1. Star Sports - #WontGiveItBack

With the ICC Cricket World 2015 on-going, Star Sports, the official broadcaster of the mega sporting event for Indian subcontinent, is leaving no stone unturned to promote the same. The company in association with Lowe Lintas + Partners has unveiled a youth oriented campaign titled #wontgiveitback. The films have been produced by Nirvana Films.

The World Cup campaign, #Wontgiveitback reflects the young nation’s attitude and mood for the World Cup. It’s their rallying call to team India who are set to defend the World Cup they won in 2011.

The campaign features the Team India members in conversation with their fans on the World Cup. The fans expect them to give it all back in Australia and New Zealand- the pressure, the aggression, but not the Cup.

The campaign connects with the youth in their language, reflecting their attitude and will get the young cricket fans excited about the cricket’s biggest and grandest extravaganza. The multi-media campaign is supported by digital, print, radio and outdoor media.

The broadcast network announced a host of broadcast innovations and firsts to make this a 'Cup for All.' For the first time, the ICC World Cup 2015 is airing in six languages - Hindi, English, Bengali, Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada, and that too in 4K format.

On January 22, Star India launched the first promo of the ICC World Cup 2015 featuring Sachin Tendulkar who is seen invoking India to 'Chase the Dream' to win the World Cup again.

The film features cricketers like Rohit Sharma, Ravindra Jadeja, Virat Kohli, MS Dhoni, Shikhar Dhawan, Ravichandran Ashwin, Ajinkya Rahane and Umesh Yadav. In the second film, Dhoni is seen walking in the Melbourne cricket ground where the final is going to be played.

Here are some of the interesting “Mauka” (opportunity) campaigns rolled out by the broadcast network during the course of the on-going sporting event:

India vs. Pakistan 

India vs. South Africa 

India vs. UAE 

Brands like Nestle, Marico,Yepme.com, Paytm, Raymonds, Pidilite and Lloyd along with the usual cricket partners have also launched interesting campaigns surrounding the ICC Cricket World Cup 2015. 

2. MRF Tyres – “There’s a lot riding on us” campaign

Following its announcement of becoming the global partner for the ICC Cricket World Cup, Madras Rubber Factory (MRF) launched its “There’s a lot riding on us” campaign during the India vs Pakistan match. The film has been conceptualised by Lowe Lintas, Chennai. 

The first film follows the journey of a bus carrying team India across the city and in between the film a shot of a mother humming the iconic song, “Saare Jahan se Achcha” to her baby. As the bus moves across the city, the song is heard coming from various mediums such as an old gramophone, marching band and so on.

As the bus pulls into the stadium, the players disembark to the rapturous applause of a crowd. The film ends with a shot of the bus’ tyres and the words, “There’s a lot riding on us." The campaign is on air across both traditional media and online media channels.

The second film features Indian cricketer Virat Kohli and Formula 1 driver Narayan Kartyekein. In the film we see Kohli getting a call from a girl, while at the same time Karthikheyan connects to his tech team at the racing circuit. They both have been given 5 minutes reach their destination, in their respective vehicles, Kohli drives a sedan while Karthikheyan drifts on his racing car.

The ad film helps the brand to establish itself as an all utility tyre brand. The film ends with the message– ‘There’s a lot riding on us.’ That is symbolic of the hopes of millions of Indian fans who want the team to return with the World Cup just like MRF tyres that undertook the journey of making the players reach safely to their destination. The story depicts how both perform their tasks effortlessly on a MRF tyre which was born to perform on the race track or on any road.

3. KitKat India vs. KitKat South Africa (SA)– Epic Twitter war!

The Cricket World Cup 2015 has lit social media on fire. The on field battle has trickled down to Twitter as well, even brands like KitKat and their country specific twitter handles are getting into the competitive spirit.

This whole thing started when KitKat India sent KitKat SA a friendly tweet:

Then KitKat SA's reply set the ball in motion for the epic brand Twitter war:

All throughout the India vs. SA match on February 22^nd 2015, KitKat India’s Twitter handle came up with sketches depicting the high’s and low’s of the match. And the rest as they say is history.

4. Lay’s “Yeh Game hi hai…Taste ka!”

Lay’s ‘Yeh Game Hi Hai…Taste Ka’ campaign captures the frenzy which grips India when the ICC Cricket World Cup 2015 is on and how mismatched timings of the matches this year creates a dilemma for viewers.

This year, the matches taking place in Australia and New Zealand are being broadcasted between 3:30 am and 12 noon, India time. When the matches are being played, many cricket fans across the country will be stuck at offices, day jobs and their daily schedules...Lay’s, as the Official Snack of the ICC Cricket World Cup 2015, is coming to the rescue of bewildered cricket fans across the country. The new campaign ‘Yeh Game Hi Hai… Taste Ka’ sees India’s heartthrob Ranbir Kapoor demonstrating some interesting ways to get out of sticky situations using the great taste of Lay’s and helping you enjoy the match with your friends.

The campaign cuts across multiple media vehicles, with significant presence across digital, retail, radio, print and TV. Innovative consumer activations and engagement activities will enable consumers to win tickets to matches in Australia and LED TVs.

The campaign, directed by Ravi Udyawar from RU Films features Ranbir Kapoor, Pankaj Kapur and Lisa Hayden, is a light hearted and fun take on the lengths a cricket fan is willing to go to catch every World Cup match. The campaign also has a riveting theme track penned by Amitabh Bhattacharya and composed by Dhruv Ghanekar of Wah Wah Music.

The Lay’s India Facebook and Twitter pages are engaged in creating conversations around the central message – #YehGameHiHaiTasteKa, while driving views to the ad video. A #YehGameHiHaiTasteKa contest has been hosted on both Facebook and Twitter, where users have been invited to get creative with their responses on how they would watch the match in a given tricky situation. The brand has also started the #LaysKePlays contest:

5. Yepme.com – West Indies Cricket campaign

Online fashion brand Yepme.com has launched its latest   campaign featuring the West Indies Cricket Team. The campaign will be aired during the World Cup telecast on Star Sports and all other major GEC, music and movie channels. New campaign will play alongside the #freshfashion campaign starring Shahrukh Khan.

The campaign, which will cost Yepme, about Rs 30 crore, is its second big move in marketing after roping in Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan as its brand ambassador in December.

It features players like Chris Gayle, Darren Sammy, Marlon Samuels and Captain Jason Holder sporting the Yepme collection of #freshfashion and sharing their take on how it goes with the famed West Indian flair. Yepme has sponsored the West Indies team in the ICC World Cup 2015 that is currently underway in Australia. The West Indies Cricket Team will play sporting the Yepme logo on their jerseys.

Sandeep Sharma, Founder and COO, Yepme.com said, “West Indies cricket stars like Chris Gayle, Darren Sammy and Andre Russel are known for their effortless style and have a massive fan following in our cricket-crazy nation. We are extremely proud of this association and look at this as an opportunity to spread the message about Yepme being the destination for the latest fashion with cricket lovers across the globe.”

The brand recently announced its ‘Fly To Australia and cheer for West Indies team contest’`, wherein 50 lucky winners who downloaded its app and answered a simple question on Fresh Fashion are given tickets to Australia and a chance to watch the West Indies team live, along with 3 days and 2 nights’ accommodation.

The Indian fans are now looking forward to the much-awaited encounter between India and West Indies on March 6, 2015 at WACA, Perth.

Roopak Saluja is the Founder & Chief Executive Officer at The 120 Media Collective. He has over 16 years of experience in advertising, account management, client servicing, video content marketing, digital marketing, commercials production and distribution.

He started his career in advertising in account management at Young & Rubicam Budapest in 1998 where he was trained on the Kraft Foods and Danone accounts. In 2001, he moved to Ogilvy & Mather Paris to run the Motorola account for Europe, Middle East & Africa, where he managed the development of the Hellomoto campaign.

He did his MBA from INSEAD, after which he moved to India and set up Bang Bang Films in 2006, an international production company. Then, in 2009, Roopak launched Jack in the Box Worldwide, a digital agency which won prestigious mandates from brands like Pepsi, Unilever, Nivea and Louis Philippe, among others.

In 2013, he established The 120 Media Collective as the parent brand for Bang Bang Films and Jack in the Box Worldwide.

In this exclusive interview with Ratnika Swami for India Digital Review, Roopak talks about the growing importance of video content and digital space in India and how The 120 Media Collective is creating communications solutions and content for audiences and brands across multiple platforms and geographies. Excerpts:

Q. Could you briefly take us through your journey so far? And what hurdles you had to overcome to reach where you are today?

I was in advertising on the agency side in account management and client servicing in Europe for a number of years. I started off in advertising with Young & Rubicam in Budapest and later I was with Ogilvy in Paris. I did my MBA from INSEAD in 2004 and I also did something in the music space in Europe, and then later I decided to set up something in media and entertainment here in India.

I moved to Mumbai in 2005, prior to that I had never worked in India, never lived in Mumbai. Back then, commercials production seemed to be the way to get into this space so I co-founded the company Bang Bang Films along with three others, none of whom are part of the company any longer.

Back in 2006, when it came to commercials production, Asia - Pacific was a very heavily cross-pollinated region. Indian agencies preferred producers from outside the country and that had to do with “large domestic market” syndrome; for example, an agency like Ogilvy Singapore would talk to companies in Singapore, Australia, Malaysia & Thailand, for getting a job done but no one was talking to companies in India, and the converse was also true.

