Mindshare India, Madison celebrate most wins at 2019 SMARTIES Awards

The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) has announced the winners of the 2019 SMARTIES India Awards. The annual gala saw a line-up of 52 award recipients in mobile marketing as well as industry-focused categories, celebrating creativity, success, business impact and outstanding achievements across the mobile ecosystem. 

Mindshare India and Madison Communications led the most wins, receiving 17 and 9 awards, respectively, across 26 categories, ranging from Brand Awareness, Most Engaging Mobile Creative and Social Impact/Not for Profit, amongst others. In the industry awards segment, Hotstar was awarded ‘Publisher of the Year’, Mindshare India was recognised as ‘Agency of the Year’ while Hindustan Unilever was recognised as the esteemed ‘Marketer of the Year’, and ‘Affle’ was awarded ‘Enabling Technology Company of the Year’. Meesho clinched the others with two awards for ‘Best in Show’ for the campaign ‘When Women Joined Hands to Break Social Shackles’ and as ‘Brand of The Year’. 

Back for its eighth season this year, the celebration-filled evening saw some of the leading brands from across different industries take the stage as awards were given out to honour the most creative and innovative campaigns in mobile marketing. 

The MMA #BuildtheFuture Forum was held prior to the Awards ceremony, where topics revolving around the adoption and leverage of technology to better understand the mobile marketing landscape were discussed. Marketing to Gen Z in an age of user generated content, the cross-media reach of OTT vis-a-vis other media, leveraging data for precision marketing and how to leverage Mobile Voice were some of the themes around which eminent panellists from the  marketing ecosystem shared their perspectives. 

“The MMA Forum and SMARTIES have, over time, created an industry ecosystem that brings the greatest marketing minds to one platform to identify and celebrate plethora of emerging talent and opportunities in the industry. It is exciting to see that marketers are truly starting to leverage mobile’s interactive capabilities to deliver real business results for brands. This year the quality of the winning campaigns highlight the growing significance of mobile and carves a promising future for the mobile marketing industry,” said Moneka Khurana, Country Head, MMA India. 

“As more brands realise the importance of mobile marketing, producing outstanding campaigns becomes a challenge. The SMARTIES Awards encourages marketers and agencies to raise the bar every time and create something impactful. This year, brands have worked a lot harder to deliver messages that will resonate with consumers. Year after year, the standards and creativity put forth continue to impress us. I also believe that the Forum serves as a great launch pad for new ideas, which we will see gathering steam in the upcoming years,” said Rohit Dadwal, Managing Director, MMA Asia Pacific. 

Ravi Santhanam, Chief Marketing Officer, HDFC Bank, who is also this year’s Jury Chair, said, “Innovation is key in the delivery of good marketing campaigns, but with attention spans being under a second now, the marketer has to churn out more innovations in shorter periods. This year as a jury, we saw brands who showcased brilliant ideas which combined high impact execution and also led to real business ROI. It was a tough one to pick winners in every category, but one that the jury has thoroughly enjoyed and learnt from.” 

The winners were hand-picked by a panel of judges with senior level brand marketers and agency leaders, who deliberated over the submissions across four main criteria – creativity, execution, strategy and most importantly, business impact. The Jury comprised: 

Ravi Santhanam, HDFC Bank

Pawan Sarda, Future Group

Abhishek Desai, P&G

Amit Sethiya, Syska Group

Asha Kharga, Axis Bank

Deepali Naair, IBM India & South Asia

Gauravjeet Singh, Unilever

Jayraj Jadhav, TATA AIG

Neel Pandya, L’Oreal

Nipun Marya, Vivo

Punitha Arumugam, Hotstar

Ravi Desai, Amazon

Rohit Dadwal, MMA

Sandeep Ranade, Kantar

Over 300 submissions were received for SMARTIES India Awards 2019, out of which 99 entries were shortlisted, which set the bar for marketing strategy, innovation, creativity and use of technology in mobile marketing. The SMARTIES India Awards was held in collaboration with MMA Forum India and showcases the increased awareness of mobile marketing and its promising future in India.