Back in 2014, Social Media in the Eastern Part of India was yet to explode and the stories
that our city Kolkata had to narrate were left without a mouthpiece.

The concept of slow, positive & city-centric journalism was yet to evolve. And we
kickstarted the movement in this part of the country with the launch of our student
initiative, The Beacon – a fortnightly black & white Broadsheet paper featuring interesting
people, places & culture in the city of Kolkata.

The first set of copies were hand-distributed, delivered and displayed via more than 100
stalls across the city. Each copy was priced at Rs 3.

The founding members themselves went out of the streets to sell copies of the paper.

Our circulation gradually increased to 10,000 copies. The paper’s space selling started to
become viable as well. It was time to move to a full colour.

This is where the concept of digital marketing started to dawn upon us. As we grasped an
understanding of what the urban audience of Kolkata preferred, we started helping brands
tweak their behaviour accordingly.

After selling more than 2 lakh printed copies of Beacon, we figured Kolkata was finally
ready to consume slow content online, thus Beacon Media was born.

Our in-depth knowledge of Kolkata and a strong fleet of content creators on ground helped us
uncover some of the most interesting stories and our content started to go viral.

At our peak we were reaching out to more than 2 – 3 Lakh people with each content on an
average.

It was at this stage as well that we began helping brands with content marketing strategies.

And the vast reach of our platform was an added advantage.

While we were excelling at textual & pictorial content, we were well aware that Video
content was the future. It was at this point that we expanded our team with a talented set
of visual content creators giving us a decent first-mover advantage.

Along with creating content on Kolkata, for our vast audience we began helping brands with
creating catchy brand content.

Audio Visual Marketing was yet to seep into the minds of brands in the city but a handful of
big names were eager to get into it. It was also at this point that we initiated a
full-swing pre & post production wing.

It was at this stage as well that we began helping brands with content marketing strategies.

And the vast reach of our platform was an added advantage.

While Content Marketing as a concept is yet to seep into our culture, we understood that
this was the only viable method of plugging in content given the rapid evolution of digital
content consumption.

From textual to pictures and videos, as of today we’ve excelled at the art of using content
to drive the message through.

As of 2020s Social Media has shifted from a content consumption platform to a content
creation platform. This led to a rise in what we call these days – ‘Influencers’.

We figured that influencers & personalities were going to become the leaders of social media
over large offline entities and tweaked our specialization accordingly.