The Association of Indian Magazines launches Dastaan Hub

The Association of Indian Magazines (AIM) has announced the launch of its content marketing studio Dastaan Hub. 

 

Put together by AIM members, the studio will help brand marketers move from vanilla display advertising to developing engaging content solutions for narrating compelling brand stories.

 

It aims to offer innovative solutions across multiple languages, demographics, interest groups, and formats.

 

The studio will be led by Industry veteran Shripad Kulkarni, along with a team of experienced professionals. 

 

It draws in the collective strengths of over 125 magazine titles, their websites and digital media assets and will cater to over 150 million Indians. 

 

Participating publishers in Dastaan Hub, include India Today, Ananda Vikatan, Delhi Press, Outlook, Malayala Manorama magazines, Network 18 magazines, ABP magazines, Business World, and Diamond Publications. 

 

B Srinivasan (Ananda Vikatan), AIM president, said, “Magazines by their very essence are a deeply immersive medium, and are trusted for the depth in their editorial content. Moreover, magazines cater to highly engaged communities, and each magazine publishing team has deep insights into their readers’ emotional psyches and consumer interests. This is where they have inherent strength for partnering with brands for creating compelling brand stories.”

 

He added, “Most marketers tend to miss out on the immense reach of magazines in the country. As per IRS 2019, the total readership of magazines was close to nine crores, which was an increase of about a crore over 2017 IRS. So, magazines offer a perfect blend of reach and deep engagement, and therefore the relevance of branded content.”

 

Kulkarni said, “Dastaan Hub team will be following a 3-step process. A classical first, studying the category and brand challenges. Second, the creative and strategy team will customise native communication led ideas, based on the client brief. And then add an O2O, online to offline media delivery plan. All this will be co-created to capture the essence of the dialogue the brands want to have with their customers.”