Carat Fresh Integrated to become psLIVE

The network will operate from eight offices across India.

Carat Fresh Integrated will transform to psLIVE in India. psLIVE is the experiential marketing agency of the Dentsu Aegis Network that is recently launched in APAC and will be rolled out in India first in the region.

Carat Fresh Integrated has built itself to a strong team of 95 experiential professionals, across eight offices in the past five years. Ashish Bhasin, chairman and CEO, Dentsu Aegis Network South Asia, will take on the additional role of chairman APAC, Posterscope and psLIVE, Asia Pacific.

In India, psLIVE will focus on experiential marketing, PR, rural marketing, branded entertainment and sports marketing and creative and consultancy as the key areas of operation in the initial phase.

Commenting on the launch, Bhasin says, "We are very happy to transform Carat Fresh Integrated to psLIVE because this puts us in a unique place of having a strong ground based operation, backed by all the global knowledge and tools. All aspects of experiential marketing, particularly activation and rural, are becoming extremely important in India. Having a world class operation like psLIVE as a part our offering, will give the Dentsu Aegis Network clients a unique opportunity to tap these areas through a professional set-up."

R Ravi Shankar will head psLIVE India. Sidharth Ghosh, vice-president; Keshav Chandorkar, national head, rural markets; and Ajay Rao, vice-president will form the core management team of psLIVE.

psLIVE India will commence across offices in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Chennai, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Chandigarh and Guwahati.

psLIVE has a ground network of over 3500 people. It is expected that by the end of 2015 the ground network will touch 10,000 and more than 100,000 villages will have been covered by then.