MAM
HDFC Life unveils campaign featuring Rajasthan Royals Players
MUMBAI: Private life insurance company, HDFC Life, has unveiled a new campaign featuring Rajasthan Royals players such as Shane Warne, Rahul Dravid, Ross Taylor, Shaun Tait, Ashok Menaria, Faiz Fazal and Abhishek Raut.
The two television commercials have been conceptualised and scripted by Leo Burnett and directed by Sanjay Shetty from Opticus.
The advertising would be on air across major television channels from this week.
The theme of the campaign is ‘to promote and propagate self respect, or living life with head held high’. It also attempts to blend the common values of both HDFC Life and Rajasthan Royals‘ self-pride — the youngsters redefining self-respect through conviction v/s highly experienced international players.
HDFC Life plans several activities in the coming months along with Rajasthan Royals. Some of them include financial planning sessions for the young players in the Rajasthan Royals team and other on-ground initiatives.
The promotion also attempts to capture the essence of self belief, pride, and conviction by showcasing the team spirit among the highly experienced international players with the fresh but confident young lot.
Said marketing and direct channels EVP and head Sanjay Tripathy, “HDFC Life recently refreshed our brand look with a more youthful approach. Our association with Rajasthan Royals fits perfectly with our Brand communication to draw inspiration from the highly experienced parentage and applying this to redefine Self Respect for today’s youth… Sar Utha Ke Jeena Ka Naya Andaaz. That’s what the new HDFC Life symbolizes. The Rajasthan Royals team this year is a heady mix of youth, experience, emerging talent, innovation and professionalism.”
In this association with the Rajasthan Royals, HDFC Life will reward excellence in the field with the “Sar Utha Ke Jiyo”- Most Valuable Player of the Match award.
The Rajasthan Royals coaching staff along with the team captain, Shane Warne, will select the most valuable player of the day from the Rajasthan Royals team, who will receive this honour along with a cash incentive of $ 1000.
HDFC Life is the principal associate sponsor of Rajasthan Royals for the third consecutive year in the Indian Premier League 2011.
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.
