WPP CEO Martin Sorrell yesterday announced that Geometry Global and Encompass would operate as a single entity in India by the name of Geometry Global Encompass Network (GGEN).The Network’s management will comprise executives from J Walter Thompson, Ogilvy, Encompass and Geometry Global and the business will be aligned with J Walter Thompson South Asia. Encompass was acquired in 2008 by WPP and aligned with J Walter Thompson. It is best known for planning and executing events and activations for clients such as Hyundai, Asian Paints, Fiat and Microsoft.Geometry Global (earlier known as OgilvyAction, a division of O&M) is well known for its shopper and rural marketing (Outreach) practices and works with clients such as Hindustan Unilever, Mondelez, Vodafone, Tata Sky, DuPont and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Geometry Global | Encompass network will continue to work closely with Ogilvy to benefit clients with the width of services. With over 400 employees in Mumbai and Delhi, the Geometry Global | Encompass Network will specialize in shopper marketing, rural marketing, large-scale events and exhibitions, urban consumer marketing, digital activation and field marketing. The Geometry Global | Encompass Network will be WPPs horizontal network working across the group. Speaking of the announcement, Sir Martin Sorrell, CEO, WPP plc said “When WPP decided to set up a horizontal activation platform we combined OgilvyAction, G2 and JWT Action (North America) to form Geometry Global. Today, Geometry Global is working for some of the world’s best brands in almost 60 markets around the world. Through this collaboration in India, we’re following up on one of our key global objectives of offering best-in-class full-service experiential marketing services that can help our clients sell more.” The Network will also work closely with Group M through a partnership called Geometry@GroupM. This joint team will use GGE’s proprietary tools and category and channel understanding to deliver shopper-marketing solutions to Group M’s clients. Over the last year, Encompass and Group M have operated Team1, a partnership delivering a combination of media and on-ground solutions to a couple of common clients through a single team. Geometry Global and Encompass will also continue to operate independently for purposes of retaining their areas of expertise and managing client conflict. The Geometry Global | Encompass Network will further extend their reach by collaborations with Go Bananas in Ahmedabad and Showspacein Chennai.
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According to a research conducted by the Content Marketing Institute, 83% of marketers across the globe have agreed to be having a content marketing strategy to promote its brand and products. Meanwhile, 29.6% of respondents to Communication Advertising Marketing Foundation survey said that the most commercially important digital marketing trend for 2015 was content marketing. It is indeed a truth that as the scale, nature and formats of events around the world is diversifying; there has also emerged a massive need to promote your events through various means and mediums. Digital marketing today through copious social media website serves this purpose. However, with abundance of information already present on these platforms it is integral for an event planner to add an edge towards marketing their event today. This edge can be forming a content marketing strategy to promote your event so that it doesn’t get lost in the big, bad, disorganized and chaotic world of information on the internet. For those of you who do not know, content marketing describes the process of developing a themed exhibit, display, or presentation to promote a product, service, cause, or organization leveraging in-person engagement. Events can happen online or offline today and even though you can host only a fixed number of people at your next event however a bigger impact can be created through it by marketing it appropriately. But marketing an event today is no longer limited to floating a status update with a few photographs on the social media platforms. By forming a content marketing strategy, an event planner ensures how will an event be promoted, creates the content for it, deep dives into making it more attractive and user friendly and consistently adds on innovative touched to achieve the same impact from an event online that it would make in person to its attendees. When a brand manager organizes an event, his aim is to help, engage and inform his consumers and also build a striking relationship to ensure loyalty towards his products down the years. He uses content marketing to promote the event but what most marketers do not understand is that without a strategy in place content marketing too adds to an act of hard sell for the brand. It merely gives the consumer an idea of an event was organized as at a specific location at a specific time. The information is static and does not stimulate the curiosity of a prospective consumer to know more about the brand and the event. However, with a pre-decided, effective content marketing strategy in place, a marketer can in each time frame before and after the event track the kind of attention his experiential initiative is gaining and this can help him in making the last minute changes to his overall event, if needed any. Carefully created content on social media helps businesses spread their brand message and enables them to increase company authority in the industry. This is when content marketing has more of an effect than unsolicited sales messages. With an effective strategy in place, content marketing also enables content to be shared at the most relevant time and it needs to be written well-enough to get shared and read, this in itself can be quite a challenge though effective when it works. Updating the social media space with frequent, relevant and strategic content gives a marketers event and the brand name overall a positive impact on search rankings. Additionally, if the SEO and keyword research is done correctly then each update made about the event has a higher chance of appearing in results and being shared by people. To conclude, it can be said that formulating a strategy for content marketing has been an indispensable part of many digital marketers marketing strategy. From better SEO benefits, to brand awareness and traffic to the site, developing a strategy before you start content marketing for your event should not be avoided.
