Weber Shandwick has been named Global Agency of the Year for the second year in a row by The Holmes Report, one of the leading public relations industry newsletters. The firm will be honoured on May 11 in New York City at the annual US Sabre Awards, sponsored by The Holmes Report.
The Institute of Advertising Singapore, in association with The Advertising Club Bombay, will launch APPIES 2010, the leading edge marketing and advertising Congress in Asia Pacific for marketers, advertisers, decision makers, practitioners and business owners. The APPIES 2010 will welcome 1,000 delegates from the Asia Pacific to Singapore on June 3-4, 2010.
The Advertising Club Bombay, in association with The Times Group, the official representative of Cannes Festival in India, has undertaken a new initiative of sending a young team of two marketers below the age of 30 years to the Cannes Festival starting from June 20-26, 2010.
AdFest has announced that one of Europe’s most acclaimed advertising creatives, Steve Henry, Founder and former Creative Director of Howell Henry Chaldecott Lury (HHCL) in London, is this year’s new Grand Jury President.
A year after its launch in 2009, People’s Samachar, a Hindi daily in Madhya Pradesh, is planning to commence its business activities in Delhi and has roped in industry veteran Sitender Mehta as Regional Head, Media Marketing and Sales.
IRS 2010 Q1 has thrown in some surprises. While most of the language newspapers witnessed growth, nearly all Tamil dailies are seeing decline in readership. Among Tamil magazines, too, a general decline trend is seen.
As per the IRS 2010 Q1 data, among the Oriya publications, the readership of the most of the publications have witnessed decline except Dharitri, which has seen a marginal growth of 0.89 per cent. Sambad remains the most read Oriya daily.
According to IRS 2010 Q1 data, Gujarati magazines have had a good run in this round, while for Gujarati dailies, the case is again of more gains and some losses. Chitralekha (Gujarati) leads among magazines, while among dailies, the leader is Gujarat Samachar.
The IRS 2010 Q1 data for Bengali publications shows that four of the top five magazines have seen a decline in AIR (Average Issue Readership). For Bengali newspapers, it has been a mixed bag.
Spice has appointed Ogilvy to handle the creative duties of its mobility businesses comprising handsets & devices (Spice Mobiles), telecom retail (Spice Hotspot) and mobile VAS (Spice Digital). The win comes on the back of a multi-agency pitch involving leading agencies, including Lowe Lintas, Draftfcb+Ulka, Publicis, Bates141, Everest, Capital and incumbent agency Contract, besides Ogilvy. The pitch process had kicked off in February-end and was concluded by mid-April.
TME, the media arm of Rediffusion Y&R, has intensified its focus on the digital space with the hiring of Uma Sivakumar as National Digital Head. Sivakumar will be responsible for the media deliveries on digital for all offices of TME India.
As part of internal movements at CyberMedia, Krishna Kumar has moved out of ‘Dare’, a magazine for entrepreneurs, as Group Editor after a stint of nearly three years. Kumar has been shifted to a new role in the Web 2.0 content platform, wherein he is now Senior Vice President Special Projects, CyberMedia.
Broadcast24 will soon add a dedicated sports news channel to its kitty. Christened, Sports24, the new channel will sport a youthful look and feel. Anurradha Prasad, MD, BAG Films, explained, “The requirement is of dedicated sports news 24x7. Only 30-40 per cent of the content on news channels right now is on sports, whereas we will offer the audience sports news content as it happens all the time.”
Star India has been entering into innovative tie-ups with various brands, for example, the Vodafone roadblock that was done on the entire Star Network some years ago. Taking this innovative theme forward, five channels of the Star Network have tied up with the 2010 Intel Core processor family to promote them through various brand integrations. This innovation is being done by OMD.
King of good times Kingfisher is looking to give a new look to its website, kingfisherworld.com, and has roped in Quasar Media to provide digital solutions, besides recreating the website, according to industry sources. The project is based out of Kingfisher’s Bangalore office and Quasar’s Delhi team is working in coordination.
The second edition of ‘Media Quotient - what’s your MQ?’, the Media Quiz 2010, culminated in a grand finale held in Mumbai on May 6. Team Cognizant, winner of the Kolkata round, overcame some strong competition to emerge the winner at the finals and won return tickets to London. Team Tata Capital of Mumbai was the first runner up.
We want Media Direction to be among the top five players within three years. India is a very competitive market, therefore, to accomplish our goals we have to be better than the competition. Being as good won’t be good enough. We will get the right people and the right structure to move forward. Growing in this market is account by account and day by day.