South Asia’s leading digital brand management firm Pinstorm announced today that it is launching its newest social media ranking scheme, based around thought leadership and not mere celebrity.

Speaking about the rankings, Pinstorm head Ansoo Gupta said “Of late social channels have become clogged with pseudo-celebrities, Bollywood types and sports people who have millions of fans but say little. This is the first-ever attempt to curate a listing of true thought leaders and people who have a philosophical bent of mind. These are people who make you think deeply about life and about important social issues with the thoughts they express online every day.”

The list of rankings are called “Wise Indian Thought Leaders & Exemplary Social Servants” and the list has been created using Pinstorm’s proprietary technologies.

“We hope you will not just follow the rankings, but also share it with your friends” added Ms. Gupta “many among us want a return to the early days of the Internet which was less polluted, and had more signal than noise. This list gives us a chance to get back to the good old days.”

Your suggested additions to this list are welcome and may be tweeted to If you do have more suggestions for this expert-curated list, please tweet them to @Pinstorm or email them to info@pinstorm.com.

Pinstorm has won the Indian Social Media Community of the Year award at WATAwards 2011 for its Social Media Management for Cafe Coffee Day in 2010.

Commenting on the win, Ansoo Gupta of Pinstorm said “A successful social community is the one which is abuzz with member’s conversations and activities. We’re really proud of winning an award for what is basically a focused Facebook and Twitter-based community with no bells and whistles other than great content and incredible engagement – in fact the engagement levels were 10 times that of other communities that were 4 times larger in member-count. It’s really bold of a retail and footfall-based brand to almost completely stay away from traditional media and choose to build its brand using only digital and specifically social media. The real plaudits here are to our visionary and bold clients at Cafe Coffee Day. This kind of work re-defines marketing communication itself – and we’re thrilled to be part of this effort.”

Here’s a brief  showcase of the Cafe Coffee Day work on Facebook and Twitter:

Cafe Coffee Day – Social Media Management from Vimeo.

It was five years ago this year that Pinstorm was born and a lot has happened since. What started off as an SEO/SEM firm has now moved on to become a full-fledged digital advertising company across 3 continents, and a family of 120 pinstormers. In the last five years, we got Red Herring’d as one of the Hottest Companies in Asia – all the three times we participated! We have been invited to speak all over the world – most recently at the 140Conf, the first twitter conference of its kind in the world. Some of our bigger clients include a telecom provider, arguably India’s largest private sector bank and a reputed educational university in Singapore among many others. We are building a brand and more importantly a culture which inculcates pay-for-performance, honesty and integrity.

The last five years have been kind to Pinstorm. We are perhaps the only digital advertising MNC in the world to be headquartered in India. After our offices in Singapore,Kuala Lumpur, New Delhi, Santa Clara and Bangalore,  it brings us great pride to launch Pinstorm’s first Europe office in Zurich, Switzerland this year. We are at Feldeggstrasse 49, so if you are ever in the area, drop in for a bite of chocolate :-)

Here are some of the photographs of the new place. That’s Christian Funke and Marion Walz you see in the pictures below:

The 140 Characters Conference (140conf) is a conference in NYC on the June 16-17 2009, about the effects of Twitter on various industries. Mahesh Murthy of Pinstorm was invited to speak there. Here is his presentation:

Here is Mahesh’s video from the event:

Mahesh’s pic, courtesy @lauriemeisel

Some stats about this post (because we all like numbers):

• Mahesh was one of two Indians invited to speak at 140Conf.
• This post first went up 15 minutes after his presentation there.
• One tweet from @Pinstorm generated 211 visits in half an hour. The number currently stands at 328.
• This one tweet generated 25 conversations on Twitter.
• The presentation was favourited by SlideShare and showcased on the front page.
• It was viewed 214 times on SlideShare alone.

It was nice to read about advertising firms cautiously moving to pay-for-performance advertising in The Economist.

At Pinstorm, we started out just over 5 years ago, on May 1, 2004 as a pure pay-for-performance advertising firm. Today, we’re probably the leading practitioner of the craft, with 8 offices across the US, Europe, India, Singapore, Malaysia and China. And we’ve worked  with HSBC, Jet, HP, Dell and other global brands.

We think there is simply no option to an advertising firm offering pay-for-performance. The other models are broken.

