MxMIndia

Tag: Effies

  • Partha Sinha, Suresh Narayanan and Suparna Mitra

    Partha Sinha, Suresh Narayanan & Suparna Mitra on Effies Global jury

    By Our Staff

     

    Three industry seniors from India will be part of the Effies Gloabl Grand Jury to determine the winners. Namely: Partha Sinha, President, The Times of India Group, Suresh Narayanan, Chairman & MD, Nestle India and Suparna Mitra, CEO, Watches & Wearables Division, Titan Company Ltd.

     

    Global Grand Judges will review the grand contenders selected to move forward in the competition to determine the Global Grand Effie Winners. The Global Grand Effie winners will then move on to compete for the Iridium Effie, the single most effective marketing effort worldwide. The grand jury will take place in September, 2023 in Singapore.

    Five other industry seniors from India have been selected to be part of the Round One judging Neha Ahuja, Director, Head of Marketing, Spotify India, Mitrajit Bhattacharya, Founder & President, The Horologists, Ruchika Gupta, Marketing Director, Beam Suntory India, Sujit Ganguli, Chief Marketing Officer, ICICI Bank and Neil George, General Manager & Managing Director, Abbott Nutrition India.

     

  • Day 2 of 3 of our Effies interviews: Subramanyeswar S, Arun Iyer and Amer Jaleel

    Winning, the MullenLowe Lintas way

     

    Continuing with our interviews with Effies interviews, on Day 2 (of three), we bring you interviews with Subramanyeswar S, Arun Iyer and Amer Jaleel

     

    Subramanyeswar S, National Planning Director – Lowe Lintas India:

    Winning effectiveness and strategy awards:

    Yes, and we are very happy to be there. It’s not just one grand moment for us, it’s the culmination of year-long efforts at various award shows and where we had done consistently well, fantastically well everywhere and something which I would  like to say is that it’s like a game of pole vault. In Olympics when you see the game of pole vault, the idea is not about how fast I run or how deep I have dug into. The question is how high have I jumped and once you do that keep raising the bar and keep jumping again and again and we hate coming second best.

     

    Planning for the awards:

    Planning in the sense of culture, it’s a culture that we have consciously built over many years and at MullenLowe you see that it’s a collective fund of intelligence between creative, planning, account management and the client where everybody comes together and this culture we have consciously built. A culture which actually breeds damn good ideas, ideas that actually win in the marketplace and become effective.

     

    What’s most important for you: planning, creative or strategy?

    It’s not about which is more important. Collectively together. Everything needs to come together into the play. You can’t say if batting is more important or bowling is more important or fielding more important? Everything has to come together. Of course there are times when one plays lot more than other but in the end it’s the collective fund of intelligence of all of us together and we thoroughly enjoy it amongst us and because I am a part of the system I know it, you always feel that energy and that momentum keeps us making it do again and again and we don’t get tired.

     

    Arun Iyer, CCO, Lowe Lintas

    If you have to list the takeouts from this years Effies in terms of winning, what would it be?

    My biggest takeout is the fact that there are a lot more agencies which are actually in the game now and that is a very positive thing for our business. It’s a good thing that other agencies are really doing well in terms of campaigns. That’s my biggest takeout.

     

    Any regrets of not bagging the Grand Effie?

    No real regret but yes it’s actually motivating to make sure that next year we also need to get the Grand Effie and make sure we have a campaign that does that well.

     

    We have noticed in various awards that most of clients are traditional clients of the agencies. There are very few new clients. Does that mean the newer, younger clients are not experimenting enough?

    Not true because even if you see our list of winners, we have won big on Unilever but we have won enough on new e-commerce clients. We won on Byju’s, we won on Hike, we won on Freecharge. so there is a bunch of new e-commerce clients that we have won on as well. One of the things that we have managed well is the balance between old,  seasoned marketers and fairly new marketers. I don’t think it’s about the marketers and the muscle that they have. It’s just about what you do for them.

