MAM
The Ad Club unveils new offering with Effie Awards 2012
Mumbai: The Advertising Club (Bombay), which organises Effie awards, has called for the entries and has also revealed new offerings for the upcoming awards that showcase effective marketing and creative strategies in different categories.
Effie committee chairperson and The Advertising Club VP Ajay Kakar said, “For over a decade, the EFFIEs has become the gold standard in measuring marketing and communication effectiveness in India. This is reflected both in the quality and the number of entries which the awards have been attracting every year – a startling increase from 53 in 2001 to 300 in 2011. In fact EFFIEs is the only award that is bestowed on both the client and agency, to jointly celebrate the in-market effectiveness of their campaigns.”
Following the discussions and feedback, EFFIE 2012 will introduce two new categories – Direct (in recognition of the Specialist discipline’s ability to give measurable results) and Best ongoing campaign (to recognise brands that have made effectiveness a way of life, across years). There will be Round 1 and 2 judging in Mumbai and Delhi, while inviting coveted jury members from across the country. Effie 2012 will see a sharpened definition of categories like Integrated and David vs. Goliath. It will attract specialist Jury members for specialist categories like Direct, Digital and Rural and this time the committee has introduced paper-less judging.
Additionally, Marico ‘uncommon Sense Award’ is an essential part of EFFIES now. Lenovo has introduced a new Award Lenovo Tech – Doers Award.
The Advertising Club has not increased the Entry Fee. Only the service Tax component gets added as a statutory requirement.
The EFFIE is open to all clients and agencies, be they creative, media, digital, DM and PR, to enter their work to demonstrate the effectiveness of their campaigns!
“I am also happy to share with you a strengthened team at our end, committed to taking EFFIES 2012 to even greater highs. Sameer Sathpathy from Marico has come on board as the Co Chairman and N. Rajaram from Airtel as our Anchor, from Delhi. And as always, we enjoy the active guidance of our President, Shashi Sinha and the active support of the Secretariat, led by Bipin Pandit,” adds Kakar.
The last day for entries to be submitted is 5 November.
The award ceremony event is scheduled to be held in Mumbai on 4 December.
Brands
Google secures AP discom licence to power $15bn Vizag AI hub
First-of-its-kind move gives tech giant grid control for massive 1GW campus
VISAKHAPATNAM: Google has secured a rare electricity distribution company licence in Andhra Pradesh, marking a decisive shift from being just a power consumer to becoming a power distributor for its upcoming mega data centre hub in Visakhapatnam.
The move effectively rewrites the rulebook for hyperscalers in India. Instead of relying on state utilities, Google will be able to procure electricity directly from generators, including its own renewable sources. This not only cuts out intermediaries but also gives the company tighter control over supply, reliability and long-term costs.
For a business where electricity can account for up to 60 per cent of operating expenses, the economics are hard to ignore. Even more critical is uptime. Data centres demand near-perfect reliability, and owning the distribution layer allows Google to manage outages and load balancing with far greater precision.
At the heart of the plan is a sprawling 1-gigawatt data centre ecosystem spread across more than 600 acres in three locations near Vizag. With an estimated investment of $15 billion over five years, the project is set to become India’s largest single foreign direct investment and Google’s biggest AI-focused facility outside the United States.
The campus is being designed with artificial intelligence workloads in mind, housing the company’s custom tensor processing units to power services such as Gemini, Search and Google Cloud. In scale, the planned capacity is comparable to powering a small city.
Google is not building alone. It has partnered with Adani Infrastructure to develop the physical campuses, while Bharti Airtel will set up an international subsea cable landing station. This connectivity backbone is expected to link the hub directly to a dozen countries, ensuring low latency for global data traffic.
Vizag’s coastal location plays a key role in that strategy. It enables direct access to subsea cables and provides the large volumes of water needed for cooling data centre operations. Equally important is policy backing from the Government of Andhra Pradesh, which fast-tracked approvals and granted the uncommon discom licence to anchor the investment.
Groundbreaking is scheduled for April 28, 2026, with phased commissioning expected to begin by July 2028.
The broader signal is clear. As AI workloads surge, hyperscalers are no longer content plugging into existing infrastructure. They are beginning to build and control it. In Vizag, Google is not just setting up a data centre, it is wiring up its own future.
