I was pleasantly shocked to find over fifty agencies queuing up for the IIT Alumni rebranding mandate. With a budget of one hour – the only option was to defer the beauty parade by a few days.
It was even more interesting that two of the Big4 and 4 of the Big5 IT majors applied to be the rebranding agency. The traditional agencies seemed woefully short on both capability and resources. The game is data and other resources – whether creative or copy or media planning don’t matter. The message is king and the messenger and media used are both secondary.
With an instantaneous reach to 42,000 IIT alumni and 10,000 alumni next members – pretty much anyone – anywhere – is literally a second away. A stone takes more time.
Now using this network to achieve results at the speed of light is the primary ask from the agency. But then who or what is the agency.
Let’s look at the journey thus far. It started in 2019 with IIT Alumnus Sunil Khullar designing the IIT Font. All communications are done using this font which has been optimised to read a A4 page on a mobile screen. The emblems are characters in the font. And using these an ai version dating back to 2020 can generate anything – from a visiting card to a letterhead to a name plate to a billboard. No matter which iit and which logo – from 20 feet the prominent word readable is IIT. Sunil has a BTech from iit bombay with a masters in visual communication from IDC at IiT Bombay.
Now come to the emblems. These were designed by Prof Udaya Dharmalingham a iit alumnus. In terms of introduction, he designed the India rupee logo. He has a PhD in logo design from iit bombay.
The branding strategy, documentation and study reports along with media strategy is all done by Anytime Media – a new age digital agency founded by Dhaval Gupta and chaired by Mrinalini Gupta.
Mrinalini, Sunil and Udaya have been awarded as distinguished fellows of the Council for their outstanding work in the conceptualisation and brand creation of the IIT Alumni Council. They have set a bar which is really hard to better. Their continued presence in overseeing work of the new agencies being onboarded will ensure continuity and an accelerated development of data layers.
The model now is to co create. And not to enter into a typical client agency relationship. What is being proposed by the Media council is to create a 51:49 jv with the three chosen agencies to create a next generation agency platform built ground up for a data world in a digital society. The three empanelled partners will be one IT company, one knowledge company (like an accounting or consulting co) and one advertising agency. It is a new format and a new business model. The agency has to write a Rs 10 crore chq to buy equity to get the mandate. We did not expect many to be interested.
So agency onboarding for the beauty contest is being re opened.
This is a new one world. This is not a business I would want to be in. I don’t know who is the customer here.
