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Introduced in 2004, The Mirchi KAAN Awards is the only platform to recognise and honour creativity in radio advertising. The jury of the Mirchi Kaan Awards includes the biggest names in Indian advertising. The 8th Mirchi KAAN Awards paid homage to these very gurus of the industry by introducing this year’s theme ‘Imitate Your Idol’. Running in its eight year, the Mirchi KAAN Awards and its esteemed jury received approx 250 entries from creative as well as media agencies across various categories.

In a memorable and enjoyable evening, the ad professionals were seen cheering for their winning teams as the winning radio spots played on air and industry stalwarts such as Sam Balsara, LV Krishnan, Raj Nayak and Roshan Abbas went up on stage to honour the awardees. Cyrus Broacha, the emcee of the evening kept everyone entertained with his wit and the audience clapped and lauded as Drum Cafe, the drum band from South Africa, kept everyone entertained

A.P. Parigi, Board Director ENIL awarded the most coveted awards of the evening – Agency of the Year to McCann Worldgroup and Client of the Year to Cadbury India

Among the other key awards, The award of Best Use of Radio as a Medium was won by Mindshare for ‘Ajab Prem ki on-air kahani’ for Idea Cellular, Lingo India won the “Production House of the Year”, Naman Jain was the “Voice of the Year” for radio caption “Moment of Weakness – Father Son’, created by Leo Burnett, and ‘Radio writer of the year’ was won by Team McCann.

Prashant Panday, CEO & Executive Director, ENIL (Radio Mirchi) said, “The Mirchi KAAN Awards has proved to be an exemplary success among the advertising fraternity. We are proud to associate with the who’s who of ad industry as our jury The Mirchi KAAN Awards is now synonymous with excellence in creativity in Radio.

The Kaan Jury is a veritable list of stalwarts comprised of established names in the business like Piyush Pandey, Prasoon Joshi, Bobby Pawar, K V Sridhar, R Balakrishnan, Ravi Deshpande, Agnello Dias, Priti Nair, Josy Paul, Senthil Kumar, Deepa Krishnan, Suguna Swamy, K.S Chakravarthi, Ramanuj Shastry, Ashish Khazanchi, Sunil Thoppil, Ramesh Ramanathan, Prathap Suthan, Rekha Nigam, Ameer Jaleel, Amit Akali, Manoj Shetty and Malvika Mehra.

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Dnyanada has 15 years of experience in media, working with media agencies like Lodestar and ZenithOptimedia and on the advertiser side, driving the media mandate for advertisers like Hindustan Unilever, Marico and ICICI Prulife.

Says Punitha Arumugam, Group CEO, Madison Media, “Dnyanada is definitely going to be a great asset for us. Her experience spanning agency and client media functions is hopefully going to bring a holistic perspective to our services.”

Says Dnyanada Chaudhari, on her joining Madison, “I have worked closely with Punitha during my stint at Marico and Sam on many industry related issues. I am happy to be part of the Madison family and it is a privilege to be groomed under their leadership. I am looking forward to offering my experience to drive disruptive thinking, leverage scale and best practices for our clients.”

Madison Media Group is India’s foremost media agency handling media planning and buying for blue chip clients including Airtel, Godrej, Cadbury, ITC, General Motors, Marico, McDonald’s TVS, Britannia, Procter & Gamble, Asian Paints, Tata Tea, Shriram Transport Finance, Levis, SpiceJet, Axis Bank, Domino’s, Bharti Axa, MaxNewyork Life Insurance, Tata Salt, Acer, Dish TV, Imagine TV, Times Television Network, Indian Oil and many others. The gross billing of Madison Media is Rs. 3000 crores.

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Sushma has over 18 years of experience in Media planning and research having worked in companies like Carat, Mindshare Fulcrum, TME, Synovate. Her last stint was with Carat as Sr. Vice President. Across her career she has worked with clients like Unilever’s oral care and deodorant brands, Colgate, Britannia, Godrej Appliances, Heinz, Castrol, Viacom 18, ICICI Bank, Star Network, Shopper’s Stop, HDFC and many others. In her research role, she has been involved with media research, micro market planning softwares, various ad tracking studies and formulating customized research for various brands.

Says Punitha Arumugam, Group CEO, Madison Media, “I have interacted with Sushma at various industry forums in the past and found her perspective and inputs refreshing and concise. With Sushma becoming a Madisonite, I am delighted that we will now have her experience and inputs available to our portfolio of clients”

Says Sushma Jhaveri, on her joining Madison, “I am happy to be given an opportunity to be a part of the Madison family. Madison has interesting set of clients which is the exciting part of work. Hoping for a great new innings.”

