Midas Awards for The World’s Best Financial Advertising Announces 2015 Call for Entries; New Categories Include Effectiveness and Recruiting

The Midas Awards® 2015 competition honoring the World’s Best Financial Advertising℠ is now open for entry.

The Midas Awards is the only awards show to recognize excellence in financial marketing and advertising on a global scale. Each year, Executive Director Alisun Armstrong strategically updates and evaluates the competition and its categories and implements changes to reflect the innovative work currently being produced in the financial advertising and marketing industry. This year, Midas Awards expanded their Use of Discipline categories, introducing both Effectiveness and Recruiting categories.

“The Midas Awards has always celebrated creative excellence, but now we’re adding the option for entrants to demonstrate the results of their campaigns,” said Alisun Armstrong. “The new Effectiveness category allows brands and agencies to showcase the payoff of the creative arsenal employed to engage consumers and boost the brand.”

As agencies and brands continue to expand, the process of finding qualified employees has become more challenging. Creative ways to attract, evaluate, and hire employees are a necessity in this competitive playing field. The newly unveiled Recruiting category will showcase inspired trends in sourcing and hiring the best-qualified candidate.

Last year’s competition marked the debut of The Midas Brand Report, a ranking similar to, but marking advertisers’ performance based on points earned within the Midas Awards. This recognition of innovative brands and their efforts to engage consumers on a multitude of platforms resulted in 10 global brands being recognized for elevating the financial advertising industry.

“The success of these creative rankings briefs, both the Midas Brand Report and the Midas Report, illustrate the importance in showcasing all facets of creative excellence within the financial advertising and marketing community,” said Ms. Armstrong.

The Midas Awards Grand Jury® is recruited from the most prominent international agencies and comprised of the most respected and influential minds in financial advertising. Client and agency leaders from the creative and marketing disciplines, as well as internationally recognized experts in financial policy and communications, will be represented. The jury awards Midas Gold and Silver Ingots to the highest scoring entries, and award the Grand Midas to the entry considered “Best in Show.” The results of the jury are parsed in an annual rankings brief, The Midas Report and The Midas Brand Report —a veritable who’s-who in the world of financial services advertising.

The deadline to enter the 2015 Midas Awards is September 15th, 2015. Enter before August 1, 2015 and receive a 15% discount with code PRM2015. Entry details and competition rules and regulations can be found on the Midas Awards website. View the 2014 winners in the Midas Winner Showcase.

Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories (NYSE: RDY) today announced the launch of its new visual identity and brand, that will guide its actions across the globe: Good Health Can’t Wait.

The new logo is an expression of Empathy and Dynamism, which helps keep patients at the center of everything that Dr. Reddy’s does. Empathy helps gain rich insights into patients’ needs, and Dynamism enables Dr. Reddy’s to address these needs - innovatively and with agility. The heart depicts empathy and caring while the circles connote dynamism and responsiveness.

The company has also chosen a new corporate colour – Purple, which is associated with creativity and wisdom. Overall, the new identity speaks of Dr. Reddy’s constant endeavour to understand the unmet and under-met needs of patients, and the swift action to solve them.

The objective of the rebranding exercise is to derive a unifying, patient–centric approach, to meet new and daunting challenges that patients are facing. With the healthcare scenario changing rapidly, it is important to be driven by a common goal that adds value to every touch-point for patients and partners alike.

The re-branding will be executed in two stages. In the first phase, the corporate brand has transitioned to the new identity. Phase two will see the new identity transitioning on to the company’s product packaging.

The existing logo and brand identity will remain in place and valid until changes that are pertinent to legal processes, documentation and other regulatory or statutory changes are complete.

Commenting on the launch, Satish Reddy, Chairman – Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories said, “Over 31 years, Dr. Reddy’s has grown from a manufacturer of APIs into a multinational pharmaceutical brand of repute, with operations in over 25 countries. Throughout this journey, we have remained true to our core values, even as we continually transform to keep pace with the changing needs of our patients and partners. Our belief ‘Good Health Can’t Wait’ lends new meaning to our core purpose of accelerating access to affordable and innovative medicines.”

G V Prasad, Co Chairman and CEO – Dr. Reddy’s Laboratories stated, “Our goal has always been singular: to ensure expensive medicines are within the reach of patients. Our focus has always been the patient. While we have expanded over the years, our purpose has remained unchanged: to bring high quality medicines within the reach of all. Today, we wish to re-dedicate ourselves to that purpose because we believe that for every human being, good health is always the first priority. In simple terms: ‘Good Health Can’t Wait.’

