Mindshare and Diageo win big at the Mobile Marketing Association SMARTIES India awards 2017

The Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) announced on Friday evening winners of its 2017 SMARTIES India Awards, returning for its sixth edition this year in New Delhi. The annual gala saw a full line-up of 42 awards in mobile strategy and industry-focused categories, celebrating innovation, creativity, and success across the mobile marketing ecosystem. Diageo was crowned the prestigious ‘Marketer of the Year’, while Mindshare was recognized as ‘Agency of the Year’.

This year, Mindshare leads the most wins, receiving 19 awards over 11 categories, ranging from Brand Awareness, Mobile Native and Programmatic, amongst others. Sony Entertainment Channel’s ‘Waltzing across TV: How 300,000 people switched channels to Super Dancer’ by Zapr Media Labs was recognized as ‘Best in Show’.

In addition, the following were presented with two Gold awards each in their respective categories:

Liva’s ‘#NoFilterNeha Campaign’ by Saavn – Cross Media, Mobile Audio
Sony Entertainment Channel’s ‘Waltzing across TV: How 300,000 people switched channels to Super Dancer’ by Zapr Media Labs – Brand Awareness, and Product/ Services Launch

Other brands awarded Gold include Godrej Greens, Iodex, Mars, PepsiCo, Hungama Digital Media Entertainment Pvt Ltd., Reckitt Benckiser, and Castrol Activ. A full list of winners is available in Appendix 1.

In an ongoing partnership with Knowledge Partner, Kantar Millward Brown, the research-based consultancy presented industry trends and characteristics of the winning campaigns.

Commenting on the winners, Shaveta Bhardwaj, Senior Executive Director, Kantar Millward Brown said, “We saw very interesting entries in comparison to last year; scale stood out for winning campaigns. Measuring brand outcomes is critical to success. It is important to think what ‘mobile’ can do for your ‘brand’ rather than what ‘brand’ can do on mobile.”

The winners were selected by a panel of judges comprising senior brand and agency marketers through a rigorous process, who deliberated over the submissions across four criteria – strategy, execution, creativity and business impact. The Jury comprised:

D Shivakumar, Chairman, MMA India
Siddharth Banerjee, Executive Vice President, Marketing, Vodafone India Ltd.
Prasun Basu, President, South Asia, Nielsen
Rohit Dadwal, Managing Director, Mobile Marketing Association Asia Pacific Limited
Shireesh Joshi, Founder CEO, Priism Consulting
Hemant Mehta, Managing Director, Media, Digital & Retail, Kantar IMRB, Chief Strategy Officer, Kantar South Asia
Sidharth Shakdher, Senior Vice President, Hotstar
Ravi K Shharma, SVP and Head of Sales, SAAVN
Gunjan Soni, Head of Jabong, Chief Marketing Officer at Myntra
Amrit Thomas, Chief Marketing Officer, United Spirits Limited, Chairman, Royal Challengers Bangalore

Pre-screeners were conducted by 52 senior brand and agency marketers from around the region.

This year, MMA partnered GUNN report and WARC to launch the first-ever Business Impact Index. The SMARTIES Index will identify, rank and award the marketing industry’s agencies, marketers and brands that are delivering the highest level of business impact by analysing finalist and winner data from all the SMARTIES™ programmes around the world.

The high quality of entries for this year’s SMARTIES India Awards demonstrates the increased awareness of mobile marketing and its potential in India, with the country boasting over 1 billion mobile subscribers, and 79% of internet traffic originating from mobile, compared to 50% globally.