Secondly, the market was dominated by director-centric production companies, so there was no dearth of creativity, but coming from the outside I saw an opportunity to introduce Western class practices observed in the rest of the world. And so we started Bang Bang Films, where our main point of differentiation was that we got in international directors from all over the world and then we supplemented that by operating with a heightened level of professionalism compared to others, which included transparency, accountability, etc. And that worked really well: in four years’ time we had become the largest brand in the commercials production space.

Q. After you launched Bang Bang Films in 2006, what prompted you to get into the digital business?

The word digital was being thrown around a lot in 2008, and we had no idea what it meant back then. It took me a year to figure out what we would need to do to get our production company to go digital and we realized a key opportunity in the space of content. We realized that our mastery of production coupled with our understanding of how to engage with consumers and audiences in the digital space would be a very potent mix.

So that meant that we had to evolve from a “doing company” to a “thinking and doing” (#thinkinganddoing) company.

Now if you start to think as a production company, you can appear to be an asset to agencies, which we were, so we created a separate brand called Jack in the Box. And the way we positioned it, Bang Bang Films and Jack in the Box together were a “thinking and doing” company that produces content for brands across multiple platforms and geographies. Right from a very young age, we have been focused on being an international company.

From 2011 to the end of 2012, we transformed again and metamorphosed into a fully functioning digital agency. We also parted ways with about 20 of our 27 clients and decided to only work with larger clients who had the willingness, propensity and the ability to invest in the digital space and with whom we could grow as well.

Our truly differentiated offering in the digital space has two basic pillars. The first is that our approach, unlike that of most other digital agencies, is deeply rooted in strategy. I think there is no greater substitute to old school advertising when it comes to understanding how to manage brands, and how to build brands and communications and strategy. Right from our chief talent officer Heather Gupta to the head of Jack in the Box Abhishek Razdan, our top team members are actually from old school advertising as we call it and have had training in really solid client servicing and I think that forms our approach. Therefore, the way that we approach communication is just like a JWT would or an Ogilvy would in terms of being very deeply rooted in brand strategy.

The second reason why we have a truly differentiated offering is because of content and content marketing, where one side of it is video content, and on the other side we have developed an understanding of the brand and how to link that knowledge to content. We create the content platforms based on a brand strategy. We create and manage the content, while ensuring engagement with the audience on that platform. We truly believe that digital content platforms are an investment in building your audience so that in the long run you don't have to pay media owners to reach out to their audiences.

Aside from Bang Bang and Jack in the Box there is, of course, The 120 Media Collective, which is a multi-platform content company. We create and produce content for TV, online, and mobile in various forms like short-form content, long-form content, editorial content or a combination of the three. We are also creating our own IP and, over the next few months, our intention is to actually have 50% of our business being based on our own IP, so as to transition from being just a service led business.

Q. Could you please elaborate on your transition into an integrated digital agency?

We realised very quickly that it wasn't just about trading the content; it was also very crucially about the dissemination, the distribution, the engagement, among other things. And for realising that we built up our social media skills and abilities, so in less than a year we evolved into a social media agency.

We found success in creating some campaigns for clients like Puma, among others. We had phenomenal success with Kolaveri Di, which we did for Sony Music, which lasted for about 18 months across the world. So social media as I said before is a great game, as far as that goes, but I think it is a terrible business if you are a smaller company with a new operation and a few younger people and a young entrepreneur or something of that sort. Social media as a business at that time didn't make sense.

However, we realised very quickly that if we wanted to be a serious player in this space then we had to expand our capabilities and become a full fledged integrated digital marketing agency. We had to also develop our skill set and expand our repertoire. We already had the content part of it because we had Bang Bang Films driving that and we had an understanding of social media and the right people on board, but we still needed to bring in people with tech development and coding capabilities, and an understanding of media planning and buying in the digital space.

Q. How do you see the digital media space in India evolving? What are the things you believe are lacking or could be done better?

Mark Pritchard, Global Marketing and Brand Building Officer at Proctor & Gamble, said, 'Digital marketing is dead' and I agree with him completely because the differentiation between marketing and digital marketing will disappear and it will all be marketing, which will have a digital layer to it. So I think we are very well prepared for that. We will see this evolution globally as well as in India.

I think that we are still about 4-5 years away from a situation where you have a majority of top 50 advertisers having a marketing function led by digital natives, but it will happen, and once that happens, it would be truly integrated.

Digital marketing will die, long live digital marketing! Basically, marketing will become digital marketing and vice versa. Secondly, video content consumption is going to be a big driver of a lot of things. We are already known for being producers and content creators in the digital space but I think that in essence for us, a production company can create and produce (120 Media Collective), whereas a content company can create, produce, distribute, monetise, get engagement around and promote the content that we are creating, so it becomes the end-to-end capability.

Between 2006 and 2012, honestly, there was a lot of talk like “Oh, it is going to be different. Digital is coming, digital is growing.” But it was all talk, nothing really happened. In 2013, more changes came than the previous five years put together and I believe that the pace will keep up. 2014 would also be looked at as a major landmark here because a lot has happened.

I think 4G is going to be a game changer, in terms of ensuring that you have major penetration into rural areas, etc. Initially there was a perception that digital marketing was only something which was suitable for categories like automotive or BFSI; now, going forward, you see a lot of FMCG engagement on digital media and as digital becomes something which reaches out to the masses and you will see a lot more things happen.

Q. How important is it for brands to have a social media presence today? And how do you calculate ROI on social media?

Today, if you don't have a social media presence, someone else will create it for you. It is better to create a social media presence and manage it yourself, so that you can be part of the conversation and participate in it. It is a whole different era of marketing now. We don't encourage our clients to look at things like Facebook likes, even though it’s hard not to, but really it’s about engagement levels.

Social media can be used for a whole bunch of different things; for example, with the BeBeautiful content platform for Unilever, we had tremendous success in using Facebook to drive traffic to the site.

It is really based on the influence of content: any content which addresses niche audiences and is able to create a community with high level of engagement will be ranked higher than one which may have much larger numbers, but is something that is consumed without much engagement.

Q. Please share in brief a couple of digital/social media campaigns that your company has done recently or plans to do next and what makes them different or noteworthy?

We have been doing a lot of stuff for Louis Philippe, BeBeautiful for Unilever, Nivea, Vaseline, Pond’s Men brands for Unilever, and FabAlley, among others.

I think that one needs to look at engagement of brands holistically across platforms, which is why we believe very strongly in content platforms. Content platforms are not the be-all and end-all for everything, and definitely not the solution to every brand's problems; however, there has to be some way where once you have engaged with an audience, you can easily re-engage with them without the effort of acquiring them again and again—and content platforms are a great way of doing it.

Q. Could you also mention some noteworthy digital/social media campaigns, apart from your own campaigns? And what do you think makes them stand out?

Last year, Honda and Wieden+Kennedy London came up with an interactive dual-story video for the Civic and its sportier version, the Civic Type R. The film, titled “The Other Side,” tells the tale of an ordinary guy who leads an intriguing double life. The original video featuring the Civic switches to a parallel storyline featuring the Type R when you press and hold ‘R’ on the keyboard. It is really a work of art.

 

 

 

The gadget-driven society has embraced smartphone technology whole-heartedly, such that a mobile is enough for people to carry out various tasks of day to day life, like shopping, doing recharge, making payments and so on. And it all started with the e-commerce industry booming in the market with the entry of new players. Although the industry is mushrooming at a rapid pace today, it is facing tough competition from the realm of m-commerce. With technology extending itself from personal computers and laptops to uber-smartphones, it has become habitual for people to access everything from alpha to omega on their mobiles. Since, smartphones have become an essential part and an addictive way of life for people today; the coming days are set to witness the m-commerce industry progress consequently and rapidly.

Estimates say that there are a whopping 116 million smartphone users in the country. The ever increasing number of mobile-fanatics has urged companies to not just diversify to the e-commerce platform, but to expand their orbit to the m-commerce landscape as well. The sole objective behind this is to cater to the fledgling number of smartphone users in the country. Organisations are launching user-friendly applications that provide ease and convenience to consumers while transacting.

Increasingly companies are devoting a sizeable portion of their budgets to mobile marketing with the aim of grabbing eyeballs of majority of its patrons and attain top of the mind brand recall. Mobile marketing is still in its early stages in India but as more people shift from laptops to smartphones it will soon mature and realize its full potential. The overall swift adoption of smartphones in the country is playing a key role in changing consumer behaviour and their expectations, making it necessary for companies to upgrade their operations accordingly.

Rising mobile phone proliferation, advent of internet and reducing costs of smartphones, are the crucial factors that are boosting the m-commerce industry, making it a lucrative platform for organisations to market themselves. According to experts, people now spend more time surfing on their mobile phones than on their laptops or PCs.

Companies are launching user-friendly apps as an extension of their websites in order to make transacting smooth and convenient for their patrons. Mobiles have gone beyond their preliminary function of making and receiving calls. Till some time back, the handheld devices were merely a source of information exchange. Now, they have become an indispensable part of everyone’s life. The basic feature phones have undergone an tremendous technological transformation, giving rise to the big-screened user-friendly smartphones that are equipped with innovative features and applications. Further to this, mobile applications have made even the most cumbersome tasks like making payments, a cakewalk for users.

