MAM
Sharat Kuttikat joins DDB Mudra west as creative director
MUMBAI: Sharat Kuttikat joins DDB Mudra west as creative director and will be based out of Ahmedabad. Kuttikat will partner with Jayesh Vaghela who has been with the agency for a number of
years and will oversee the creative side of the agency‘s client roster including Arvind, Zydus Wellness, Smphony, Nirlife, Rotomac and others.
Both Kuttikat and Vaghela will work under the guidance of DDB Mudra Group chairman & CCO Sonal Dabral.
Prior to this, Kuttikat has worked with Stark Communications Bangalore as creative director. He has also worked with Happy Creative Services as associate creative director, Ogilvy & Mather as a creative group head and Frank Simoes, Delhi. Kuttikat was the founder/creative head of Anonymous Creative. This will also be his second stint with DDB Mudra as he has worked with Mudra Communications, Kochi in 2002-03.
In his 12 years stint Kuttikat has worked with some well-known brands such as Vodafone, SAP, Karnataka Tourism, Bengaluru International Airport, Lee Jeans, Basics Life, Wipro Technologies, The Federal Bank, Malayala Manorama Classifieds and Rohan Builders.
DDB Mudra Group chairman & CCO Sonal Dabral said, “Our
Ahmedabad office is a very important part of the DDB Mudra Group and it needed a team not only rooted and conversant in traditional thinking but also fully adept at new media and new age creativity. Sharat and Jayesh are just that team. I‘m very excited to have Sharat on board and am sure along with Jayesh he will take DDB Mudra Ahmedabad to new heights.”
On joining DDB Mudra west, Kuttikat said, “Honestly joining DDB Mudra west was an easy decision. A great opportunity to work on prestigious brands, an enviable mix of categories, and not to mention, the people you get to work with. Also, to be operating from an office where it all began for Mudra is special. The ambition is to partner with brands and drive them to greater glory, while staying true to the amazing culture DDB Mudra has. I cannot be more excited.”
DDB Mudra Group is a part of the Omnicom group. DDB Mudra Group comprises three agency networks, six specialist agencies and eleven strategic business units which offer their expertise under four disciplines (Media, OOH, Retail and Experiential).
MAM
The Merit of Madness: How AI is Changing the Game in Advertising
By Ritz Malik, founder, Ritz Media World.
MUMBAI: When it comes to growth in a competitive landscape, a businessman always has to be a firm believer in Darwinism. You either need to bring a better product, or a better price, or both to the table to get customers and scale. Without this value proposition, you remain unnoticed, and staying unnoticed is not something that a brand wants to do.
You have to do all this and also make sure that you stay cashflow positive at the same time. Otherwise, you’re at a real risk of becoming a large hollow balloon that your competitors are just waiting for to explode or implode under its own weight.
As we’ve entered the era of AI, the notion of a product’s efficacy, cost efficiency, marketability, workflow management, and logistics reliability has become increasingly relevant and prevalently impactful. None of this is background noise anymore. It is the difference between bleeding money on traditional media and actually engineering a profitable campaign.
For example, META’s AI Algorithm has finally given us the ability to measure the ‘CREATIVE’ for a business’s promotions. The best part is that we can do so organically. Content that is actually relevant to the target audience gets more views through reach. This tells us exactly how the audience is reacting before we even scale the budget. This is how we have been gifted the ability to provide merit to the madness of the creative process.
So, our process is as follows:
A set of creatives is built for social media
Their performance is closely monitored for reach and engagement.
Based on the best organic performance, we choose the creative.
Make micro adjustments to add a sales proposition and CTA (but keep it subtle)
Publish the modified creative as an ad.
There’s a lot that goes on in between, but this is the basic method for getting it right. And this is just the AI that’s being used by platforms across the world.
AI utilisation is something that has greatly made the creative process a lot easier. As an agency that thrives on coming up with ideas that are out of this world, we have made the most of leveraging AI to bring ideas to life without spending a fortune.
So, this way, the ability to create high-impact brand stories is no longer under the tyrannical gatekeeping of large budget organisations. It is now that merit solely falls on the storyteller.
Now, AI-powered content production and the AI algorithm on Social Media platforms are asking the question: Is your content compelling?. If yes, the audience will watch your content, share it, and engage with it.
And when it comes to keeping budgets down, we can surely say that it holds the capability to execute million-dollar shoots at a fraction of the cost.
For example, we recently came across a creative challenge by a major Real Estate Developer from Gurugram. They had signed a celebrity couple for their brand ambassadorship a few months ago. They were now about to launch their new project, but for some reason, they could not get their shoot done.
What we came up with was to use the likeness of this celebrity couple and place them throughout the project’s feature video. With the help of AI generation, we were able to rebuild a completely new feature video with their brand ambassadors in 2 days, and no additional physical shots were required.
Imagine being able to save 50-60 lakhs in production costs, 15-20 days in production time, and comfortably be ahead of schedule to launch the project.
This has changed the game entirely. With AI, you can now just acquire the likeness rights of celebrities, and you can just build environments and scenarios with them. The balance between creative and artificial intelligence isn’t a battle for control; it is simply the ultimate tool for survival and scale in a landscape that rewards the fastest and the smartest.
