Digital creative shop IdeateLabs has reported multiple new accounts recently. The wins include Tata Tele Business Services, UTI Mutual Fund, TransUnion CIBIL, IDC Technologies and Ashwin Sheth Group amongst others.
Vrutika Dawda
Commenting on the wins Vrutika Dawda, Director, IdeateLabs said: “We are excited to bag mandates for some of the most prominent brands, spread across varied industry domains. We aim to realise the brands’ true potential by ‘building conversations’ – which is also our brand philosophy – between the brands and their customers.”
Tata Sky, India’s leading content distribution and Pay TV platform have announced their partnership with Shemaroo Entertainment Ltd., one of India’s leading content powerhouses. The partnership will see film and non-film entertainment through the ShemarooMe app available on Tata Sky Binge.
Speaking about this development, Pallavi Puri, Chief Commercial and Content Officer, Tata Sky, said: “At Tata Sky, we are always endeavouring to expand our content offerings and present best in class entertainment choices to our viewers. We have always believed in creating an enhanced and agile ecosystem of entertainment and our OTT aggregator platform, Tata Sky Binge has been a step towards that direction. To that end our partnership with ShemarooMe will not only help their content reach a wider set of audience but also give our Tata Sky Binge subscribers an even richer bouquet of quality content to choose from.”
Added Kranti Gada, COO, Shemaroo Entertainment: “We at Shemaroo always believe in delivering the best of entertainment to our audiences in the most preferred format and mediums. Our latest association and longstanding relationship with Tata Sky is a testimony to the same promise where together we will be delivering top notch entertainment through the most consumer centric value proposition and user-focused technologies. We are elated to partner with like minded brands who resonate our ideologies and help us enhance end to end viewing experience for the consumers.”
FB-BCG Guidance bo Brands based on Report Findings
By A Correspondent
Facebook India in association with Boston Consulting Group has released a report titled ‘Turn the Tide’ that focuses on how Covid-19 has dramatically changed consumer behaviour and altered the path-to-purchase. The report also shares actionable guidance for brands to build for the new consumer journeys in times of Covid -19 and beyond.
Sandeep Bhushan
Said Sandeep Bhushan, Director and Head, Global Marketing Solutions, Facebook India: “As business after business joins the dots to understand consumer shifts in both mindsets and behaviours as a result of COVID-19, we have invested in studying the new paths to purchase in continuing our commitment to enabling growth for businesses both large and small. The ‘Turn the Tide’ report outlines the opportunities that businesses need to embrace in the context of new consumer journeys and category needs. In response to consumers embracing the digital medium, brands need to focus on solutions that are relevant for the new normal such as hyper-localization, creating virtual experiences, re-looking at the media-mix to build efficiency, or building messaging around new habits such as DIY and the increased focus on health and hygiene.”
Facebook and Boston Consulting Group are also expected to share vertical-specific insights to help businesses gain almost real-time insights, enabling them to ‘Turn the Tide’.
The report delves into key consumer-shifts based on three societal-truths that have emerged as a result of the pandemic – social distancing, increasing focus on health and hygiene, and increasing income uncertainty. Within each of these shifts, the report finds that there are three kinds of behavior change movements that are being observed – reversal of past trends, acceleration of existing trends, and formation of new habits.
Nimisha Jain
Added Nimisha Jain, Managing Director and Partner, Boston Consulting Group: “We are experiencing unprecedented shifts in consumer attitudes and behaviors – 80%+ consumers will continue to practice social distancing and are bringing the outside inside, over 40% of consumers are dialing up on health and wellness spends, e-commerce adoption has already advanced by 2-3 years – to name a few. These aren’t just temporary surges, and many will last longer and become more defining traits. Our analysis reveals that only one in six companies emerged stronger in past crises – players who show the agility to reinvent their value propositions, go-to-market plans and business models to address these demand shifts will be the ones that set themselves apart from the pack”
The reports especially calls out the massive acceleration in digital led by social media, the emergence of micro-market opportunities, an increase in value consciousness leading to more utility-led shopping, consumers embracing digital even in historically offline categories such as education, health, and fitness, the increase in spend on e-commerce in the coming months even for traditionally offline categories, a definite increase in spends on health, hygiene and wellness, and a rise in do-it-yourself (DIY) trends.
Executive Summary of Turn The Tide report
The COVID-19 outbreak has proven to be a global pandemic of an unprecedented scale impacting people, communities, and businesses across nations. In India, as with the rest of the world, the first few weeks of the lockdown saw the industry in a wave of panic and uncertainty as the disruption in business continuity threatened to potentially destabilize the economy.
