Sula Vineyards, India’s largest wine producer in collaboration with The Lalit, New Delhi is hosting a Royal Wine Dinner at Baluchi. The Lalit's popular in-house restaurant - Baluchi has curated an exclusive menu that compliments Sula Vineyards' award winning wines. Ajoy Shaw, Chief Winemaker at Sula Vineyards in collaboration with Charles Donnadieu, Corporate Sommelier, The Lalit Hotels worked together on the selection of wines to perfectly pair the new ‘A la Carte’ menu which will run exclusively at Baluchi for the coming months. The menu comprising a mix of “Royal” Indian food like Panchpohran Mahi Tikka, Awadhi Kalmi Kebab, Naan-Pheni Parantha, Lamb Masala, Dal Baluchi and Naan – Gilafi Kulcha will be paired with the best wines from Sula including Brut Tropicale, Sula Sauvignon Blanc and Rasa Shiraz. The menu also includes sumptuous Indian desserts Khubani ka Meetha and Phirni Sakora – this paired with Sula Brut Rose. Details of the dinner: Date: 1st July 2016 Venue: Baluchi, The Lalit, New Delhi Barakhamba Avenue, Connaught Place, New Delhi, Delhi 110001 Timing: 8.00 pm onwards Price: Rs. 3,000 (inclusive of taxes)
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Mumbai based Onspon.com , an event- brand partnership platform startup has raised 1 crore from Indore’s Swan Angel Network. The most time consuming and difficult task for any event organiser is to find sponsors. Similarly, brands (and their agencies) also have an equally tough time finding the right event with the right target audience and reach at the right time. In order to bridge this gap and solve the problems of both these segments, Onspon.com came into being. Headquartered in Mumbai and with offices in Gurgaon and Bangalore ; Onspon offers a technological platform to help brands find the best events to partner with and helps entrepreneurs create profitable and well-managed events. Onspon is currently the largest aggregator of events and brands in India on all counts, with 9000+ events, 12,500+ event managers, 350+ brands, 10000 Mn+ sponsorships on the website. It connects brands with event organisers through an algorithm based on the demographic data of audience, geography targets of brands and marketing budgets of brands. According to Hitesh Gossain, Founder of Onspon, an IIM Ahmedabad alumnus (who was earlier the business head at Percept) there is no revenue source for events in India apart from ticketing – but the costs associated with creating high quality events are plenty and are growing by day ; hence the net result being diminishing returns in the event business leading to shortage of quality events and the dispersed nature of the industry. He further added: "There are several start-ups and new-age brands nowadays that are in requirement of associations and synergies to attain a product market fit and reach scale. Brands can now select which audience they want to target at what time – and can use Onspon Smartboard to create a custom calendar for event association with budgets at a click of a button. 350+ top brands like Tata Motors, Daikin, Adani, Housing.com, Mahindra Holidays, Zebronics, Nissan are already using our services and this number is increasing every day". Per IEG, Event sponsorships is a USD 56Bn industry with almost 4Bn of the same coming from Indian sub-continent. India is on the cusp of being a high event consumption nation with live events as a space growing – which will drive brands attention towards events even better ; and with Onspon bridging this discovery gap ; the team is excited to grow and engage with maximum events and brands. ‘We have a great team in place and are all set to scale up our business with this fund’ Hitesh added. The angel round of funding will be deployed primarily towards scaling up operations, marketing and enhancing the technology backbone of the product (Onspon.com and sub products). Onspon is an innovative company creating disruptive solution to access timely sponsorships accessible to brands. “We are confident that investment in Onspon will deliver positive results while building company value” said co-founder B.P.Inani- Swan Angel Network, in a statement. Abhishek Sanghvi, co-founder of Swan Angel Network, believes that the concept of automating the process of making sponsorship decisions is something that is both highly scalable and impactful, he said. Speaking of their investment he further added –that they look at the startup idea and the team. “It is about whether the team has the right drive, hunger and humility. With Onspon, I realised that the founders had a strong passion and motivation to solve this problem and we believe that the team has found a viable solution to this problem. As an investor I believe that the events and sponsorship sector is a massive opportunity that is yet to be tapped, and we believe that Onspon has the right motivation to solve this problem.”
