Terry Savage, chairman, International Advertising Festival, Cannes Lions, is in India to promote the recently instituted Spikes Asia Awards that are to be held in Singapore. With 26 seminars and six workshops from some of the world and region’s leading speakers, Spikes Asia is a learning and development opportunity for Asian advertisers and marketers.

India has made its presence felt at all major Advertising festivals. From the number of jury members increasing to winning metals, India has clearly become a creative powerhouse.

Terry Savage adds “Take last year’s Lead India campaign by JWT that won an Integrated Grand Prix at Cannes. It was a social campaign and it tried to bring change. Compare this with the Obama campaign that won this year. These are essentially the same – world class campaigns that strike a chord universally, irrespective of cultural boundaries.”

The IAF chairman also feels that global slowdown will accelerate the trend of agencies becoming selective about award festivals and the not-so-premium awards functions will be under threat. However, festivals that provide serious learning, networking and a platform for meeting with peers are the ones that will flourish.
Cannes is the mother ship and is the premium advertising festival globally. Last year Cannes instituted the Middle East festival – Dubai Lynx and a European festival – Eurobest. And this year they are rolling out Spikes Asia. A regional festival allows us to deal with issues that are pertaining to the region.

Wieden+Kennedy, popularly called as W+K, is now the creative powerhouse for the leading online retailer, eBay India. In plans is a complete integrated campaign spanning over TV, radio, outdoor, and digital in the coming quarter. The focus of the campaign will be to make otherwise offline Indians to spend more online. W+K will be handling only the creative duties for offline campaigns while online marketing will be managed within eBay India.

The company is also in the process of finalizing a media buying and planning agency.

The core campaign will link television to digital, the objective being raising awareness about eBay in India and convince shoppers to shop smart through eBay. in. The company also seems to launch a SEM (Search Engine Marketing) campaign and an affiliate marketing campaign as part of its digital marketing in India.

Over the next six months, India Media Exchange (IMX) will be transformed and renamed as VivaKi Exchange. The Publicis owned IMX is a consolidated media buying arm of Starcom MediaVest Group, Zenith Optimedia and Solutions Digitas.

The re-branding will be executed simultaneously in India, China and other parts of the world, where media exchanges are live.

VivaKi will focus on digital and will do a lot more of digital media buying as compared to IMX. Presently, digital comprises less than 10 per cent of the total media buying deals carried out through IMX, while 90 per cent of media buying is in the traditional media space.

The objective is to constitute more than 20 per cent of the total media buying from digital buying.

VivaKi will introduce a few search marketing tools to assist advertisers in paid search advertising; mobile advertising tools to place SMS and MMS ads; and social media marketing tools to help advertisers to place ads on social networking sites. Some analytical tools will also be made available to pull data from the online ad server to achieve better targeting.

All the tools will be launched under the VivaKi Nerve Center (VNC) banner, the research and technology development arm of VivaKi.