The Hindu Business Line : Lintas Media, Pinstorm in tie-up for pay-for-performance

Mumbai, March 18 Multinational digital advertising company Pinstorm and advertising agency Lintas Media Group have announced a non-equity partnership designed to push clients to performance-driven media choices. The alliance between the two leading firms in the offline and online worlds is expected to put further pressure on traditional agencies and media houses.

Mr Lynn de Souza, Chief, Lintas Media Group, said, “We don’t think that just buying a digital agency will contribute to our client’s success. What attracted us to Pinstorm was its pure adherence to pay-for-performance — a vastly different model to the commission and retainer structures that Indian clients are used to. We think this model can go a long way in bringing accountability and transparency to investments in advertising.”

The pay-for-performance model was pioneered by Google and Yahoo, and has been pushed further by Pinstorm, , where the agency pays for the media and the creative — and the advertisers just pay for results.

Mr Mahesh Murthy, Founder of Pinstorm, said: “Around the world, media costs are going up and clients are cutting commissions and retainers because they aren’t able to see how their advertising is performing. At Pinstorm, we make it simple, by asking a client to only pay for the prospects or results we deliver. Our alliance with Lintas comes from our joint belief that the Rs 16,000-crore advertising industry needs a new model. We believe that working together, we can bring pay-for-performance advertising into the mainstream of advertiser choices.”

The alliance partners estimate that they will be able to drive an incremental Rs 100 crore of advertising to move over from traditional models to a performance-driven model in the next 12 months. “Digital advertising accounted for just 4 per cent of spends in India last year. With this alliance and other efforts, we believe that investments in digital advertising will cross the Rs 1,000-crore mark in India this year — which is almost a 100 per cent growth over last year,” said Mr Murthy.

The Lintas-Pinstorm alliance will first come into effect on Lintas’ roster of clients and soon expand to other businesses.

Lintas Media Group is among the largest media agencies in the country, managing a spend of over Rs 1,300 crore on broadcast, print, outdoor and other media for clients such as Idea, Bajaj Auto, Maruti Suzuki, ITC, Sony, UTI and Naukri.com.

Pinstorm is an independent digital advertising firm in South East Asia, with offices in Mumbai, Delhi, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Beijing and Santa Clara in Silicon Valley. Pinstorm uses proprietary technologies across search engine marketing, search optimisation, e-mail, SMS advertising, online display advertising, online community creation and blog management to handle the performance advertising needs of Yatra, Jet Airways, Taj Hotels, Share khan and HSBC in India.

The alliance is effective immediately and in place across all advertisers in the country.

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