Facebook has always been committed to developing and sharing industry-leading full-funnel solutions for brands across all categories. As India opens up to limited business activity, this joint collaboration with the Boston Consulting Group – a consumer sentiment survey, titled ‘Turn the Tide’ – aims to serve as a reference point on consumer insights, trends, and guidance for the industry, brands, and agencies as they begin to negotiate the commencement of operations.
What’s different about this report is that it’s not just a research study but that it also provides actionable guidance that brands can deploy right away. It brings together the expertise of BCG’s deep insights and years of consulting experience with Facebook’s experience across thousands of campaigns run on its platforms.
Covid-19 has impacted lives in 3 big ways:
:: Social Distancing
:: Health & Hygiene
:: Income Uncertainty
Key points:
:: Consumer journey has altered; brands need to urgently identify opportunities to build for new consumer journeys.
:: COVID-19 has fueled the digital medium in an unprecedented manner. Some of these consumer trends are here to stay.
:: Brands are already leveraging social media platforms to build for the new consumer journeys.
Consumer Behavior has fundamentally changed: Emerging Trends (11 Uber themes)
A. Reversal of Past Trends
1. Bringing the outside inside: 79% people are not going out of house, except work
2. Trust in Brand above all else: 63% people are paying more attention to origin of product
3. Trading Down and Bargain Hunting: 43% people are expecting decrease in overall spend in next 6 months
4. Shopping for Utility: Purchase triggers expected to become more “functional”
B. Acceleration of Existing Trends
1. Embracing digital services & experiences: 51% consumers saw an increase in payment via digital wallets
2. Accelerated adoption of e-commerce and O2O: 50% of all consumers expect to increase e-commerce spend in next 1 month
3. Strive for Health & Wellness: +40% may increase spend on Health and Wellness
4. Rise of Smart Shoppers: Informed purchase decision; High salience of digital research
C. New Habits:
1. Remote way of living: The new normal
2. Do It Yourself: Spike in new hobbies and habits
3. Superior Hygiene and Clean Living: 91% Indian households washing hands more often
Digital marketing agency Liqvd Asia has taken a quantum leap and announced seasoned marketer and business head Sagnik Ghosh as its Managing Partner. Ghosh will be based out of the company’s Mumbai office and will help build the communication across verticals like Media Planning & Buying, Performance Marketing, Brand Strategy, Online Listening & Reputation Management, Creative, Social Media and Content marketing solution. Having spend over two decades in the business, Ghosh has worked recently with Star India and was earlier with Axis Bank, Grey Worldwide, TBWA India and HSBC.
Arnab Mitra
Said Arnab Mitra, Managing Director, Liqvd Asia, on the appointment: “Sagnik and I are friends first and may be then everything else. Like we are partners now! I am extremely elated to have Sagnik on board and therefore get to work on the next phase of growth for Liqvd Asia. His illustrious career does little justice to his capability and together we want to focus on building an all service marketing agency of the future. I wish him all the very best and look forward to it”.
On his new appointment, Ghosh added: “I am happy to join the ever-growing team at Liqvd Asia and partner Arnab to help grow the agency. I love working across categories and brands & this gives me an opportunity to do so. At Liqvd, we want to bolster our position as an ideas company for the digital world and I will be working towards this mandate.”
O4S, a leading Enterprise SaaS start-up that enables supply chain visibility through a serialisation solution, is betting big on digitised trade promotions and management (TPM) solutions. The company has launched ‘Gynger’ to enable brands and manufacturers to not only adopt a data-driven approach for planning as well as executing trade promotions, but improve effectiveness of their trade promotion spends.
Commenting on the launch of Gynger, Divay Kumar, CEO and MD, O4S, said: “With complex supply chains for distribution and their varying levels of maturity, companies across sectors including FMCG, Agriculture, and Pharmaceutical face the challenge of disconnectedness with the retailers and influencers. The wide spread retailers’ network which commands a significant share of product sales, needs stronger and direct engagement, powered by automation. The current approach to trade promotion planning and execution by companies is often based on “gut” & “experience” of the trade marketing team, and the tools to manage and measure promotions are understated. Hence, Gynger offers the right tools to companies for complete control over their TPM schemes to plan, execute, assess, and gather actionable insights on their effectiveness in real-time, enabling mid-way course correction and bringing value to enterprises. The uniqueness of our solution ensures that the entire process is data-driven, eliminates reliance on any middlemen, and adapt to the existing schemes format to reward the champions in order to achieve desired sales result.”
Prime Focus Technologies (PFT), the technology arm of Prime Focus and Whip Media Group have announced a strategic supply chain partnership programme. The partnership, notes a communique, will provide media companies better transparency into their content workflows to maximise revenues, reduce costs, increase efficiencies, and get complete visibility and control over where and how television and movie titles are being distributed, both on a global scale and in real-time.
