Mumbai: Diwali is as much about spreading joy in others’ lives as it is about celebrating with our loved ones. This Diwali, Zupee, one of India’s leading online skill-based gaming platforms announced its ‘Saara India Chamkega’ campaign to brighten the lives of thousands of senior citizens.
Staying true to the spirit of Diwali, this initiative is designed to gamify the experience of giving with an in-App engagement on the Zupee App, urging players to light up e-diyas as part of the collective effort towards supporting senior citizens.
As part of the week-long campaign until Diwali, Zupee players can simply click on the ‘Saara India Chamkega’ in-App banner and participate by rolling a dice, where each dice roll will lead to the lighting of corresponding number of e-diyas illuminating a digital map of India. For every e-Diya lit, Zupee will contribute towards supporting senior citizens in association with The Earth Saviours Foundation
A real-time tracker will be active throughout the week, showcasing the total number of e-diyas lit. Additionally, players can also invite their friends and families to join in the cause through WhatsApp and Facebook via the Zupee App and website.
The Earth Saviours Foundation, an internationally acclaimed and recognized non-profit organisation to champion this initiative. The initiative aims to impact over thousands of residents as part of The Earth Saviours programmes for senior care and the specially abled.
Zupee’s donation will be channelled by the Earth Saviours NGO in securing essential provisions, including food, hygiene and toiletries, medicine etc for the senior citizens. Furthermore, Zupee’s team joined in the Diwali celebrations with the residents of Earth Saviours and organised a meal at the NGO, located at Bandhwari Village, Distt. Gurugram.
Share the joy of Diwali with a simple tap and light e-diya to show your support for senior citizens. You can do this by either clicking on the ‘Saara India Chamkega’ banner inside the Zupee App or by visiting the Zupee website.
Mumbai: Kaumudi Mahajan has announced the position of head of content strategy at Viacom18’s Colors. Mahajan shared the news of her move through a post on LinkedIn.
In the post she said, “My passion lies in the world of entertainment and so even after spending 15 years in it, it has kept me excited, curious and involved. I am grateful to work on brands that I truly admire. When I first started working, I was in awe of the impact Colors had by talking about social realities and now as I experience this brand, I am truly wowed. Looking forward to an incredible journey and can’t wait to learn and unlearn everything I know.”
In her previous role at Meta, Mahajan served as the head of Entertainment Partnerships. During her tenure, she collaborated with diverse teams to unlock substantial value for partners. She also harnessed the power of pop culture to create engaging opportunities on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Mumbai: Star Sports, India’s leading sports broadcaster, has unveiled an insightful social-first collaboration with WhatsApp, ‘Privacy Unplugged’- a captivating five-part short-form content series, facilitated by Starcom, that underscores the paramount significance of privacy features within today’s digital realm. This exclusive property presents poignant and personal narratives of our much-loved sporting champions, intricately woven around the central tenet of privacy.
The line-up features eminent cricket stars including Rishabh Pant and Shreyas Iyer, prodigious cricket talent Jemimah Rodrigues, hockey icon Rani Rampal, and accomplished footballer Gurpreet Singh Sandhu. Each athlete’s unique story serves as a powerful catalyst for widespread awareness, highlighting the advanced privacy features introduced by WhatsApp, and further emphasizing the platform’s unwavering commitment to user safety and data protection.
Speaking about the association with WhatsApp (Meta), Star Sports head – ad sales Kingshuk Mitra said, “This marks our third collaboration with Meta, and we’re excited to be associating with WhatsApp for the ongoing ‘Privacy Unplugged’ series. We’ve brought on board a few highly regarded sports stars to emphasize the importance of privacy in today’s interconnected world. Star Sports’ extensive reach of 30 million fans across social media platforms enables WhatsApp to effectively spread the campaign’s message. This content series also lays the groundwork for potential collaborations with other brands, allowing us to craft compelling stories that deeply connect with our audience.”
