Jio Updates - Media Agency, AjioFashion, Lyf Devices

Back in June-July of 2015 McCann Worldgroup India (Prasoon Joshi is the chairman of its Asia Pacific business) was in the front to grab Jio's advertisement deal. McCann was in the same position for Aircel 4 years back. ​McCann earlier was in charge of ad campaign of Cheers Mobile (Etisalat-DB Group's joint venture), which was shut down in 2012 after Supreme Court's verdict. [link]

However there was no more update regarding that. We can assume that McCann did not get the contract. 

In February 2016 TimesofIndia and EconomicsTimes reported that RIL ended contract for PRA with Ashwani Singla. Ashwani Singla with his new company, Reputare was handling the public relations affairs of Reliance Industries. RIL was not happy about the way REPUTARE handled Jio's mega launch (among its employees). Reputare has less than 25 employees and Jio will assimilate them in the company.

Ashwani Singla is the Founding Managing Partner of Astrum (astrum.in), India’s first specialist reputation management advisory that uses science to understand and shape public opinion. He curved out to form Reputare to handle Jio's affairs. 

I am not sure that Reputare was handling Jio's profile since when. 


Who are Handling Whom? 

DDB Mudra ---  Aircel
JWT and Taproot Dentsu --- Airtel,
Ogilvy & Mather (led by Piyush Pandey) --- Vodafone,
Lowe Lintas & Partners --- Idea
Grey --- Reliance Communications
Contract --- Tata Teleservices

In January this year, Jio's fiber business head Ralph Steffens resigned after successful completion of 2 year's contract. joined London-based global mobile network firm Truphone as its chief executive.

Jio will have a fashion e-commerce site - Ajio.com.

Jio's 4G services will be offered over Reliance Digital's new smartphone brand - LYF. R-Digital already has another own brand - CONNECT for some time. However LYF is completely 4G affairs i.e. all LYF devices will be 4G/LTE supported. As of now there are 7 LYF smartphones launched in a price bracket of Rs 20,000 to Rs 5,000.

First launched in mid Jan, 2016 Lyf smartfones are Jio's 3rd product that's publicly released (after Jionet WiFi and JioChat) and now available in four sub brands - Water, Flame, Earth and ?Wind.

Available on Reliance Digital stores, the electronic retail chain of RIL,  these are made by chinese OEMs, probably ZTE.

What I don't like about LYF:

1. Pricing - better spec-ed and 4G/VoLte supported phones are available at lower price.
2. Android version : most of them are running on v5.0 or v5.1 and RIL never promised about

Anyway while Jio is still readying its network to be glitch-free, Airtel continues to expand on 4G turf (they acquired Videocon's spectrum in several circles too as well as Aircel's entire 2300MHz assets) and TheWire pointed out that Jio's entry into Indian telecom is not completely legal : The Immaculate Conception of Reliance Jio
, which I don't believe completely. I would rather say Reliance Industries is cunning enough to use the loopholes of the law and regulations.

Liittle trouble for Jio: 
Jio recruited some 800 field workers on contractual basis for 4G/OFC network roll out. Hired engineers are actually ex-armed forces and they did their job really well and met the target before 2 years of contract and now they are asked to leave the company with one month's salary as compensation. The engineers are really angry with company's decision and wrote to home minister and state labour commisioner for help.  (dated April 5, 2016)

BBG International Submarine Cable System:
​The Bay of Bengal Gateway (BBG) consortium's 8,100km long submarine cable system went live on April 18, 2016. It has 8 landing points : Fujairah (UAE), Barka (Oman), Mumbai (India), Colombo (Sri Lanka), Chennai (India), Mt Lavinia (Sri Lanka), Penang (Malaysia) and Singapore.

The BBG cable system is owned and maintained by Dialog Axiata (Sri Lanka), Etisalat (UAE), Omantel (Oman), Reliance Jio Infocomm (India), Telekom Malaysia Berhad and Vodafone (UK). In 2013 Alcatel-Lucent signed the contract to build and build BBG's entire cable infrastructure.

Jio whose 4G services yet to be launched commercially will have a major international bandwidth boost.

The system is using DENSE WAVELENGTH DIVISION MULTIPLEXING (DWDM) which allows capacity increase anytime without any submarine intervention - the initial capacity of 9 terabyte per second can be increased upto 55Tb/sec.


LYF Smartphones has seen its 1st TVC:

Introduced as LYF Smartphone+, LYF makes a move in the market. Their website mylyf.com is live for quite some time.

However their facebook page has been started for few days.

Facebook page: www.facebook.com/lyf/ There they have shared the first TVC featuring Indian cricketers and Kangana Ranawat: www.facebook.com/lyf/videos/267971436876276/



Preview of Jio's website as shared by welovejio - the youtube links are not working anymore due to copyright claim by Reliance Industries.

Jio importing SIM Cards from China

Regarding the launch:

As many top officials of Jio has opened up their mouth, we can now understand why Jio is delaying the commercial launch. As they said only Mukesh Ambani knows the launch date, The delay is due to the last moment wrinkle off the LTE networks. 

Article was first published on 19th March, 2016 (19/03/2016) and being updated as required.