     

    Any fresh thinking on participating in the creative award?

    Not really unless it dramatically changes because for us it’s really important that what it did in the market place not because we have an opinion on the creative awards, it’s only because that’s the approach we take to our work. While we are thinking about creative, we are trying to push creative boundaries but it’s not pushing creative boundaries for ourselves. It’s pushing creative boundaries for the clients.

     

    So the standpoint doesn’t change after Balki’s moved on?

    This is a question I am asked very often. It’s just that Balki planned this very well. He has not been there on day-to-day basis for sometime now and it’s a culture we all believe in otherwise we wouldn’t be spending this kind of time in the agency if we didn’t believe in the culture. It was a culture that was introduced in the agency by Balki but it’s a culture we all believed in and I’ve lived it and we breathe that culture.

     

    Plans for next year:

    I am taking away a lot of learning. I am taking away learning like conventional media is not enough, we have got to do more stuff. So those are interesting learnings that I am taking back from a lot of the work that I saw. Some of the work that has won is the work that I personally liked very much. So I think there are a lot of learnings at an individual level which I am going to take back and hopefully translate it to the agency.

     

    Amer Jaleel, Chairman & CCO – Mullen Lintas

     

    Winning has become a habit for Lowe Lintas group at the Effies. Third time in four years…

    For me personally the journey that we have started a new agency and we did a little bit of contribution this time to the MullenLowe group but I am very very excited that the work that we did on Bajaj Avenger sort of stood out and won some points for us. Next year, please watch out for us.

     

    Is there some healthy competition between you and your older sibling?

    Healthy, yes but we are not at this moment really competing but I’d like to say that we want to be a parallel agency. We have come with this objective of being a competitor not just to MullenLowe group but to the big networks, Ogilvy, JWT, to McCann of this world and we want to be that agency that makes a difference at the Effies hopefully in time to come as an agency on its own.

     

    Agencies like Pickle which were merged to form Mullen Lintas did participate in creative awards…

    I have a view on this and I want to say that whether it’s the Abby or any other awards I have always said that I would like the criteria to have a bit of contemporary input from the agencies and the thinking of today. As far as Abby considers the input from the people of today, the people who make the advertising today, if they are willing to consider the inputs of today then I don’t mind being a part of Abby

     

    What about your clients? How have they contributed to the success at Effies?

    Let’s take a case in point. Let’s take Bajaj brotherhood, such a huge and differentiated piece of work. We cannot pull it off without having our clients believe in the piece of work. So big big contribution.

     

    A word on Bajaj Auto. Other than Avenger, its Bajaj V campaign has also won great accolades. We’ve heard it from the folks at Leo but what is it that makes Bajaj a dramatically different client than others?

    I’ve been doing work with Bajaj for the last twelve or thirteen years and I think how they look at their brand, for example Avenger, you could say it’s a narrowly focused brand but in that narrow focus they work with the agency to make such a strong and incisive to the kind of audience they are talking about. If you look at the work for V, if you look at the work for Avenger, the work is so different and so incisive and so pointed towards the kind of audience that makes them of the leading clients today.

     

  • What did the awards held last week say about the cultural desires of the industry. An analysis by Dheeraj Sinha

    Analysis: Effies show the industry’s desire to stand up and be counted

     

    By Dheeraj Sinha

     

    The side lawns of the Taj Lands End, Bandra, were bustling with energy and celebration this Friday. It was the 2015 Effies Awards night, which brought together the young and the old of the industry, the clients and the agencies, the planners, the client servicing and the creative folks alike. This, in many ways explains the success of the Effies as a platform – an Effie Award belongs to everybody. All parts of the machinery called marketing communications must move together to deliver a piece of work that looks distinctive and works in the marketplace. To that extent, an Effie is an award for fabulous team sport, not individual brilliance. The way an industry awards itself says a lot about the culture it wants to build. So what does the rising popularity of the Effies (57 agencies, 603 entries) point to? What do these awards say about the cultural desire of this industry?