Said Carl Segal, Senior Vice President, Digital Distribution, Prime Focus Technologies: “Monetization of content providers’ catalogs is essential in today’s fast paced and competitive OTT and VOD landscape, making digital distribution and discovery of content to end users a critical component for M&E companies. It becomes imperative to not just monitor and measure effectiveness but analyse the results of that data in order to monetize content, Whip Media is a renowned name in the industry, working with the world’s leading entertainment companies and we are excited to partner with them.”
Added Alisa Joseph, Senior Vice President, Business Strategy & Development, Whip Media Group: “Automation of content avails management and distribution is crucial to achieve scale and enable faster time to market. PFT is well known for supply chain automation and has been selected as a Strategic Partner for their expertise in end-to-end digital distribution supply chain management,”. “We’re thrilled to partner with Prime Focus Technologies as our integration will help drive greater efficiencies to maximise the viewing and monetization of content.”
Leading daily Deccan Herald has launched its news app for Android and iOS mobile devices. This is another step in the revamp of the product portfolio at the Printers Mysore, the company that owns Deccan Herald and Kannada title Prajavani. Last August, it launched a redesigned version of the DH newspaper and the website deccanherald.com.
The new DH app, notes a communique, offers breaking news, analysis and opinion, across text, video and audio, and also features new formats, justifying the tag line “One News App. Many Experiences”.
Said Sitaraman Shankar, Acting CEO, The Printers Mysore, and Editor, Deccan Herald: “Our new DH app is everything a modern news app should be: It presents news elegantly across formats, and in new ways designed to keep younger consumers engaged. What hasn’t changed, of course, is the high-quality journalism it draws on, and our belief that the reader is at the centre of everything we do: In fact, the way the app works, it will only increase the reader’s bond with us.”
Add Arpan Chatterjee, COO – Digital, The Printers Mysore: “A lot of ideation and research has gone behind making this app. Digital news consumption is taking new forms regularly and we have built the app on many of these new facets to give our users a richer & wholesome user experience added with a touch of News personalization. What we will learn from the app will help to expand these user experiences to our other digital assets. ”
Design firm ThinkDesign carried out user research and worked closely with Deccan Herald to arrive at the design for the app, while app development partner Webdunia was responsible for the implementation.
Leading gaming company Games24x7 has unveiled a new digital influencer campaign for RummyCircle. Conceptualised by marketing consulting firm Spring Marketing Capital, the campaign aims to deepen the connection between the game’s platform and players of India’s favourite card game: rummy, across different parts of the country.
Games24x7 has partnered with Bollywood artists, Aparshakti Khurana, Varun Sharma, Vir Das, and Manjot Singh for the campaign in the North Indian market. In the same spirit, the company has also associated with popular artists Danish Sait and Sathish Muthukrishnan for Karnataka and Tamil Nadu regions. Games24x7 has also partnered with actor Mandira Bedi to release a series of tutorial videos on rummy, to help players master their skills in an easy and fun way.
Speaking about the new digital influencer campaign, Avik Das Kanungo, Director – Brand and Marketing Strategy, Games24x7 said: “We are delighted to associate with Bollywood celebrities and popular influencers for the slice-of-life depiction of enthusiastic online rummy players in the campaign. Rummy is undoubtedly India’s favourite card game and is becoming increasingly popular across the length and breadth of the country. At RummyCircle, we want to bring alive the game online in a new way by highlighting the inherent skill involved in the game. We believe rummy is a super exciting and fast-paced game to play as it needs you to think on your feet while in the game to master the moves and become a champion.”
Added Arun Iyer, Founder and Creative Partner, Spring Marketing Capital: “Rummy as a game has always been a favourite with families. In this digital influencer campaign, we’ve tried to capture the skill, strategy, fun and banter that every game of rummy on RummyCircle comes with. The actors were shooting the films themselves at home.”
eBay in India has launched its #LocalToGLobal campaign to encourage Indian MSMEs to expand their businesses globally. The campaign was kickstarted by highlighting ‘India Se Duniya Tak’ narrative with a series of specially curated creatives across its social media handles.
Said Pavan Ponnappa, Head – Growth Categories, Shipping & Marketing at eBay: “eBay has been at the forefront of fostering the culture of entrepreneurship in India. The #LocalToGlobal campaign aims to highlight the potential for Indian products, build awareness among Indian small and medium businesses of this opportunity and the role that the eBay marketplace can play in realizing this business opportunity. There has been a seismic shift in consumer behaviors in the wake of the COIVD 19 pandemic that is seeing growing demand for e-commerce across the globe and Indian MSMEs should capitalize on this by expanding their businesses, thus giving a much-needed push to the economy. We are glad that our marketing service provider Clevertize has been able to translate our vision into this precursor campaign and bring it alive in the most creative fashion”.
