News returns in its purest avatar, featuring ground-breaking stories from around the world

Emmy Award-winning journalist and co-founder of the international media company VICE Media, Shane Smith is back with VICE - season 3 on HISTORY TV18, premiering on Friday, 7th August at 8pm.

The show features VICE correspondents travelling across the globe, bringing to audiences fourteen hard-hitting episodes dealing with cultural, political and environmental issues alike. VICE stands out for its content, off-beat style and bold approach, with its journalists going to the edge to highlight often underreported and overlooked news stories.

In its third season, VICE smashes barriers of decorum to cover stories on current global topics like the outbreak of Ebola, shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, the rise of synthetic drugs and religious tensions spiraling out-of-control in France. Closer to home, the show investigates the commercial surrogacy industry in India and our country’s struggle to provide adequate clean water and sanitation systems for its growing population. With courageous attitude, Shane Smith also travels to Antarctica this season to investigate the West Antarctic ice sheet and see how the continent is melting.

VICE's fearless approach is incomparable on television, and showcases some of the scariest, weirdest and most absurd customs and practices known to humanity.

Tune in to VICE (season 3) starting 7TH August, Fridays at 8pm, only on HISTORY TV18

Havas Media today announced the win of the Integrated Media Mandate of ClubMyCab in a multi-agency pitch. The account will be handled from the New Delhi office.

ClubMyCab is a ride sharing app that makes ride sharing safe and fun. The biggest obstacle to ride sharing taking off in a big way in India is that people don’t feel safe sharing a cab or car with strangers. ClubMyCab believes that sharing works best with people you trust – friends, colleagues and neighbours – not with strangers.

ClubMyCab allows you to create these trusted “clubs” of known people who travel the same routes as you and start sharing with them. Examples of clubs could be - your home to office, home to airport, office to airport, etc. – essentially routes that someone travels on frequently. ClubMyCab helps you reclaim 3-4 hours of your life everyday by travelling in comfort and being able to catch up on many other things – chatting with friends, reading a book or just grabbing a nap.

Speaking on the appointment Pratul Chopra, Founder-CEO, ClubMyCab, said, “Ride sharing is still a nascent concept in India and requires building customer awareness towards the benefits. We are therefore partnering with Havas Media to take this message to our customers. We believe Havas Media’s vast experience and established infrastructure in customer communication design and delivery will be of immense value to ClubMyCab.”

Anita Nayyar, CEO, Havas Media Group-India and South Asia said, “ClubMyCab is an innovative concept and very necessary in the daily lives of Indians. Comfort, affordability and above all safety are the key drivers in travel today and ClubMyCab offers these. More so travelling in a more social environment helps beat the traffic grind and also allows for a happier disposition and hence higher productivity. We look forward to partner with the team as they scale in India.”

“ClubMyCab offers an interesting and timely proposition also ensuring people are in their comfort-safety zone as they commute. Apps and the digital frontier are witnessing exciting growth in India. The Havas Media unique digital offering is perfectly suited to connect and engage with this audience, encouraging evolving customer behaviour”, added Mohit Joshi, Managing Director, Havas Media Group-India.

On completing ten years at RED FM and having taken on numerous challenges over the past decade, Malishka has now invited her listeners to throw any exciting challenge her way – something they feel she hasn’t done in so many years. She will be taking up 10 such challenges and executing them.

While the listeners are calling in with hundreds of challenges every day, for now she has successfully completed three challenges. She jogged in Dharavi (she usually jogs in Bandra) and was accompanied by lots of kids from Dharavi, who took her to various lanes in Dharavi and shared their stories. She ate a “Mawali Bhai dish” which was a Manchurian Cheese Cake and she also travelled by a Local train with Shibani Kashyap from Lower Parel to Churchgate and back.

Synonymous with Radio in Mumbai and arguably the best known RJ in India, Malishka has been responsible for changing the game of Radio. When people thought radio was only about playing songs and talking about the musicians involved in the making, Malishka and RED FM started the revolution of ‘Provocative Entertainment’. She not only played the biggest super hits but took to challenges that brought her head-on with stars and authorities alike; becoming the voice of the people of Mumbai. In the ten years with 93.5 RED FM, she has literally become “Mumbai Ki Rani”.

Introduces Product Listing Ads

Currently available for Android, to be released for iOS soon

India’s leading mobile ad tech platform Tyroo Technologies recently introduced its revolutionary Product Listing ads (PLA). Tyroo’s PLA is the world’s first native ad platform, by an independent ad network, open to all app publishers and competes directly with Google and Facebook’s PLA.

The PLA platform allows app publishers to deliver ads without compromising on a user’s app experience, by embedding these ads natively, similar to the Facebook and Google ads. The platform was first globally launched at Mobile World Congress, Barcelona in March this year, which is now being adopted by the ecosystem.

