Marketing through the recession:
is pay-for-performance advertising the silver bullet?

In these times we’re seeing ad budgets cut, agreements re-negotiated and the pressure to deliver increase on marketing, advertising and publisher teams.

Is pay-for-performance advertising the answer? Instead of paying for eyeballs or impressions, would you rather pay for sales or leads? Whither branding?

Google started this trend – can it spread beyond search to all digital advertising, including banners? Should this be the model for TV and print? Will we see the good old days of large allocations to branding again? How do marketers see media spends in this era of unprecedented accountability?

We (Pinstorm & our partner Lintas Media Group) along with the IAMAI are hosting a series of closed-door roundtables on these questions. The first one:

“Marketing through the recession: is pay-for-performance advertising the silver bullet?”

is on Tuesday, January 13, 2009, Mumbai – the first in a series of events to be conducted in Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai.

This open-format discussion will be led by Pradeep Srivastava of Idea Cellular, Ronita Mitra of ICICI, Rajiv Prabhakar of Sharekhan, Debadutta Upadhyaya of Yahoo and Lynn de Souza of Lintas and moderated by Mahesh Murthy of Pinstorm.

This closed-door event will be beneficial to those who make marketing / advertising decisions for their brands.

For more details, contact:
Asfaq Tapia | asfaq@pinstorm.com | +91 989 211 3910

Indian firm chosen among “Asia’s Hottest” three times in four years.

Pinstorm, the world’s leading pay-for-performance digital marketing firm has been selected by Red Herring Magazine to their list of Asia’s 200 Hottest companies for 2008. This is Pinstorm’s third appearance in the list, having graced it earlier in 2005 & 2006. Pinstorm has the distinction of being perhaps the only firm in the world to be selected thrice in four years.

The Red Herring Award is bestowed by Silicon Valley-based Red Herring magazine after evaluating the business model, analysing profitability forecasts, and assessing the management team.

Mahesh Murthy, Founder, Pinstorm said “Colour us red with joy. We first won when we were barely 20 people working out of one office. Today we are over 120 from 7 offices in 6 countries – and it’s a thrill to know that the world sees us just as hot as ever. Our pay-for-performance model is revolutionizing advertising both on the search and display fronts – and we hope to continue this hot streak for a long time to come”, Mahesh Murthy added.

Pinstorm is the only India-based MNC advertising firm, with offices in USA, Europe, China, Singapore, Malaysia and India. We are unique for our integrated approach which re-bundles creative and media in the digital world. Pinstorm’s solutions are created across Display, SEM, SEO, WAP, SMS, Social Media, Viral and other digital media – while they are charged for only on a pay-for-performance basis. Clients don’t pay for strategy, creative, servicing or media – but only pay for the measurable branding impact and prospect responses generated. Our clients around the world include Microsoft, Jet Airways, Yahoo, HSBC, Standard Chartered, Canon, Panasonic, Sharekhan and NIIT.

Mahesh Murthy of Pinstorm will participate in a discussion organised by IAMAI on The Conference on Digital Marketing, to be held on 9th September ’08, at Taj Residency, Bangalore. His panel will discuss the allocation of ad spend between digital and traditional media.

You can find the itinerary for the rest of the event at http://is.gd/2lgF.

It’s been a while since this space was updated. Not that we have had nothing to say, just too much to do! What better way to kick things off again than to tell you of our recently concluded Annual Off-Site.

Unlike the last two years, we headed to Goa (hell yeah!) this year for one whole week. However, this year was special for a different reason; Pinstorm has added offices in the EU and China apart from being present in Singapore, Malaysia and the US and it was the first time that all Pinstormers were meeting in one place. You can imagine the pandemonium that ensued!

125 Pinstomers from across the world started for Goa on the 25th of August ‘08, from the Mumbai head office. We caught the Garib Rath – ‘chariot for the poor’ in Hindi- train, which turned out to be quite a misnomer as we were seated in AC sleeper compartments which also had (working) electrical sockets to power our gadgetry.

Imagine a group that large, spread over three bogies, running all over the train, laughing boisterously and generally having a good time.

The pinvasion of Goa started with the occupation of Sun City Resort near Baga beach. Once there, the group was divided into 12 teams of around eight people each, with a captain and vice-captain. An events schedule of conferences and tasks of the week was handed over to all captains.

The Pinstomers spent the remainder of the week taking part in various conferences and outdoor activities. We were privileged to have Alok Nanda – founder, Alok Nanda and Company; NP Satyamurthy – Joint President of Lintas Media Group and Sanjay Khare -Executive Creative Director of Euro RSCG, India, hold special sessions with a team task assigned at the end. Teams were then scored on the basis of how well they executed the tasks.

In the outdoor activities the teams took part in learning how to read a compass and tie different knots. The best part however was the activity where the teams had to race all over Goa, each destination providing a clue to the next, like The Amazing Race. The only difference being that the Pinstomers were left in the lurch with a bottle of water, biscuits and Rs. 20 (US$0.45!) only per person. Personal money and mobile phones were banned too! Even after two days, the company is still buzzing with the different modes of transport the teams hitched rides on to complete the race. More on this later! (yes, we’ll devote an entire post to this one Its here.)

As the minutes ticked by, the Pinstormers on the station were seen lying on the railway track able to convince the station master to delay the train at the Goa station by 12 whole minutes! This allowed us to jump off the buses and into the train just in the nick of time!

All in all, the entire week turned out to be a lifetime experience for all of us, which brings us to the next question: How soon are we having the next off-site?

Images at gallery.pinstorm.com