Mumbai : GroupM is likely to launch a separate vertical for its fast-growing e-commerce and digital business. The new vertical will be headed by GroupM South Asia’s chief strategy officer Tushar Vyas.
The decision comes amid the boom in this segment. Mindshare, one of WPP’s biggest media buying and planning agencies under the GroupM umbrella, secured ecommerce and digital business worth Rs 700 crore in the past four months while it won just two traditional business accounts during the period.
The new accounts include the digital mandate for Snapdeal, media mandate for PayU, Saavn, Practo, Housing.com, NewsHunt, Novi Digital Entertainment and several others. The agency declined to give a break-up of the accounts. Other prominent ecommerce clients handled by various GroupM agencies include Flipkart, GoDaddy.com, Makemytrip, Google, Hike and Myntra.
Mindshare has had a very promising start to 2015 as it added several blue-chip clients, especially in the ecommerce and digital industry, said Prasanth Kumar, CEO, Mindshare South Asia. “We are channelising our services towards various tools including adaptive and realtime marketing”, he said. “Increasingly most advertisers, including ecommerce players, are looking at digital media and data analytics very closely,” said CVL Srinivas, CEO of GroupM South Asia.
“While traditional media advertising continues in the short run they will be layered with more aggressive digital forays. We can add that critical layer,” he said.
A top media planner, who did not wish to be identified, said the contribution of ecommerce to advertising in India is estimated at 7%. For GroupM, though, the share is growing in double digits, he said. Similarly, the ecommerce category has been growing 50-100% whereas for GroupM it has been growing over 100%.
While there are several other sectors such as FMCG that spend much more than the ecommerce sector on advertising, Srinivas said that the dynamics of the ecommerce category are very different from that of the more traditional categories.
“With our experience of handling over 40 such players locally and the learning we have from our network, especially in markets like China, we are putting together a full-service suite of products that will help these players not just market their brands but also understand their consumers and monetise their assets,” he said.
