Network Advertising Bags Creative Mandate for Essilor India

Among India’s leading independent advertising agencies, Network Advertising has won the above-the-line creative mandate for Essilor India, a world leader in prescription lenses, following a multi-agency pitch. The account will be serviced out of Network's Mumbai office; the mandate includes all consumer-facing and partner communication across India for Essilor India. Network Advertising is best known for its path-breaking campaigns for HDFC, Jet Airways, Henko, Mahindra Lifespaces, Goa Tourism, i-Pill, Vijay Sales, Charagh Din, Vinod Cookware, among others.

Commenting on the win, Vinod Nair, Managing Director, Network Advertising, said, "Essilor India is a strategic addition to our growing clientele and this is a responsibility we feel proud to own. It was basis our ability to understand their business challenges and our sound strategic thinkingthat has helped us win this mandate. The win is sweeter because a global organization, with global alignments has chosen us, a 100% Indian agency, for their India business." 

Shayondeep Pal, Chief Creative Officer, Network Advertising, has an interesting take, "From an advertising standpoint, Essilor is unlike many other categories. Because you are communicating with the end consumer indirectly through her optician, knowing very well that the buyer is more interested in the frame, than in the lens. Having said that, both strategically and creatively, we are working on new-world insights as Indians embrace a new work culture where our exposure to screens is maximum. We hope to create excitement in a category which for some reason has believed in functional advertising."

Speaking on the partnership, Neha Sharma, Head – Marketing, Essilor South Asia, said “We have decided to associate with Network’s seasoned teamdue to their long standing exposure to the changing advertising landscape, their creative consumermind-set, and agood strategic approach. This will help Essilor strengthen its brand presence further. We are delighted to have Network on board with us and look forward to an enriching association.”

Essilor is the world leader in the ophthalmic industry and prescription lenses. Globally, Essilor is committed to providing solutions to correct and protect the visual health of people. Essilor India, with its headquarters in Bangalore, was founded in 1998 and since then has been providing solutions to correct vision of Indians through their various brands like Crizal, Varilux, among others. They are the leaders in their category and have been maintaining this position in the post-Covid world with a lot of product innovations and trade programs.

About Network Advertising:

Network is an independent, fully-integrated, full-servicebrand, media and digital solutions provider. Its 25+year existence is defined by its ability to think fearlessly and help impact the client’s business. The agency has created several path-breaking and industry-defining creatives for the clients and the partners. From revolutionary Designs to comprehensive Business Strategy, and from Media Planning and Buying to Activations and Innovation, Network provides comprehensive services under a single roof. Network has been the communications partner helping create many sunrise industries through differentiated advertising for a host of sectors including Pharma, FMCG, BFSI, Real Estate, Travel, Logistics, Consumer Durables, among others.

Why Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo! oppose Google book project?

Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo! are planning to join a coalition of library associations and non-profit groups in opposing Google's ambitious book scanning project, US newspapers reported on Friday.

The New York Times and Wall Street Journal said the technology heavyweights have agreed to form what is tentatively being called the Open Book Alliance to challenge Google's class action settlement with authors and publishers.

The settlement, which gives the Internet search and advertising giant the rights to commercialize digital copies of millions of books, is already facing anti-trust scrutiny from the Justice Department and awaiting court approval.

Gary Reback, an anti-trust lawyer in Silicon Valley who is acting as counsel to the Alliance, told the Times the book deal "has enormous, far-reaching anticompetitive consequences that people are just beginning to wake up to."

Reback, who helped persuade the Justice Department to file its anti-trust case against Microsoft in the 1990s, said the group includes the Internet Archive, a San Francisco non-profit which maintains a digital library of websites.

The Times said the group plans to make a case to the Justice Department that the arrangement is anticompetitive.

It said that members of the Alliance were likely to file objections independently with the US District Court in New York which is set to hold a "fairness hearing" on the deal on October 7.

Microsoft and Yahoo! confirmed to the Times that they were participants while Amazon refused to comment.