If an advertising agency charges a commission on a media spend, you know they have an incentive to get you to spend as much as possible. So they can earn as much as possible. But today, brands are built by outsmarting, not outspending. So you’re not likely to be the winner in this relationship.

But, hey, you say, we pay our guys a retainer. We’re not sure that’s any better. Paying a team a fixed price for their time, regardless of what they do with it is just as big a recipe for disaster. You’ll end up with with an agency that tries to just keep you happy, so it can retain the retainer. There’s no reward for great work that moves the needle, so to speak – and no penalty if an agency’s asleep at the wheel. This can’t be an inspiration to either party.

Pay-for-performance is the answer – one that many agency heads have fought for decades. Quoting from the article: "Some agency executives are sceptical about being paid for value, because it is so subjective. They interpret talk about value as code for cost-cutting." We completely disagree.

When asked to present credentials, most firms will talk about how much value they add – but when asked to measure that very value, you hear the bugles of retreat. And we don’t think it’s about cost-cutting – but quite the opposite, but more on that later. More importantly, marketers don’t have subjective measures of effectiveness. Their jobs are on the line if they aren’t able to convince their bosses and their boards that they’re objectively, measurably adding value.

The problem is different: with agencies fighting furiously to get business, commissions have dropped from the 15% level to about 1.5% today. And retainers aren’t going up – they went down in many cases in this downturn. With all this, the advertising persuasion has become an even more terrible business to be in. It’s not strange that after all these decades, there are no advertising billionaires, no ad agencies in the Fortune 500 – and because there’s really so little money in the business, it’s crazy difficult to attract great talent.

Pay-for-performance can change all that – it can bring MORE money into the business, not less. For starters, it helps advertising spend go from a fixed marketing budget to part of a variable cost-of-sale. And when that happens, the spends get uncorked. One look at why people have thronged to spend money on clicks from Google is because marketers love to pay for advertising performance of any sort on a variable basis.

More so, pay-for-performance lets you break away from creative straightjackets – your client isn’t likely to interfere with your ads as much, as long as you’re on brand, if you’re being paid for how your ad works. And you’re less likely to think first of what will impress the judges at Cannes, and more of what will impress your consumer, on pain of not getting your salary and bonus. Of course, sometimes, you might end up doing both, which is a fine thing.

Three, to repeat the point, it’s not subjective. All of us in the digital world have learned to live and die on the sword of how our ads perform. You may claim that you don’t have that power of objective measurement on TV or Print. We think you’re somewhat right here – but not for long. Soon all TV and all print – not to mention all radio, outdoor and other media will be delivered digitally, and there’ll be mechanisms to measure effectiveness in each of these – if there aren’t already.

And it’s not just about clicks, leads and sales. There are sufficient measures already to measure all these supposed intangibles when it comes to brand awareness, strength and perception. And for ad firms  to be paid according to these.

Comes the final argument – "Oh, we’re okay to take some part of our compensation as a variable, but hey we can’t walk away from our fixed income". Why so? This is probably more about your confidence in your art and craft than anything else.

At Pinstorm we’ve been 100% pure pay for performance from day 1, and we’ve managed to fund our own growth around the world over these years based on the monies we’ve earned. We go to more insane lengths than most agencies can imagine – we even pay for all of the media spend from our own pockets – and we bet every single day that our media investments combined with our strategy and our creative – all paid for by us, if you please – will make money for our clients and for us. And truth be told, often it does, though sometimes it doesn’t.

(We’re big believers in bundling, not unbundling media from creative. But that’s perhaps a different article, a different blog post.)

We’ll end this with an analogy – the traditional world of media commissions is like the world of stock brokerages – a commodity offering where growth comes from buying market share by offering lower fees. The creative side of agencies, paid on a flat-fee basis are the stock-recommendation analysts, on salary with no responsibility for the success or failure of their recommendations. Both these segments are but a small part of today’s financial landscape. Right for some investors, but not all.

In that vein, we’re probably the mutual funds, the portfolio managers, the hedge funds or even the venture capitalists of this world, if you will. And I posit that it’ll be firms like ours or those after us that can open up this landscape and bring a lot more growth, vibrancy and innovation into the world of advertising and marketing. Yes, we will have our market crashes; yes, we will have our boom and bust cycles. But marketing and advertising are far too important activities to be left to some combination of media commissions and flat fees.

Of course, I’m curious now how the people at The Economist think they’ll charge for advertising now and in the future. :-)

Mahesh Murthy
Founder, Pinstorm.