We’ve won recognition for our search capabilities, we sense our social media capabilities are much talked about and now we’ve bagged an award for display advertising.

Perhaps that ‘integreatness’ mantra is being lived up to, after all.

Yesterday, our campaign for CNN was awarded the Gold at the first Digital Media Awards, for online banner advertising using rich media.

For all who asked, here’s the campaign:

At first glance, you’ll see this ad and say “What’s so rich media about it?” But look a little closer and you’ll see this is not a regular banner ad.

This campaign emphasised that the CNN web site always has the very latest world news and videos on it – and we did so by importing, in real-time, the news images, videos and headlines into our ads – which ran on non-CNN news sites.

How did we do it? We used a very clever piece of technology to pull top stories from CNN.com in real time. Our proprietary technology enabled us to meet the brief effectively and showcase the very latest from the CNN web site in these banner ad executions.

Rich Media doesn’t just have to be rich in audio and video – it can be rich in interactivity and surprise. The click through rates on this campaign – significantly higher than industry standards – proved us right – we engaged and delighted!

Follow this link for a demo. Click on the ad you will see, to go to the right story on the live CNN website.

Read the full story on the IDMA 2010 awards on exchange4media.com

In his latest WSJ column, our CEO Mahesh Murthy, talks about harnessing the power real-time marketing.

Some of you may recognize the construct in the headline with the symbol – it’s called a hashtag, and the 4-odd million folks on Twitter in India and the other 90 million worldwide will probably know what it is.

It’s an indicator of a topic that could trend.

And boy, has this topic trended today.

The travails of the Indian godman who was outed yesterday for trying to achieve nirvana with a south Indian film actress has caught the imagination of Indian twitterati. At the moment as I write this, the Nithyananda hashtag is trending at somewhere between #7 and #8 in the world, with over 1,350 contributors who have weighed in on the “X by day, Y by night” theme, with over 5,000 tweets. Go here to see the latest tally.

But Twitter aside, it is the top trending topic on Google search today – actually it’s 6 of the top 10 topics at this moment, the others being the name of the Tamil actress, his alleged partner in passion, that mainstream media has so kindly but futilely blocked out.

Now if you take that the average person on Twitter has about 125 followers, then the hashtag and mention has already touched at least 1 million people in India and elsewhere today. Not counting the many more who are already discussing this avidly on Facebook and other platforms.

1 million folks is many more people than any newspaper reached in India this morning; or any daytime TV show will reach. So this isn’t just about a flash trend – it’s a huge opportunity.

This isn’t just news – this theme is a lightning rod for continuing entertainment, albeit at the poor godman’s expense. While some contributions on the hashtag are really funny – from the inimitable Ramesh Srivats’ “Bhagwan ke liye” by day and “mujhe ch*d do” by night, the medium has allowed everyone to chime in with their own 2 cents: sample “Brahman by day, bra man by night” and I predict in the process brightened up the mood at thousands of offices around the country.

There might be nothing new about this incident. Indeed, we’ve had a long and lovely record in India of godmen – from Osho to Dhirendra Not-So-Brahmachari – who were known to explore non-theoretical routes to bliss. We are, after all the country that wrote the Kama Sutra and built Khajuraho.

What’s interesting though is that never before have we had a medium, or a set of connected digital platforms that the average entrepreneur could so easily take advantage of to reach so many, at such little cost.

Is there a learning here for a business, or a brand? Let me venture a few.

One, realize that we live in a world where real-time marketing is becoming a necessity. My favorite analogy is that a brand manager’s role is increasingly more like that of an air traffic controller – watch your prospects globally in real-time, and manage your campaigns 24 by 7. See the trends early, watch them build momentum and make your calls, really quick. In the future you might even have to work in shifts. If a trend lasts from Saturday to Sunday, will your brand not take advantage of it because it’s your day off? In the marketing firm I run, we already have a few folks working weekends to keep tabs on the buzz for the brands we help manage.

Two, realize that you can’t predict the next hashtag, or theme, or meme. You can either have a system that can quickly learn to evaluate and take advantage of it or, you’ll need to learn to roll your own, and deal with the unpredictability there.

Three, learn to respond pretty damn quick. This trend today, for instance could be used by anybody from a TV channel looking for an audience to a rival religious sect as an opportunity to advertise. No one has, yet. You should, the keyword prices are really cheap right now: zero bidders. And it doesn’t always have to be paid advertising. I, for one, have shamelessly latched on to this meme to write and launch this column. I’ll try to tag it appropriately, and put it up on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Buzz and such to reach you right away. Perhaps it might get a little more traffic as a result.

Four, response isn’t always the best offense. How do you learn to get these working for you more reliably? Think about your brand promotion – can it become news by itself on a regular basis? A small manufacturer of kitchen appliances called Blendtec has built a cult around their regular videos of what their blenders can, well, blend. If you’ve ever wondered whether an iPhone or a golf ball can be liquefied, wonder no more. Blendtec’s funny videos on the – yes, free – YouTube platform have  been seen well over 20 million times. I can’t imagine the cost of a TV commercial to get that kind of reach and attention.