Meta strategic media planning lead APAC Natasha Kapoor said, “We’re thrilled to associate with Star Sports to highlight the importance of secure and private messaging, through the personal stories of some of India’s top athletes. It’s a great privilege that millions of Indians trust WhatsApp to deliver their personal messages everyday. This series reinforces the role that WhatsApp’s multiple privacy features play in enabling our users to stay connected with their loved ones, have meaningful conversations and even express their authentic selves, privately.”
Chief operating officer Niti Kumar said, “Starcom discovered that India’s beloved athletes, respected by millions, hold an exceptional talent for safeguarding the most critical aspects of their lives even as they artfully define their individual understandings of ‘privacy’. This insightful discovery enabled Starcom to bring about a strategic partnership between WhatsApp and Star Sports, which aims to unravel the narratives around privacy in the lives of India’s premier athletes.”
The Privacy Unplugged series spotlights the need for privacy in the lives of athletes. Each story underlines how WhatsApp’s built-in layers of privacy help create a safe space for our champions to express themselves freely and have their most private conversations.
Content Showcase
Rishabh Pant: Recovery in Private: After a life-threatening accident, Rishabh Pant’s private recovery journey becomes the focal point. WhatsApp’s End-to-End Encrypted platform empowers him and gives him a safe space to share his progress securely with family, friends, mentors, and coaches.
Shreyas Iyer: Finding confidence in Private: Shreyas Iyer uses WhatsApp’s ‘View Once’ feature to share his favorite magic tricks, fostering private conversations that encourage young cricketers to open up about their challenges in a space they feel comfortable in.
Jemimah Rodrigues: Being herself in Private: WhatsApp’s ‘Chat Lock’ feature help’s Jemimah Rodrigues secure her private conversations with a select group of friends, allowing her to maintain her public image while being her homebody self in private amongst her girl tribe.
Gurpreet Singh Sandhu: Finding focus in Private: As India’s top goalkeeper, Gurpreet Singh Sandhu relies on WhatsApp’s ‘Silence Unknown Callers’ feature to cut out the white noise and eliminate spam, preserving his mental focus during rigorous training.
Rani Rampal: Training in Private: Rani Rampal leverages WhatsApp’s ‘Online Presence’ privacy feature to stay connected, mentor and give dedicated time to the next generation of girls aspiring to play hockey for India, offering them a secure and personal space for learning.
Mumbai: In an age where privacy and online security have become paramount, WhatsApp is at the forefront of innovating features that continually help enhance the safety and privacy for users globally. From chat lock to disappearing messages, silence unknown callers to privacy checkup, every new feature adds to WhatsApp’s multiple layers of protection.
Understanding that launching innovative features alone is not enough, WhatsApp has invested time and effort to educate users and drive awareness around some of its key safety and privacy features. This strategic effort involves multiple safety and privacy campaigns designed to empower users to take control of their online safety and privacy.
Stay safe with WhatsApp campaign:
• On 12 April, WhatsApp rolled out their three-month ‘Stay safe with WhatsApp’ that focused on creating user awareness around safer digital practices, highlighting product features that empower users to take control of their online safety and ensure a safer messaging experience.
• WhatsApp collaborated with influential figures such as Rajiv Makhni, Manoj Chugh, Jaspreet Bindra, Akancha Shrivastava, Pankaj Gupta, and Deepak Maheshwari to amplify awareness of WhatsApp’s safety and privacy features.
• As part of this campaign, WhatsApp released educational user guides highlighting safety tools and product features to secure users’ WhatsApp accounts. Additionally, it offered insights on how to stay protected from scams using WhatsApp’s safety features.
Privacy campaign highlighting WhatsApp’s “Multiple layers of protection”
• WhatsApp launched a global campaign focused on the importance of secure communication and WhatsApp’s multiple layers of privacy. The campaign shows how a private conversation with a friend or loved one on WhatsApp creates a safe space for people to communicate with one another.