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Who says it is only brands with products to sell who use experiential as a means to engage their target audiences? In the dynamic marketing environment today even service providers and restaurants can be easily spotted constantly using varied and immersive experiences to establish connection with their target customers. Case in point, the multinational food giants like Pizza Hut, McDonalds, Hard Rock Café and Burger King. All of these food outlets are somewhere down the line competing for the same set of target audience and hence in order to race ahead each other have time n again come up thoroughly engaging experiential campaigns. So if you are wondering which food giant has an upper head in terms of experiential campaigns? Well, you are in luck as we at EE this time, deep dive into the experiential campaigns of these giants to provide you with an exclusive insight on who does experiential better? To start off McDonalds has been one of the most pro-active food brands when it comes to experiential. The fast food giant has come up with multiple experience driven campaigns across the globe. From enabling customers to play games on public billboards to promoting a no littering ideology through ‘kick the trash’ campaign and from launching an outdoor breakfast campaign in UAE to launching a Piccadilly circus campaign in London, McDonalds has constantly and consistently used experiential as an important aspect of its overall marketing strategy. Interestingly, even though the food giant invests a lot of money into the execution of these experiential campaigns, however most of them are based on similar lines of using digital as the only interactive element for most of its campaigns. Additionally, McDonalds is not widely known to tell a story with its experiential campaigns as a majority of them feature the target customers having fun with the brand rather than establishing an emotional or sentimental connection. Have a look at some of its most applauded experiential campaigns Burger King on the other hand, which stands as a direct competitor to McDonalds can be said to be weaving the aspect of storytelling into all of its experiential campaigns. Be it creating a Statue of Liberty Time Lapse moment for its customers or the Burger King Motel case where it asked foodies to cheat on its famous whooper burger and try on the newly launched chicken burger, Burger King always has a message embedded in all its experiential efforts. It recently was also awarded the coveted Cannes Lions for its ‘We are all the same inside’ campaign, where the food giant supported and advocated the agenda of LGBT rights. Clearly between Mcdonalds and Burger King the experiential efforts of the latter are more thought provoking and are likely to stay in a consumers mind for a more prolonged period of time. Moving on to the food giant which is famous for introducing the word, foodgasm in the universe, i.e. Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut as a multinational food giant has though invested in experiential but experience driven campaigns have not been a key contributor to its overall marketing agenda across the world. The brand has often come up with campaigns like engaging gamers in a retro arcade, in store activities during its ‘taste freedom’ campaign which was executed in 28 locations in the UK and others. However, the food giant mainly uses ATL as a primary technique to connect with its consumers and is yet to make a substantial effort in the experiential space. The last remembered globally successful experiential initiative run by the brand was in 2010, where Pizza Hut made its staff ‘the star of its brand’. The campaign was centered around a beautiful message and used mediums of ATL and BTL to promote itself heavily. But Pizza Hut has not been successful in coming up with a hugely successful experiential initiative anytime after that. Clearly, the brand believes that ATL is still the way to go as far as promoting the sales of the brand is concerned. Hard Rock Café on the other hand is one of the most evolving, attracting and engaging fast food giants which thrive on experiences. From organizing Comedy nights in countries to music fiestas in others and from establishing a successful souvenir line for its customers to having a special Hard Rock Café outlet in every country that the giant operates in, Hard Rock Café has been constantly involved in coming up with initiatives one after the other to make sure it has new experiences to share every time a customer walks in. Though India as a country sees less of experiential by these fast food multinationals however the Hard Rock Café outlets in the country are always on the verge of curating different experiences. Be it celebrating EMD festivals to the season of cricket, or bringing Puddle of Mud to India to coming up with India’s first ever Mojito festival, Hard Rock Café has done it all. Though there is less of innovation involved and no storytelling present. However, Hard Rock Café manages to charm its audiences better than other food giants simply on the basis of something new being served in terms of experiences to its target customers. Undoubtedly, experiential sits high for the Hard Rock Café as far as their marketing initiatives across the globe are concerned. And why wouldn’t it? Isn’t it a good experience that truly matters at the end of the day?
