Aegis Media India announced the launch of Carat Fresh Rural, a rural communication agency, on 17 December. The agency will be a division of Carat Fresh Integrated.
Keshav Chanorkar will lead the agency and will report to Ravi Shankar, head, Carat Fresh Integrated. The agency will provide rural marketing and communication solutions to clients including planning, implementing outreach campaigns, route planning, monitoring, van operations, Haat and Mandi contact programs, wall paintings and melas, informed an Aegis statement.
Carat Fresh Rural has started operations with a team of 30 and a network of 1,500 operators across seven offices and 20 operation bases, according to the agency. The agency claims to have bagged assignments from clients like Mahindra & Mahindra, Godrej Consumers Products, Escorts, Godrej, GPI, Sony Max, Pidilite, Force Motors and Bayer Crop Science.
On the development, Ashish Bhasin, chairman India and CEO South East Asia, Aegis Media, said, “Rural marketing communications is the holy grail that no agency has successfully cracked in India, thus far. I believe that there is a universe at least equal to the size of the entire advertising industry available to agencies to explore in the rural marketing communications field. Carat Fresh Rural will, in many ways, pioneer that. We are developing, for the first time in India, state-of-the-art rural management tools. The Carat Fresh suite of rural tools will have the country’s only real time rural planning tool, enabled by 3G connectivity and linked to a host of data sources including the rich census data, media data and 16 other sources of data. Since implementation in rural is key, every one of the Carat Fresh Rural operators will have an app on their GPS enabled trackers that will automatically monitor and relay data without human intervention. Several tools and apps are being developed to revolutionise rural communications in India.”