     

    1. Make it real – You can’t scam your way to the Effies. Well, mostly. Once in a while you do see an attempt to put some hasty results around a campaign that you never saw. But the wide spread of jury and a greater client mix almost always sniffs it out. It’s difficult to win an Effie for a piece of work that people haven’t seen. This, to my mind is the biggest reason for the legitimacy of these awards. Effies are turning out to be the awards for the creative product that works in the market place, not just in the jury room. Their popularity puts clear weight around what this industry wants to stand for.

     

    2. Make a difference – Marketing and advertising people have realised that they don’t want to be remembered merely as sellers of soaps and shampoos. This trend is apparent even at the Cannes Lions Festival. At Cannes last year, every time the team from the ALS ice bucket challenge went on stage, it received a standing ovation. The industry was overwhelmed by the cause and its global impact. Many of the campaigns awarded at the 2015 Effies had social themes to them: Delayed marriage (Fair & Lovely), gender equality (Ariel), anti-smoking (Nicotex) and so on. Clearly, socially-relevant thinking is now close to everyone’s hearts. Even fairness creams are built around progressive themes. The industry wants to make a greater social difference, not merely to the texture and complexion of people’s hair and skin.

     

    3. Find a solution – It looks like advertising is getting tired of ads. We want to move up the value chain. Remember, no one wants to be thought of as the seller of soaps and shampoos. So solutions are the way to go. Brands such as Shopclues and Paper Boat won for their solutions, not just for their advertising. This is also an ode to the rising client-agency partnership, where the lines between a creative idea and a business solution are blurring. We want to be known for ideas that solve a problem or tap an opportunity, not just create ads for product features.

     

    4. Make it big – Unfortunately small is not big in today’s India. We want to reward big, visible efforts. It may have to do with the industry’s desire to stand up and be counted in this cluttered world. In fact, we seem to like scale almost to a fault – most wining campaigns are big, visible ones. It’s almost as if you should have seen it and liked it in real life to vote for it. The written case is a mere substantiation. The reason why many digital-only, long-format films failed to impress the jury was that their felt impact on our minds and lives was uncertain. That many of these cases ended at ‘millions of social media impressions’ as their key result, didn’t help either. It said little about how the idea worked in the market.

     

    So here’s to the spirit of real work, done collaboratively, that makes a social difference and makes its impact felt. Here’s to the industry’s cultural desire behind the Effies.

     

    Dheeraj Sinha is the CSO, Grey S & SE Asia. He is the author of India Reloaded and Consumer India, two works on the Indian consumer market. This article first appeared in dna of brands on February 1

     

  • Is creativity a means to communicate effectiveness, or to gather awards? MxMIndia speaks to industry pros

    What’s more important – Creativity or Effectiveness?

     

    By Ananya Saha

     

    Creativity vs Effectiveness: what is more important for any brand’s advertising? What is the point of the other if only one is more important? Is creativity a means to communicate effectiveness, or a means or gather awards?

    MxM India spoke to creative heads and marketers to get their views.

     

    Vivek Srivastava

    Vivek Srivastava, Jt. Managing Director, Innocean Worldwide India

    This debate is perpetuated by people who wish to create a divide in the business of communication. To my mind creativity has always been evaluated. In the case of art by artists and art connoisseurs, in case of scientific discoveries by scientists and the far-reaching impact around us, and in the case of advertising by its beneficiaries. So it is a rather frivolous way to look at a serious commercial and business building endeavour by saying that creativity and effectiveness are separate perspectives. They are intertwined. One without the other does not and cannot exist. Those who claim otherwise are merely perpetuating shallow myths.

