The Hindu Business Line : Lintas India to tap into sports marketing

Mumbai, June 4 Lintas India is eyeing the arena of sports marketing and intends adding it as part of its marketing services to strengthen its positioning as an integrated communications agency.

Speaking to Business Line, Mr Charles Cadell, CEO, Lowe Lintas said, “There is an enormous opportunity in sports in India. Yes, we are looking at sports marketing but it would be in a specific area within it as we want to be good at what we are offering.”

Lowe Lintas has big ticket clients such as Idea Cellular which is already using the cricket platform extensively, and this has prompted the agency to look at extending its services to sports marketing.

In the recent past, Mudra had floated a specialist unit in sports marketing – 10 Integrated, while other agencies like Rediffusion DY&R (through Showdiff), Dentsu and Percept D’Mark already offer sports marketing services through their respective agencies.

Meanwhile, dCell, the agency’s strategic design consultancy division, would be launching 24/7, a production studio for collateral material. In future, 24/7 would be serving Lowe’s global clients and become the outsourcing hub for the agency’s operations.

Print production

“Most agencies are already offshoring production to places like Bangladesh and India where it is cheaper.

“In our case, we would start with print production and then move to digital production and serve our clients on a global basis from India,” added Mr Cadell.

Print production would involve making collateral material such as brochures, dairies, annual reports, calendars and leaflets, while digital production would extend it to making Web pages and banners.

Recession pinch

With clients tightening budgets in the recent past, Lowe Lintas has been feeling the pinch of recession.

Admits Mr Cadell, “Clients were exercising caution in the last quarter of the previous year and the first quarter of this year.

“But now there is palpable difference, especially after the elections. We have clients releasing spends and campaigns are ready to go for clients like Idea, Bajaj, Maruti and ICICI Prudential who had been cautious in the past.”

Rural marketing

Besides there is also a definite skew towards rural marketing spends, especially in such times. Linterland, the agency’s rural initiatives division, is already witnessing this trend.

“Clients now see serious growth and are getting committed towards the rural markets. There is a greater split in their marketing budgets and significant rural campaigns are being unleashed by brands like Castrol, Nokia, Idea and Lifebuoy in the rural markets,” said Mr Cadell.