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Embassy of India, Paris is organising a series of events on Yoga on the occasion of the Second International Day of Yoga. As a part of these celebrations, a Yoga event was organised at the iconic Eiffel Tower on 19 June 2016 in Paris. The event saw an overwhelming response. Due to constraints of ongoing security measures, the participation had to be limited to 300 Yoga enthusiasts chosen through a lucky draw out of more than 2000 registrations received. The youngest Yoga enthusiast was a 6-year old boy while the oldest was a 92-year old senior citizen. Speaking on the occasion, Ambassador of India, Dr. Mohan Kumar emphasized the importance of Yoga for a healthy and balanced life. The event commenced with a meditation session by the teachers of the Shivananda Yoga Centre in Paris. Synchronised asanas and mudras by the participants at the foot of the iconic Eiffel Tower were a visual delight. Earlier on 18 June, another Yoga event organised by the Embassy at the La Villette park in Paris drew more than 2000 participants. An important part of the event was a narration of personal experiences of several individuals who immensely benefitted from Yoga. Their addresses drew much applause from the participants. On 21 June, the Embassy of India will organize Yoga on the river Seine onboard the famous Bateaux Mouches boat sailing from the Eiffel Tower to the Notre Dame Cathedral. Meanwhile, news of celebrations of the International Yoga Day is being received from many other parts of France including from the cities of Gretz, Strasbourg, Avignon and the overseas territories like Guadeloupe and Martinique islands. Managing Director of World News Network Satish Reddy said, "I am glad to be the part of this International Yoga Festival in Paris. Yoga is an ancient science which leads to health in the body, peace in the mind, joy in the heart, and liberation of the soul. I am happy that Embassy has done a very good job where thousands of French and Indians have come toward to Celebrate Yoga day and It can be said that Euro Cup and Yoga Day is the most rocking events in France." Others who were present at the event are Mr. Manish Prabhat (Deputy chief of mission) Mr. Lavanya Kumar (First cultural secretary ) and Mr. Suresh K Sharma (Attaché Cultural).
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Mr. Karthik Raman is the Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at IDBI Life Insurance, a brand that has invested heavily into the category of sports. In the following authored account he talks about IDBI's popular 'Childsurance' campaign, everything non-sports and cutting the clutter. "As a brand we have always chosen to go on an off beaten path. Be it our sports and fitness initiatives or our various campaigns across the year. Our messaging style of hope and humour has helped us stand apart in the cluttered market space. A striking example of this was our Childsurance campaign. Children’s future solutions are the second most popular life insurance plans in India. This is because most studies point towards the fact that Indian parents save and invest widely in insurance for the future of their kids. They contribute about 20% to our sales portfolio and remain an important category for the company. We wanted to launch a child campaign to drive sales and build positive disposition for the brand through awareness. With a bouquet of child products in our kitty, as a brand we were keen to highlight our offerings but soon found that the category was already too crowded. What’s usually depicted in life insurance ads in this category is a child asking for something, an arrested moment of thought and then the parent resolving the tension by planning for it. To distinguish between multiple such ads is clearly difficult. So, we came up with an idea that would nudge the young parent harder in a manner which is humorous. That’s how the ‘angry baby’ campaign came up. Our company captured the hearts and minds of millions of parents in India with the angry baby hoardings plastered across the skylines of 110 Indian cities. In the month of September, 2015, our company launched an outdoor promotion for the children’s future solutions with the ‘Childsurance’ campaign. The outdoor creative asked parents how their angry child of today would look at 18 years of age. Clearly, he or she wouldn’t be as cute then. It was then followed up with an interactive radio campaign and digital campaign called ‘the cutest angry baby hunt’. Apart from high-impact activations in prominent malls across key metros to hunt the cutest angry baby, our company also launched 33 on-air short radio films featuring children for their campaign. In the phase II, an educative radio programme, ‘Badon ki Pathshala’, was launched that enabled young parents to share and learn from the experience and enables us to bing celeb moms, child psychologists and financial advisors on the same platform. The show gave tips on good parenting, financial planning, understanding and tackling the developmental stages of children from 0-8 years. Unconventionally, we excluded a TVC from this campaign and restricted it to Outdoors, Digital and Radio. The idea worked for us - despite being a passive medium, it managed to stop the consumer in his tracks. The series of awards won and superlative brand scores achieved during the period bear testimony to the success of the campaign. We won a Gold in the Radio Effectiveness Category for the Childsurance Radio Film Festival and Bronze in the Best Use of Celebrity Endorsement for Badon Ki Pathshala at the prestigious Asian Customer Engagement Forum (ACEF). We also won Gold in the Social Media Category at the Public Relations Council of India and won the Most Effective Use of Radio in an activation campaign at the Excellence in Radio Awards (ERA) by India Radio Forum. Our consideration scores moved up 5% and our partner banks’ total awareness increased from 81% in March-August 2015 to 99% between Sept'15-Nov'15 during the campaign period. One of the biggest challenges for marketers today is fragmentation. This is not just in terms of the proliferation of brands in various categories, but also in terms of consumer interests and the way they engage in those interests. A few years ago, you could advertise on the networks; sponsor a few big sports or events and rest assured that your brand message was being delivered. Now, you have dozens of media avenues with content that draws passionate followers. This is landscape that is much more diverse with the impact of social media and new trends and passions emerging every day! Our campaign idea thank fully allowed us to break through the clutter and delivered the message powerfully. It gave us an opportunity to add value to the experience of participants and align with their values through something that they truly care about – the future and well being of their little stars!"