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To boost leisure, adventure tourism and aviation based entertainment in the state, Department of Tourism, Government of Uttar Pradesh in association with E-Factor & Sky Waltz will be hosting TAJ Balloon Festival in Agra from November 14 – 16, 2015. This was announced to the media and press on the World Tourism Day recently. The Festival will feature more than 15 balloons from across 12 countries like the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Spain, Belgium, Taiwan, Australia, UAE and Germany, amongst others. Expert balloonists will be displaying their skills as the skyline of the ‘Taj’ city Agra will be dotted with colourful balloons. Regarded as one of the safest form of aviation sport, Hot Air Ballooning has been gaining prominence in India as well. Speaking about TAJ Balloon Festival, Shri. Amrit Abhijad, DG & Secretary Tourim of Uttar Pradesh, said, “Uttar Pradesh is the unique state that provides various adventure sport related activities to tourists. While white water rafting, trekking, mountaineering are popular, we are now introducing Hot Air Ballooning as the latest aviation & adventure sport for the discerning tourists. This Festival is the first step towards creating a world class ballooning centre in the state of Uttar Pradesh.” Samit Garg - Founder/Director of E-Factor SkyWaltz added that "it has taken more than 2 years to procure all the required permissions across departments like ASI, MOD, DGCA, City Administration etc and we are grateful to all the office bearers for their continued support in helping us reach until here”. The Taj Balloon Festival will see about 15 hot air balloons rise up and grace the skies of Agra every morning during the event and will also feature special “Evening Tethered Flights”, wherein balloons will rise to a certain height from the ground. This will enable enthusiasts to take a closer look at the balloons. During the TAJ Balloon Festival, a Night Glow Concert will take place where hot air balloons will light up in sync with live music. Talking about the Taj Festival, Shri. Pankaj Kumar, District Magistrate – Agra, said, “Taj Balloon Festival is going to be an important event in the history of modern Agra. We look forward to the international balloonists flying over Agra. The District administration will extend its full support to make the festival a success.” The Festival is being held by Department of Tourism, Government of Uttar Pradesh in association with E-Factor SkyWaltz.
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UltraTech Cement has recently announced its association with Mumbai City FC, Mumbai’s franchise in the Indian Super League, as Strength Partner. The brand now aims to extend its support towards building the beautiful game in India with this tie-up. Football is fast gaining popularity in the country, and the success of the first edition of the Indian Super League is a testimony to it. Indian Super League achieved the rare milestone of having registered the highest average stadium attendance for any football league in Asia, and the fourth highest in the world in its first edition. Indian National team captain, Sunil Chhetri and Goalkeeper, Subrata Paul among others are the core players of Mumbai City FC. Nicolas Anelka, the marquee player-manager for Mumbai City FC, is a globally renowned footballer having plied his trade with top clubs in Europe including Real Madrid, Manchester City, Chelsea and Arsenal, among others. Bollywood actor and football enthusiast Ranbir Kapoor is the co-owner of the team. The team’s logo is a reflection of a resilient fortress that depicts the strong and determined spirit of the city. It also depicts a train that is the lifeline of the city. The seven stars symbolize the seven islands that form Mumbai. “UltraTech has always been strongly connected with sports in India; be it cricket and now football. UltraTech, as a brand, signifies strength and beauty, which is what football as a sport stands for. Mumbai City FC has a strong mix of top national and international players and has a promising season ahead. Our association with Mumbai City FC is a step towards connecting with the youth of India through football, while also leveraging the rising popularity of the game as a brand,” said Mr. O P Puranmalka, Managing Director, UltraTech Cement Ltd. Commenting on this association with UltraTech Cement, Team owner, Mumbai City FC, Ranbir Kapoor, said, “UltraTech Cement have been associated with sports teams in India for awhile now and it gives us a major confidence boost that they have ventured into football in India with Mumbai City FC. I am very glad to welcome them on board as our strength partner for this season.”
