afaqs! Campus launches Digital@Work

The book features outstanding work done by brands in the digital marketing space in India.

For too long, digital media has been referred to as a medium for the future. But there have been instances of famous brands using digital as a medium to reach out to more consumers on a regular basis.

Taking this into view, afaqs! Campus, the digital marketing education vertical of afaqs!, conceptualised a book that demonstrates that digital is here, working and set to surprise in 2014.

Titled Digital@Work, the book features outstanding work done by brands in the digital marketing space in India. It is a compilation of case studies that have successfully used the power of digital marketing to solve actual problems and achieve business objectives.

For the book, afaqs! Campus received more than 250 entries, from which the best work was selected by a special panel of judges consisting of senior marketers and agency professionals. The judges included Mohit Hira, CEO, Hungama Digital and digital head, JWT India Group; Karthi Marshan, head, marketing, Kotak Mahindra Group; Tushar Vyas, managing partner, South Asia at GroupM; and Dinesh Swamy, digital creative leader at BBDO Proximity India.

Speaking about the idea behind the book, Prasanna Singh, COO and publisher, afaqs.com and afaqs! Reporter, says, "At afaqs! Campus, we have heard about, seen at work, and yes, even taught innumerable case studies of digital marketing in the past year. What this showed us was that contrary to perceptions, digital had gone mainstream quietly, with marketers no longer pondering the issue of using digital marketing. The question to answer was how to use it best. With this as the basis for Digital@Work, we set out to find the best case studies. Suffice to say, it has been a great learning experience for us, as we hope it will be for you too as you go through the case studies selected by our jury of experts."

Expressing his thoughts about the book, Marshan says that doing a book using live case studies and yet not actually making it an awards contest, which always runs the risk of attracting more hyperbole than learning oriented facts, is an admirable venture. "I have enjoyed reading and learning from all the cases that were submitted for possible inclusion, and given unlimited space and reader time, I think almost every single case deserved to have been there. I look forward to this book growing every year in stature as well as depth and width of learning," he adds.

Hira states, "Digital campaigns continue to remain cloaked in anonymity, unlike their older counterparts in print and TV. Very often, one sees an interesting digital campaign for a brand but is unable to determine who created it and how effective it was. This curation will help plug that gap and create a handy source that should inspire both, practitioners and students of the craft because there is so much to be learned every day. Hats off to the team at afaqs! for conceptualising this and then making it a reality."

"Case studies remain a popular and effective means to study and analyse real business decisions. However, good compilation of Indian digital case studies was a gap. This book has been designed to fill the void with a variety of interesting local cases in the digital domain contributed by practitioners. It's also a great initiative to curate collective knowledge to help grow the digital ecosystem," Vyas says.