Five, what if it’s a wave against you? What if you were the unfortunate Nithyananda? Well, if you had the right Hollywood-style agent you could parlay it into a book and TV deal and get even more followers if you wanted. But levity aside, if you wanted to clear your name, you should use this very medium to tell the world. A soundbite to a TV reporter won’t cut it here.

As an aside, somewhere we all need to realize that there is very little privacy on this planet. It’s really difficult to ‘get off the grid’.

What you might reluctantly adjust your thinking to is the opposite – to take advantage of the grid and the network out there and make it work for your personal and business brands. Sure enough, the buzz on this topic will die down in a day or two. And there’ll be something else after that, for its fifteen hours of fame.

Rakhi Sawant, Salman and Blendtec get it. Perhaps a Tabu, Rani and a Kelvinator don’t.

To paraphrase Brendan Behan, the Irish playwright – there’s no such thing as bad publicity – except your own obituary.

Yesterday, a bunch of admen and women tried to showcase their mental prowess and knowledge of supposedly pointless information. (Though, if it was so pointless, how come it won us valuable vouchers?)

The BBC Think Tanked quiz was held at Zenzi Mills in Bombay and Pinstorm sent in two teams along with a cheering squad sans the pom poms – much to the relief of our HR. Many internal demons were conquered as the brave Pinstormers managed to stay sober at a venue where booze was free and flowing.

Mahesh, Nikhil and Namita managed to bag the third prize after a tight battle across 40 questions while Gayatri, JK and Vibhas managed to come in sixth in the pecking order.

A great performance if we say so ourselves. Especially considering that the quizzing careers of most of us were limited to their rather distant college days (Mahesh as always continues to be the exception, even to this rule!) .

Not only was Pinstorm’s quizzing ability acknowledged they also gave us a prize for being the noisiest bunch around. A big thank you to Anjali, Vicky and their respective vocal chords.

The evening concluded on a good note as Mahesh conducted an informal open round of quizzing while the rest hit the bar and continued to gloat at their Crossword gift vouchers.

We’ll keep doing this and keep getting better at it. Coming soon, at a quiz near you. Do watch this space.

This Sunday, a few Pinstormers did what no other Pinstormer had ever done before. They took charge of their balls and showed the world that they can knock out a few pins in style.

The event was Pinbowl, a corporate bowling championship organized by DNA, held at the Club, Andheri. There were two teams from Pinstorm. Team 1 comprised of Chetan, Ujjwal, JK, Namita and Shazia, while Team 2 was made up of Claude, Vicky, Nachiket, Anjali and Chitra.

Barring a few practice (read experimental) sessions, none of the guys had any previous bowling experience (unless we count Namita’s Nintendo Wii sessions). Inspite of this, they fared quite well. It was a treat watching Claude spinning the ball (miles away from the pins), Namita counting to three every time before throwing the ball (remember Goli from Lagaan?), a supposedly drunk Vicky slipping and falling all over the floor (drunk on one pint), JKs sharp focus (on the chicks around) and Ujjwal’s commitment (in sourcing a beer from the crowded counter).

It was a fun filled day enjoyed by everyone. And in the end, being placed a decent 11th out of 35 teams, that too without any previous bowling experience was not bad at all. All in all it was an awesome experience and we’ll be holding on to our balls till the next one comes around.

Our CEO Mahesh Murthy, was at the World Mobile Congress in Barcelona. He shares his views on the future of mobile applications in his WSJ Column.

An abbreviated version of this piece first appeared in Business Standard.

It’s hard not to run into some wide-eyed fanatic telling us how mobile will change our lives. And I am in Barcelona as I write this – the Mobile World Congress, also called 3GSM, is on – and the city is positively bursting with mobile fanatics from around the planet.

A colleague from the Internet business in India meets me before we board the plane and says that his employer, one of India’s leading print media groups, is now investing in mobile startups. Another presenter at the conference I’m speaking at here has just gone on about how social networking is being used much more on mobiles than the desktop.

The buzz at Barcelona is about Microsoft’s cool new operating system for phones. And also that, after failing to buy MTN, Bharti’s trying to buy Zain.

But let’s slow down here. There is news of this sort virtually every year – and I believe that it’s easy to miss the woods if one focuses on the tree-like nature of these one-off announcements.

Yes, I do know the numbers. 500 million mobile subscribers in India – though I understand it’s more like 400 million, the rest being either accounting jugglery or the same person being counted twice. And 5 billion subscribers around the world this year. These are big numbers.

But where are these users headed?

Should you run out now and start a mobile applications company? I’d caution you a bit.

At the risk of sounding self-obsessed, here’s something that happened last night.