• Mirrors Activation and partnership with Anushka Sharma to highlight the power of private messaging. WhatsApp partnered with actor Anushka Sharma to launch a series of mirrored messages appearing in private spaces – women’s restrooms – in malls across Delhi. Mirrored messages with QR codes appeared in women’s restrooms in Delhi malls, offering suggestions for checking in via a private WhatsApp message. These messages disappeared afterward, similar to the Disappearing Messages feature on WhatsApp.
• 3D Anamorphic installations at the Gateway of India: WhatsApp hosted an immersive storytelling experience at Mumbai’s iconic Gateway of India, where anamorphic privacy installations and projection mapping on the monument facade vividly showcased the layers of privacy WhatsApp offers:
For the final leg of the privacy campaign, on 4 September, WhatsApp will announce a partnership with Ranveer Singh to promote message privacy where he talks about how WhatsApp’s multiple layers of protection give him control over his most private conversations.
In a candid conversation the actor opens up about what’s in his phone and how he protects his most private conversations on WhatsApp. The entertaining video almost has Ranveer spilling the beans but instead educates people on the importance of private and secure messaging with simple privacy features like end-to-end encryption, chat lock, screenshot blocking for view once messages on WhatsApp.
Talking about the collaboration with WhatsApp, Ranveer Singh, said, “With more and more private conversations happening online, our privacy needs are also evolving. From sharing my most private thoughts with my friends and family to discussing work, my WhatsApp has private information like film scripts, my financial details. The cool thing about WhatsApp is that with its layers of privacy I know my conversations are always secure and with features like chat lock, I can password protect my most private and important chats so that even though my phone changes hands, my chats don’t.”
Meta director, consumer marketing Vyom Prashant said, “We’re thrilled to partner with Ranveer to bring alive the multiple ways in which WhatsApp protects our users’ privacy, in an entertaining, informative, and relatable manner. We believe this partnership along with our campaign on privacy, demonstrates to our users that they always have a safe and private space on WhatsApp for their conversations.”
Mumbai: Global tech giant YouTube has dethroned Google to top YouGov’s 2022 Best Brand Rankings in India, recording an increase of +2.5 to its year-on-year brand health score.
YouGov’s latest rankings reveal the top ten brands in terms of overall brand health, according to urban Indians. The rankings are based on the index score from YouGov BrandIndex, which is a measure of overall brand health that indicates how well a brand is delivering on its brand promise on key attributes and is calculated by taking the average of the impression, quality, value, satisfaction, recommend and reputation scores collected in BrandIndex.
Google moves down one spot to second (with a score of 54.9), and WhatsApp moves up to third (53.9) with a considerable increase in its year-on-year score.
E-commerce giant Amazon moved down one spot to fourth, but its video-on-demand platform, Amazon Prime, moved off the list this year. Flipkart enhanced its brand perception over the past year but moved down three places in the 2022 rankings, to ninth (40.8).
This year, many new brands make up the top ten list. Amul is fifth on the list with a score of 49.5. Tanishq follows in the sixth (42.2), Cadbury Dairy Milk in the seventh (41.3), and Dettol Disinfectant in the eighth (40.9). Zomato rounds up the top ten in tenth (40.0).
The rankings also show the brands that have improved the most over the past 12 months. Air India is the most improved brand of the year, with a change in score of +7.1.
Telegram is the second-best mover with a change in score of +5.2, along with other social media platforms such as Instagram (change in score +3.9) and WhatsApp (+3.5).
Smartphone brands like Realme (+4.0) and global electronics company Apple (+3.4) appear in the list of improvers.
Myntra (+3.3), Booking.com (3.0), Tata Motors (+2.8), and Flipkart (+2.7) are other brands to appear in India’s 2022 top ten improvers list.
Mumbai: In a conference call with analysts to discuss the third quarter 2022 results, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that in terms of the business, total revenue grew slightly this quarter on a constant currency basis. “We’re still behind where I think we should be, but we believe that we will return to healthier revenue growth trends next year. That said, it’s not clear that the economy has stabilised yet, so we’re planning our budget somewhat more conservatively.”