Madison Media was in the news earlier this year for winning the coveted ITC media planning and buying AOR that it is currently handling through its unit CREST.

Madison Media is India’s foremost media agency handling media planning and buying for blue chip clients including Airtel, Godrej, Cadbury, ITC, General Motors, Marico, McDonald’s TVS, Britannia, Asian Paints, Tata Tea, Shriram Transport Finance, Levis, SpiceJet, Axis Bank, Domino’s, Bharti Axa, Max Newyork Life Insurance, Tata Salt, Acer, Dish TV, Imagine TV, Times Television Network, Indian Oil and many others. The gross billing of Madison Media is Rs. 3000 crores.

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Says Sam Balsara, Chairman & Managing Director, Madison World, “Digital has now become the focus area for most advertisers. Many agencies have set up independent digital agencies, but we at Madison believe that this expertise should reside within Madison media planners and buyers, given the importance of this medium in the coming years. Madison Media now has over 20 Digital practice experts”.

Madison Media’s spend in Digital accounts for about 10-15% of total digital spends in the country. The agency does digital work for clients like Airtel, Cadbury, McDonald’s, Levis, Britannia, Tata Tea, Bharti AXA, Spice Jet, Spice Mobile, etc… The agency has also won several awards at Cannes, Yahoo Big Idea Chair, Emvies and Goafest in the digital and new Media space.

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Chris Riley, Regional Director, South Asia, OgilvyOne Worldwide says, “I am delighted to welcome a new Head of Country for OgilvyOne India. We are particularly lucky to have Kunal Jeswani join us at an important time of change and growth for OgilvyOne. This is a direct continuation of strategy to investment significantly in talent, to create new competencies and services and to provide sponsorship from the global OgilvyOne network in the Indian business.”

Kunal has been involved in a variety of important roles within Ogilvy India since 2005 and has over 14 years of agency management experience that he brings to the table. In addition to having run some of Ogilvy’s most important relationships, including Unilever, Cadbury and BCCI, Kunal has been instrumental in leading strategic planning for OgilvyOne and has most recently been involved in Vodafone and Unilever, amongst others.

The combination of strategic and operational management skills provided by Kunal comes to OgilvyOne India at a special time of rejuvenation and reinvention.

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Since its existence, the company has witnessed rapid growth in terms of its reach to mobile users. It now serves 26 million users across India that would only justify the popularity that mobile devices share in India. The company’s research shows interesting facts that sees a meager 50 million web users against a whopping 550 million mobile phone users with a 10 to 1 mobile-to- PC ratio. Clearly, serving through SMSs is the strongest point for the company to exploit the Indian market as it is the most popular medium of communication in today’s world. The fact itself that SMS GupShup processes over 480 million messages and is accountable for 5 per cent of all text messages sent within India, speaks volumes about the company’s growth.

The idea behind the launch of an App Store is not only to expand its wings to avenues, but would also enable the developers to create mobile applications and widgets based on SMS adding up to the micro blogging service.

Known as AppShup, it would provide API platforms for the developers to use so that they can create and connect them with the GupShup team. To simplify it for developers to submit apps, it would also pre-enable carrier approval processes. With more than 100 SMS apps including – Tic Tac Toe, Cricket Quiz, Word Jumble etc, already being available for free. The company is also holding discussions with carriers in other countries as well in order to spread and expand the program.

With India being recognized as a potential space for social marketing activities and networking websites like – orkut, facebook and even twitter becoming such a hit with Indian masses, it only makes sense for SMS GupShup to come up with an idea of an App Store and releasing APIs to developers. The company has clearly foreseen the huge potential that mobile social networking has in store in near future and such an activity would only create a platform to exploit it. In the process, it has already created an environment that has attracted networking platforms to keep an eye on its developments. Last year, Facebook was seen partnering with SMS GupShup in order to enable its users to update status messages through text messages. Adding to it, SMS GupShup has not missed out on any kind of advertising possibility too and over 100 advertisers run on the network including the likes of ICICI Lombard, PUMA, Microsoft and Cadbury.

Clearly, there seems to have a lot of planning and strategy gone in place for SMS Gupshup’s activities to make the best use of people’s addiction towards social networks and mobile usage in India. The future looks bright with the current happenings and undoubtedly promising too. The impact of the apps however would only be interesting to be seen especially with giants like Twitter being around.

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As per media reports, Kiran Murthi on his appointment here said, “Radio business is a new arena for me. In India, the radio industry is in a nascent stage. The whole business of radio is such that new technologies and innovative ways of marketing to reach consumers are myriad. My major role at the station would be to build listenership and create marketing solutions for the clients.”