Dr. Reddy’s will deliver on its purpose and belief through 5 promises:

To bring expensive medicines within reach of patients who need them

To address unmet patient needs

To help patients manage their disease better

To enable and help partners ensure availability

To work with partners to help them succeed.

Dr. Reddy’s new identity expresses its purpose and belief in a compelling way and reiterates its focus on keeping patients at the heart of everything it does. Together with its partners, Dr. Reddy’s aims to ensure a better world for all, as Good Health Can’t Wait.

We are uniquely positioned, by virtue of LinkedIn’s data, to provide insight into gender equality across every industry represented on the network.

In fact, one of the winning teams of the LinkedIn Economic Graph Challenge is currently working on research that evaluates gender differences in self-promotion on profiles.

Having released our own workforce diversity numbers and an update on our Women In Tech (WIT) and Women’s Initiative (WiN) efforts last week, and with diversity and inclusion continuing to be an important issue across fields, we decided to take a look at gender parity across several industries. We analyzed millions of profiles and compared female representation across a dozen industry groups – with a detailed look at leadership positions and software engineers. Industry leaders can use this data as a benchmark to measure their progress towards achieving gender equality in the workplace.

An important factor to measure is the leadership gap, which we’re defining as the difference in female representation between membership overall, and members in leadership positions. We have found this gap to be most pronounced in healthcare, retail, and financial services. Looking at healthcare, 59.8% of all members in the industry are women. However, only 45.2% of members in leadership positions are women – a gap of 14.6%. Retail and financial services have a similar gap, with financial services having the lowest absolute representation of women in leadership (28.7%) among the three industry groups we highlighted. In these industries, leadership is less representative of their companies as a whole with regards to gender. For reference, government, education, and nonprofit industries have the narrowest gap (6.4%).

Technology companies are generally considered to be some of the most sought-after employers in the world. We have an inherent “home field advantage” when it comes to recruiting the largest and richest talent pools of our most critical position: software engineers. However, despite this advantage, our data indicates that software engineering teams in tech have proportionally fewer women than several non-tech industries; namely healthcare, retail, government, education, and nonprofits. For example, a typical software engineering team in a healthcare company is likely to be 32% women, compared to 20% in technology. While these non-tech industries employ significantly fewer software engineers versus technology, their teams tend to exhibit greater gender parity.

We noticed significant variance within the technology, financial services and insurance industries. Below, we broke out the technology group into its twelve component industries represented on LinkedIn.

Companies that operate in e-learning and information services industries have the most gender equal workforces within our technology group. However, even among these relatively inclusive tech industries, women are still significantly underrepresented within software engineering roles.

Below, we broke out the financial services and insurance group into its nine component industries represented on LinkedIn.

As we noted above, there is a significant leadership gap in these industries. Accounting, insurance, commercial real estate, and venture capital all have gaps of 16% or more. In accounting firms, women represent nearly half of the total employee base, but only 26% of leadership. The three industries that employ the most software engineers – financial services, insurance, and banking – all tend to include proportionally more women than each of the technology industries we looked at.

As we continue to build the Economic Graph, a digital representation of the global economy, we want to create more transparency for issues like gender diversity by drawing insights from our data, allowing business leaders and members alike to make better informed decisions that ultimately create economic opportunity.

Methodological details: The results of this analysis represent the world as seen through the lens of LinkedIn data. As such, it is influenced by how members choose to use the site, which can vary based on professional, social, and regional culture, as well as overall site availability and accessibility. These variances were not accounted for in the analysis.

Keen observers will note that there is no field for gender on the LinkedIn profile. We have inferred the gender of members included in this analysis by classifying their first names as either male or female. Members whose gender could not be inferred from their first names weren’t included in the analysis. Additionally, we excluded all members in countries where less than 67% of the respective member base could be classified as either male or female, to account for coverage lapses in our gender classifier.

Members in leadership positions were defined as those who have a seniority of director, vice president, CXO, owner, or partner. Software engineers were defined as those whose current title fit one of the following occupational categories: information technology engineer, database programmer / administrator, hardware engineer, software configuration / release manager, oracle developer / database administrator, data center manager, storage engineer, information security specialist, software tester, software developer, technology manager, information technology system administrator / engineer, embedded software engineer, network engineer, research development software engineer, database developer.

