AD Agencies
DAN India launches proprietary tool ‘DAN Explore’
MUMBAI: Dentsu Aegis Network’s science team has launched its first proprietary tool ‘DAN Explore’ which captures the trend of changing audience behaviour and understands the nuance of various consumer cohorts across media touchpoints, backed by behavioural triggers and psychographic understanding.
Dan Explore will be the first tool in the market which examines the difference in media consumption habits across TV, digital, out of home, mobile and other touchpoints in the consumer’s journey. And it will also help marketers combat the challenge to determine when, where and how best to reach their audiences.
Dentsu Aegis Network South Asia chief data officer Gautam Mehra says, “With data and smartphone prices being more ubiquitous, India has seen a distortion in the traditional path to purchase of the digitised consumer. While traditionally there have been challenges in brands understanding nuances in audience traits of the various subsets of their consumers, the growing needs of clients and brand strategists alike have inspired us to probe further in assuming ways to extracting these rich insights.”
“The influence of sophisticated techniques like artificial intelligence, on the backbone of heightened processing capabilities has now made deeper understanding of audiences across various touchpoints very real. Through our access of deep rooted APIs with our partners in traditional and new media and our proprietary data sources, we have endeavored to decode audience behaviours across various platforms to capture a unified audience view to solve brand challenges,” he added.
Commenting on the same, Dentsu Brand Agencies South Asia group executive and strategy officer Narayan Devanathan said, “There have been two ‘fights’ in the communications business one that’s been around for a couple of decades now and the other of more recent making. The first is between media and creative. The separation of these two components has resulted in a gap in how a media planner sees the audience and how a brand planner sees the consumer. The second is between big data and creative. What we seem to have forgotten in all these ‘fights’ is that everything we do is in the interest of best matching consumers and brands. What that requires is a connecting of the dots so that we understand people as people not only as consumers of media or brands. DAN Explore opens up countless ways to connect the dots precisely because it collects all kinds of dots about people and their lives. From passion points to brand and media consumption, from offline to online behavior, from individual to group affinities. In doing so, it does what data is supposed to do in the first place – help explore and find unexpected, inspiring insight.”
The tool is also integrated with Dentsu’s proprietary data sources like SVG Columbus’ app inventory and M1 Panel.
The aim of DAN Explore is to paint a much more detailed and nuanced portrait of consumers than has been available to date. The tool is not only meant to bolster media and communication strategies for the network’s clients but also to inspire creative themes.
AD Agencies
The smell that told Mumbaikars which station was next
Tata AIA turns Mumbai’s Parle-G memory into a sharp, city-wise outdoor play
MUMBAI: When a biscuit factory became Mumbai’s unofficial station announcement. Long before smartphone maps and automated announcements, commuters on Mumbai’s Western line relied on their noses. As trains rolled into Vile Parle, compartments filled with the warm, sweet smell of baking biscuits from the Parle-G factory. It was a cue to gather bags, wake dozing children and shuffle towards the door.
Now that memory has been pressed into service by Tata AIA Life Insurance as part of its 25-year anniversary outdoor campaign — a city-by-city salute to the lived moments that shape urban life.
One hoarding, mounted close to the old factory site, reads: “We have been protecting Mumbaikars since Vile Parle smelled of freshly made biscuits.” Spare. Local. Loaded.
The broader campaign, rolled out across major metros, leans hard into contextual storytelling. In Kolkata, it nods to trams. In Pune, to Magarpatta’s transformation. In Bengaluru, to a time before IT parks. In Chennai, to OMR before it led to tech corridors. Each line anchors the brand’s longevity to a shared civic memory.
The Mumbai execution is the most evocative. For decades, the Parle-G factory was more than a production unit. It was a sensory landmark. Residents nearby set their clocks by the factory horn. Office-goers marked their commute by the waft of glucose and flour. When the plant shut, the city lost more than jobs. It lost a rhythm.
By placing the hoarding beside the former factory, the insurer collapses distance between copy and context. The site does half the storytelling. The rest comes from commuters who remember opening steel tiffins packed with Parle-G, or jolting awake as the train slowed.
It is a neat piece of brand positioning. Rather than trumpet balance sheets or policy counts, Tata AIA borrows emotional equity from the city itself. Twenty-five years becomes less a milestone and more a presence — steady, local, embedded.
Outdoor advertising is often a blunt instrument. This one is anything but. It whispers. It remembers. And in doing so, it sells trust without sounding like it is selling at all.
The scent may have faded. The memory has not.
