GroupM, the world's leading media investment management company, is launching a separate vertical for its e-commerce and digital business. The new vertical will be headed by Tushar Vyas, chief strategy officer, GroupM South Asia, reports Ad Age India.

In the past four months, Mindshare, one of WPP's biggest media buying and planning agencies under the GroupM umbrella, secured e-commerce and digital business worth Rs 700 crore, while it won just two traditional business accounts during the period.

The new accounts include the digital mandate for Snapdeal, media mandate for PayU, Saavn, Practo, Housing.com, NewsHunt, Novi Digital Entertainment, among others. Other prominent e-commerce clients handled by various GroupM agencies include Flipkart, GoDaddy.com, Makemytrip, Google, Hike and Myntra.

Prasanth Kumar, CEO, Mindshare South Asia told Ad Age India that Mindshare has had a very promising start to 2015 as it added several blue-chip clients, especially in the e-commerce and digital industry.

"We are channelising our services towards various tools including adaptive and realtime marketing", he said. "Increasingly most advertisers, including ecommerce players, are looking at digital media and data analytics very closely," CVL Srinivas, CEO of GroupM South Asia, told Ad Age India.

"While traditional media advertising continues in the short run they will be layered with more aggressive digital forays. We can add that critical layer," he added in the report.

According to the report, citing a top media planner, the contribution of e-commerce to advertising in India is estimated at 7%. For GroupM, though, the share is growing in double digits, the media planner added. Similarly, the e-commerce category has been growing 50-100% whereas for GroupM it has been growing over 100%.

While there are several other sectors such as FMCG that spend much more than the e-commerce sector on advertising, Srinivas said in the report that the dynamics of the e-commerce category are very different from that of the more traditional categories.

"With our experience of handling over 40 such players locally and the learning we have from our network, especially in markets like China, we are putting together a full-service suite of products that will help these players not just market their brands but also understand their consumers and monetise their assets," he added in the report.