I had tweeted about my talk, and I’ve set things up so that I update all streams – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Buzz and more at the same time. It’s too much trouble to do them separately.

An ex-colleague in New York saw the update on Facebook and left a message there, suggesting a restaurant I should go to for tapas after my talk. I looked it up on TripAdvisor, saw that it had an average rating, and looked for other places with a better reputation.

It turned out one of those was just a mile away from me, according to Google Maps – so I took a cab there and got off, in cold weather and freezing rain. To discover the place was under renovation.

So I went back online to find a tapas restaurant which was within walking distance and found one that claimed to be 0.07 miles away – which was about how far I was willing to brave in the weather.

Thankfully, it was where the map claimed it to be – but they had a menu just in Spanish. So I went back to Google again to figure out that a Bombas wasn’t a terrorist but actually something quite edible.

Notice anything interesting about that? It took me a while to figure it out.

That I hadn’t really used any mobile-only applications through the entire process. I had used both devices – my laptop and my phone, but I’d used a set of applications that worked across both platforms, and that were agnostic to what I was using. Except for the fact that when on the mobile, they were a little more location-aware than my laptop applications are – and of course, they were visually formatted differently.

The ‘platforms’ word struck an “a-ha!” light in me. Mobile was just another platform. Much like CDs came after audio tape, or DVD after VHS.

You didn’t need a new set of musicians or film-makers for the world of CDs and DVDs – they simply moved their work to the new platform. We continue to listen to the bands we love and the directors we like as they moved to new platforms.

But as users, we don’t really care about what device we are on.

In pretty much the same way, I think the mobile revolution is probably more important for hardware companies – because they can make and sell devices in new form factors. And maybe the operating systems guys – as they work on different chips and power consumption patterns, and application developers have to port their work to different platforms. But there’s no money in this business as the players are giving it away free.

But if you’re one of the millions of startups looking to create the next mobile Facebook, or the next mobile Twitter or the next mobile Google, guess what. They’re already there. Facebook is the mobile Facebook. Twitter is the mobile Twitter and Google is the mobile Google.

This reminds me of the time many years ago when I railed against the companies trying to build the Indian Yahoo, the Indian eBay and the Indian Facebook. My logic then was those brands themselves would define the Indian experience, and it turned out not too different.

A Rediff today is a tiny fraction of the size Yahoo is in India, Ebay swallowed Baazee for virtually nothing and the whole lot of Ibibo, Minglebox, Fropper and BigAdda put together can’t hold a candle to what Facebook has done in India with no promotion.

Yes, there may be room for really narrow, specific software that is only relevant on the mobile platform. I use apps like Where and Wikitude to show me stuff that is around me, based on where my mobile phone is at that point in time. But that’s a limited set.

What do I see happening as a result in India?

One, I think all these mobile walled-garden portals in India from operators like Reliance and Airtel will go the way of AOL: wither away to nothingness. The consumer isn’t going to want to be locked to your little limited version of the Internet when the real one is just a click away. So, to all the companies putting together white-label apps and ringtones for the carriers and unhappy that the carriers aren’t giving you enough money for it, here’s more bad news: Your carrier will have even less money to give you in the future. Your road to long-term salvation lies in building a consumer brand and pull – because operators won’t have the ability to push things down the throats of the 500 million for much longer.

Now to the second big driver – data on the mobile. I do think it’ll be a big deal – and data-ready phones are getting cheaper and better – and there’s enough competition among operators to drop prices on data plans here. As an aside, I wish someone could give us cheaper data roaming overseas – I think I single-handedly pay for the fuel bills of Sunil Mittal’s private jet. Data will increasingly be consumed by the younger generation – a sample size of one in my research study involving my 12-year old son shows that his pre-paid bills are 95% data, 5% voice.

The numbers on mobile data are growing. When Pinstorm buys digital ads on the mobile in India, outside the walled garden, we already see about 7 million users we can reach through just one vendor alone. Interestingly, an IMRB survey claims there are only 2 million people such folks there – this is one instance where, unlike the TRAI, the official data on telecom usage is way behind the actual commerce.

Third, again, somewhat contrary to what many pundits have said, I believe that usage of applications on data will start on familiar grounds for many of us-  that is, the desktop, and from there move out to the mobile. Especially for social apps, where the newbies will go where their wired friends already are – and that means a pre-existing presence on the desktop.

I don’t think there’s room for too many mobile-only applications, like there isn’t a market for too many Blue Ray-only movies. I’ll also put my neck out – and insist I’m not being elitist when I say that I don’t think there are too many applications that will start at the bottom of the pyramid where the folks with Rs. 80 ARPUs will start using it and then migrate upward to the Rs. 800 ARPUs.

Want this market? I will duck from the Prahalads and bottom-of-the-pyramid pundits and say to you: Start from the more affluent desktop user, and then go down.

I’ll wrap up now, and go see if I can advance check in online for my flight back. Not sure if I’ll use the phone or the laptop for it though!