Brands are gradually introducing in-app initiatives to carve a niche for themselves in the market. Today, applications have become the new destination for gaining additional value. After the success of the e-commerce platform, brands have earned significant loyalty among consumers, due to which they are going extra miles to deliver unparalleled services to their patrons. This is being done by launching mobile applications which provide personalised and tailor-made services to the users. Moreover, companies are coming up with attractive offers like discounts, coupons and additional rewards to persuade consumers to try the app version of websites. Also, applications that give users cashback or credit points are cropping up in the market. Multiple apps for serving the one purpose is futile, hence companies are launching separate apps for serving different needs like one for banking and finance, one for entertainment and so on.

Mobile applications are simple, data-driven and provide a user-friendly interface that empowers users with impeccable services complemented by ease of use and convenience. Brands are striving hard to lure consumers to earn real money or rewards by downloading their applications. This has given a fillip to the mobile app usage by patrons.

Applications are slowly becoming perfect companion of users, for watching movies, shopping, visiting a destination or planning a trip. The instant notification system provided by applications is what keeps users updated and intimated about new movie releases, new trends, and best destinations to visit etc. This keeps users constantly connected with the application and the brands. Application-based services enable firms to reach out to the widely-scattered audience, shoot up sales and bring a ground-breaking change in the business landscape of the country.

Companies can feel the heat of the fierce competition that’s rising in the country. Owing to this, brands are coming up with amazing offers on their applications to attain an edge over their competitors. In such a scenario, it’s obvious that the firms providing the best-in-breed experience to their users and those that are spontaneous with cutting edge strategies will dominate the market.

 

 

 

Sandeep Amar is the Chief Operating Officer at India.com Web Portal Private Limited, where he is responsible for managing the P&L, strategy, sales, editorial, product management, technology, UI/UX, marketing, finance, admin and general operations of the company.

He has over 17 years of experience in sectors like TV, print, banking, Internet and mobile. He had joined Times Group in 2007 as the Business Head  of Simplymarry.com at Times Business Solutions, and later was leading marketing for all divisions of TBSL. In 2009, he was made the Head of Marketing and Audience at Times Internet. He’s also worked with Zee Telefilms, Citigroup, and Hindustan Times.

Amar is an alumnus of Delhi University’s Faculty of Management Studies (FMS). He did his MBA in marketing management.

In this exclusive interview with Ratnika Swami for India Digital Review, Amar talks about the growing importance of the online content space in India, how India.com is trying to capture the younger, social savvy generation and the data based direction that advertising is taking. Excerpts:

Q. Could you begin with a brief introduction to India.com, including some highlights and an overview of your current operations?

India.com is actually India Web Portal Pvt. Ltd., which comprises a set of websites like India.com, TheHealthSite.com, CricketCountry.com, BollywoodLife.com, OnCars.in, BGR.in and we also represent ZeeNews.com, DNAIndia.com and ZeeTV.com as well. We are a joint venture company of Zee Media and Penske Media Company (PMC). The latter has sites like HollywoodLife, and has just bought Variety magazine, so it has got Variety.com. PMC has also bought a lot of Conde Nast properties.

Q. What is the state of the online content driven portals in India? And where do you see the market 1-2 years from now?

The content publisher business in India is strong, and the interest in online is obviously increasing. Right now, I think we are more than 200 million users, and a lot of these users are on mobile phones. Earlier, content used to be driven by the web, but now we see a lot of app traffic also coming in.

The display business is strong but not as much as we would like it to be in India. In digital, a major chunk of advertising is related to search, which mostly goes to Google—though the money is moving to Facebook as well.

If you see a newspaper competing with a newspaper, say, in print, a Times of India competes with a Hindustan Times, but in online it competes with Google and Facebook for advertising dollars, which is a tough kind of play. Similarly, NY Times digital would not only compete with Washington Post digital, it would also compete with Google and Facebook, and that is why the digital editions do not make as much money as the print papers used to. They tried to make it paid also, but paid content is a tough business and I do not think people would pay for content anytime in the near future. 

Today, from a comScore perspective, Times Internet is the number one player in India, the number two player is Network 18, and we are the number three player in the market, after beating India Today and NDTV.

According to comScore, in India, Times Internet has around 22-23 million users and Network 18 around 19 million users, whereas we have around 10 million users. NDTV has around 7-8 million and the India Today Group in the range of 8-9 million.

These are the top 5-6 publishers in the game, and the numbers [of users] are increasing, mostly on mobile.

I think content is going to grow, in terms of audiences, but in terms of monetisation, I feel the advertising ecosystem is not putting as many dollars on display as they should. And the core reason is that a lot of people are performance oriented on digital, and on Google and Facebook, you can buy cost per click (CPC); advertising on pure search takes care of some of the performance part of it.

So I think that is a big challenge, and the way we look at surpassing that challenge is the way the Western market is going: the data route. We are invested in data and will be doing data oriented sales very soon. We have partnered with Lotame, one of the leaders in data.

Now, when the opportunity is a data opportunity, we are not just selling ZeeNews or India.com, we are selling audiences. For example, when we talk about OnCars.in, we are selling an audience of 30+ auto-lovers in Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore, and that we will sell not only on our sites, but we will also sell them across the Google display network and Facebook exchange. So that way, we will give much deeper solutions to the advertisers. And I think advertisers will also be far more excited about the data-based ecosystem.

Q. Would you agree that over the last few years, online has taken over offline as the preferred mode of content consumption?

Well, in terms of offline content sources, magazines are definitely “dead or dying.”Newspapers are still relevant in India, but in terms of breaking news, newspapers have no contribution–for that, there is online or television. Twitter and TV are two places where you see breaking news kind of stories. Content is consumed throughout the day, which is especially driven by Facebook and Google, and this is where, I think, newspapers do not stand a chance.

There is also the concept of the second screen, like even the Oscars website is tuned in to the television. I think newspapers still have some life left in India, as a mode of content consumption. But overall, I think it will be online.

Q. Last month, citing the comScore November 2014 report, you mentioned that India.com is the number one new age content site in India. Could you elaborate on what you mean by new age content?

New age content is a term coined by us and some other players in the market. It generally means content for younger people. Earlier we were only aggregating content of other portals, but then we decided to provide content for the Internet savvy younger audience.

After a lot of research, we realised that for young people entertainment, sports and hard news are equally important. So if you go to our homepage, you will find the latest movie trailers as top news, you will find a football match as top news.

We try to cover that kind of news that young people would want to read. The difference between a news site and a new age content site is that the latter’s priority is not [necessarily] news, the priority could be entertainment or sports. And that is why we compare ourselves with Scoop Whoop. We also compare ourselves with Scroll and Quartz--sites that I think mark the revival of long form, intellectual, personal opinion kind of content, which is also positive, and we also do that.

So we provide a mix of a lot of things which others are not doing. And I would not say that we are ahead of them, we are only ahead in terms of numbers. We are very driven by our audiences. We are totally focused on what young people do on Facebook and Twitter, and we try to cover that. For young people entertainment and sports are top categories, so we cover that. But we also cover hard news as much as anybody else. So that is what I would call new age content for young people.

Q. How would you measure engagement on your site? And what are the parameters that you use to measure it?

There are various analytics, but primarily, the first thing we notice is page views per visit and bounce rate, and the second thing we try to measure is time spent on our sites, which, unfortunately, Google analytics is not very good at, so we use some other tools.

Then we try to understand how people use our sites. We track some mouse movements and use software like Mouseflow and ClickTale for that. This enables us to see where the mouse is moving on the screen, where the focus was maximum, where did a reader stop in first scroll, second scroll, etc. We also use eye-tracking, which we have to do in an experimental scenario. This helps us understand how consumers are engaging with the site.

Q. India.com also stated that you have 2.63 million unique users. Could you please specify if that figure includes only India.com users or ZeeNews.com and other sites’ users as well?

On comScore, in India alone, India.com has 2.63 million unique users. On Google analytics we are 8.6 million unique users worldwide. There is a lot of difference in comScore and Google analytics figures, as comScore does not cover mobile data, they do not cover cyber cafes or people below the ages of 15. If you see worldwide comScore figures, we would be around 3.5-4 million users.

Q. On what basis do you identify a unique user? Can you share with us figures for time spent on your site?

It is generally done through a browser cookie. So if a user logs into a site, the site pushes a cookie into the browser and that cookie is unique. When the user returns the next time and the system again pushes a cookie and if the cookie is duplicated then that means that it is the same unique user.

In terms of time spent, it is a constant process of growth. We have relatively younger sites, and we are working on that, and there are a lot of areas for improvement out there.

We are getting audiences and are competing with some very big brands, which have been there for decades. India.com is a three year old company, but we started out one year back. Right now we have respectable numbers but I think those numbers need to get better.

In terms of time spent, India.com is not doing as well as CricketCountry or BollywoodLife, but it depends, as readers may come for a very specific article which they read and exit the site. Now, Bollywood is a lot of leisure reading, lots of gossip about stars that people want to read, so people spend far more time engaging with that content.

Since we run so many sites, at times a site wise analysis is not right, so we do some section wise analysis. These days opinions fly a lot, and all those debates that happen in comments and on Facebook are pretty exciting. As per my experience what has happened is, when we have taken on brands, wherein the consumer has not been given value, for a BGR king of site, we got 15000 likes on a single article. So what we noticed was that when you represent the consumers in a certain matter, then it is taken more positively, or if you take on a political party then the opposition party sort of takes it up.

