Flipkart Splits Creative Duties, Gets Lowe Lintas Bangalore on Board

Happy Creative Services, which has been the brand's creative agency since 2010, will also stay on board.

Lowe Lintas Bangalore has bagged the creative duties of e-commerce major Flipkart. The business was awarded on the back of a multi-agency pitch process that lasted nearly two months.

However, Flipkart confirmed to afaqs! that Happy Creative Services, which has been the brand's creative agency since 2010, will also stay on board as a creative partner.

"With changing times and an ever growing brand mandate at Flipkart, we felt we needed a more strategic approach to brand building that would help us reach out to multiple markets and audiences. Keeping this requirement in mind we had commissioned a multi-agency pitch and Lowe Lintas and Partners won that pitch on the basis of their planning and creative inputs. Lowe Lintas and Partners will be coming onboard as Flipkart’s creative agency and strategic brand partner. Happy Creative Services will continue to work with us and creative duties will be shared between both agencies," FLipkart has said in a statement.

Though Flipkart hasn't quite indicated which part of the business will be handled by which agency, rumours are that Myntra, the fashion e-commerce major which Flipkart had acquired in May 2014, will be handled by Lowe Lintas, which had already been the brand's creative agency since March 2014.

Happy Creative Services tweeted about the development here.

Flipkart and Myntra continue to operate as separate entities and Myntra founder Mukesh Bansal is the head the fashion business for Flipkart and join the Flipkart board.

Last year, afaqs! published a cover story titled Harmless Flirting- as the name suggests, it studies the way marketers have begun exploring creative options outside of their respective 'AoR marriages'. Typically, one 'mainline' agency stays on board, on a retainer fee basis, while other - often smaller - agencies work on intermittent projects, as and when the client commissions them. The fee structure of the Flipkart-Happy-Lowe arrangement is not known yet.

Looking back, Flipkart's first TV commercial for the e-retailer, 'Fairytale', was an elaborate 100-second effort. Created in the old English style of fairytales, it was the story of an old woman, a voracious reader, who lives in a cottage and orders her daily read by clicking on a live mouse.

The rest of the ads including 'No Kidding', 'Shopping ka Naya Address' and the most recent one, 'Flipkart it', have been etched in TV viewers' minds owing to the unique approach of using child actors to communicate the ease of shopping on Flipkart.

In 2013, the e-commerce portal announced its entry into the realm of fashion and lifestyle with a new TVC campaign titled 'Fashion has a new address' - an extension of its previous punchline, 'Shopping has a new address'.

Says Joseph George, CEO, Lowe Lintas + Partners, "The e-commerce game of today is akin to the cola wars of yesteryears. The challenges, the excitement and the sheer opportunities that lie ahead of us in this category are both daunting and mouthwatering."

Shoumyan Biswas, senior director, Flipkart states, "Our business landscape is rapidly expanding and our growth rates have been exponential - in this environment we need our brand to also evolve at the same pace. We felt the need to have a more strategic approach to be able to address a wider variety of consumers and markets. With this is mind, we felt that we needed more than one brand partner to be able to deliver on this challenge with even greater commitment and rigour."

Reacting to the win, GV Krishnan, executive director, Lowe Lintas Bangalore, says, "We would like to be the agency that creates effective communication for the brand which can break the clutter in this high-decibel category."