He noted that the company in the quarter had launched JioMart on WhatsApp in India. “It’s our first end-to-end shopping experience that shows the potential for chat-based commerce through messaging.” He said that beyond Reels, messaging is another major monetisation opportunity. “Billions of people and millions of businesses use WhatsApp and Messenger every day, and we’re confident we can connect them in ways that create valuable experiences.”
For the record, Meta’s share price fell by 20 per cent in after-hours trading after it reported its fourth straight quarterly decline in profit. Analysts want Meta to cut costs. Some analysts describe Meta’s investments as being confusing and confounding.
Zuckerberg also said that Meta’s product trends look better than what the commentary that he has seen suggests.
“Our community continued to grow this quarter. We now reach more than 3.7 billion people monthly across our family of apps. And while we continue to navigate some challenging dynamics—a volatile macroeconomy, increasing competition, ad signal loss, and growing costs from our long-term investments—Iq have to say that our product trends look better from what I see than some of the commentary I’ve seen suggests.”
He said that three of the areas that Meta is very focused on are the AI discovery engine, the ads and business messaging platforms, and the future vision for the metaverse. “I believe the tougher prioritisation, discipline, and efficiency that we’re driving across the organisation will help us navigate the current environment and emerge an even stronger company.”
Reels, which is its short-form video platform, continues to grow quickly across apps—both in production and consumption. “There are now more than 140 billion reels played across Facebook and Instagram each day. That’s a 50 per cent increase from six months ago. Reels are incremental to time spent on our apps. The trends look good here, and we believe that we’re gaining time spent on competitors like TikTok.”
While analysts are unsure about whether the big bets on areas like the Metaverse will pay off, Zuckerberg expressed confidence in the work being done in the Metaverse space. “We just had our Connect conference and announced Quest Pro, which we just started shipping. It’s our new high-end VR headset that delivers high-resolution mixed reality so you can blend virtual objects into the physical environment around you. It’s pretty amazing when you see it, and it’s going to enable all kinds of new experiences in socializing, gaming, fitness, and work. I’m really looking forward to seeing what people build with this new capability.
Working in the metaverse is a big theme for Quest Pro. There are 200 million people who get new PCs every year, mostly for work. Our goal for the Quest Pro line over the next several years is to enable more and more of these people to get their work done in virtual and mixed reality, eventually even better than they could on PCs.”
He dwelt on the importance of partnerships. “To deliver a great work and productivity experience, I’m excited about the partnerships we announced with Microsoft bringing their suite of productivity and enterprise management services to Quest, Adobe and Autodesk bringing their creative tools, Zoom bringing their communication platform, Accenture building solutions for enterprises, and more.
“There’s still a long road ahead to build the next computing platform, but we are clearly doing leading work here. This is a massive undertaking, and it’s often going to take a few versions of each product before they become mainstream. But I think our work is going to be of historic importance and create the foundation for an entirely new way that we will interact with each other and blend technology into our lives, as well as a foundation for the long term of our business.”
Mumbai: Collective Artists Network has announced a major upgrade for its organised creator marketplace, Big Bang Social. As part of the expansion, new tech features and services will be made available to meet the needs of both creators and brands. The platform will now offer licensed products which brands can subscribe to in line with the upgrade.
For the brand’s side, this model will enable sustained engagement with a curated list of creators from more than 120k creators on the platform. The unique features of the product upgrade include easy connection and seamless messaging to influencers via WhatsApp, email, or calling directly through the platform. Another standout feature for brands is that multiple campaigns can now be seamlessly integrated across several platforms as part of the subscription model. In the discovery phase, brands will receive strategy support to search for the right audiences, map new creators, and review ideal platform recommendations depending on campaign briefs.
