Six agencies in fray for ING Vysya 'corporate' account

Late last week, a minimum of six advertising agencies in Bangalore are believed to have pitched for the ‘corporate advertising' account of financial services company, ING Vysya. According to agencyfaqs! sources, the agencies in the fray for the newly-constituted business - estimated to be worth at least Rs 5-6 crore, in annualised billing - are McCann-Erickson India, Saatchi & Saatchi India, JWT India, Rediffusion/DY&R, Grey Worldwide and Dentsu. While the client was not available for comment, a senior agency executive connected with the pitch has confirmed that the first round of presentations is over. He added that "two to three agencies will be shortlisted for a second round of presentations." Round two is likely to happen in a week to 10 days' time.

From what this website has gathered, the purpose of the pitch is to identify an agency that can present a consolidated face of ING Vysya to potential investors. While the company operates in a variety of financial sectors - including corporate and retail banking (ING Vysya Bank) and life insurance (ING Vysya Life Insurance) - the ING Vysya entity is fairly diffused as far as investors are concerned. "ING Vysya has not promoted itself aggressively beyond the life insurance arena, so the need of the hour is a corporate branding exercise that demonstrates the companies diverse business interests to investors," opines one agency professional familiar with the financial sector.

Bearing this out, the afore-mentioned agency executive says that the company's end objective "is to achieve economies of scale by bringing all the businesses under one umbrella brand, and project ING Vysya as an integrated financial services entity". He, however, clarifies that the result of the pitch is not likely to have any bearing on current agency alignments. For the record, city-based agency IMO handles the advertising for ING Vysya Bank, while the ING Vysya Life Insurance account is with Rediffusion. © 2003 agencyfaqs!