Peter Brantley, a director of the Internet Archive, said the Special Libraries Association, the New York Library Association and the American Society of Journalists and Authors were planning to join the group.
He told the Journal its membership would be formally disclosed in the next couple
of weeks.

Brantley said members of the coalition all see problems with the settlement and are pushing for revisions, but not all necessarily want to see it blocked.

The Google Book Search project has come under fire from a number of quarters, including from groups worried about privacy.

The American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic of the University of California at Berkeley recently wrote to Google chief executive Eric Schmidt expressing concerns about privacy aspects of the deal.

"Given the long and troubling history of government and third party efforts to compel libraries and booksellers to turn over records about readers, it is essential that Google Books incorporate strong privacy protections in both the architecture and policies of Google Book Search," they said.

Google reached a settlement last year with the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers on a copyright infringement lawsuit they filed in 2005 over Google's plan to scan millions of books and put them online.

Under the settlement, Google agreed to establish an independent "Book Rights Registry," which will provide revenue from sales and advertising to authors and publishers who agree to digitize their books.

Microsoft shut down its own book scanning project in May of last year.

Agencies

Has Microsoft hired Morgan Stanley to sell Razorfish?

Microsoft has hired Morgan Stanley to sell Razorfish, its digital agency, and French marketing company Publicis Groupe SA is thought to be a possible bidder, according to a media report.

Microsoft acquired the agency, formerly called Avenue A Razorfish, as part of its $6 billion takeover of aQuantive in 2007.

The report cited an analyst valuing Razorfish at $600 million to $700 million, based on sales of about $400 million last year and profit margins for similar businesses of 12 to 13 percent.

Publicis and Morgan Stanley were not immediately available for comment.

Microsoft declined comment.

Razorfish is one of the largest interactive advertising and marketing agencies, boasting a client list that includes McDonald's Corp, Starwood Hotels & Resorts, and Carnival Cruise Lines.

Microsoft and VivaKi, the digital arm of Publicis, last week unveiled a broad cooperation deal to develop new content, improve marketing performance and better target digital advertising audiences.

Agencies

Techies turn to social media to reach consumers

Recognizing the limits of traditional advertising, established technology companies are diving headlong into the sometimes chaotic landscape of social media to promote their products.

Companies ranging from PC maker Dell Inc to storage equipment maker NetApp are increasingly turning to outside blogs, viral videos and websites such as FaceBook, Twitter, FriendFeed and Digg — and their tens of millions of users — to reach consumers.

These social networking sites harness the age-old power of the word-of-mouth recommendation and can be potent marketing tools. If nothing else, they demand a higher level of consumer engagement than conventional ads.

“This is 180 degrees from that sort of advertising,” said Debra Aho Williamson, a senior analyst at eMarketer. “Having a conversation with them (consumers) is a very new skill.”For tech companies with big marketing budgets, the shift to social media is an implicit acknowledgment that television and print are not necessarily the most effective ways to reach buyers, particularly younger ones.

In addition, with a recession looming, corporate budgets are being slashed. UBS has forecast global ad spending will fall 3.9 per cent in 2009. In such an environment, social media could prove to be a cost-effective way to sell to consumers.

But the strategy is not without some risk. While every company wants to generate buzz, online backlash can be brutal.

Consumer healthcare giant Johnson & Johnson learned that the hard way with a recent Web video ad for its Motrin painkiller. While apparently trying to be irreverent about the pain of wearing a baby in a sling, the ad offended many mothers who savaged it on Twitter, the wildly popular “micro-blogging’’ site where users communicate with short “tweets’’ of 140 characters or less. J&J was forced to apologize on Monday.

Brian Keeler, a vice president at media consultancy VShift, said the key to social media is credibility and enlisting consumers in the act of marketing itself. But if you upset your audience, it can mean trouble. “With the online media, things can go viral and spin out of control really fast,’’ he said.

Dell has a dedicated team of around 40 people that interacts with consumers through its blogs, community forums and third-party sites. The company began its social media push last year as it moved to repair its public image.

“There’s been a realization over the last several years that your customers are going to talk about you online and you have a choice to join that conversation,’’ spokeswoman Caroline Dietz said.