VC money going into start-ups, every third person used to say “Digital Inflection Point” has truly arrived in India.

    So, I am kind of tired of this whole story, but wait… 2020 has been that year when the digital inflection point truly arrived. I say it with total conviction, data points and authority as a media agency head, based on what I am seeing on the ground and how clients have responded to the turning landscape and massive consumer behavior changes happening around us.

    VCs invest in ideas for the future and 90 per cent of them fail but the ones that stick, address the growing need when the inflection point arrives, solving a problem and making the business viable because the business has a purpose. Purpose of disseminating information or spreading joy through entertainment or enabling healthcare in remote places or bringing education to people’s homes or even making financial transactions simpler.

    This would not be possible without the technology that could back the high-speed internet required for addressing any of the purposes I have mentioned above. India as a country still has affordability issues. So,  when the high-speed internet became affordable, consumer intent naturally swayed towards cheaper options, making viewability of content agnostic in nature.

    That is the only true reason why I believe that the inflection point has arrived and it’s here to not just stay but grow exponentially. Now how does that translate to comparing digital video to TV?

    TV is known as the idiot box and it will continue to be one. Mobile will be known as an idiot brick, but these idiotic products are the only mediums that enable communication with the latter being a two-way mechanism of communication at the highest levels.

    Indians have consumed AV since the early fifties  through movies, which was later followed by terrestrial TV, then the VCR wave settled in with cable TV from early nineties. Indians are emotional and therefore anything that brings in emotional highs has always worked, which is why entertainment as an industry is so large in India. Naturally, the progression would be towards affordable consumption, and high-speed internet did just that. It enabled consumption of the ever-growing content from emotional to comedy to dramatic to romantic to edgy to sexual to the next level. Add to that social media, where you could be a star with millions of followers generating income for the content you create, made the medium even more adoptable for creators and stickier for the consumers.

    We haven’t even spoken about cricket here!

    Add to that the pandemic in 2020, every aspect of consumption soared, and India’s favorite pastime now made its entry into the idiot bricks or what we call mobile phones. Everything changed and I am going to quickly explain how the growth of mobile internet actually grew the market and did not take away the share from TV.

    I recently met an MD of a very large financial institution with my team and we started talking about how OTT is taking away the share from TV in terms of reach and I begged to differ with him because the data that I am narrating shows that not only has TV grown in size and consumption, but digital video has also in fact created newer audiences, thereby breaking the myth of OTT taking over TV in the future.

    India is the second largest television market in the world with 195 Million households of which 80 per cent are paid C&S channels, which makes it a subscription market for TV at around 156 million as per Statista. As per BARC, TV viewership grew by 10 per cent  in 2020 over 2019 (consolidated – urban + rural, Jan – Nov). India is looking at a projected revenue generation of $3 billion  from TV as an industry through advertising in FY 21.

    Despite the growth in C&S, digital advertising is going to overtake TV advertising in FY 21 with a projected revenue of $3.5 billion. As per KPMG, the 20 per cent drop from projections is largely the dismal economic situation due to the Covid 19 pandemic but what that did was to enable the massive adoption of OTT and grew the whole base of paid subscribers which will cross 40 million in FY 21 fueling the growth of digital advertising northwards.

    There are standing examples of these claims with the release of movies on OTT and its subsequent adoption, IPL on Hotstar which saw unprecedented growth reaching over 300 million handheld devices and the ever-growing connected TV story, for which Samsung is gearing up to provide solutions on advertising in the near future.

    With an average of $10 in subscriptions, we are estimating  paid subscription revenue on OTT to be around $400M which clearly indicates that consumers are willing to pay to consume more and more video content. Players to watch out for in 2021 will be YouTube, Hotstar, Instagram Reels, Netflix, Amazon Prime, Zee5, SonyLiv, MX Player, Ullu, Hoichoi and SunNext.

    If TikTok makes a comeback then it will see tremendous adoption but there are players like Josh who are taking that space up quickly, so while OTT consumption will continue to grow, social video sharing apps are also now part of the same mix when it comes to content consumption if it has to be classified as digital video.