We want to be strong on both intellectual content as well as the social media driven content. And a lot of it is done in terms of images, infographics and listicles, as young people have limited time and use mobile phones a lot, and such things help them in comprehending the content faster.

I think content consumption is changing really fast, and a lot of this content consumption will move into video.

Q. What is your path to profitability?

We are thinly a bit negative, and we want to kind of stay in that direction. Scale is more important for us right now than profitability, although we are very close to break-even; we can achieve profitability anytime. India.com is our flagship brand now, and it is contributing significantly to that. For now, we are increasing our revenue, and our losses are on the decline. The key in Internet companies is to scale up revenues at an affordable loss, and we are very much there.

Q. What are your plans for the future?

I think it is important to take on the next level publishers. It is going to be a tough battle ahead. And that is where our focus is right now. We need to fire all cylinders and make it to the next level. The next publisher, which is Network 18, is a distance away. In the recent mobile browser report by comScore, we are neck to neck with Network 18. So we need to see how web + mobile data looks like, and then we need to make sure that we kind of ascend.

 

1. Audi's 'Share your light' campaign 

Audi India came up with a unique initiative to make its presence felt last Diwali. The premium car manufacturer collaborated with its fans, and used Diwali as a platform to promote their long association with LED technology, while giving back to the society.

The company leveraged micro-blogging service Twitter to help light up 400 homes in a village. For every 50 tweets with the hashtag Shareyourlight, Audi pledged a set of solar LED lamps per household. The digital campaign was executed by W+K Delhi.

A microsite was created for users to track the traffic of tweets vis-à-vis the number of homes to be lit. @AudiIn urged its 45,000+ followers to share their Diwali wishes using the hashtag. The goal was to light up 400 homes with 20,000 tweets. To increase the number of tweets, Audi also promoted the hashtag across platforms – the 3.6 millions followers on Facebook, included.

#Shareyourlight trended on the day reaching out to 10 million people in the process and achieved a whopping 120million+ impressions.

2. British Airways launched ‘Welcome to Home’ campaign 

U.K.-based airline British Airways (BA) launched a ‘Welcome to Home’ campaign. The concept revolved around the fact that British Airways connects many people living in countries that may not have a homegrown carrier offering long-distance flights, to destinations across the globe.

In the “Welcome of Home” video, BA highlights the millions of Indians who live in North America – far from their extended families in India. The airline created a short four-minute film that documents a Canadian woman and her family’s return to India to see her grandmother, and shows the emotional experiences expatriates go through.

The campaign follows the airline’s “Visit Mum” campaign in 2013. The company launched a contest on Twitter that would send a winner, plus a guest, a trip to wherever “home” may be. One simply had to tweet a photo to British Airways that reminds them of home and use #WelcomeOfHome in their Tweet.

3. Philips India ‘HIM’ campaign

Personal care brand Philips India has launched a digital campaign to spread awareness about breast cancer, in association with its agency Ogilvy One. Launched on October 19, the campaign ‘Husbands initiated Movement’ or HIM, urges men to ensure that their wives take a 10-minute breast self examination once every month. The brand created a microsite called HIM Initiative.com. It bears information about the disease and the test. "It's simple. Just tell your wife to do this test, while you do one of the chores she does," says the website, which also has a Breast Cancer Risk Assessment Tool. So far, the site has received 55,000+ visits so far. The campaign features a video, which was published on YouTube, features a deaf-and-mute couple.

4. HE Deodorant’s ‘League of Interesting Men’ campaign

Personal and healthcare product giant Emami launched their ‘League of Interesting Men’ campaign with a 21 Day challenge starting on September 22, 2014. The company forayed into the men's Deodorant market by launching HE brand of Deodorants. Hrithik Roshan was appointed as brand ambassador for HE brand. The company created a microsite – www.leagueofinterestingmen.com through which they gave daily challenges to people for 21 days, with Apple MacBook Air, Xbox connect and Xiaomi mobile as the grand prizes. The activities were anything from photo bombing your boss to driving an auto rickshaw to doing a public performance. The participants had to login through their Facebook id and submit their entries in picture or video format.

5. Dettol’s ‘Give life a hand’ global campaign

With its global campaign 'Give Life a Hand’, RB India’s personal hygiene brand Dettol leveraged the digital medium to spread awareness about the importance of handwashing. Largely led by digital, the campaign invited people to pledge their support for the cause by posting #handfie, which as the name suggests, is a selfie of your hands. To join the movement people needed to click a picture of their clean hands and upload their #handfie.   For every #handfie submitted by people on the campaign website or through Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Dettol has pledged to educate 1 child about healthy hand-washing habits through school contact programs around the world.

6. Philips ‘Like A Brat’ campaign

The personal care brand Philips India had roped in the actor Arjun Kapoor to promote its range of face stylers and other grooming kits including the Pro Skin Advanced beard trimmers, through its campaign ‘Like a Brat’. On the digital front, a dedicated ‘Like a Brat’ website had been created for the campaign where one can pledge their allegiance to the cause and enter into exciting contests. The campaign was conceptualized and designed by digital agency Isobar. To make the site more interactive visitors were asked to tale a virtual oath of awesomeness over a candle, on the webcam.

The recorded pledge video could then be submitted. The brand used social media to drive users to its microsite. The Philips Men India Facebook and Twitter pages actively shared the brat philosophy by inviting users to take the pledge at the site. Users had been engaged with the help of the ad film, memes, and #Likeabrat contest where the wittiest three tweets made with #LikeABrat hashtag on what makes them a brat were gratified with the Philips beard trimmer.

7. IndiaMART’s  ‘Kaam Yahin Banta Hai’ campaign

Conceptualized by McCann, the 360 degree campaign is set to integrate Print, TV, Radio, Outdoor and a digital mix of social media – Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. It primarily focuses on the new age buyer, who demands hassle-free buying, either to fulfill his business or personal requirements. The TVC was first rolled out exclusively on the digital platform, and later on TV.

A massive digital campaign was held around Twitter and Facebook page of IndiaMART, asking people to share their favourite #aaramkitune (tune that relaxes them the most) and enabling IndiaMART create the longest playlist of Aaram ki tunes. The contest was a precursor to the main TVC, where Irrfan Khan plays his aaram ki tune while buying through IndiaMART.

8. DBS Chilli Paneer Season 1

DBS Bank India, a part of Asia’s foremost financial services group, had launched the industry’s first love story –Chilli Paneer in September last year, breaking the traditional advertising norm in the banking space. DBS Bank had rolled out an innovative campaign where the story of Chilli Paneer would unfold every Friday on www.chillipaneerfilm.com. Being true to the bank values, the story revolves around purpose, relationship and connectivity. The film witnessed over 1.2 million views across platforms.

And now, it has come up with the second season of the ‘Chilli Paneer’ film – a first-of-its kind interactive digital ad film in India. The second season of this digital ad film has SapientNitro as the creative and technology partner for the campaign.

 

Kesavan Kanchi Kandadai is the Chief Executing Officer at Tangerine Digital Pvt. Ltd, where he is responsible for running content creation and management business. Kesavan understands the evolving digital landscape and is adept in creating innovative products and solutions to meet the ever-changing needs of the digital consumer.

As an alumnus of IIT Bombay, Kesavan started off his career with India's largest IT services company, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) as an Associate Technology, where he consulted one of the biggest financial institutions in the world. Post his stint with TCS, he had a seven year long association with Sapient as a Manager Technology where he was leading large scale IT development, transition and change management initiatives. He built his expertise in content management and multiplatform content delivery systems.

In this exclusive interview with Ratnika Swami for India Digital Review, Kandadai talks about the growing importance of the online content space in India, how the digital content market is changing in the country and the challenges faced by companies in making the most of digital. Excerpts:

Q. Can you briefly describe how Tangerine Digital has evolved into a digital content management agency, since it started in 2006?

Founded in 2006, the company started out with content production, content post-production and services. We were entirely focused on the media and entertainment industry at the time. We always kept digital as the primary focus area for the company.

Digital content in India started off in Telecom VAS; Tangerine’s services have also evolved with the changing VAS industry. We decided to shut down our content production and content post-production services and focused entirely on the digital ecosystem

Initially we were servicing the mobile VAS industry through our content services.  Then later on video-on-demand portals came up, YouTube became big and VAS kind of went down. As the digital industry took shape, we were one of the front-runners and also the early adopters of everything digital. We have the credit of doing the first ever sports live streaming in India forr the T20 Cricket World Cup. We are also the first company to be YouTube certified in South-East Asia. In 2014, we were voted as the #1 digital content services company in India by AFAQS.

Q. How do you think the digital marketing space is evolving in India? And what are Tangerine’s plans for the future?

According to the latest IAMAI report, in 2014, there was a total digital ad spends worth Rs. 2,750 crores in India. That’s a 22% growth from the last year but from 2011 onwards it has been growing at an average of 25% or more. This year, it is expected to grow further by 30% to Rs. 3700 crores. We are seeing tremendous growth in the e-commerce space, the smartphone penetration and the growth of bandwidth and internet users in India. In the coming times, digital marketing is set to grow faster.

Right now, we are entirely focused on content services. Globally, on an average, almost 25% of the marketing budgets are being spent on content. In B2B business model, the companies spend around 28% of their digital marketing budgets on digital content and in B2C model the companies spend about 25%.