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As the year is closing towards its holiday season the war of experiential between brands is intensifying. While some are sticking to their original roots and reiterating their brand identities with creative on ground offerings to their target consumers, others are riding the digital wave to generate likeminded experiences. The month of September witnessed some of the most creative experiential campaigns by brands like Epson, Carlsberg, Nestle and others. In this list we at EE share, the 4 experiential campaigns that grabbed the most eyeballs last month. Medieval activation by Carlsberg This particular experiential initiative by Carlsberg proves yet again why it is considered as one of the most consumer centric brands across the world. As a part of this the beer brand had created a London pop-up bar which was Housed in The Vaults underneath Waterloo station. Executed in the last week of September, the overall concept of the activation was inspired from the idea of connecting the drink with 887 year heritage that it represents. It was themed in the style of the Grimbergen Abbey, where the drink was first brewed. An estimated 600 people attended this medieval activation and they were treated to a complimentary half pint of the blonde craft beer and music from The Retrosettes and High Jives. 2-Epson Giant Water Tank in Times Square This one is certainly one of the most path breaking experiential campaign to be executed in recent times. For the launch of their new line of EcoTank printers Espon created a giant water tank in Times Square and infused the elements of synchronized swimming performances to showcase them. Interestingly, the performers wore custom swimsuits which were designed with Epson printing technology. The bottom and rear panels of the tank were designed with the Epson ink cartridge to make believe audiences that swimmers were actually performing in ink. Additionally, pedestrians were also provided photo opportunities with the swimmers and the chance to test out the EcoTank printers. 3-Americas Cake and Sugarcraft Fair Everyone loves cake and everything related to it. The creamy frosting, the flavors, the scrumptious designs all make it a delight to cherish. However, what would your reaction be if one told you, you can also wear cakes now! Well, no kidding. Cake artists and pastry chefs from around the world participated in the first ever Americas Cake and Sugarcraft Fair, which took place September 18 to 20 in Orlando. The best part about the fair was undoubtedly how models in the event's fashion show wore outfits created entirely of edible materials such as chocolate, fondant, gum paste, and sugar art. Now that is some experience for the viewers. 4-National Cheeseburger Day This experiential initiative celebrated the love shared by New Yorkers for a Cheeseburger. Yes, to celebrate National Cheeseburger Day on September 18, the Melt (a fast-food eatery in the city) partnered with cheese sculptor Troy Landwehr to create a Guinness World Record-breaking cheese sculpture. This Cheeseburger sculpture was made with cheddar cheese from scratch and resembled the burger served in the restaurant. With over 30 hours spent on its creation, this delicious installation weighed 1,524 pounds and was a nice surprise for the customers of the restaurant who wanted to celebrate the day with great fervor.
