MAM
Rajat Mukherjee joins Garage Group as principle creative consultant
Mumbai: Garage Group, a full-service and creative agency founded in 2015, has strengthened its creative capabilities with the appointment of Rajat Mukherjee as principle creative consultant. In his new role, Mukherjee will oversee all markets and lead the organization’s creative division for its clients.
With an impressive background, Mukherjee brings more than two decades of creative experience in the field of advertising and communication and is considered one of the prominent creative leaders in the industry, having worked with agencies such as HSAd, JWT, Leo Burnett, Hakuhodo Percept, Dentsu, Mudra, and R.K. Swamy BBDO, to name a few.
He has worked on several leading business brands such as LG, Horlicks, Boost, Monte Carlo, Pepsi, Coke, Hero Cycle, Pizza Hut, Sony, ESPN, Star Sports, Hero Honda, Maruti Suzuki, Suzuki Bikes, Honda Motors, Toshiba, Central Park, PUBG, Numero Uno, and Hindware, among others.
Before joining Garage Group, he served as national creative director for HSAd India, the primary partnering agency for the electronics giant LG, where he headed the firm’s entire creative communication division for more than ten years.
Talking about his new role, Mukherjee said, “A real 360-degree communication is the key to the communication business today, and Garage Group excels with its diversified in-house offering for the same. Thus, it becomes an exciting move for me, as this allows me to expand my wings to soar to newer heights with Garage Group and its varied application format in the field of communication.”
Speaking on the appointment, Garage Group founder and managing director Saurabh Gupta said, “We’re thrilled to welcome Mukherjee to the Garage Group family. With our expansion into creatives, digital, music, and technology, Mukherjee is a clear fit in the organisation. His diverse experience in industry and understanding of the brand ecosystem will further lift Garage Group’s service offering in the market.”
Mukherjee is a graduate of the esteemed Delhi College of Art. He has received numerous significant national and international honours during his 23-year journey, which in turn adds another feather to his cap.
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.