If we assume Rs. 3700 crores is the total digital marketing spends in the next year, and 25% of that will be for content marketing, there is almost a Rs. 900 crores opportunity in India in the space that we operate in. So there is a huge opportunity coming their way for all parties involved. If the US is spending 25% of their total spends on content, India is currently spending at 10%, according to me prediction this is going to grow exponentially in 2015.

Q. How important is it for brands today to have an online content strategy? And how do brands influence through content creation? 

Companies who do content strategy are far more successful in their content marketing plans than companies who don't do content strategy. Almost 90% of all companies’ money for content strategy involves social media and blogs.

For example, for the AskMe app launch we came up with a content strategy, where we advised them that they should involve blogger engagement as a major source in terms of the digital promotion of their brand and their app. And the result was that they engaged with around 1000 bloggers who reviewed the product and wrote about it.

The top three reasons why brands use content are brand awareness, lead generation and engagement (80 - 90%). There are around 18 tactics that one can use in terms of content marketing and out of the 18- the largest growth in the past couple of years has been seen in video and infographics.

Q. What are the most common mistakes that brands make while creating an online content strategy?

The most common mistake is to not use analytics in terms of your brand or your competitors to help create online strategies. The study of these analytics will bring out interesting numbers and metrics in terms of what content and what platform will carry forward your brands’ message the best. Still, there is no set formula. One has to do a lot of experimentation with putting some money here and some there and seeing what works best. The other mistake is to not have a strategy and ape someone else’s or competitors’ plans.

Q. Sometime back, Tangerine Digital had launched analytics driven content solutions for different sectors, including travel and FMCG. How is the adoption of those solutions going? What are the new trends in analytics that brands should look at?

Within our group, TO THE NEW, we have an analytics solution called Omnio G. With that we have worked with a lot of organizations globally. We have worked in the lifestyle consumer space and the financial industry space and both of them are doing decently well.

As far as the trends in analytics are concerned, the traditional metrics of how to measure digital marketing campaigns are not enough and people are looking at engagement as a major feature. This would mean that the quality of content will also play a major role going forward.

Another metric is the readership in terms of the number people reading the content and the time spent reading it. One needs to set certain goals in strategic terms to keep people engaged to the content and this is where the focus is shifting to.

Q. How methods do the brands need to adopt to boost online content and what are the limitations they should keep in mind?

First thing any brand should do before promoting themselves is doing a bit of analytics. Then they should come up with a strategy that details where and when they should spend the money. There are some technologies globally that help brands promote content. Now, to promote content on social media there exist distribution technologies. These are technologies like NewsCred, ContentFeed and Skyword etc. These technologies not only help you distribute content on your own channels but help you identify new channels and to promote your content on those channels. The second type of amplification is in terms of reinvigorating the content itself and how easy have you made it for people to like and comment and share in the organic way.

Now, one of the major limitations is going to come from how great the content is. The other limitation is the metrics being used to measure the quality of one’s content. The third limitation is that there is no instant gratification in content; it has a slow boiling point.

Q. Recently, you have also launched customised content solutions for brands in the burgeoning e-commerce sector. Could you elaborate on that?

One thing we kept in mind is that we need subject matter experts to review the quality of content. You also need content sources that are specific to the genres. We have lined up subject matter experts, the aggregators and publishers, content sources like the books and the magazines and have packaged it in a very different way for the e-commerce sector. This as a factor doesn’t exist anywhere else and is working very well for us. Firstcry is an example and there is also another travel portal that is soon to be launched that we are currently working for.

Q. Companies have been talking about user generated content, for quite a while now, but only a few blue chip brands are able to gain any traction. How do think that other brands can leverage this and how does Tangerine help them accomplish this?

User-generated content moderation has slowly shifted towards either self-driven, crowd-driven on tool-driven moderation. Earlier brands wanted people to moderate the content but now it has shifted to tool-driven and community-driven moderation.

We help brands to engage with their influencers in a positive way and to get these influencers to write and engage with other audiences in a direct way.

 

 

Over the years, rising internet and mobile phone penetration has changed the way we communicate and do business. Digital companies lean heavily on the internet and mobile phone revolution to fundamentally alter the way businesses reach their customers. 

This year has many highs and lows in the Indian digital ecosystem, particularly the e-commerce sector. In 2014, the country saw big investors from India and abroad putting their money on numerous e-commerce ventures, which have raised funds to the tune of $ 3 billion from individuals, companies and PE firms. And the inflow of funds in expected to continue and maybe grow stronger in the year ahead. The year was also very significant as we saw many important acquisitions in the digital sector.

2014 Funding Roundup 

Flipkart – This year, Singapore based Flipkart has around $2 billion from three funding rounds. In 2014, Flipkart has raised over 5 times the money it had raised in 2013. In May 2014, the company raised $210 million from DST Global, Tiger Global, Naspers and ICONIQ Capital. Then with a goal of becoming the “mobile e-commerce company of the future,” Flipkart raised $1 billion in from Tiger Global, Naspers, Singapore government’s GIC, DST Global, Accel Partners. While at the same time, rival and e-commerce behemoth Amazon announced a $2 billion India-specific fund. Less than six months after the company raised $1 billion, the online marketplace rounded off the year with a $700 million round from existing investors DST Global, GIC, ICONIQ Capital and Tiger Global, and new backers Baillie Gifford, Greenoaks Capital, Steadview Capital, T. Rowe Price Associate and Qatar Investment Authority. Flipkart also disclosed that it has applied to become a public company in Singapore, where it is registered. In December, Hong Kong based alternate asset management Steadview announced that they are investing $180 million in Flipkart.

Snapdeal - Snapdeal came into existence in 2010, as a daily deal platform. Snapdeal was the first established online player in India to shift to the marketplace model, a format in which a company hosts traders on its website to sell products, in 2012. The company raised around $133.7 million in a Series F funding round from Saama Capital, eBay, Nexus Venture Partners, Kalaari Capital, Intel Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners, in February. Then in May, the online marketplace raised around $100 million from Tybourne, PremjiInvest, Myriad, BlackRock and Temasek Holdings. Tata Sons Chairman Emeritus, Ratan Tata also invested in a personal capacity in the online marketplace. Following in the footsteps of Ratan Tata, Tata Group too invested funds in Snapdeal. In October 2014, the company raised $627 million from SoftBank. The company is targeting an annual $3 billion in gross merchandise value (GMV) sales by March 2015.

Zomato – Zomato, the popular restaurant search and discovery service, raised $60 million at a post-money valuation of $~660 million in November. The round was led jointly by Info Edge (India) Limited and Vy Capital, with participation from Sequoia Capital. This took Zomato’s total funding to over $113 million. Zomato has earlier raised $53 million from Info Edge (India) Limited and Sequoia Capital over multiple rounds of funding.

Quikr -In a funding round led by Tiger Global, the online classified site Quikr raised $60 million at a valuation of $460 million, from existing investors Kinnevik, eBay, Omidyar Network, Matrix Partners India, Nokia Growth Partners and Norwest Venture Partners also participated in this funding round. In March 2014, Quikr had raised $90 million in a funding round from their exisiting investors, led by Kinnevik. Back then Quikr was valued at $250 million. 

Olacabs – In October, Taxi service provider Olacabs had raised $210 million from Japan's SoftBank Corp at a valuation of nearly $1 billion.

Uber - Online Taxi-hailing service Uber raised $1.2 billion in another funding round that now brings the company’s valuation to $40 billion. This fresh round of funding would be used for expansion in Asia Pacific region.

Top start ups in India

Furniture e-tailer Urbanladder closed $21 million in Series B funding from Steadview Capital along with the existing investors, SAIF Partners and Kalaari Capital, in January this year.

Online baby care portal Firstcry received $15 million funding from Vertex Venture Management, a subsidiary of Singapore’s state run investment company Temasek Holdings.

In March 2014, Jewellery and accessories e-tailer BlueStone had raised an investment of $10 million. This round of funding was led by venture capital firm Kalaari Capital and existing investors including Accel Partners and Saama Capital also participated. Ratan Tata has also made a personal investment in Bluestone. In May, Furniture and home products marketplace Pepperfry raised $15 million funding led by Bertelsmann India Investments (BII), including Norwest Venture Partners (NVP).

In September, FreeCharge, online platform for recharge, utility payments, promotions and couponing, raised $33 million in Series B funding from Sequoia Capital, Sofina and RuNet.

In December, Amazon has led a $10-million funding round in gift card technology and retail firm QwikCilver Solutions for a stake believed to be just under 15%. Existing investors Helion Venture Partners and Accel Partners also participated in the fund raiser. 

Major acquisitions in 2014

Myntra - In May, Flipkart had acquired the online fashion store Myntra and had stated plans of investing upward of $100 million into Myntra in the near future. Post acquisition, Myntra CEO Mukesh Bansal had joined Flipkart board and is now heading Flipkart’s fashion business. In February, Myntra had raised $50 Million in a financing round led by Premji Invest along with new and existing investors. Meanwhile, rival Amazon inches closer to acquiring Rocket Internet backed Jabong.com.

Zomato - Online restaurant search and discovery service Zomato acquired Italy's leading online and mobile restaurant search service Cibando, making it Zomato's fifth acquisition this year. Zomato acquired MenuMania in New Zealand, Lunchtime in Czech Republic, Obedovat in Slovakia, and Gastronauci in Poland in the past months. 