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The UEFA Euro 2016 has got off to a rocketing start. With the on-field action grabbing the headlines, the Indian market has moved swiftly to capture the biggest football flavor of this season. Mobile handset maker GioneeMobiles has come on board as the title on-air sponsor after their successful rebranding stint with the Kolkata Knight Riders in the Indian Premier League. Sony Pictures Networks India (SPN), hold the rights for Euro's broadcast in India and are beaming it across their channels and online onsonyliv.com. Last heard before the beginning of the tournament, they had sold almost 80 % of the advertising inventory. Highly placed sources close to these deals reveal that brands have allocated tentatively Rs 8-10 crore towards sponsorship. According to a report in the Business Standard, SPN is continuing with an activity it had started dabbling with in 2014 where it had multi-lingual feeds for the FIFA World Cup with a Bengali feed on Sony Aath, the Bangla entertainment channel under the network. Euro 2016 will be available in six languages, English, Hindi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam. Sony SIX will telecast the English language feed while Sony ESPN will give viewers the other options. Prasana Krishnan, executive vice-president and business head of Sports Cluster, SPN, says, "When we experimented with the Bengali feed, we realised that there is an appetite for the sport in the regional markets. With Euro 2016, we intend to test out more markets and so we have added three more languages. It is perhaps the first time in India that a non-cricket tournament of this scale will be available in so many languages." According to the ESP Properties - SportzPower India Sports Sponsorship Report 2016, on the back of Hero Indian Super League (ISL), ground sponsorship for Football shot up from Rs 59.5 crore in 2014 to Rs 114 crore in 2015, a jump of 91.6% . Hitesh Gossain, CEO of Onspon.com, gives us a lowdown on the brands that have moved on-board for the European football fiesta, "According to market sources and SPN estimates, the brands that have agreed to be a part of the Euro bandwagon are Honda Cars India, Idea, Carlsberg, Hero Cycles, Crompton Greaves, Micromax, YES Bank and Renault. E-commerce players such as Amazon, OLX and Paytm were also said to be keenly interested in taking up slots. As the games are shown on Sony SIX and Sony ESPN channels at the primetime slots of 6:30 pm and 9:30 pm, and 12:30 am. SPN's sales team has quoted a rate of Rs 2.25-2.5 lakh for ad-spots and most brands have accepted this.
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Vh1 All Stars is a strategic program for the benefit of advertisers and brands across the country. It aims to provide customized solutions to clients and brand campaigns taking their message to the relevant TG across on-ground outlets spanning 60 cities. Speaking more about this initiative, Sabrina D’Souza, Head Marketing, English Entertainment Cluster, Viacom18 said, “Vh1 has been a consistent frontrunner in providing innovative solutions to clients and now we are taking things forward with Vh1 All Stars. Vh1 All Stars is a unique strategic program designed to help brands reach out to their audience in an effective and impactful manner. With a program reach of over 3 million people each week via our unique set of more than 870 on ground partners, we are certain that advertisers will find merit in this pioneering initiative providing added width & depth to their marketing efforts” Through Vh1 All Stars, the channels have established associations with 878 on-ground partners in 60 cities across India. Besides partnerships in tier I cities and metros the program has a 191 partner outlets in Mumbai and 118 in Delhi NCR alone. The program also reaches out to smaller cities such as Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad, Agra, Indore, Surat etc., thereby engaging with the relevant TG’s Pan India. Vh1 All Stars has established partnerships with brands such as Costa Coffee, Ginger Hotels, Truefitt & Hill, Haagen Dazs, Gold’s Gym, Jean-Claude Biguine and Hoppipola, as well as associations with locally admired venues such as The Humming Tree, Bootlegger, High Spirits, Johnny Rockets, Thalassa, Summer House, to name a few. The on-ground partnership stretches out through diverse categories such as adventure surf schools, sports hubs, book clubs, tattoo parlours, robotics, dance studios, language clubs, gyms, spas, salons, restaurants, pubs, bars, dessert chains as well as hotels. With multiple brands on board, Vh1 All Stars aims at providing brand solutions to advertisers through an all-encompassing approach.
