We made history of sorts yesterday, by becoming the only brand management firm in the world to be awarded the “Red Herring Global Top 100” award this year.

The award is given by Red Herring magazine to companies, in their judgement, who show a combination of technological innovativeness and business success.

Winners in earlier years, we’re somewhat thrilled to note, include Google, Yahoo, YouTube and Skype. That certainly is one list we’re proud to be part of!

While we’ve won Red Herring awards before – they’ve been at the Asia regional level. This is the big kahuna – Global Top 100.

We’re humbled. We’d first like to thank our clients. You had faith in us from when we started out of a 400 square feet office in Bombay – and you’ve stayed with us and helped us grow to be the first India-based multinational ad firm, with offices in Europe, North America and Asia. Thank you.

We shared this with a couple of our clients late last evening when we heard the news. Rajiv Prabhakar who heads marketing at Sharekhan said, “At Sharekhan we’ve worked with Pinstorm for over 5 years – and I’m happy their investments in technology and delivering value have paid off. We look forward to more innovative work together.” And Charudatta Deshpande, who heads communications at ICICI Bank said, “We are proud to partner with Pinstorm and happy to see their technologies recognized as among the world’s best. We wish them all the best in the years ahead.” And both told us they could be quoted as saying so. Wow.

Sharing the thank-you honours are our people, past and present Pinstormers. We didn’t have much stacked up on our side when we started - no international lineage, no funding, no nothing. Yet you persevered and helped us build out our technology and business to a point where we’re now seen as among the world’s best. Thank you.

Some of you may be curious – what exactly is the technology and business edge that won us this award? For a deeper explanation, you might have to call one of us over to show you a demo – we don’t exactly publicise what we do.

But here’s a glimpse. We manage our clients’ digital personas using a combination of all relevant media – from mobile phones and search to social forums and banners. And we do so with one strategy, one creative approach, one team and a big advantage through our technology that lets us do more and scale better.

On the tech side, we started by building out BroadWords – our tool that generates long-tail keywords to lower SEM costs. Then we added LiveContext, which remains to date the only fully-automated SEM system we know of. CAT and OCAT help our clients ferret out what their rivals are doing on pay-per-click and SEO: words, CTR, costs, rankings and all. That was in the first few years.

Then we turned to other forms of digital brand management. LiveBanners bring a never-before dynamic changeability to banner ads. Our cost-per-impact system puts to death the obsolete CPM-based banner buys that others do and allows our clients to get much more branding for much less. In the last couple of years, Social Media has been on top of our minds.

We built TweetReach and p1n.in – some combination of that may have brought you here. This allows us to measure not just the virality of outbound social media messaging, but also more interesting things like the CTR of tweets and the geographical targetability of Facebook messages. BuzzMeter is our industrial-strength tracking system that picks out over 100,000 mentions a month for just one brand alone – a hundred times more than Google Alerts do – and does so across multiple brands. While our SocialConsole is an equally-industrial strength workflow system that helps clients manage thousands of conversations in parallel keeping in mind both their Customer Service and their confidentiality needs.

But as we’re fond of saying, tech alone doesn’t do very much. All of this has been implemented as part of well-conceptualised and fully-integrated marketing plans, with great stuff from not just our creative and media teams but also our client services teams who are far flung-out around the planet. Thank you, guys!

Sanjay, our Head of Design probably hit the nerve when he sent a mail around to us a few hours after receiving the award. Yes, we won this big award – and our clients and people were to thank for it.

But to make it all happen, we’ve had to work late and on weekends, uproot ourselves from our hometowns, not be around when our kids are growing up, have someone wake us up at unearthly hours to catch flights – and much more. And the people who took the brunt of the pain were our families and loved ones.

To all of you, our spouses, partners, parents, kids and extended families – thank you. You helped us come this far. And we hope you all feel that your sacrifices have been worth it.

We owe this to all of you.

Click here for our press release

Red Herring Top 100 Global Award Release is available here

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