MAM
Bata donates 1 million pairs of shoes to health care workers, volunteers and their families
As a global leading shoe company, Bata feels responsible towards all its stakeholders including the communities in which it operates across countries and regions. This is why the Bata Group commits to donate 1 million pairs of shoes to health care workers, volunteers and their families, the front-liners fighting the Covid-19 with admirable courage and dedication every day. The donation will impact a number of countries, in Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia-Pacific, and India.
“During these unprecedented times, Bata is committed to doing everything possible to ensure the health and safety of our employees and consumers, to continue to serve our consumers to the best of our ability, and to take meaningful action to help communities in need and those on the frontlines” said Alexis Nasard, Bata CEO. “Now more than ever, we are committed to upholding our values and to improving the lives of our consumers, employees, suppliers, customers and communities”.
Since the onset of the outbreak, Bata through its ‘Bata Heroes’ initiative, has been working with its long-standing foundations, charitable partners, government officials, and other organizations to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, in countries as diverse as India, Czech Republic, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Colombia, Italy, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Chile, Peru, Thailand, Malaysia. Bata produced and donated face masks, face shields and protective equipment (PPE) for healthcare workers, as well as donated food, hygienic products, or funds through the Bata Children’s Program and the Bata Shoe Foundation.
MAM
Publicis Groupe India launches data-led influencer platform ‘Influential’
A new platform, a seasoned hire and an ambitious plan to bring discipline to India’s booming but chaotic creator economy.
MUMBAI: Influencer marketing in India is big, messy and, for most brands, maddeningly hard to measure. Publicis Groupe India has decided it has had enough of that and is moving to fix it.
The advertising giant has launched Influential, its global creator marketing solution, in India, pairing the rollout with the appointment of Diwaker Chandani as managing partner for Influential India. The brief is blunt: drag influencer marketing out of the spray-and-pray era and into one defined by data, accountability and results that actually show up on a balance sheet.
A fragmented market ripe for disruption
India’s influencer ecosystem has scale in abundance. What it lacks is maturity. Measurement standards are inconsistent, creator databases are riddled with duplication, and brands remain dangerously hooked on organic reach, a strategy that flatters vanity metrics while delivering uncertain commercial returns. Chandani, who brings nearly two decades of experience across digital platforms and media, puts it plainly. “The ecosystem has scale, but not maturity,” he says. “By combining data-led audience intelligence with creator ecosystems and media amplification, we aim to build a model that delivers measurable and repeatable outcomes.”
It is a diagnosis that Publicis Groupe is staking serious infrastructure on. Influential is anchored in the group’s Connected Identity system, which maps consumer profiles to enable more precise audience targeting and creator selection. Layered on top are the Captiv8 platform and Influential’s global creator network, giving brands the tools to plan, activate and measure campaigns across the full funnel, from awareness down to commerce, rather than treating each influencer post as a standalone act of faith.
The hire
Chandani is not an unfamiliar face in the industry. He has held senior roles at Meta, Zee Entertainment and the Network18 Group, working across creator partnerships and content-led media strategies. His mandate at Influential India is to integrate data, creators, media and commerce into a unified framework and to build the team and client roster to scale it.
Anupriya Acharya, chief executive of Publicis Groupe South Asia, frames the launch as a response to a market that has grown faster than its own infrastructure. “The channel has reached scale, but lacks a unified, data-led foundation,” she says. “With Influential, we are moving from a creator-first approach to a cohort-first, identity-led model powered by Connected Identity.” The integration of creators, media and commerce, she adds, will enable more precise and scalable outcomes for brands.
Why now
The timing is deliberate. Influencer marketing in India is expanding rapidly, fuelled by cheap data, a vast and young social-media audience, and brands increasingly willing to redirect budgets away from traditional media. But growth without governance has created a market where consistent returns remain elusive and accountability is largely aspirational. Publicis Groupe is betting that the industry’s next phase belongs not to whoever has the biggest roster of creators, but to whoever can prove, with hard numbers, that those creators are actually shifting product.
The old model of picking a popular face, posting a reel and hoping for the best is running out of road. Influential is Publicis Groupe India’s wager that the future belongs to the spreadsheet as much as the selfie.
