Facebook signs first agency deal in India with GroupM

Facebook signed its first agency deal in India with WPP’s integrated media and marketing company. This partnership was announced during the recent visit of Sheryl Sandberg, COO, Facebook to India. GroupM has been at the forefront of digital developments in India covering areas like Search & Platforms, Mobile, Content and Measurement.

"Our partnership with GroupM will benefit clients to reach over 100 million people in India, 84 million on mobile — both smartphone and feature phone —  and custom audiences within the 100 million in urban and rural India.” said Kirthiga Reddy, Head, Facebook India. "We’re excited about this wide-ranging collaboration which combines the strength of the world’s best global advertising platform with GroupM’s market-leading position to deliver personalized marketing at scale.”

GroupM South Asia CEO CVL Srinivas said "We are delighted with the Facebook partnership that can help unlock even greater value for our clients. We work closely with Facebook globally, regionally and locally. India is projected to be the largest country for Facebook by people very soon and we see exciting possibilities for our clients. This partnership adds to the set of enablers we have created over the years that can help drive digital adoption in our market."

GroupM has been creating cutting edge digital solutions for clients and given its access to data and research, has been integrating digital with traditional media for its clients. For Nokia Lumia, GroupM pioneered the deployment of Facebook’s outcome measurement and leveraged Facebook’s sophisticated targeting capabilities to deliver a 54x return on Facebook ad spend.

Once again, leveraging Facebook’s sharp targeting capability, GroupM delivered outstanding results for Arrow, a premium apparel brand. Arrow was running an end of season sale and wanted to drive a special discount promotion to an audience between 18 to 35-years-old residing in metro cities. Arrow was able to deliver a 30x return on Facebook ad spend and a significant redemption rate from this exclusive Facebook campaign.

GroupM has been creating cutting edge digital solutions for clients for close to 10 years. Given its leadership position and access to data and research, GroupM has been integrating digital with traditional media for its clients. GroupM agency brands today have fully embedded digital resources that are supported by the scale and leverage of the network.

To add to its digital offerings, last year GroupM India launched Mash Up a digital content unit which has been creating engaging digital content solutions for brands, the most recent being the digital video campaign with Kapil Sharma for Honda Mobilio. GroupM also manages a specialist mobile advertising company, Madhouse, bringing brands together with mobile media publishers to unleash the power of mobile. Its full service digital marketing agencies Quasar and Blazar include end of end digital solutions for advertising across the web, social media, search, analytics and creative services. As part of renewed focus on digital, GroupM in the last year has evolved its practices in Content, Movie Activation, Experiential Marketing and Analytics with a more digital focus.