Siddharth Puri, CEO, Tyroo Technologies, said, “Our partnerships with leading Indian and global publishers are a clear endorsement of the tremendous value that Tyroo’s Product Listing Ads holds for app publishers. Our research indicates that consumers look at native ads 52% more frequently than banner ads and with PLA app developers need not look any further for better returns. We are confident that PLA will help our clients drive sustained revenue growth on one hand and user engagement on other, without compromising on the app’s user experience in any manner.”

Product Linked Ads by Tyroo Technologies mark a major innovation in global mobile ad tech industry. This is for the first time that ads have been developed keeping consumers at the epicenter of the mobile advertising ecosystem. While other e-commerce ads overwhelm and confuse a consumer by showing different products to choose from, Product Linked Ads only show relevant products as per consumer interest, reducing their efforts of buying products online.

The PLA integration enables these apps to engage with their users with more relevant e-commerce product ads, which are consistent and superior in user experience. Users today are subjected to number of app download and other irrelevant ads but e-commerce ads driven by Tyroo’s proprietary data engine will not only help in driving higher engagement but also recommend products to users as per their interest.

The native format of Product Linked Ads enables consumers to accept it as an integral part of the app experience and is the ideal solution for app developers and publishers who had to deal with problems of limited advertisements, less traffic, non-engaging content and worst of all, low fill-rates. To overcome these challenges, PLA is enriched with features and benefits like curated product feeds, programmatic solution, strategic placements of ads, 100 % fill rate, upto 25 % increase in user engagement and 2X lift in eCPM (Effective Cost per Million Impressions).

Through this technology product ads will appear natively in an application with product recommendations powered by Tyroo Technologies’ proprietary Big Data recommendation engine. The engine generates Recommended Ads based on competition between display ads, product ads, app install ads and video ads. The ads enriched with native design will enable the consumer to experience shopping within their favorite applications; leading to high yield and increase in time spent for app developers.

PLA technology allows different formats for app developers based on their mobile app design, font and layout and drive purchase via Product Discovery. It also enables advertisers to monitor native product ad performance through an in-built dashboard and accordingly use product analytics to create more engaging content for the audiences.

My recent post titled, “Getting realistic about the odds of marketing success” sparked a couple of interesting comments. Take, for example, this quote from a comment by Shann Biglione,

“If marketers spent more time influencing salience rather wanting to be seen as innovation junkies, we would have better marketing.”

Some of Biglione’s previous comments make it clear he is a big proponent of Professor Byron Sharp’s view of the marketing world, but is he correct in making this assertion?

One of the reasons I wrote the previous post is because I believe that Sharp’s “rules of marketing” hold good when the status quo rules. Every brand is seeking to improve the probability that it is purchased, and a state of dynamic tension or stalemate is reached where no one brand wins big. Success all comes down to how well you play the existing game. Under those conditions, improving salience is a key growth driver. Once this state is reached the stalemate can last for years (in my analysis 45 percent of categories saw no significant change the course of five years).

The obvious conclusion is that under those conditions marketers should spend more time influencing salience than worrying about innovation… except that if you do not worry about innovation then someone else may identify an opportunity and your brand will get disrupted (along with others).

Take the example of when Coca-Cola launched I LOHAS bottled water in Japan. The brand became the number one mineral water sold in Japan in just six months and undermined several well-established brands. No doubt those brand’s marketers did not think there was much opportunity for innovation in a familiar and growing market.

Coca-Cola’s research revealed that, while Japanese consumers wanted to do something about environmental issues, they admitted that their behavior had not changed. Thin and lightweight PET bottles provided consumers of Coca-Cola’s I LOHAS the chance to create a ritual out of twisting the bottle, and offered them the opportunity to choose a brand with a smaller carbon footprint, thereby demonstrating their commitment to the environment.

The marketing team also turned what had been a negative into a positive: rather than publicizing the qualities of a single source like the French Alps, I LOHAS is promoted as coming from seven local sources around Japan. The BrandZ data for 2012 suggests that the brands which suffered most from the launch of I LOHAS were the premium imports like Evian and Volvic.

If by “innovation junkies” Biglione is referring to innovation for innovation’s sake – the desire to have something new to say - then I would have to agree with him. However, there is always the risk that if you do not continually seek meaningful and differentiating innovation and launch it effectively then your brand risks being sidelined. Once again, the answer is not an either/or, it is both: you need to both seek meaningfully different innovation and grow your brand’s salience at the same time.

Can you think of any similar examples to I LOHAS? Yes, Apple, but what other ones come to mind? Please share your thoughts.

Authored by Nigel Hollis,Executive Vice President and Chief Global Analyst at Millward Brown

Source:Millward Brown