With growth slowing down in the 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, touted as 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 like automobiles, telecom, entertainment, consumer durables among others.
“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.
The company has already bagged assignments from clients like 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. Pre launch, the company has already carried out activities in over 18,000 villages across 21 states.
Since implementation in the rural region is the key, every one of the Carat Fresh Rural operators is to have an App on their GPS enabled trackers that would automatically monitor and relay data without human intervention.
The company aims to have a network of 10,000 people and 100 rural experts, across 26 states by mid-2015. By 2015, it expects to have covered over 100,000 villages throughout India.