Interactive agency Quasar has launched a new digital agency, fittingly called Blazar (a Blazar is a compact Quasar). According to Manish Vij (Co founder of Quasar) ”Blazar will have creative, media planning and buying capabilities. It will offer all kinds of digital marketing solutions, ranging from display advertising, social media, search and mobile marketing to online reputation management,” (Source: afaqs)
Interestingly, Blazar doesn’t seem a secondary agency in terms of its scope of services and provides a complte digital solution as can be seen from Vij’s words. Afaqs also reports that Technology and software development services will also be made available.
I couldn’t quite find any piece on if there is a specific need that Smile Interactive and WPP are looking to answer with this venture. It just seems like a move to increase the share by addressing the problem of competing accounts.
This is quite different from the other agency launch that is making headlines: C2WDigital by Contest2Win.
According to Alootechie, Contests2win.com has launched a digital agency named C2W Digital to provide various digital services including viral solutions, micro-sites, e-training tools, mobile and Facebook apps and sales linked promos to its clients. ” ..we decided to demarcate the resources and launch a new entity altogether where the core focus will be given on developing creative solutions for our various clients,” is how Alok Kejriwal, founder of the 2win group reasoned about the need for a new agency.
The demarcation of course is from Contests2win which offers advergames as a solution and perhaps this launch is trying to create an all round digital brand. However, I thought that’s exactly what Media2win, their other agency was for. According, to Kejriwal C2Wdigital will be a purely creative solutions provider while Media2win will extend services such as media planning and buying. A visit to c2wdigital shows that services are categorized into two: Business and Brand solutions. Though with advergames still remain one of the services in the new agency as well.
The Great Digital Clutter or The Great Digital Goldrush?
The two announcement again brings to light the debate on whether India has a digital agency too many (disclosure: I am part of one myself).
This is the time when many brands and brand managers are slowly warming up to digital media, perhaps social media even more so with the amount press and other words it is getting. And it opens up avenues for a lot of digital agencies to grab hold of the drivers seat and establish their position in the market. And with social media gaining traction and the motherload of social media experts that ‘self expression’ has enabled, the barriers to market in this space is nearly none. The result digital agencies have sprung everywhere from Gurgaon, to Mumbai to Bangalore, funded ones to one person teams creating digital experiences that they hope are only different from others.
The biggest reason why too many companies in the same space might be bad is because it gives way to undercutting. Add to this the flimsy work many might execute because of (on a general note)
- Lack of adequate resources
- Improper strategy due to client and competition pressure
It leads to bad quality work, and done at prices which are not standard, forcing the entire space to perhaps undercut their work. Add to this the shortage of talent that digital media has been facing since quite some time now, and what we find is that far too many agencies don’t have strong enough team to sustain good work.
So this whole agency bloom is bad right?
Perhaps not. I remember ex WATlogger Harshil’s question at WATBlog’s first panel discussion last year, on whether digital media in India needs an overspend like it happened during the dot com bubble to make the digital media ubiquitous here. Perhaps the same logic can be applied to this race. If there are 10 digital agencies today, maybe only 3 or 4 will survive two years from now. However, all these 10 would have contributed their share in increasing the market itself. And not just that, the biggest point will also be the trained and experiences talent pool that all of them will contribute to.
This is perhaps the digital marketing goldrush that we see or even have been seeing some time now, and pretty soon a few might strike gold and stake claim.