Added Sagar Nidavani, CEO, at Clevertize: “What started as a small topical idea to support #VocalforLocal translated into a beautiful extension called #LocalToGlobal. If [the] 21st century belongs to India, Export has to take the center stage. The campaign captured the imagination of the Indian sellers and got many of them to aspire to sell their products across 190 countries through eBay marketplace platforms. The campaign has reached more than 1 Million Indian Sellers already, with many of them expressing their interest to sell on eBay. This is a step towards establishing eBay as the preferred platform to export for Indian sellers”.
WeWork India hasn show solidarity with the LGBTQIA+ community in India, albeit from a distance. To continue celebrations despite the current WFH situation, WeWork India launched an initiative, known as ‘#PrideStreetofWe.’ The campaign, designed and executed by Digitas, aims to move the on-ground experience of a celebratory parade online through a special microsite.
Vineet Singh
Speaking on this campaign and on WeWork’s culture of diversity and inclusion, Vineet Singh, Group CMO, Embassy Group said: “At WeWork, the ethos of our organisation is one of inclusion, and creating a sense of belonging. It certainly does not change based on who you are or who you love. We believe that personal growth of an individual is interlinked to being in a more diverse, inclusive and aware environment and having an open outlook, and WeWork India is committed to support its community in making this happen. In this time of isolation, the community at WeWork aims to ensure LGBTQIA+ employees and members feel far from distanced. This microsite is our small way of showing love and support as we are extremely passionate about educating and creating safe spaces for everyone. This platform will help people feel empowered and motivate them to share their stories and experiences to help lift one another up.”
Unny Radhakrishnan
Added Unny Radhakrishnan, CEO, Digitas India: “WeWork is a modern brand and lives by values like diversity and inclusion. During Pride month, WeWork wanted to communicate that it stands by the community. Given the lockdown situation and movement restrictions, this simple idea of a virtual pride parade, enables the WeWork community to come together and celebrate.”
Sportskeeda, a subsidiary of Nazara Technologies has reported 1.3 crore users within two months. The company witnessed a 70% drop in revenue when all mainstream sports were suspended with the nationwide lockdown announced in March. Sportskeeda, notes a communique, was quick to convert the Covid-19 adversity into an opportunity by focusing on Esports without breaking away from the core. “With a 2000% hike today, the company has now emerged as the biggest Esports news destination in the country,” it claims.
Porush Jain
Said Porush Jain, Founder, and CEO, Sportskeeda: “Quick thinking and apt decision-making enabled us to harness the Esports growth opportunity successfully. Our strategic approach, innovation, and precision mingled with team-spirit is what truly fast-tracked the growth.”
Given Sportskeeda’s success in the Esports vertical, Manish Agarwal, CEO, Nazara Technologies added: “The young team of Sportskeeda has always kept their users in mind while designing strategies which leads to their success time and again. Nazara has always had a predominant space in Esports with subsidiaries like Nodwin. With Sportskeeda entering the Esports news space we have not only widened our horizon but also established synergy within the subsidiaries.”
Mobile gaming and e-sports platform Mobile Premier League (MPL) has released a fresh set of television commercials (TVCs), conceptualised and executed by Taproot Dentsu. The films are part of the brand’s ‘Har Game Mein Jeeto’ campaign.
Speaking on the campaign, Pallavi Chakravarti, ECD, Taproot Dentsu said: “Creating this campaign was as rewarding for us as playing on MPL is for gamers. MPL has got some fantastic titles on its platform, and the multiple tournament formats and exciting prizes make the go-to even better. All we had to do was have fun and put the point across as sharply and simply as possible. It’s what I’d call a win-win situation.” MPL has over 40 games on its platform with numerous tournaments and exciting prizes on offer.
added Abhishek Madhavan, VP, Growth and Marketing, MPL: “We chose to work with Taproot Dentsu after a closely-contested multi-agency pitch due to their thorough understanding of our brief, our product and users. The current set of films that Taproot Dentsu has delivered hits the nail on its head in terms of conveying MPL’s unique value proposition and will be running across TV, digital and OTT platforms. We hope these will help further cement MPL’s position as India’s biggest gaming app.”
Said Carl Segal, Senior Vice President, Digital Distribution, Prime Focus Technologies: “Monetization of content providers’ catalogs is essential in today’s fast paced and competitive OTT and VOD landscape, making digital distribution and discovery of content to end users a critical component for M&E companies. It becomes imperative to not just monitor and measure effectiveness but analyse the results of that data in order to monetize content, Whip Media is a renowned name in the industry, working with the world’s leading entertainment companies and we are excited to partner with them.”
