Interview: Chaitanya Ramalingegowda, co-founder and director, Wakefit

Launched nearly eight years ago as a D2C mattress brand, Wakefit has now widened its range of offerings to include home décor and furniture. Chaitanya Ramalingegowda, the company’s co-founder and director, recounts the brand’s offline journey to Christina Moniz and talks about its strategy to compete with large, legacy brands in the home business. Edited excerpts:

Yours is a high investment category. What does it take for a newbie to succeed?

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Schneider Electric’s Chris Leong on using AI and building sustainability lead strategies for brands

With Sustainable Development Goals being made mandatory by the Indian government, it is now important for all companies and states to follow and achieve these 17 goals. It is here that Schneider Electric India believes that it has an edge over others, as it has several industry leading brands in its portfolio. Schneider Electric India had launched an innovative marketing campaign ‘60 Years Innovation Yatra’ in October 2023, with the aim of increasing awareness about sustainability and celebrating 60 years of glorious presence in the country.

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Pricey proposition

One of the biggest disruptions in 2023 was JioCinema making the Indian Premier League (IPL) free for audiences in its bid to scale up its viewer base. Asone of the new entrants in the over-the-top (OTT) business, the platform had to do something extraordinary to compete with the likes of Prime Video and Disney+ Hotstar.Let’s not forget that Viacom18, which owns JioCinema, spent a mammoth Rs 23,758 crore for the IPL digital broadcast rights for the 2023-27 period. How viable is it then for the platform to keep offering premium content like this for free?

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Tips Industries’ Kumar Taurani on how company plans to maintain its profit as it continues to grow the business

Music plays a critical role in the lives of Indians from Tansen of the Mughal era to popular singers including Kishore Kumar, Mohammad Rafi, Manna Dey, Asha Bhosle and Lata Mangeshkar to these days Arijit Singh, Shreya Ghoshal, Armaan Malik among others. Over the years, music companies like Tips Industries have been the bridge between music artists and lovers, and now with the advent of music streaming apps and other content lead platforms such as YouTube, the bond has grown.

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Sports channel genre witnesses 10% decline in ad volume in July-September 2023, reveals TAM report

The Sports channel genre experienced a 53% increase in advertising volumes during April-June 2023 when compared to January-March 2023. Whereas, July-September 2023 observed a decline of 10% in ad volumes for the sports genre over January-March 2023. Moreover, compared to July-September 2022, ad volumes in the sports genre witnessed a growth of five percent in July-September 2023, according to a report by TAM.

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Tectonic shifts! Investment in martech takes a nose-dive

Despite a lot of chatter around how brands need to boost up the martech stack to be able to create marketing strategies around first-party data, it seems only a handful of ad-tech and martech start-ups have managed to get funds Investment in martech and adtech start-ups slumped by 94.2% to $45.2 million between January till December 20, 2023 from $769.5 million in CY2022, reveals data from Tracxn, a start-up data platform “In 2023, overall economic uncertainty led to a downturn in investments across sectors. Martech, encompassing 19 categories, experienced a substantial decline from $13.2 billion in Q1 to $3.1 billion in Q2 FY2023, respectively. This decline was influenced by a $10 billion investment in ChatGPT in Q1 and a $1.3 billion investment in Inflection AI in Q2,” Mitesh Shah, co-founder, Inflection Point Ventures, said.

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Flexing muscle

The need for co-working spaces is rising in tier-2 and tier-3 cities as companies strive to offer flexible work arrangements to reduce costs, stay close to their employees, and retain valuable staff. Also, considering the growing opportunities in many of these cities including several infra projects in the pipeline, a host of large corporations see this as an opportune time to expand base there. For instance, Incuspaze, which manages 2.5 million sq ft across 14+ cities, is expanding to smaller locations and has developed facilities including in Indore, Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Kochi, and Dehradun and is aiming to be in 30 cities by 2025. Awfis, which started expanding its network into tier-2 cities in FY18, has a presence in seven cities including Indore, Nagpur, Bhubaneshwar, and Jaipur. These brands are focusing on providing premium offerings in fully customised offices that can also accommodate international clients.

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Disney Star pitches U-19 World Cup to advertisers

Broadcaster Disney Star has begun making presentations to advertisers and media agencies for the upcoming ICC Under-19 Cricket World Cup, which begins on January 19 in South Africa.

The tournament will mark the start of the international cricket calendar for 2024. However, given that several senior cricket tournaments featuring India are in the pipeline including the India-Afghanistan three-match T20 series starting this week (Thursday) and the India-England test series beginning later this month (January 25), Disney Star is keeping advertising rates competitive, media industry sources said. The aim is to attract sponsors, they said.

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Blogger’s Park : Sustainable innovation

By Nand Kishore Chaudhary

There are no two opinions about the fact that innovation is critical for the growth and survival of business organisations. Firms that refuse to embrace innovation face stagnation. It is equally true that the responsibility to ensure sustainable innovation lies on the shoulders of ethical global business leaders.

There is also merit in the argument to preserve traditional craftsmanship. Inevitably, striking a judicious balance between preservation and innovation will be challenging. However, environmental sustainability will be an overriding factor to guarantee access to natural resources to our future generations

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On the spot with Ramanuj Shastry, creative chairman & managing partner, Infectious Advertising

Argentinian agencies are known to hit the ball out of the park consistently, but this time GUT managed to hit the ball into the flippin’ moon orbit. Stella Artois is an old Belgian beer, its first brewery opened back in 1326. Hence the idea is this: if Europe has been enjoying Stella Artois for the last 600 years, people drinking beer in any European artwork at this time, are probably enjoying Stella Artois. So GUT developed an algorithm that analysed paintings by Old Masters where people are drinking alcohol.

And based on variables such as the year of painting, place, the type of glass, the colour of the liquid, the distance between the artist and the original brewery, Artois’ distribution coverage in the year of the painting and potential competitors, they came up with a number – the probability that it was a Stella Artois. In one fell swoop, GUT and Stella Artois managed to insinuate that Manet, Van Gogh and all other great European masters were ‘probably’ endorsing Stella for the last 600 years.

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