AD Agencies
Mogae acquires Ashish Dabral’s Ao1 with share-swap
MUMBAI: A leading provider of integrated mobile marketing services Mogae Media has acquired Ao1 personalized video platform from Dentsu Marcom CEO Ashish Dabral. He had been developing this new-age technology platform for the past 18 months with a young tech team out of Gurgaon.
The transaction is a cashless one, involving a share-swap that will see Dabral joining Mogae Media as the executive director and Mogae taking full ownership of the tech platform. Mogae will fund the further development and deployment of the platform.
Ao1 is actually an acronym for ‘Audience of One’ which is what Mogae’s new acquisition seeks to deliver. “This is a wonderful technology that combines technology with creativity. It is like producing a TV commercial for just one person as audience”, said Mogae Media chairman Sandeep Goyal. “Worldwide, the trend is towards more and more video content consumption. With Ao1 we can personalise that content. So messaging to high-value customers can be individualized, and personalized such that the recipient feels special, and more positively disposed towards both the brand and its communication.”
Ao1 works as a sell/cross-sell/up-sell engine for customer loyalty. It works to enhance the messaging in any CRM effort of banks, insurance companies, telecom operators, retail, airlines, hotels, e-commerce destinations and all such business that seek to engage their customers better. Mogae Media has in the past worked with Idomoo of Israel, the pioneer-leaders in video personalisation.
The platform connects with the database of any client. The real-time personalisation engine resides in a cloud that enables the right video to be served to the right customer at the click of a link received by the customer in an email or text message. The driving principles behind Ao1 are engage (involve and inspire customers), connect (make it personal), satisfy (reward loyalty) and impact (create visible positive ROI).
AD Agencies
Fevicol releases its last ad campaign by the late Piyush Pandey
The adhesive brand’s last campaign by the late advertising legend Piyush Pandey turns an everyday Indian obsession into a quietly powerful metaphor
MUMBAI: Fevicol has never needed much of a plot. A sticky bond, a wry observation, a truth that every Indian instantly recognises — that has always been enough. “Kursi Pe Nazar,” the brand’s latest television commercial, is no different. And yet it carries a weight that no previous Fevicol film has had to bear: it is the last one its creator, the advertising legend Piyush Pandey, will ever make.
The film, released on Tuesday by Pidilite Industries, fixes its gaze on the kursi — the chair — and what it means in Indian life. Not just as a piece of furniture, but as a currency of ambition, a vessel of authority, and a source of quiet social drama that plays out in every home, office and institution across the country. Who sits in the chair, who waits for it, and who eyes it hungrily from across the room: the film transforms this sharply observed cultural truth into a narrative that is, in the best Fevicol tradition, funny, warm and instantly familiar.
The campaign was Pandey’s idea. He discussed it in detail with the team before his death, but did not live to see it shot. Prasoon Pandey, director at Corcoise Films who helmed the commercial, said the team needed five months to find its footing before they felt ready to shoot. “This was the toughest film ever for all of us,” he said. “It was Piyush’s idea, magical as always.”
The emotional weight of that responsibility was not lost on the team at Ogilvy India, which created the campaign. Kainaz Karmakar and Harshad Rajadhyaksha, group chief creative officers at Ogilvy India, described the process as “a pilgrimage of sorts, on the path that Piyush created not just for Ogilvy, but for our entire profession.”
Sudhanshu Vats, managing director of Pidilite Industries, said the film was rooted in a distinctly Indian insight. “The ‘kursi’ symbolises aspiration, transition, and ambition,” he said. “Piyush Pandey had an extraordinary ability to elevate such everyday observations into iconic storytelling for Fevicol. This film carries that legacy forward.”
That legacy is considerable. Over several decades, Pandey’s partnership with Fevicol produced some of the most beloved advertising in Indian history, building the brand into something rare: a household name that people actively enjoy watching sell to them.
“Kursi Pe Nazar” does not try to be a tribute. It simply tries to be a great Fevicol film. By most measures, it succeeds — which is, in the end, the most fitting send-off of all.