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Forbes India has been celebrating entrepreneurial capitalism, in line with the Forbes DNA defined almost a century ago in the US. It shares the vision that over the next decade, India has a never-before chance to create an entrepreneurial renaissance. Forbes believes in the spirit of fairplay: that entrepreneurs need to follow the rules while creating value for all stakeholders. One way they seek out and recognise outstanding leaders who lead from the front every year is the Forbes India Leadership Awards. The brand has instituted the distinctive annual awards to recognise transformational leadership across the entrepreneurial firmament, from start-ups and mid-sized firms to the more mature organisations of global scale. The categories also reflect the magazine's charter. The nine awards recognising outstanding CEOs, entrepreneurs and business leaders who have built enterprises that have had a deep and enduring impact on the wider society were presented at a function attended by the crème-de-la-crème of India Inc in Mumbai recently. The achievement of this year’s winners assumes added significance since many of the business leaders felicitated have braved difficult local and global economic conditions to steer their organisations towards operational excellence. The process for organizing the awards started almost six months ago, with research on qualitative and quantitative parameters. The long-list of nominees for each category was whittled down by June. In late June, the jury headed by Mr Harsh Mariwala, chairman of Marico Ltd, examined the nominations and came up with the set of winners. The other members of the jury were Naina Lal Kidwai, chairman, HSBC India and director, HSBC Asia Pacific; Manish Sabharwal, co-founder and chairman of TeamLease Services; Noshir Kaka, managing director of McKinsey India; Sanjay Nayar, CEO of KKR India; and Akhil Gupta, former senior managing director and chairman of Blackstone India. KPMG, were the knowledge partners for the event and the ceremony was executed by Percept. Below mentioned are the winners of the Forbes India Leadership Awards 2015: 1)Outstanding Start-up for the Year Bhavish Aggarwal and Ankit Bhati – Ola 2)Nextgen Entrepreneur for the Year Siddhartha Lal – Eicher Motors Ltd 3)Entrepreneur with Social Impact Samit Ghosh – Ujjivan Financial Services Pvt. Ltd 4)Conscious Capitalist Company for the year Godrej Consumer Products Ltd Gujarat Cooperative Milk Marketing Federation Ltd (Amul) 5)Best CEO – Multinational Company Uday Shankar – Star India Pvt. Ltd 6)Best CEO - Public Sector Arundhati Bhattacharya – State Bank of India 7)Best CEO - Private Sector CP Gurnani – Tech Mahindra Ltd 8) Lifetime Achievement Award for the Year RC Bhargava – Maruti Suzuki India Ltd 9)Entrepreneur for the Year Uday Kotak – Kotak Mahindra Bank Ltd
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In a first move of its kind, Mumbai City FC has partnered with Haptik Inc to provide on the go information and further engage with it's fanbase across the country for the upcoming second season of the Indian Super League. The Haptik App serves as a personal assistant on Chat to its users and this is one of the first time ever that a Sporting Club has integrated with a Chat based app to help their fans get easy access to the club for the entire season. The partnership doesn't only mean FAQ and help for the Mumbai City FC Fans, but also enables ticket booking, live scores, players and match information, expert opinions on games and a lot more. It is pretty much, a Personal Assistant by the Club for its fans. Further taking its promise to simplify everybody's life, for Haptik this alliance takes convenience to the next level. Commenting on the announcement, Indranil Das Blah, CEO, Mumbai City FC said, “The season is almost here and with everyone having multiple things to do at the same time, Haptik as an app makes life a whole lot easier with its unique features. We see tremendous value and promise in the Haptik app for our fans.” All a user will have to do now is download the Haptik App and speak to their assistants on the Mumbai City FC channel for any help, information or trivia. With this, Haptik also becomes the only player in the Personal Assistant/Chat Space to foray into the live events/sporting domain, taking their first step into bringing their users a more holistic experience in a single app. “It’s a very exciting step for both Mumbai CIty FC and Haptik to take,”said Aakrit Vaish, CEO & Co founder, Haptik Inc, which has more than 150,000 loyal users of the app. “This is the world’s first Sporting Club assistant integration, and we are all excited to see what users think of it. As sports fans, we have always wanted a channel to talk about our favorite clubs, and Haptik is proud to finally offer that! This is going to be a very exciting ISL Season for all of us.” The Mumbai City FC Channel goes live on Haptik on the 3rd of October, until the end of the season. And users can also watch out for the some very special surprises in store for them through Haptik, every time Mumbai City FC wins a game.
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