    So, my humble submission therefore is, “inflection point” has truly arrived in 2020 and was accelerated by the pandemic, which is why in FY 21, digital advertising will overtake television advertising and while TV is seeing growth in viewership, it is declining in revenues due to the drop of 20 per cent  in advertising spends again due to the pandemic that impacted our economy on the whole. TV and OTT are parts of the same coin as heads and tails are. Hence, while we see OTT adoption is growing at a rapid pace, it will necessarily not replace TV anytime soon. OTT behavior is in silos except when on connected TVs  and television viewing is typically family driven, again a big difference in consumer behavior thus making a niche for both these mediums which is why I continue to believe that OTT as disruption has increased the overall size of audience and not taken away share from TV. Therefore, both these mediums will co-exist in India for some time to come, period!

    (The author is managing partner at DDB Mudra Group and is responsible for the media business. )

  • Newly launched Velfie reaches 2 lakh download milestone

    Newly launched Velfie reaches 2 lakh download milestone

    MUMBAI: The recently launched new age mobile app #Velfie has reached the 2 lakh download mark. Launched by entrepreneurs Ankush Johar and Rammohan Sundaram, the app lets one connect with circles in a more personal and entertaining way through ‘video selfies.’

     

    The platform has made more than 300,000 videos since its launch in April, this year. The app is already a hit with the celeb bandwagon including stars like Akshay Kumar, Tanmay Bhatt (AIB) and Jacqueline Fernandes among others.

     

    Velfie co-founder Rammohan Sundaram said, “Social networking platforms provide a unique opportunity to connect with several people at once. The fact that users are spending over 8 minutes on an average on the app shows an increasing propensity among them to adopt more and more innovative methods of interaction as they evolve.”

     

    “India is already a big market for us with maximum users (65 per cent) followed by other countries. With Velfie, we aim to deliver a platform which can be used by anyone, celebrity or otherwise, to reach out and connect with others in their network through personalised video content in a fun way,” added other co-founder Ankush Johar.

     

    Besides India, the Velfie user base is also spreading its global network to Hispanic Americas, Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, and South East Asia prominently. The venture intends to soon launch a live video streaming facility which will enable users to connect with their circles in an off-hand, informal manner. The app has already bagged brand associations with Snapdeal, Bata and Datsun, as well as movies such as Dil Dhadakne Do, Gabbar is Back and Drishyam.

  • Former Networkplay CEO Sundaram launches PlatformPlay Media Ventures

    MUMBAI: Former Networkplay CEO Rammohan Sundaram has announced the launch of PlatformPlay Media Ventures.

    PlatformPlay Media Ventures will focus on devising the India Entry Strategy for digital businesses looking at increasing their presence in India.

    The new venture would be led by Sundaram as the chairman and managing director with majority stakes from SVG (Smile Vun Group) Media. He is expected to roll out multiple services related to digital advertising under the newly launched company.

    Sundaram said, “Last four plus years as an entrepreneur were filled with tremendous learning but I still have unfinished business with the digital space. With PlatformPlay, we would be the first of its kind firm focussing on “India Entry” for various international digital brands looking at either entering or expanding their footprint in the market.”

    “India is an important market for all growth focussed companies, and we at PlatformPlay have significant experience in launching large properties in the country, thus making us the preferred India entry partners. SVG Media‘s involvement as an investor adds to the belief of the idea. Domestically, we are focused on bringing the right audience for various categories of advertisers through some exclusive relationships that we are signing off now,” Sundaram added.

    SVG Media founder & CEO Manish Vij will join the board of PlatformPlay as SVG Media‘s representative.

    SVG Media is a digital media network operating market leading businesses such as Tyroo, PrecisionMatch, DGM and Velocity in Performance, Digital Data and Display respectively.

    Vij said, “SVG Media has a clear focus on investing and acquiring digital assets and being the launch pad for successful digital media businesses. Having concluded our transaction with DGM last year, we invested in PrecisionMatch and launched Velocity as an audience based network within the group. We were sure of investing in PlatformPlay when we first about it from Ram. Ram‘s skills, passion, commitment and energy are known to everyone in the industry. The fact that PlatformPlay will be led by Ram is enough to guarantee success.”

    “I have known Manish for over a decade and the understanding we have is immense. We are extremely confident that we would be trendsetting some of the digital brands in India in the near future.

    With the Indian digital advertising market headed to a $2 billion mark by 2016-17, it is going to see a lot of international entrants in the next few quarters. We are well poised to make the most of it with a few announcements already round the corner and aggressive focus on bringing web and mobile publishers which have engaging solutions for brands to capitalise on,” Sundaram concluded.