The Background
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Osian’s Connoisseurs of Art Pvt. Ltd., one of the leading auction houses and world’s largest archive of contemporary Indian art, has been with Prana for over three years. It has played a pivotal role on making Art as a asset class and an attractive investment option. Following the vision of its prime mover Mr. Neville Tuli to bring the investment in Art to a wider set of investors, Osian’s decided to float an Art Fund with a reasonably low ticket size. The Art Fund was to be open for participation for a period of one month and Prana PR briefed about three months in advance to build a strong case for participation among the investors.
While Osian’s had set a target of Rs. 100 crores, the mobilization in such instruments floated by others were a fraction of this amount.
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Key Communication Challenges
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- Osians could not have raised the money from the public through an IPO or Mutual Fund because of its corporate structure.
- The concept of art as a form of investment was very new in India.
- The only way that Osian’s could have mobilized was through private participation of individuals.
- If it chose the route of private participation of individuals, Osian’s could not venture into the marketing of this through advertising or any other form of direct communications. This would have violated the regulations governing such offerings
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Prana’s PR Strategy and Plan Recommendations
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As a strategy, we recommended that we discuss the issue of art as an asset class intensely in the key media and therby, create a position of Osian’s as a thought leader with clear vision and willingness to shoulder all responsibilities of an important market participant.
We divided the entire plan into 4 phases where we first raised the debate whether art can be considered as an investment. This was followed by highlighting issues that are relevant while considering art as an investment. After this, we focused our efforts on profiling Osian’s as an ideal platform for investment in art. The last phase of the campaign was directed towards creating a lot of hype around Osian’s Art Fund.
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Key Achievements in Plan Implementation
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Our campaign prompted a nation-wide media focus on Art as a new asset class and highlighted several issues that the market participants, regulators, governments, intermediaries need to address.
The campaign saw dozens of editorials comments, guest articles, spokesperson interviews etc in India’s most important business dailies and magazines. These included a cover stories each in India’s largest selling weekly magazine and one of leading business magazines. Atleast two national mainline dailies carried a full-page feature each on the lines of ‘Art of Investing in Art’.
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Overall Impact
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Osian’s Art Fund mobilized Rs. 104 crores at a time when the stock market was depressed and investor sentiment was low across all other asset classes. Not only, did the campaign help Osian’s achieve its business objective, but the awareness created helped the media as well as the market players understand each other better after that.
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