 All right now after gaining those extra pounds in the holiday season it's time to put on your running shoes. It's time for the standard chartered Mumbai Marathon 2016. It's an event that's come to be marked on the calendars of not just athletes but brand managers as well. The Mumbai Marathon has seen so many brands using innovative ways to catch the attention of consumers for more than a decade now. For instance you might remember in 2013 Fevicol had come up with a brand activation where a bunch of runners wearing Fevicol branded t-shirts were seen glued to the ground even as thousands of runners made their way past them. The sight of these runners doing slow, stationary jogging, some intense others just pretending to enjoy the run, it really grabbed a lot of eyeballs. So as this year's edition shaping up to be a bigger brand extravaganza than ever before we are finding out in our top story this week. I think the biggest success has been getting everybody onto one platform. You see for Marathon to work in any city you need the authorities to come together, you need the government to come together, you need the people to come together, you need the partners to come together, you need the media to come together and when everything comes together it actually makes a statement. So if you ask us I think the biggest achievement of the Mumbai Marathon is that it's got all stakeholders to align to a certain vision. The fact that all the profits from the event go to charitable organizations is also a huge draw for participants and celebrities. For instance, John Abraham has been the official random ambassador for the Marathon for over a decade. Ironically, the actor who is known for being a fitness freak is not even allowed to run in the Marathon. I've tried in the first four or five years I kept speaking to Anil Singh and I said listen I need to run, I need to run and they're like no, no, no you need to perform these duties and you need to stay in here but the standard charted Mumbai Marathon is very special. It's something that I give credit to Pro Cam for. Just when in the first year when people thought that it was impossible to see Indians run on the road, it was like alien that you actually want to make people run, today it's become a world event. I would say that the standard charted Mumbai Marathon is amongst the top four marathons in the world today. It's a gold leaf marathon. It's probably up there, not probably, it is up there and it's one of the most coveted marathons where you get champion runners like John Keelia etc who come in and win big prizes. Over the years, this marathon which is now the largest in Asia has also become a landmark event for brands. For its title sponsor standard charted which has been associated with the event from its very first edition, this has turned out to be a long and fruitful association. The marathon just goes from strength to strength. Over the last 13 years it has grown from a relatively small base and running as a sport was not that popular 13 years ago across most of India. When we began this in 2004, there were only about 20,000 runners in the entire marathon. It's more than double that today so it has an amazing momentum for us. The second thing, it goes well beyond just normal branding is the power of the marathon for goods. As standard charted our brand promises we are here for goods and we tell that very seriously that the communities that we live and work in, we play a major part in improving over time. This year's marathon has actually been a very exciting digital experience and I think the leading pack on that is the hashtag run for a reason wherein people have fed in their individual reasons to run so there are some people who do it for their individual achievement, there are others who do it for the community, there are the third type who actually do it just as a set of people to achieve something. So this is something which is running right now on Twitter. The other very, very interesting initiative is actually the virtual marathon. This is the first time that it's been done in India by anybody. So this is a 360 degree immersive feel which we've created with a technology called Oculus Rift. The other big thing that has happened is something called marathon of delights which is we've got a host of associations that we've built with a lot of willing partner brands. So we've got about 20 partner brands who are giving very special discounts on health and fitness related packages for our clients and that further helps to build the association of health and fitness and here for good for standard charted. Apart from title sponsors, companies like TCS are also taking up prominent sponsorships. In fact, while the SCMM has sparked off a trend with over 200 such malathons being organized all over India, TCS has been actively involved in similar events across the world for some time now. And this year round, it's integrating its brand at a deeper level for this edition of the standard charted Mumbai marathon. Probably our biggest activation for the standard charted Mumbai marathon is our mobile application, the official marathon mobile application. And the big feature in that application is obviously being able to track runners on the day of the race. And we do that very well and that's we've had great success in doing that. And over the years, we've evolved the application. The big addition to the application this year is an ability to track your training. In addition to the app, another activation that's important to us. I mean, we also have some of our employees not only participating running in the event, but also helping post-race. About 60 volunteers will be helping to clean up post-race. So getting in and helping clean up the city after the race, which is a unique aspect of the partnership with the marathon. With a total tally of 17 brands coming on board as sponsors for the marathon, it's likely to be a brand extravaganza of sorts. Brands across the board are trying to leverage this platform and create a partnership that could be scaled up in the future. We do a lot of things around the marathon and then within the marathon in itself. So there's a lot of events that we've participated in. We've been treadmilling challenges across the cities that we're participating in. So really bringing the average individual out and really getting them to think about exercising and running and walking and so forth. Within the marathon in itself, we have cheering sections. We have our employees participating. We have invited our customers to participate, our distribution partner. So we really want to engage the entire ecosystem that we work in. We think there's a tremendous amount of opportunity. Runners themselves have special needs as their training and so forth. And we've talked about many ideas around how we can actually bring that to life for the runners. And beyond that, really what kind of products and services do we bring to life?