With growth slowing down in urban markets, small towns and rural areas are becoming increasingly important to advertisers. Good agricultural output, following a good monsoon, has further accentuated this trend. To tap this region, Aegis Media India has launched Carat Fresh Rural, the country’s first international rural communications agency.
Carat Fresh Rural, the rural division of Carat Fresh Integrated, is to provide comprehensive rural marketing and communication solutions to clients, which include rural planning, implementing outreach campaigns in rural areas, monitoring, Haat and Mandi contact programmes, melas and other marketing communication activities.
Nearly 750 million Indians live in rural India and are expected to add additional consumption not only in the fast-moving consumer goods category, but also in categories such as automobiles, telecom, entertainment and consumer durables.
“Rural marketing communications is the holy grail that no agency has successfully cracked in India. 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. We are developing state of the art rural management tools,” said Ashish Bhasin, Chairman India & CEO South-East Asia.
Assignments The company has already bagged assignments from clients such as Mahindra and Mahindra, Godrej Consumer Products, Escorts, Sony Max, Pidilite, Force Motors, Bayer Crop Science, and others.
Building on a soft launch a few months ago, Carat Fresh Rural is to start with a team of 30 rural marketers and a network of 1,500 operators, across seven offices and 20 operation bases.