AAAI opens up membership to digital agencies

The Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI) constituted the first-ever Digital Agency Forum attempting to be truly representative of the current industry environment.

In a significant move, the Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI), the official national organization of advertising agencies, has opened its doors to digital agencies by allowing them to be full-fledged independent members. This will in particular benefit standalone, independent digital agencies that were left out from the AAAI as membership was only open to Creative, Media & Full Service Agencies. Membership to the AAAI not only helps protect their interests, and gives representation on industry forums, but also benefits the larger digital marketing ecosystem.

Ashish Bhasin,  President,  Advertising Agencies Association of India and CEO APAC & Chairman India Dentsu Aegis Network, said, “ In order to future proof AAAI it is absolutely essential to include the Digital Agencies as our members since digital is an important and ever-increasing part of our industry. With this in mind, Anupriya Acharya was nominated by the Executive Committee of AAAI to drive the Digital Media Forum, which has now resulted in the opening up of Membership for the Digital Agencies to become full-fledged members of Advertising Agencies Association of India, for the first time in our 75 years of history as an association. On behalf of AAAI,  I welcome the Digital Agencies to our membership fold and thank Anupriya Acharya for driving this initiative”.

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Anupriya Acharya, AAAI Vice-President, and Publicis Media India CEO said, “With digital advertising becoming so mainstream, there are many digital agencies operating in this space now. Hence, it is important that AAAI begins incorporating these too, to be truly representative of the current industry environment. In order to enable greater participation from the digital agencies, we created the first-ever Digital Agency Forum wherein we got key leaders from digital agencies of existing AAAI members  to identify important areas that are unique to the digital agencies and find solutions to address some of their challenges and opportunities.”

The Digital Agency Forum focuses on areas such as Account shift protocols, Viewability standards, and audience metrics, relationships with digital bodies, Best practices, Commercial norms, Talent & training, to begin with, but will expand its role as it grows.