Snapdeal – The online marketplace acquired fashion products discovery site Doozton in April and then announced the acquisition of Wishpicker.com, a rapidly growing technology platform that offers users gift options based on intelligent recommendations, in December. 

News Corp - In December, Media mogul Rupert Murdoch's News Corp acquired the start-up Bigdecisions.com.

Yahoo - Yahoo has acquired digital video advertising service BrightRoll for $640 million in an effort to boost its revenue.

SVG Media - Digital media network SVG Media has fully acquired mobile video technology platform SeventyNine and performance display platform NetworkPlay from Gurner+Jahr

Nilay Arora spearheads the marketing and business operations for Tencent's biggest global product for India - WeChat. Arora has over 10 years of marketing and product experience across consumer technology and media, including mobile, Internet, social media, online gaming, TV, radio and print. He has also been an active member of the leadership team driving marketing and product for various business verticals for about seven years. 

Before joining WeChat, Arora has worked with Hindustan Times, Radio Mirchi and Ballarpur Industries in various consumer marketing roles. He holds a Master’s in Business Administration from IMS and an Engineering degree in Electronics and Telecom, apart from a being a part of Harvard’s Strategic Management programme.

In this exclusive interview with Ratnika Swami for India Digital Review, Arora talks about the growing importance of the instant chat and messaging category in India, how the OTT market is changing in the country and the challenges faced by companies in making the most of digital. Excerpts: 

Q. How does the digital medium - Internet as well as mobile - figure in WeChat’s plans to reach out to the Indian consumers?

The product is already in the digital space. We are a communication app, which is an OTT app and every possible thing in our business is broadly on the Internet, and is in the digital space. As for as reaching out to the customer is concerned, yes, it does happen online significantly as well as offline at times. 

There are two ways to educate the users about you product: online and offline. In the online space, what happens is, typically, the first category of apps that the users go to are the communication apps, because that is the primary need from a phone. Then there are obviously guys who are trying the Internet for the first time on their smartphones; therefore there is a lot of offline communication that is also required. In the past we have done mass education programmes through TV and other mediums as well.  We also do very significant user reach-out programmes in colleges, etc. 

Q. How do you see the OTT (instant chat and messaging) market in India evolving in the coming years? And what is WeChat's current share in the market?

As far as the market is concerned, the OTT space has tremendous potential. The reason being, in India there are almost about 800 million-odd mobile connections and barely about 70-80 million Internet connected smartphone users. And in the next 3-4 years, as per a KPMG report, there will be 250 million-plus Internet connected smartphone users. If that is the case, the potential is enormous. 

Secondly, communication has always been the category which is the most utilitarian on a phone and almost all the communication needs are getting served OTT these days. Therefore in this category, there are multiple players and very clearly users are trying out multiple messaging apps. WeChat does feature very significantly there. Where will we go from here? We are very clear that we have spent a lot of time, energy and efforts in ensuring that our product is relevant to the user, the user experience is improved even more, the value that an app provides to the user keeps growing, and people are engaged on our platform for a period of time—I think that should result in further growth. 
 
Q. Could you please elaborate on the Freemium (Free + Premium) model and what role does it play in the OTT segment?

In the communication category, almost all the apps are free right now, and all the core communication features are also free. Unless of course there is calling to PSTN, which is outside of India, for which one pays. That would be the same for all the players in the category, if it is calling to a non-OTT number, which is basically an outside-the-network mobile number or an outside country landline number, I think that would remain paid. A couple of players are already offering that in the market and that is the only thing that I see will be paid. Going ahead, instead of core services being freemiumised, I think a lot of evolution of the platform is where the focus is for us; for instance, introduction of gaming as a service can contribute to the freemium model. Gaming is a place where the freemium model works better, because that is where people are engaged and when they are stuck into the game, they don’t mind paying to clear the levels. 

Q. What marketing initiatives are you undertaking online to stay ahead of the competition?

Throughout the year, we try and educate the audience through various marketing initiatives—online and offline both. In the online space, our focus is on using our own users as brand ambassadors to tell other people about WeChat and get them on board. Because those are the ones who like our features, who like our products, who consume that, and believe that there is a significant value, we’d like to use them as the ambassadors. 

Secondly, our effort is towards creating a positive cycle of word of mouth. We have also been doing advertising in the past: it’s a good medium to educate the mass audiences. At various stages of our product’s life cycle in the country, advertising will also be used as a medium. 

Q. How important is it for brands today to have a significant presence on social media? How do you use WeChat’s messaging and gaming features to create new interactive experiences for users and brands alike? 

While our focus is significantly directed towards those who are already on WeChat, we do try to use other platforms to talk to our users and communicate about our product, whether it is Facebook or Twitter. There are multiple ways of doing that: sometimes we reach out to them directly, or sometimes we engage with them through some activities where they come to know about our features, so those are very tactical things that we do on our platform. The core objective is to communicate what is the latest that you have on your product, which will help them to add value to their life and communicating with their friends and family. For example, we did a quiz contest about the feature that has a six-second recording on WeChat. Or which of the stickers do you like the most? 

Q. You have recently announced a content partnership with Buzzfeed. Could you elaborate on that? And also, please shed some light on the other partners that WeChat has engaged with, so far, in India.

Buzzfeed is also on WeChat now. WeChat as a platform has a concept called the official account, where brands and services can also have their presence on WeChat. And this presence is in the form of an account, which users can follow to keep connected with these brands. The user can engage with the brand through this account; it’s like chatting with the brand. It’s a chat interface, not a page interface that most of us think of when we think of a Twitter handle or Facebook page. The brand has an admin panel, at their end, through which a social media person can reply when required. 

Secondly, this can be used as a content distribution platform. So, for example, they [brands] can push one communication a day. Because messaging is a very personal space, you don’t spam. Otherwise, the user will “unfollow” their official account. And you don’t want that as a brand, that users unfollow you. Then how do people discover more? You just tap on whatever news you want and you’ll receive that news on the fly from their API plugged into our admin panel. 
Some of our other official account partnerships include Dainik Jagran, Flipkart, T-Series, ScoopWhoop, Sunburn, Desi Martini, Zoom TV, Food Panda, Cafe Coffee Day, and eBay. And ideally, this platform can be an open platform also. Just the way a Facebook paid platform is, but right now it is not, as it’s in a very early stage; in China it is an open platform. Over a period of time, this will become an open platform. 

Q. What is your current revenue model and how do you see it evolve as the market matures?

There are revenue opportunities. We have a sticker store, that’s an opportunity. Then there is gaming, where the freemium model fits in very well. Back in China, transactions is also an opportunity. WeChat has a wallet service in China, so those kinds of opportunities are also there. And over a period of time you’ll see us evolve in those directions. The Indian market is a huge and diverse market, and we’re still barely at 70 million connected Internet smartphone users. The moment this grows significantly bigger, there would be plenty of opportunities to do many more things.

Vineet Sehgal has more than 18 years of experience in marketing and business strategy across diverse industries such as telecom, FMCG, banking and management consulting. As the Chief Marketing Officer at the online classifieds company Quikr, Sehgal is responsible for marketing strategy and plans across all areas, including brand building, performance marketing and partnership and alliances.

Prior to joining Quikr, Sehgal headed Nokia's programs and planning portfolio. He led large-scale launches of some of the most popular mobile devices in India. He also founded the Nokia Money start up team and drove its growth from conception to market. Sehgal began his career in consumer marketing with Nestle.

In an exclusive interview with Ratnika Swami for India Digital Review, Sehgal talks about the growing importance of the digital medium, how the online classifieds market is changing in the country and the challenges faced by the CMOs in making the most of digital. Excerpts: 

Q. How does the digital medium - Internet as well as mobile - figure in Quikr’s plans to reach out to consumers?

We are an Internet company, so digital as a medium is a very key part of our overall plan, be it from the product side, be it from the marketing side, or even from the customer acquisition side. In fact, today, almost 35-40% of our total marketing spend goes towards digital. Now the bigger question is, we are one of those companies that started off as digital companies and actually now have a lot of offline legs; by offline legs what I mean is that we factor in field people who go out in the market and educate the consumers about how to create online classified ads.

We also spend a lot of money on all the elements of digital, whether it’s SEM, SEO, the digital ads at Google network, the Facebook network, lead generation marketing, social media, mobile marketing…so I think every element of digital marketing that a typical company or an e-commerce company would focus on, we make a lot of efforts there.

The third element of our digital plan is actually about mobility, where we are focusing a lot on our mobile segment, on our apps marketing, because increasingly, we see India is more about the mobile Internet and the desktop is kind of stagnant. Moreover, consumers are taking up mobile as a means to access the Internet, whether it’s an app or even a mobile platform. So I think in that sense, digital is a big part of our overall strategy, be it from expense, traffic or even engagement perspective.

Q.  How big is the online classified market in India and what is Quikr's share in the market? What marketing initiatives are you undertaking to stay ahead of the competition?

There is no formal estimate. There are some estimates available from different industry sources. I think I saw an IAMAI report which talked about last year’s total market to be about Rs 3100 crore. And it includes all sorts of online classifieds like matrimonials, jobs and other portals. This market is growing at 30-40% p.a., so in that sense it’s a fairly sizable market growing at a pretty good pace.    