Written by Sohan Murthy

Source:LinkedIn

Moneybhaskar.com, the financial website by DB Digital turns one. Last year, with a fresh thought of ‘Fayde Ki Soch’, Moneybhaskar.com was launched with an intent to provide relevant information and insights about the world of finance and business.

With its uniqueness and quality of content, within a year the website emerged as the second largest financial website in the country (Source: Comscore; UVs: 2.4 million; PV: 15 million). Marking the first anniversary and its landmark success, moneybhaskar.com has now come up with its Gujarati version as well, that will continue to bring to the fore comprehensive and profound insights into the sector and empower the consumers to utilize this information for their benefits.

For the last one year, moneybhaskar.com has been offering real time market tips and trends, guidance, opinions and analysis to its users. From policy to  Politics, Corporate, State, Global news to Tax related information, anything related to Economy, Markets, SMB, Stocks, Mutual Funds, Commodity, Forex Trade, IT, Textile, Exports, Engineering, Handicrafts to daily market rates of Gold-Silver, Property, Gadgets and Automobiles-you name it, moneybhaskar.com has it. The USP and key reason behind this quick success is the interactivity of the website and its special emphasize on providing personalized guidance to its users through tips and trends. The website largely caters to the Stock & Commodity Investors along with Small and Medium Business Entrepreneurs (SMB) and Retailers followed by working professionals looking for investment opportunities.

In 2008, Viacom18 disrupted the Hindi entertainment landscape of India with the launch of their flagship brand COLORS. And now, one of India’s fastest growing entertainment networks is all set to repeat history with English entertainment as they announce two new English General Entertainment channels – ‘COLORS INFINITY’ and ‘COLORS INFINITY HD’.

The brand new channels will be co-curated by the multi-faceted celebrity duo – Karan Johar and Alia Bhatt – passionate viewers of international content. As creators and consumers of gripping content themselves, their biggest contribution to the channel would be to design a disruptive and addictive show line-up to bring a great blend of insight and finesse to COLORS INFINITY. The channels will be available across DTH & Digital cable platforms.

On the latest offering from the Viacom 18 stable, Sudhanshu Vats, Group CEO, Viacom18, said, “Today, we are the world’s second largest English speaking population and live in an environment where English is seen as a ladder to personal progress. The market is widening its appeal across viewers who think and speak in English, but haven’t been invited to consume international entertainment yet. COLORS INFINITY aims to speak to this larger audience which goes beyond the metros and has never been addressed by the category. English is an extremely important space for us and with this move, we will further strengthen our share in the category.”

In unprecedented acquisition for the Indian market, the network has entered into major multi-year deals with Warner Bros. International Television Distribution, NBC Universal, Sony Pictures Television, Twentieth Century Fox, Lionsgate, MGM, BBC and Endemol Shine amongst others.

The channel boasts of never-seen-before content in India, both scripted and unscripted, that will span genres such as Drama, Superheroes, Comedy, Fantasy, Crime and Thrillers. Additionally, there is a special focus on Reality television with some of the world’s biggest shows across Dancing, Cooking, Magic, Singing & other lifestyle interests. The channel will also play home to some of the biggest global Live Events & Award shows, as also premium biopics, mini-series & documentaries.

Talking about COLORS INFINITY, Ferzad Palia, EVP, Viacom18 and Head, English Entertainment said, “Globally, television series have become a force to reckon with, be it in terms of scale of production, Hollywood actors being cast, quality of story-telling, writing and in many other ways. This is the ‘golden age’ of television. COLORS INFINITY, with its sheer breadth of offering and carefully selected content from across global markets, will be the definitive platform for the best in English language entertainment across genres. Freshness will be at the core of what we do, be it the content we air, scheduling strategy or marketing. Our objective is to grow the category by broadening the appeal and reaching to a wider base.”

On having Karan and Alia on board as co-curators, he further added “Karan and Alia have been an integral part of our decision making process. Their perfect blend of insight and finesse has helped shape our content selection and brand. We're delighted to welcome them to the COLORS INFINITY family and to work closely with them.”

The channel is slated to release information regarding its mega show line-up and programming schedule along with the marketing strategy, in the days to come.