As part of its IAP campaign, AMFI plans to rerun its last year’s television commercial on ‘diversifying investments through mutual funds’ this week.
“We will repeat the commercials. The campaign will run for about six weeks,” said C.V.R Rajendran, CEO, AMFI. The commercials are expected to be aired on general entertainment channels and radio.
Last year, the industry body had come out with a commercial which urged people to diversify investments through mutual funds. The advertisements went on air on August 22, which coincided with AMFI completing 20 years of operation. Earlier, AMFI had come out with its first advertising campaign ‘Savings ka naya tareeka’ in 2011 which talked about the advantages of mutual funds and what to expect from them.
Fund officials say that such campaigns help create buzz around mutual funds. “It helps create visibility. MFs are largely unknown among people so such campaigns help create awareness and positivity around MFs,” says Karan Datta, CBO, Axis Mutual Fund.
The industry body has more than Rs. 120 crore to popularise MFs and is expected to come out with a fresh campaign soon. Last week, Leo Puri, Chairman, AMFI had said recently at a Businessworld event that AMFI’s IAP blueprint was ready. AMFI is also likely to propose to SEBI on allowing using IAP corpus to be spent on enrolling new distributors. “We have our blueprint ready of how we define our objectives. We have two objectives. One if to popularise the MF category and second is education. The education piece is a much trickier one because the regulator perceives that we have not done enough. Our proposal to SEBI is to use a part of IAP corpus to build the distribution network,” said Puri.
