IPG launches its web based media management system ‘iMix’ in India

IPG has launched iMix, a web-based media management system, in India. It is developed by Interpublic GIS Guongzhou and is used by IPG’s offices in Asia and other parts of the world. It is an integrated system that offers planning, estimation, release, invoicing, payment and MIS functionalities to manage media transactions for clients.

Scott Beltran (pictured, centre), CIO, Lowe Worldwide said, “iMix is a product that IPG has been developing for the last 10 to 12 years. We have taken the best practices through media operations from around the world and have incorporated some of the specifics within the Indian marketplace. Given the dynamic of infrastructure in India, we will now be able to provide services to the clients from whichever office we want with an online centralised system.”

According to Beltran, the biggest advantage of iMix is that it handles media buying, monitoring, and matching; all the things which have traditionally been very manually intensive processes. “It is automating a lot of processes which have been manual based and spread-sheet based processes till now. Thus, we can provide better services at low costs to our clients,” he added.

It also allows data access to the clients. “They can see what their media position is in real time at any point of time. Earlier they had to put in a request to us and developing the reports and providing them with that information would take lot of time. With iMix, they themselves can log on anytime and pull out the reports they need in terms of billings etc.,” he said. Media owners can also gain access to the data and reports instead of having to do phone based conversations and back and forth discussions.

iMix is an important tool for India, said Beltran. “Since Lintas has become a bigger part of IPG’s global network, we have seen media in India as a key value added strategy in what we want to do globally. We started last year and invested significant amounts in technology to support media practices here. We really believe that the investments that we have made in other tools apart from iMix will differentiate us from other media companies.”

The present module is the latest version of iMix, and is currently available for TV and radio. Other media will be rolled out by the end of the year.