AliveNow appointed Penguin India's social media agency

The publishing house awarded the mandate to AliveNow based on the agency's earlier work and its ability to create differentiated content.

Publishing house Penguin India has awarded its social media mandate to Bengaluru-based full-service agency, AliveNow. The agency will be responsible for Penguin India's online and social media presence and help it to connect better with the youth.

Penguin India evaluated the credentials of a few other agencies before AliveNow bagged the account.

Adhvith Dhuddu
, chief executive officer, AliveNow tells afaqs! that being an avid reader, there was a personal connect for him with the business and eventually, it was the agency's content-driven strategy that helped it to win favour with Penguin.

"We presented a well laid out content-driven strategy. We have a thought-out approach to create curiosity towards Penguin's books among its audience and facilitate better engagement,"

he says.

"AliveNow showed us its previous work that we liked. We also gave it a sample task to create content, which was done well. It is eventually all about creating content. If you cannot create content, you cannot crack social media," says Priyanka Sabharwal, manager, online marketing, Penguin India.

Dhuddu agrees with Sabharwal and says that Penguin India is very particular about the content on its social media pages, be it text or images.

Penguin India is already well represented on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. On Facebook, at the time of filing this report, the Penguin India page had more than 56,000 Likes, while on Twitter, it has over 12,000 followers.

Sabharwal says that Penguin is particular that every book is treated in an individual manner and work at the company is handled "book-by-book".

"Each book, after all, is a brand by itself," she asserts.

Founded in 1985, Penguin Books India is the largest English language trade publisher in the continent, the company claims; it publishes books across genres such as biography, travel, business, politics, history, religion, philosophy and others.

Among its recent releases are Shobhaa De's latest political satire, Sethji, the launch of which saw a lot of activity on social media by Penguin.