Facebook, GroupM sign major ad deal in India
Facebook has signed its first agency deal in India with GroupM. The agreement marks a significant development for social media marketing in the country. Even as India is one of the largest markets for most social media platforms, the advertising revenue generated lags significantly behind the user base.
“Our partnership with GroupM will benefit clients to reach over 100 million people in India, 84 million on mobile — both smartphone and feature phone — and custom audiences within the 100 million in urban and rural India. We’re excited about this wide-ranging collaboration that combines the strength of the world’s best global advertising platform with GroupM’s market-leading position to deliver personalised marketing at scale,” said Kirthiga Reddy, Head, Facebook India.
“We are delighted with the Facebook partnership that can help unlock even greater value for our clients. We work closely with Facebook globally, regionally and locally. India is projected to be the largest country for Facebook by people very soon and we see exciting possibilities for our clients. This partnership adds to the set of enablers we have created over the years that can help drive digital adoption in our market,” added GroupM South Asia’s CEO, CVL Srinivas.
GroupM has been creating digital solutions for marketers and given its access to data and research, has been integrating digital with traditional media. For Nokia Lumia, GroupM pioneered the deployment of Facebook’s outcome measurement and leveraged Facebook’s sophisticated targeting capabilities to deliver a 54x return on Facebook ad spend.
Leveraging Facebook’s targeting capability, GroupM delivered results for Arrow, a apparel brand. Arrow was running an end of season sale and wanted to drive a special discount promotion to an audience between 18 to 35-years-old residing in metro cities. Arrow was able to deliver a 30x return on Facebook ad spend and a significant redemption rate from this exclusive Facebook campaign.
To add to its digital offerings, last year GroupM India launched Mash Up a digital content unit which has been creating digital content solutions for brands, the most recent being the digital video campaign with Kapil Sharma for Honda Mobilio. GroupM also manages a specialist mobile advertising company, Madhouse, bringing brands together with mobile media publishers to unleash the power of mobile. Its full service digital marketing agencies Quasar and Blazar include end of end digital solutions for advertising across the web, social media, search, analytics and creative services. As part of renewed focus on digital, GroupM in the last year has evolved its practices in Content, Movie Activation, Experiential Marketing and Analytics with a more digital focus.
