Neha Kalra
Advertising

Indian Oil empanels three agencies

The three agencies have been brought on board as part of a two year empanelment process

Indian Oil Corporation Limited (IOCL), an integrated energy company playing a national role in oil security and public distribution, has empanelled three creative agencies – Dentsu, Percept's AMO Communications and Mumbai based Inter Publicity for its communication needs. The empanelment for the brand is for a period of two years.

These agencies are basically responsible for the communication that is to take place for the headquarters of IOCL (which is in Mumbai) which includes releases, tenders and various kinds of notices, as well as the Western region of the country. Likewise, the company has a set of three agencies, for each of the other regions (northern, southern and eastern regions) too.

Indian Oil empanels three agencies
The news was confirmed to afaqs! by Rajesh Aggarwal, president, Dentsu India; Yogendra Gouti, director, Inter Publicity; and Jitendra Khokle, chief operating officer, AMO Communications.

The size of the the business that has been awarded to the new agencies is in the region of Rs 10 crore, confirms Srikumar N, executive director, branding, corporate communication and planning. IOCL, however, on a whole, spends an estimated Rs 100 crore annually on advertising.

The pitch was called for a month ago. Almost 26 agencies showed interest to participate in the pitch process. After one round of essentially creative presentations, the three agencies were selected.

The brief circulated amongst the agencies focused on the company's completion of 50 years.

The incumbent agencies on the corporate business were Percept's IBD, Goldmine and Foresight. IOCL has a separate set of empanelled creative agencies for its product portfolio.

The set of agencies that handles the creative duties for the range of products for IOCL such as Xtracare, Servo etc, include Rediffusion Y&R, McCann Erickson, Draft FCB Ulka and Grey Worldwide.

It is also learnt that no media pitch was called for and Lodestar Universal continues to be the media agency handling the print releases for the company. Madison looks after the media buying for the non-print part of the media business for the company. As per the three year long empanelment contract, Lodestar has completed one year in the role of the media agency for IOCL.

For the record, Indian Oil Corporation Ltd. (Indian Oil) is India's largest commercial enterprise, with a sales turnover of Rs 2,47,479 crore (US $ 61.70 billion) and profits of Rs 6,963 crore (US $ 1.74 billion) for the year 2007-08. It is the 18th largest petroleum company in the world.

The company holds a major portion of the market share in terms of distribution of oil and oil products in India.

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