afaqs! news bureau
Advertising

Scarecrow Communications bags creative duties of Justbooks

The spends are estimated at Rs 2 crore per city. The company plans to extend its presence to 10 cities.

Bengaluru-based Justbooks has appointed Scarecrow Communications as its creative AoR (agency of record). The account will be handled by Scarecrow's Mumbai office. Though there wasn't a multi-agency pitch, the process started in December.

Justbooks is a community library chain owned by Strata Retail & Technology Services, incubated at IIM Bangalore. It is already present in 10 cities including Mumbai, Bengaluru, Pune and Hyderabad.

The company looks forward to expand in other cities of the country. According to sources close to the development, the planned spends per city is about Rs 2 crore.

Scarecrow Communications bags creative duties of Justbooks
Scarecrow Communications bags creative duties of Justbooks
This is the first time that the company has got an agency on board. Earlier, Justbooks has worked with a couple of independent agencies on a contract basis. Scarecrow was assigned the mandate on the basis of the solutions it provided to some real marketing assignments set by the company.

R Sundar Rajan, founder and CEO, Justbooks, says, "We are excited to partner with Scarecrow in our attempt to redefine libraries as a new generation platform connecting books and readers. Building a brand around a traditional neighbourhood service can present a lot of interesting challenges and we look forward to work with the creative team at Scarecrow to get people back to reading.

Raghu Bhat, founder-director, Scarecrow Communications, says, "Justbooks is our first ever client from Bengaluru. Our target will be to make more people visit Justbooks, which has the most charming libraries I have ever seen."

Manish Bhatt, founder-director, Scarecrow Communications, says, "Reading is the only addiction that is healthy. We have suggested a couple of creative recommendations to the client. Since the company also plans to explore the online reading medium, digital will also make a significant part of the media mix."

Aiming to expand across India, Justbooks incorporates proven retail practices like warehouse-backed operations with centralised inventory and new generation technology usage like cloud-hosted infrastructure with RFID-enabled touch-points to meet the ultimate goal of every library - Get every book a reader and get every reader his/her book.

Have news to share? Write to us atnewsteam@afaqs.com