With the help of a data analytics dashboard, brands will get access to a deep insight tracking mechanism and a recommendation engine. A dedicated consultative team will guide brands and agencies through the process and provide offline support. Special access like trials and surveys of tastemakers of a category, i.e., the influencers, will be made possible. Through Big Bang Social, various qualitative and quantitative feedback from creators can be organized, which will help brands develop better products and campaigns.
Collective Artists Network CEO Vijay Subramaniam said, “We wanted to go beyond just offering a database of influencers and brokering. The Collective has a wealth of experience in identifying and incubating talent, which we felt could be effectively applied to the creator ecosystem. To be able to do justice to such a large and evolving market and capitalise on the potential of the creator economy, we need to bring in structure, sharpen focus and introduce effective processes at both the creator’s and the brand’s end.”
As a part of its new elevation strategy, Big Bang Social will help creators build their brand on three pillars, namely: content experiences, monetisation, and upskilling. Creators will get access to online training, learning, and masterclasses from industry leaders in a convenient way. Out of around 8 crore Indian creators, only about 1.5 lakh can monetize their services effectively, which makes up for less than 0.2 per cent as per a report by Kaalari Capital. Big Bang Social is working towards changing this reality by providing support to monetize assets and increase revenue streams for creator businesses.
Big Bang Social aims to streamline India’s largely unorganised creator economy using a tech-first approach. Several needs, like finding the right creators, gathering data, measurement, and analytics, exist in the industry. For creators, a lack of support to hone their skills, the need for better representation, and unfettered access to opportunities are still tricky. Big Bang Social aims to fill these gaps in need by bringing creators and marketers together with the ease of swift discovery, transparent costs, and real-time connection with the relevant parameters for an effective brand campaign.
Mumbai: On Friday, WhatsApp announced the launch of a new film under its privacy campaign in India. The campaign is focused on message privacy and WhatsApp’s interlocking layers of protection that come together to offer users more control and privacy over their conversations.
Conceptualised by WhatsApp and directed by Jess Kohl, the second film under the campaign “It’s coming home” features Indian badminton player HS Prannoy, who created history by winning the Thomas Cup title in May this year.
The film brilliantly depicts the value of privacy and how the team’s WhatsApp group, cleverly named “It’s coming home,” provided them with a secure, private setting where they could not only plan their strategy but also express their emotions in times of self-doubt.
The film focuses on WhatsApp’s privacy features, such as end-to-end encrypted video calls, privacy settings like last seen, and hidden online presence, which guarantee users the privacy and security to share their most vulnerable moments and life-altering dreams, empowering them to live their dreams in private until they are ready to be shared with the rest of the world.
The film comes after WhatsApp’s earlier-in-August launch of a global brand campaign that emphasised the messaging app’s built-in layers of privacy protections added over time and how various privacy features enable and empower people to have meaningful conversations in their most vulnerable moments.
Speaking about the campaign, Meta India director of marketing Avinash Pant said, “WhatsApp’s mission is to connect the world privately and this campaign highlights the multiple ways we defend privacy so users can feel free and confident with their messages. Through this film, we want to celebrate our national champions who brought home the coveted Thomas Cup and demonstrate how WhatsApp provided them a safe space where they felt empowered to have private conversations even during vulnerable moments because they knew their messages were always protected and secure, no matter where they were. We want to show people the closeness that’s possible with WhatsApp’s built-in layers of protection without compromising on the assurance of privacy and personal space to live your dreams in private until they’re ready to be shared with the world.”
Commenting on the film, Prannoy said, “Being a part of the Thomas Cup squad was an honour, and I knew to win the title as a team, we had to communicate as a team and go through those moments of hardship, emotional vulnerability, and self-doubt together. WhatsApp was that safe space for us where we could have conversations, strategize and share our most private moments, thoughts and ambitions away from the public eye. Every time I looked at the WhatsApp group name “It’s coming home” it gave me the confidence and fervour to make my dreams a reality. In a country that loves cricket, my dream was to make people love badminton as much as I do and to inspire the next generation of players to believe in themselves and the sport.”
