In one of the largest brand-building exercises of recent times, the Reliance-Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group has appointed six advertisement agencies to capture the public imagination and will spend over Rs 700 crore (Rs 7 billion) on advertising this year. The figure promises to be among the highest in the country.
While Ogilvy & Mather and Mudra have been given the mandate for all corporate campaigns of the group, Leo Burnett and Everest Brand Solutions will be in charge of Reliance Communication's voice business, which accounts for a large chunk of the ad spends.
Sanjay Behl, head of branding and marketing, Reliance Communication Ventures said, "The pace and enormity of the re-branding of the company will be one of the fastest and the most complex carried out by any brand in India. Also, our advertising endeavour is to raise the floor on quality of our communication and support quality advertising with adequate media monies."
Behl pointed out that the company's major challenge over the rollout of its new corporate identity was the number of applications that needed to be changed on the Reliance mobile, which were far beyond conventional brand applications like product logos, communication material and retail signages and the challenge also traversed to mobile hardware and software applications.
He added that close to 500 branding applications had to be changed. While the makeover will pan across 4,500 towns and 300,000 villages in the next 25 days, the identity change has already been completed in the six metros.
The company has appointed Indian Market Research Bureau as its strategic partner for conducting a quantitative dip-stick to monitor the efficacy of the makeover and its impact on the consumer.
The advertising for the data and international business segment will be handled by Tribal DDB India, the interactive arm of Mudra.
This will include all online activities, mobile data as well as virtual calling cards.
Reliance Communication has aggressive plans to grow its international calling card business. The US currently has 600,000 users, Canada has 100,000 users and UK, where it launched its products two weeks ago, has about 5,000 users. Reliance enjoys a 55 per cent share of calls from the US to India.
Mudra will also handle the enterprise business, which includes the B2B integrated connectivity solutions. Contract will be in charge of the home segment where the group is foraying into. The home segment will involve Reliance's landlines, IPTV, and broadband.
Cartwheel, the creative shop run by D Ramakrishna, J Walter Thompson's former executive creative director, will be in charge of all value added services such as R World, now called Reliance World Mobile.
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