There is no Quikr share as such. We don't evaluate ourselves from a market share perspective. Overall, what we look at is how many users are using online classifieds. At this point of time our focus is more about what penetration can we strive for within the larger Internet mobile community in India. And how many more millions of people can we win from our efforts.

I think you must have seen that across-the-board, both us and our competition have been spending heavily on marketing, enough to create awareness and also to demystify the whole concept of online classifieds. We have been marketing pretty aggressively across various media. In fact almost 60% of our marketing expense goes to offline, to the usual TV, which is a big medium for creating reach and awareness amongst millions of Indians. We use outdoor pretty aggressively; sometimes, we use print medium. We also use digital and activation on ground, for example, a college event, but more importantly, across all the different platforms we use all types of digital marketing plans like SEM, SEO, even lead marketing and so on and so forth.

I think product plays a key role as we try to develop the categories. When I say product, I also mean the entire user experience, when the person comes online to post an ad or look for an ad or search for something, the entire journey has to be seen from the point of view of simplicity or discoverability.

The second big part of our focus is quality, which is one of the big challenges in this industry. When it’s user generated content, like the ads that people post themselves, there can often be a lot of spam and a lot of junk ads that are Quikr-generated. In fact, we spend a lot of time curating the ads: today almost 35-40 % of the ads that get posted by consumers are removed by us because we believe they are not of high quality, or they are spam or they could be some kind of a fraud. We are very finicky about quality.

Our competition has been focusing a lot more on buying and selling of used stock. I think if you look at Quikr’s site, we actually focus on a whole lot of different categories—out of the nearly 170 categories and sub-categories, , an ad can be about donating, it could be exchanging, or even about pets.

Regional focus is also a very big part of our strategy and that even starts at the time that you enter our website and you are asked to identify which city you belong to. Even in our marketing plan we go deeper into the towns and cities, especially now going into tier-2 cities and towns, where we do a lot of on-ground activations.

 Our sites are now available in regional languages as well.

Lastly if you see our recent campaign ‘Buyer aur Seller ka perfect matchmaker’, which is currently on air, we are clearly shifting the focus as it’s not just about selling but also about the buyers, because any classified is always about both sides and it has to be a win-win situation for both. 

Q. How do you see the mobile Internet market in India evolving in the coming years? And how would this evolving market affect Quikr?

India is set to be the second largest mobile market in the world. That means 2-3 things: first of all as users or consumers start accessing the Internet on their mobile, I think they will start to follow the logical sequence of email-Facebook-WhatsApp and other social media. I think the second thing they will do is e-commerce, in fact e-commerce will develop faster than what we initially anticipated. From Quikr’s perspective, mobile accounts for more than 60% of our traffic, including mobile Internet and the Quikr App. And that is growing very fast. Even in the online classifieds market, which is relatively under-penetrated, mobile already accounts for more than 60% of our traffic and it is going to grow even bigger. So in that sense a lot of our efforts are going towards mobility.

Q. What are Quikr’s current digital spends? How do you see them move in terms of growth and focus?

We normally don't share the exact numbers. Like I said, almost 35-40 % of our total marketing spend goes to digital. Mobility is one big part of our focus area; when I say mobility I'm looking at both the mobile app and the mobile traffic. In terms of focus area, one is product development—how we can make the product even simpler, more user-friendly and quick. When the consumer comes online they should be able to quickly post an ad or reply to an ad.

Secondly, from a marketing perspective it’s about generating better traffic. It’s not just about bombarding consumers with ads and kind of hoping that some of them will click. Actually digital marketing allows us to target very contextually relevant ads to consumers.

The third part of it is about changing the behaviour. There is a lot of inertia amongst consumers when it comes to selling or buying used stuff. And I think that once they realize that they can get some great deals on the second-hand market, once they realize that they can get value, I think we will see a constant jump in terms of traffic and we are already seeing that.

Q. How important is it for brands today to have a significant presence on social media?

Social media is evolving literally every day. Two years ago most brands were talking about, 'Let’s have a Facebook page' and then it became 'Okay, let me get some likes', and now I think Facebook itself is evolving as a medium for advertisers. Facebook is also changing itself in terms of what it allows and what it doesn't allow. I think the days of buying fan page and likes are over. One has to understand that consumers of Facebook are themselves evolving. But the moment a brand tries to use Facebook as a means to do customer acquisition, say, by doing some heavy messaging, it interferes in the private time of  consumers, who then lose interest. So I think to us, Facebook is a medium for engagement in a very interesting, entertaining, relevant manner.

Now let’s take WhatsApp as an example. WhatsApp is a chat medium but it’s also a social medium that has significant impact, as almost all consumers have moved on to WhatsApp. Now some brands push spam messages, which are clearly intrusive because, again, WhatsApp is about personal space. We respect that.

The third part is about Twitter; again, we are focusing on the Indian context, what is your TG? For a mass brand like us, we need it to stay relevant and have visibility. You can have a Twitter handle, you can have a Twitter page, you can post something on it, but it’s not just about trending, it’s about what is the message or the context in which you are putting the message out in the market.

So one has to understand how the consumer is using social media and whether we as brands are infiltrating it adding on to it. 

Q. What is your cost of acquiring each customer and how is it changing?

We don't share those numbers, but again it varies for different media You know the cost of acquisition on the digital or mobile medium is very different from the cost of acquisition on, say, offline medium or a house-to-house medium. In that way we are still learning and evolving, but clearly we are pretty satisfied with the numbers we've seen so far.

Q. Are you planning on engaging in some activities to increase your customer acquisition?

As we move into smaller towns, initially, the cost will be higher since we'll be investing in terms of consumer education and activity building. But with the kind of growth we've seen, once the consumers get a taste of this, I think things will come around rapidly. We are in a growth phase right now and our focus is on category building and getting consumers on board.

Q. What is your current revenue model and how do you see it evolve as the market matures?

Quikr has three broad revenue models. First one is what we call 'premium listings', in which consumers pay a premium for a better placement of their ad on the overall listing space.

The second is lead-generation; we basically generate leads for customers who post ads on Quikr.

And the third is, of course, advertising, because we generate a lot of traffic online for marketers who advertise on our sites. And the way I see it, in terms of monetization, which grew three times in the last one year or so, it is only going to go up as the categories grow. 

Q. What challenges do you foresee for CMOs in tapping the digital medium?

The way I look at it, digital is a double edged sword. I think first of all marketing has become very accountable. I think for the first time in the history of marketing, the marketers or CMOs are being held accountable, which is a great thing. Because you know any campaign that you do, you can measure it very effectively. Now some people might be threatened by it but I think that most people see it as a great medium which will bring not just a lot of innovation but also a lot of opportunity in hand. You can try new things, you can fail, you can try again and you can fail and try again. So innovation is a big way out, that’s one thing.

Another thing that’s happening is the newer format, which again is both a challenge and an opportunity. Newer format, like social media, gives a great opportunity to experiment. You may not see the results but you may really be able to figure out what works and what doesn't work.

Now in terms of challenges, I think what is happening is that, increasingly, the clutter is going up, so there are so many websites, there are so many set formats, there’s a big long list available. So you know you have to be very clear about what you want to focus on. What is the TG? How are they using the media?

Secondly in certain cases, the costs, while still manageable, are going up, especially when you look at SEO, SEM, and the whole Google part of it.

I think the third challenge is about shifting audience preferences. The audience is Internet savvy, they have all the information on their finger-tips, which is great from a consumer perspective, and I totally respect that. But I think it therefore makes the job of marketers more difficult to really tap that audience.

I think the fourth challenge, or rather the temptation that marketers have, is that they are looking for a quick win or an overnight success. Just because one campaign became viral, now suddenly they have started thinking in a state of viral pitching. Now there is nothing called a viral video: you have to think through the content because the consumers have to like it and the consumers need to make it viral—we can't make it viral.

Lastly, while digital as a medium is very measureable, you can measure a whole lot of stuff. Often, marketers get confused about what to measure, whether it’s the impressions, whether it’s the traffic, whether it’s the cost per acquisition, whether it’s fan pages, whether it’s likes. When you have too many measures available, it is always hard in digital to focus on a few measures that truly impact business.    

 

Vineet Sehgal has more than 18 years of experience in marketing and business strategy across diverse industries such as telecom, FMCG, banking and management consulting. As the Chief Marketing Officer at the online classifieds company Quikr, Sehgal is responsible for marketing strategy and plans across all areas, including brand building, performance marketing and partnership and alliances.

Prior to joining Quikr, Sehgal headed Nokia's programs and planning portfolio. He led large-scale launches of some of the most popular mobile devices in India. He also founded the Nokia Money start up team and drove its growth from conception to market. Sehgal began his career in consumer marketing with Nestle.

In an exclusive interview with Ratnika Swami for India Digital Review, Sehgal talks about the growing importance of the digital medium, how the online classifieds market is changing in the country and the challenges faced by the CMOs in making the most of digital. Excerpts: 

Q. How does the digital medium - Internet as well as mobile - figure in Quikr’s plans to reach out to consumers?

We are an Internet company, so digital as a medium is a very key part of our overall plan, be it from the product side, be it from the marketing side, or even from the customer acquisition side. In fact, today, almost 35-40% of our total marketing spend goes towards digital. Now the bigger question is, we are one of those companies that started off as digital companies and actually now have a lot of offline legs; by offline legs what I mean is that we factor in field people who go out in the market and educate the consumers about how to create online classified ads.