Mumbai: As the festive season is just around the corner, a conversational commerce company, Jio Haptik, has announced plans to organise its exclusive product launch event, ‘Hype.’ Jio Haptik, through this much-awaited event, will launch new commerce products and features for the upcoming festive sales.
The event will be held at Taj Santacruz, Mumbai, on 15 September from 4:00 p.m.
While dealing with an increase in sales and support requests, WhatsApp has emerged as the ideal medium for brands to achieve their goals. This product launch event is aligned with the increasing importance of proactive customer engagement strategies through WhatsApp. The event will witness top industry leaders discuss various WhatsApp campaign strategies to help brands break sales records, especially during the upcoming Diwali and festive season.
As part of the launch, the products introduced by Jio Haptik will help brands significantly optimise marketing budgets, achieve phenomenal sales, and enhance customer interactions. The product ‘proactive messaging’ will help customer-facing teams to initiate new conversations with users via WhatsApp notifications. The second product, ‘commerce plus,’ will make shopping through conversations easier through search and FAQs on WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram.
The event will be facilitated by leading CX and growth leaders – Jio Mobility platforms & products manager Satinder Singh, Jio Mart director of product management Archit Shrivastava, Netmeds chief communications officer Bruce Schwack and many more.
Sharing his views on the event launch, Haptik CEO and co-founder Aakrit Vaish said, “Messaging as a medium is now helping brands accomplish sales via direct customer conversations at scale. As the world’s largest WhatsApp chatbot provider, our exclusive features will help enterprises proactively sell their products to customers, digitise the end-to-end shopping experience, and meet enormous demand during the festive season. Also, our solution shall significantly increase brand discovery through newer channels like ads, SMS, and Instagram to help brands build a true-omnichannel strategy.”
Commenting on the occasion, Netmeds chief communications officer Bruce Schwack said, “We have been using Haptik for two years now, and from the outset, we have been impressed not only with their technology, but also with their sharp focus on how the technology could help us achieve our business objectives. We’ve already experienced the tremendous advantage Haptik gives us in managing and reducing friction on the CS side, and now the new WhatsApp commerce feature promises to help us convert browsers into customers. Any tool that helps us retain existing customers and on-board new ones gets a big thumbs up from me. So, don’t put your fork down, the best is yet to come!”
Mumbai: In a global first, Meta has partnered with Jio Platforms to launch an end-to-end shopping experience on WhatsApp, where consumers can shop from JioMart right within their WhatsApp chat. JioMart on WhatsApp will enable users in India, including those who have never shopped online before, to seamlessly browse through JioMart’s entire grocery catalogue, add items to their cart, and make the payment to complete the purchase – all without leaving the WhatsApp chat.
Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post, “Excited to launch our partnership with JioMart in India. This is our first-ever end-to-end shopping experience on WhatsApp—people can now buy groceries from JioMart right in a chat.”
“Business messaging is an area with real momentum, and chat-based experiences like this will be the go-to way people and businesses communicate in the years to come,” he added.
Making the announcement, Reliance Industries chairman and managing director Mukesh Ambani said, “Our vision is to propel India as the world’s leading digital society. When Jio platforms and Meta announced our partnership in 2020, Mark and I shared a vision of bringing more people and businesses online and creating truly innovative solutions that will add convenience to the daily lives of every Indian.”
“One example of an innovative customer experience that we are proud of developing is the first ever end-to-end shopping experience with JioMart on WhatsApp. The JioMart on WhatsApp experience furthers our commitment to enabling a simple and convenient way of online shopping for millions of Indians,” he further said.
The launch is part of a strategic partnership between Meta and Jio Platforms to accelerate India’s digital transformation and provide people and businesses of all sizes opportunities to connect in new ways and fuel economic growth in the country, the company said in its statement.
Consumers can start shopping on JioMart via WhatsApp by simply sending ‘Hi’ to the JioMart number on the networking app, it added.