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Book between 10 and 19 June 2016 and receive a 50% discount (on weekends) and 35% (on weekdays) on the Hyatt Daily Rate for stays between 10 June and 8 September 2016 at Hyatt hotels in India and Nepal. Explore Mumbai in the company of old friends and enjoy the eclectic and cosmopolitan vibes of this great city. Visit Goa with your family and be charmed by its balmy palm-fringed beaches, the architectural beauty of its old churches and houses and fascinating home-style cuisine. Go on a culinary adventure in Chandigarh and Ludhiana and savour the authentic flavours and fragrances of the region, or marvel at the splendour of the Golden Temple in Amritsar. If you are a history enthusiast, a visit to Hampi will awaken your curiosity. Head further south to colourful Chennai - a city steeped in music, art and culture - or enjoy a romantic interlude in the beautiful old palaces of Hyderabad. Wherever your travels take you, a stay at Hyatt hotels, with such great fares, is a must-not-miss this season.
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Today as we enter the era of the fourth industrial revolution wherein the lines between physical, digital and biological spheres are narrowing, it is imperative for large companies to avoid the 'Kodak moment'. Publicis Groupe feels the need for its clients to brace for this change by helping them innovate and stay ahead of disruption. It intends to do this by bringing together some of the sharpest minds from within the tech startup ecosystem in India and the Publicis Groupe brand builders to ‘hack’ solutions on the various brands that it works with across the group. In the late 50s Publicis Groupe founder Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet started the Drugstore near Arc de Triomphe in Paris to bring multiple brands physically under one roof, with the express idea of getting 'consumers to experience brands and for brands to get to experiment with them in return'. Today, it invokes its founder’s vision to bring this concept of disruptive innovation thinking and prototyping to clients and help them 'thrive at scale'. Drugstore India is an innovation facility that fosters relationships between large companies and early stage startups for mutual benefit. This innovation thinking will be mentored by minds across Publicis Groupe companies such as L&K | Saatchi & Saatchi, Publicis India, Leo-Burnett, MSLGROUP and Razorfish. The idea of the Drugstore is fundamentally based on the spirit of identifying and harnessing these innovations and innovators and bridging the gap between needs and resources. Drugstore India will collaborate with leading players in the Indian startup ecosystem like Zone Startups amongst others to bring some of the proven and agile innovation programs such as Minibar, Meet the Makers, Demo Days, Supper Club, Rapid Prototyping & Incubator Accelerator to capitalize on inventions and have radical outcomes in the process, products and services. Besides helping client brands stay successful, Drugstore will add strategic marketing value to the emerging startup fraternity through both physical and cloud based access to brand building resources across the Publicis Groupe and by collaborating with them to help them acquire scale expertise and by mentoring and immersing them on turning any business into a successful brand. Publicis Groupe has launched the Drugstore in London, Sydney, Johannesburg and Zurich and the first Drugstore edition in Asia is now officially starting in India and will be based in Mumbai. The Drugstore India team will be led by Anil K. Nair (CEO, Digital L&K | Saatchi & Saatchi) along with a core team comprising of Sreeraman Thiagarajan (Publicis), Parth Nagar & Aarti Samant (L&K Saatchi & Saatchi), Sanju Menon (Leo-Burnett), Suryasen Kundu (MSL Group), & Swapnil Puranik (Razorfish) and under the overall mentorship of Praveen Kenneth, Chairman & Managing Director, L&K Saatchi & Saatchi.
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