Agency Feature - ZIRCA

Who are we?

ZIRCA is an independent global digital solutions company that provides cutting-edge digital advertising and content solutions to brands across industries. The company’s three key verticals—Content and Brand Solutions, Representation, and Platforms—work in tandem to unlock the value of its clients’ digital assets. The company’s diverse offerings range from rich media and programmatic to branded content creation.

ZIRCA today represents multiple Indian and global publishers and platforms, and enables them to monetize their multi-channel assets in India. The company exclusively represents several international brands including The Economist, Fast Company, Inc.com, MailOnline, and Microsoft in India. Collaborating with partners that range from content discovery and optimization platforms to programmatic advertising tech platforms, ZIRCA’s sales team is able to develop a revenue maximization strategy for its numerous clients. In addition, the company’s seasoned content team provides a spectrum of services ranging from media planning and content strategy to content amplification.

What's in the name?

While ZIRCA was being formed, we asked the employees of our sister company to pick out a name as part of the branding exercise. The brief was simple: suggest a name that would have an instant brand recall. Several names were picked out amongst which ZIRCA caught our attention. Since the name stood out for its uniqueness, we felt it would resonate solely with our company.

What we do?

Through the company’s Content and Brand Solutions vertical, ZIRCA helps brands develop and define a content strategy, as well as create and curate content for various digital channels. The company is also adept at finding the best way to amplify your brand’s content while ensuring it reaches the right target audience. ZIRCA’s strength lies in leveraging content to create higher recall value and effective engagement with potential consumers.

The company also helps brands amplify their content and reach the rightaudience at minimal costs. Through its Platforms vertical, the company delivers robust programmatic advertising capabilities as a result of its partnership with leading technology company MediaMath.

ZIRCA even supports online publishers and brands in monetizing their multi-channel digital assetsand generating revenue for them.They exclusively represent international brands like The Economist, MSN, Skype, and Bing in India, and Fast Company and Inc.com in both India and South East Asia.

Their proprietary offerings include ContentdB and ContentiQ (both currently running in beta versions). ContentdB is an integrated native advertising management platform that lets you run global content campaigns across multiple search, social and content discovery channels from a single dashboard. It enables you to reach the right audience at the right time with the right content, through the right channel at optimal cost. While ContentiQ, a first-of-its-kind content intelligence tool, combines the power of audience profiling data and their content consumption behavior data to help make research-backed content media plans.

Why we do it?

ZIRCA has always been at the forefront of bringing new publisher brands and technologies to India. Today, as we all know the market trend is rapidly moving towards content marketing. But the understanding we have gained is that there is a dearth of technologies in this space. Hence, we are developing products that can help marketers drive higher efficiency in their content planning and amplification.

How we evolve?

Our saliency lies in our understanding of the need gap, our ability to solve problems for our clients, and doing all of this by leveraging research, strategy and creative solutions. What differentiates us from our competitors is our in-depth understanding of the rapid shift in content consumption patterns through the use of our proprietary tools, including our own content intelligence platform. We are constantly focused on identifying growing trends and then providing solutions to Indian marketers so that they can take advantage of new platforms and technologies. To that end, we’ve recently launched an integrated native advertising management platform ContentdB, which will be a trendsetter by enabling brands to drive better results from their investments in digital.

Social responsibility in social media

We advise all marketers and agencies to ensure communication on all social media platforms is clear-cut and truthful. Social media is like a double edged sword—on one side it provides instant reach and connects with the audience, and on the other, it can be harmful if not used properly.

Need of the hour

India is the second largest country in terms of Internet users, and will soon beat China as well at the rate it is growing. It’s time for us to have a strong, all-encompassing IT policy that includes cyber laws, social media usage, security laws, privacy laws, IP laws, etc.

We learned the hard way

Right now, India is at a crucial juncture where it is poised to be a ‘digital superpower’, which in turn can give a huge boost to its economy given the right ingredients such as high mobile penetration, rapid internet adoption and a youthful educated population. Though, in India, the print medium is still very strong—compared to most countries where print is slowing down and getting overtaken by digital—the government is very focused on developing its digital economy moving forward.

Did we just share that?

Funny SMM incidents or amusing experiences with clients (without naming them if you’d prefer)

They work with us

We are led by an experienced management team whose total experience is close to 200 years. Our team of more than 120 digital experts across India and Southeast Asia enables us to rapidly engage with our clients and our partners globally. We work with over 3,000 brands and have exclusive partnerships with The Economist, Inc.com, Fast Company, MediaMath, MailOnline, Microsoft, MSN, and Bing.

Industry as we foresee

Today, not only is the consumer base increasing, but also their appetite to use content via social sites, social apps, etc. Every marketer is now trying to be a ‘content creator’ or a ‘publisher’ so that they can reach and engage consumers directly where their consumers are, instead of going via a ‘formal’ media channel. This is creating a whole new industry that may even be bigger than the ‘media industry’ itself.

A day without Internet

Professionally, a day without internet may be a disaster, but I would consider it a blessing in disguise as it would give me the opportunity to catch up with people in person rather than electronically. After all, we are all human and the internet is just an enabler for us.

Lastly, are you hiring?

We’re a young, dynamic organization, where each individual through his or her contribution, makes a significant impact on one or more goals of the company. Almost 90% of our workforce comprises young professionals who live and breathe the digital medium. We’re constantly looking to hire talent that can help foster innovation and growth at ZIRCA.