MUMBAI: For the first time, India’s top digital marketers came under one roof to appreciate and uphold the brilliant work that their peers are doing exclusively on the digital front. Put together by Moneycontrol and IAMAI, the maiden Digital Marketing Awards saw a healthy turnover of CMOs, executives and creatives from various sectors in the industry.
Dentsu Aegis Network chairman & CEO South Asia Ashish Bhasin set the tone of the awards function with his address to the audience. “Digital marketers should get confident,” he said, adding, “We must move on from convincing others and ourselves about the imminent digital future with quotes, studies and results. If someone isn’t convinced already, leave them be. They will soon follow after.”
Staying true to the medium that the show was vouching for, attendees were requested to tweet about the event with #DMAwards, with a live Twitter feed visible to all on the monitor.
Network18 group board of director Rohit Bansal was the Keynote Speaker at the award ceremony and shared his views on the future of digital marketing where new trends were being introduced every day.
On the difficulty in categorising the entries, jury and Mahindra Holidays & Resort India CMO Deepali Nair shared that the first edition of the awards was definitely a learning experience and based on the results and feedback the jury is considering to club or separate a few categories. “When deciding on how many categories to have it is always a debate as to what to club and what not to. After we got the entries, there was a bit of learning on how to categorise the digital campaigns. You may see one or two more categories next year because in clubbing some categories, we saw some entries losing out. Some brands are restricted by virtue of their categories and hence we are thinking of separating them. A category like Travel and Hospitality is vast and there is a lot of good work, so each deserve their own category for the awards,” Nair said.
Conversely, she added, “In several awards we have seen bank, insurance and mutual funds as separate categories. But when you think of financial services and what they are doing on the digital front in their digital brand communication, I feel that is a category we can club together.”
Speaking on the occasion, Moneycontrol COO Rubeena Singh said, “Brands have started investing a lot of money in digital marketing, which is significantly growing every single day. We at Moneycontrol have also taken path breaking initiatives to reach out to the youth through this medium. Being the face of India’s digital growth story, we feel there couldn’t have been a better opportunity for us to recognise the leaders in the digital marketing industry today.”
The awards come at a crucial juncture when the industry upgrades itself to the changing times and not only churn out serious digital work but have yardsticks and standards to compare and appreciate the trends setters.
The winners, who took away the Digital Marketing Awards are as follows:
• Karthi Marshan, Kotak- Digital Marketer of the Year, Banking/ Insurance
• Gaurav Suri, UTI mutual fund - Digital Marketer of the Year, Mutual Fund / Broking
• Naveen Kukreja, Policy Bazar - Digital Marketer of the Year, ECommerce / Online Classified
• Manmeet Vohra, Starbucks - Digital Marketer of the Year, Travel /Hospitality
• Bedraj Tripathy, Godrej Interio- Digital Marketer of the Year, FMCG / Consumer Durable
• Aparna Lal, Microsoft - Digital Marketer of the Year, IT / ITES
• Karan Sarin, One Plus - Digital Marketer of the Year, Mobile Service/Hardware
• Reema Kundnani, Oberoi Realty - Digital Marketer of the Year, Real Estate
• Amit Tiwari, Philips - Digital Marketer of the Year, Healthcare
• Virat Khullar, Renault - Digital Marketer of the Year, Automobile