     

    Not just Effies, but Cannes, Emvies or even Goafest, I presume, the endeavour is to reward creativity that causes impact to state it broadly. I guess if we allow ourselves to be driven by aimless scamsters who do one off ads/pieces for merely awards and succeed then we are giving too much credence to a set of renegades. The motto or credo for the business of advertising is one and will be that way forever – It isn’t creative if it doesn’t sell.

     

    Ajay Kakar

    Ajay Kakar, Chief Marketing Officer, Aditya Birla Group – Financial Services

    If you have creativity for the sake of creativity, them someone someday will ask us to put it at the National Museum of Arts. If we are spending money and so much money as marketers, the only measure should be the creativity that works in the marketplace. And therefore, it works. More and more clients are demanding to know ‘what is their campaign doing in the market’. On one hand, everybody wants effectiveness and on the other, rupee and budget is a scarce commodity and you want every rupee to work. To create work that works is imperative.

     

     

    Bipin Pandit

    Bipin Pandit, COO, The Advertising Club

    Effectiveness is supreme. How can one explain the rationale behind making an advertisement if it does not take the brand to the next level? The campaign should be designed or created in a way that it works in the marketplace. Yes, creativity is important but not at the cost of effectiveness.

     

     

     

    Bindu Sethi

    Bindu Sethi, Chief Strategy Officer, JWT

    The effective campaign is based on creative thought. The creativity, however, should stem from the strategy behind the product just like a fire behind the rocket. Creativity is absence of strategy would not work. But creativity can work wonders for the campaign if executed in line with the thought behind the product.

     

     

    N Rajaram

    N Rajaram, CMO, Airtel Centre

    It is important that the clients and creative agency sit and work together while devising campaign strategy. The agencies work for creative solutions while brands aim at effectiveness. There can be no mismatch between the two if both the parties work for creative solution for effectiveness.

     

    Anil Dua, Sr VP – Sales and Marketing, Hero Honda

    Effectiveness is about result. Effectiveness of a campaign lies in the saliency it delivers. A campaign grows your business and it should be sustainable in the longer run. A campaign, if creatively effective, will be advantageous for your brand and will take your business on higher growth trajectory. Of course, effectiveness is more important for a brand than creativity but creativity is important to attract more consumers.

     

    Satbir Singh

    Satbir Singh, Managing Partner and Chief Creative Officer, Havas Worldwide India

    Creative work that is effective works. Advertising exists speak about a product or service, effectively. If you belong to the brand or creative side, you cannot push people to buy your product or prefer your service. Yes, it is about effectiveness but not about boring people. The role of creative, depending on business strategy, is to entice people to prefer a brand’s product or service over another. How creatively can you do it is the question.

     

    Raghav Subramanian

    Raghav Subramanian, Founder, The Media Cafe

    One cannot do without the other. Effectiveness and creativity, to me, are not different things. Effectiveness is a metric while creativity is a means. Both go together and both fail without each other. It is like asking of the body can work better without the brain or without the heart. Creativity and effectiveness are an essential part of a successful and meaningful campaign.

     

    Prashant Mathur, GM, Contract Advertising

    Creativity and effectiveness lead to each other. Unless the message is effective, creativity fails. Effectiveness of a campaign measures creativity. It is important to see how the message is received. Sometimes when agency loses the plot, which happens very rarely, the intent is not to be less effective. It only happens when the intent of a campaign is not clear.

     

    Shiv Sethuraman, CEO TBWA\India

    Creativity and Effectiveness – these two words cannot and must not ever be used in opposition. There is no conflict; only complementarity. To ask which is more important is akin to asking, “Would you like a great journey or a great destination?” Obviously both.

     

    Effectiveness is the end. Creativity is the means to that end. If you focus only on the means you may have a lot of fun on the way but there is no telling where you will end up. If the end is your exclusive focus then you might find the ride there uninteresting and (often) more expensive than you’d imagined.

     

    The verdict on this particular case has come in many years ago. You need both. And both together provides better results than either alone. Effectiveness through Creativity is the Holy Grail.