Moreover, it will be Murthi’s first experience in a media company as prior to this he has only worked in technology start-ups and consumer marketing. He began his career with Jhonson & Jhonson, sales and marketing where he worked for a year. Then, he joined Cadbury (India), marketing space, and worked for almost 5 years.

Murthi has also worked with Infosys Technologies as a domain consultant. In fact, he was even a part of the core team that launched AOL in India, and worked there as marketing head, for two years.
However, Murthi’s specialization lies in consumer marketing. He has worked with the two start-up companies as well – in mChek he worked as a marketing director, and in Go Mumabi he worked as a business development (Head).

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DTH subscriber’s main motive is to touch 29-30 million more consumers, by the end of the next financial year. If it happens it will be a 50 per cent jump, as of now there are only 19 million viewers.

There is a time to reach there, till then, DTH subscriber’s are working on the medium’s capabilities. Like, Tata Sky and Dish TV with a subscriber base of over 4.5 million and 6.5-million has seen 30-35 brands, including – Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Hindustan Unilever, in tie-up with it over year and a half.

However, Dish TV who has been the oldest in this service still has been slower, with fewer brands associating with it. On this, Salil Kapoor, chief operating officer, Dish TV said that the company is moving fast on that. Then, Sugato Banerji, chief marketing officer (CMO), DTH Bharti Airtel said, “We have attracted advertisers like – Maruti, Cadbury, Nestle, Hewlett Packard and Yahoo,” as per media reports.

As per media reports, on the DTH subscribers having different models in place, Vikram Mehra, CMO, Tata Sky said, “Tata Sky has the default, power-on channel available for advertising, besides the interactive application platform, where advertisers can associate as content providers, thereby getting their branding on the channel. Or, they can do interactive ads on our platform.”

Mehra further added, “So, a viewer interested in a particular ad can click a button that appears on the screen. This takes him to a page that provides relevant details. For more information, the viewer has to type in a short code that appears on the screen, using his mobile. This information is then passed to the relevant advertiser. The latter can accordingly get in touch with the viewers, based on leads we pass.”

Moreover, DTH companies are promoting the interactive ads on their platforms, including Airtel, on this, Banerji said, “There is a lot of traction we are seeing for it. When you switch on your DTH connection, the first screen that appears is the booting screen. From there, it goes to the default channel in the case of a few operators. Our technology takes the subscriber straight to the last-viewed channel from the booting screen. We have monetised the booting screen. In the case of the electronic programme guide, a subscriber is using it repeatedly during viewership. So, that is another property we have monetized,” as reported by media.

Also, every DTH subscriber has a different costing exercise. Interactive ads are charged on the basis of costs per lead, while ad rates on the default, power-on channels are worked out on the basis of half-hour and one-hour slots. For e.g. Tata Sky charges anywhere between Rs 6 lakh for half-hour slots and Rs 12 lakh for one-hour slots for a period of 30 days.

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Kraft Foods – it is the largest confectionary, Food and Beverage Company headquartered in the US. As per media reports, on owing the Cadbury, Irene Rosenfeld, CEO, Krafts Food said, “Owning UK-based Cadbury would enable the American confectionery giant to expand its footprint in the developing market, including India.”

Cadbury – a British confectionary company, which sells popular chocolate brands like – Dairy Milk, 5 Star, Perk and many more. Besides, chocolates, it also sells products in the snacks, beverages, candies and gums categories.

As reported by media, Rosenfeld denied the criticism that Kraft is going to ‘asset-strip’ Cadbury, and explained, “First look at how Kraft has invested in ‘Milka’ and ‘Toblerone’ – two European businesses it picked up decades ago. Cadbury is an icon. We are not going to get rid of it. It generates enormous recognition and love and loyalty. I believe it’s a very important asset in the acquisition.”

Regarding the Bournville base of Cadbury, she said, “I understand it is the heart and soul of the company. I have every desire of wanting to continue to make investments in the site… and I look forward to visiting and seeing what’s under way.”

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Cadbury Gems has always had the essence of fun and pranks and with the television advertisements, the theme only gets extended in a refreshing way. A research suggests that kids associate colours with emotions. It was this research-based result that prompted O&M to leverage on this aspect as colours have been the USP of Gems.

The TVC opens with a wildlife expert going mad uncovering the mystery behind a multi-coloured Panda and has a documentary-like feel to it. the humorous narration adds the extra amount of fun to the commercial. Through the TVC, a lot of implausible reasons are investigated for the distinctive colour of the Panda before finally it is discovered that the reason is Cadbury Gems.