TAM Media's Eikona rebrands

The audit arm will now focus on neutral, one-stop solutions for earned media management.

Eikona, the neutral public relations audit arm of TAM Media Research, has rebranded itself to help brand custodians (client organisations and its agencies), with end-to-end solutions on brand management through earned media.

The objective is to play an intrinsic role in helping clients and agencies at every step of their brand communications planning, execution and review process. Eikona will now offer holistic, neutral, one-stop research and data solutions for earned media management. The service span will include helping brand custodians listen to the mood of the market, set communications targets, monitor execution, audit and advisory and finally, establish earned media's impact on (corporate/product) brand reputation.

LV Krishnan, CEO, TAM Media Research says,"Our organisation is uniquely placed. While through TAM and RAM we help the industry understand the TV and radio consumption patterns and dynamics of Indian consumers, what makes us come a full circle is our ability to not only monitor and correlate a brand's paid media initiatives through ADEX and but also the earned media initiatives through Eikona. These data sets help industry scientifically understand and correlate brand's visibility as well as its reputation."

Explaining Eikona's focus on earned media management, Siddhartha Mukherjee, SVP, Eikona adds,"We are living in a reputation economy. Earned media is fast moving towards the centre stage of any brand building or sustenance exercise." In India, the definition of earned media is quite different from that of the Western markets.

According to Mukherjee, the western world has already transitioned deep into the online world. He believes that the western definition of ORM (online reputation management) should be positioned as offline reputation reputation management in India. Why?"Web portals, news websites, social media platforms comprising of blogs and chats forums comprise 70-80 per cent of the average daily time spent on overall media consumption in the West. However, in India, offline mediums like print (newspapers and magazines) and TV news channels show similar numbers."

TAM Media Research's definition of earned media is when a company or brand gets third party endorsements, promoted or discussed in editorial media and conversations, without any official monetary transaction.