MAM
ZeeQ kicks off on-ground initiative ZeeQ on-Wheels
MUMBAI: ZeeQ, Zeel‘s edutainment channel, has flagged off its on-ground initiative ZeeQ on-Wheels in Mumbai. The ZeeQ van will visit 20 cities across the country with the aim of connecting directly with kids.
The ZeeQ van will ply on the roads of Mumbai and then will cover the rest of the Western Zone. Apart from Mumbai, it will also visit Pune, Surat, Baroda, Ahmedabad, Indore, Bhopal and Nagpur in Western Zone.
In North the ZeeQ on-wheels is set to tour New Delhi, Jaipur, Agra, Kanpur, Allahabad, Lucknow, Chandigarh and Amritsar. In Southern region the touch points will be Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad, whereas in East, ZeeQ on-Wheels will mingle with children in Kolkata.
“ZeeQ‘s main aim behind this journey is to interact with children and their parents to communicate how learning can be fun,” said ZeeQ Business Head Subhadarshi Tripathy at the launch.
ZeeQ on-Wheels is a knowledge treasure for children, providing opportunities of playing games like Balloon Maths, Bottle Cap Memory, Larger than Life Scrabble, English Wordmatch and M.I. Four Quiz.
Along with games, ZeeQ on-Wheels will also screen ZeeQ programmes like Amar Chitra Katha Heroes, Sid the Science Kid, Teenovation, Word Match, Science with Brain café and Cyber chase for children and parents on the van.
On the whole activity, ZeeQ Programming Head Aparna Bhosle, is confident that firsthand engagement with children will enrich the experiences of ZeeQ‘s Programming team. She said, “As a broadcaster, through our shows, we are committed to give life experience to children and this initiative, ZeeQ on-Wheels is the extension of our very same commitment.”
From marketing perspective, ZeeQ on-Wheels will ensure sampling of ZeeQ‘s shows in its target market. Anuj Katiyar, ZeeQ‘s Head, Marketing and Research, informed that the activities on ZeeQ on-Wheels are interactive in nature and are formulated considering the four key subjects like English, mathematics, science, and general knowledge.
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.