We also spend a lot of money on all the elements of digital, whether it’s SEM, SEO, the digital ads at Google network, the Facebook network, lead marketing, social media, mobile marketing…so I think every element of digital marketing that a typical company or an e-commerce company would focus on, we make a lot of efforts there.

The third element of our digital plan is actually about mobility, where we are focusing a lot on our mobile segment, on our apps marketing, because increasingly, we see India is more about the mobile Internet and the desktop is kind of stagnant. Moreover, consumers are taking up mobile as a means to access the Internet, whether it’s an app or even a mobile platform. So I think in that sense, digital is a big part of our overall strategy, be it from expense, traffic or even engagement perspective.

Q. How big is the online classified market in India and what is Quikr's share in the market? What marketing initiatives are you undertaking to stay ahead of the competition?

There is no formal estimate. There are some estimates available from different industry sources. I think I saw an IAMAI report which talked about last year’s total market to be about Rs 3100 crore. And it includes all sorts of online classifieds like matrimonials, jobs and other portals. This market is growing at 30-40% p.a., so in that sense it’s a fairly sizable market growing at a pretty good pace.    

There is no Quikr share as such. We don't evaluate ourselves from a market share perspective. Overall, what we look at is how many users are using online classifieds. At this point of time our focus is more about what penetration can we strive for within the larger Internet mobile community in India. And how many more millions of people can we win from our efforts.

I think you must have seen that across-the-board, both us and our competition have been spending heavily on marketing, enough to create awareness and also to demystify the whole concept of online classifieds. We have been marketing pretty aggressively across various media. In fact almost 60% of our marketing expense goes to offline, to the usual TV, which is a big medium for creating reach and awareness amongst millions of Indians. We use outdoor pretty aggressively; sometimes, we use print medium. We also use digital and activation on ground, for example, a college event, but more importantly, across all the different platforms we use all types of digital marketing plans like SEM, SEO, even lead marketing and so on and so forth.

I think product plays a key role as we try to develop the categories. When I say product, I also mean the entire user experience, when the person comes online to post an ad or look for an ad or search for something, the entire journey has to be seen from the point of view of simplicity or discoverability.

The second big part of our focus is quality, which is one of the big challenges in this industry. When it’s user generated content, like the ads that people post themselves, there can often be a lot of spam and a lot of junk ads that are Quikr-generated. In fact, we spend a lot of time curating the ads: today almost 35-40 % of the ads that get posted by consumers are removed by us because we believe they are not of high quality, or they are spam or they could be some kind of a fraud. We are very finicky about quality.

Our competition has been focusing a lot more on buying and selling of used stock. I think if you look at Quikr’s site, we actually focus on a whole lot of different categories—out of the nearly 170 categories and sub-categories, , an ad can be about donating, it could be exchanging, or even about pets.

Regional focus is also a very big part of our strategy and that even starts at the time that you enter our website and you are asked to identify which city you belong to. Even in our marketing plan we go deeper into the towns and cities, especially now going into tier-2 cities and towns, where we do a lot of on-ground activations.

 Our sites are now available in regional languages as well.

Lastly if you see our recent campaign ‘Buyer aur Seller ka perfect matchmaker’, which is currently on air, we are clearly shifting the focus as it’s not just about selling but also about the buyers, because any classified is always about both sides and it has to be a win-win situation for both. 

Q. How do you see the mobile Internet market in India evolving in the coming years? And how would this evolving market affect Quikr?

India is set to be the second largest mobile market in the world. That means 2-3 things: first of all as users or consumers start accessing the Internet on their mobile, I think they will start to follow the logical sequence of email-Facebook-WhatsApp and other social media. I think the second thing they will do is e-commerce, in fact e-commerce will develop faster than what we initially anticipated. From Quikr’s perspective, mobile accounts for more than 60% of our traffic, including mobile Internet and the Quikr App. And that is growing very fast. Even in the online classifieds market, which is relatively under-penetrated, mobile already accounts for more than 60% of our traffic and it is going to grow even bigger. So in that sense a lot of our efforts are going towards mobility.

Q. What are Quikr’s current digital spends? How do you see them move in terms of growth and focus?

We normally don't share the exact numbers. Like I said, almost 35-40 % of our total marketing spend goes to digital. Mobility is one big part of our focus area; when I say mobility I'm looking at both the mobile app and the mobile traffic. In terms of focus area, one is product development—how we can make the product even simpler, more user-friendly and quick. When the consumer comes online they should be able to quickly post an ad or reply to an ad.

Secondly, from a marketing perspective it’s about generating better traffic. It’s not just about bombarding consumers with ads and kind of hoping that some of them will click. Actually digital marketing allows us to target very contextually relevant ads to consumers.

The third part of it is about changing the behaviour. There is a lot of inertia amongst consumers when it comes to selling or buying used stuff. And I think that once they realize that they can get some great deals on the second-hand market, once they realize that they can get value, I think we will see a constant jump in terms of traffic and we are already seeing that.

Q. How important is it for brands today to have a significant presence on social media?

Social media is evolving literally every day. Two years ago most brands were talking about, 'Let’s have a Facebook page' and then it became 'Okay, let me get some likes', and now I think Facebook itself is evolving as a medium for advertisers. Facebook is also changing itself in terms of what it allows and what it doesn't allow. I think the days of buying fan page and likes are over. One has to understand that consumers of Facebook are themselves evolving. But the moment a brand tries to use Facebook as a means to do customer acquisition, say, by doing some heavy messaging, it interferes in the private time of  consumers, who then lose interest. So I think to us, Facebook is a medium for engagement in a very interesting, entertaining, relevant manner.

Now let’s take WhatsApp as an example. WhatsApp is a chat medium but it’s also a social medium that has significant impact, as almost all consumers have moved on to WhatsApp. Now some brands push spam messages, which are clearly intrusive because, again, WhatsApp is about personal space. We respect that.

The third part is about Twitter; again, we are focusing on the Indian context, what is your TG? For a mass brand like us, we need it to stay relevant and have visibility. You can have a Twitter handle, you can have a Twitter page, you can post something on it, but it’s not just about trending, it’s about what is the message or the context in which you are putting the message out in the market.

So one has to understand how the consumer is using social media and whether we as brands are infiltrating it adding on to it. 

Q. What is your cost of acquiring each customer and how is it changing?

We don't share those numbers, but again it varies for different media You know the cost of acquisition on the digital or mobile medium is very different from the cost of acquisition on, say, offline medium or a house-to-house medium. In that way we are still learning and evolving, but clearly we are pretty satisfied with the numbers we've seen so far.

Q. Are you planning on engaging in some activities to increase your customer acquisition?

As we move into smaller towns, initially, the cost will be higher since we'll be investing in terms of consumer education and activity building. But with the kind of growth we've seen, once the consumers get a taste of this, I think things will come around rapidly. We are in a growth phase right now and our focus is on category building and getting consumers on board.

Q.  What is your current revenue model and how do you see it evolve as the market matures?

Quikr has three broad revenue models. First one is what we call 'premium listings', in which consumers pay a premium for a better placement of their ad on the overall listing space.

The second is lead-generation; we basically generate leads for customers who post ads on Quikr.

And the third is, of course, advertising, because we generate a lot of traffic online for marketers who advertise on our sites. And the way I see it, in terms of monetization, which grew three times in the last one year or so, it is only going to go up as the categories grow. 

Q.  What challenges do you foresee for CMOs in tapping the digital medium?

The way I look at it, digital is a double edged sword. I think first of all marketing has become very accountable. I think for the first time in the history of marketing, the marketers or CMOs are being held accountable, which is a great thing. Because you know any campaign that you do, you can measure it very effectively. Now some people might be threatened by it but I think that most people see it as a great medium which will bring not just a lot of innovation but also a lot of opportunity in hand. You can try new things, you can fail, you can try again and you can fail and try again. So innovation is a big way out, that’s one thing.

Another thing that’s happening is the newer format, which again is both a challenge and an opportunity. Newer format, like social media, gives a great opportunity to experiment. You may not see the results but you may really be able to figure out what works and what doesn't work.

Now in terms of challenges, I think what is happening is that, increasingly, the clutter is going up, so there are so many websites, there are so many set formats, there’s a big long list available. So you know you have to be very clear about what you want to focus on. What is the TG? How are they using the media?

Secondly in certain cases, the costs, while still manageable, are going up, especially when you look at SEO, SEM, and the whole Google part of it.

I think the third challenge is about shifting audience preferences. The audience is Internet savvy, they have all the information on their finger-tips, which is great from a consumer perspective, and I totally respect that. But I think it therefore makes the job of marketers more difficult to really tap that audience.

I think the fourth challenge, or rather the temptation that marketers have, is that they are looking for a quick win or an overnight success. Just because one campaign became viral, now suddenly they have started thinking in a state of viral pitching. Now there is nothing called a viral video: you have to think through the content because the consumers have to like it and the consumers need to make it viral—we can't make it viral.

Lastly, while digital as a medium is very measureable, you can measure a whole lot of stuff. Often, marketers get confused about what to measure, whether it’s the impressions, whether it’s the traffic, whether it’s the cost per acquisition, whether it’s fan pages, whether it’s likes. When you have too many measures available, it is always hard in digital to focus on a few measures that truly impact business.