Continuing with our series on Digital Marketing with Sanjeev Jasani, VP, Ogilvy One, New Delhi
The digital market has almost exploded in India. Millions of choices exist for consumers today and the average youth practically lives online. Companies like Google, Twitter and of course our favorite Facebook has changed the way we consumer media today. Social is the new Buzz word today.
Some figures relevant from India’s point of view: Google receives over 85% search queries out of all search queries, avg. no. of people spend over 400 mins on Google’s network, people spend an average of 4 hrs. a week on facebook and over 0.5 million people are accessing facebook on their mobiles. These could be surprising and shocking figures for any online brand, particularly Yahoo! which started loosing its market to these brands despite having the first mover advantage in India.
Yahoo’s internal research found that:
a) People were loosing interest from Yahoo’s home page due to a decade old and slow product experience.
b) People visited Yahoo Mail more than the Yahoo home page.
c) Usage of Yahoo was growing faster on mobile in comparison to pc
Convergence was also becoming a trend. “If i can do everything in one page, why go to multiple sites?” was a glaring question to most companies like Yahoo. Yahoo introduced the new APP structure that provided users the flexibility to Add the stuff they wanted right onto their homepage. This would make the homepage of Yahoo more relevant to all their needs and they would then not have to go to multiple sites.
The marketing objective was thus to communicate the APP led features of revamped Y! Home page, Y! Mail and Y! Mobile and get users to come back to the Yahoo! network. This would enable Yahoo to become relevant and get back into people’s hearts..
The activity was planned to fulfill the following objective over a period of 3 weeks:
a. Increase Y! network usage by 10%
b. Increase page views on the Yahoo network by 5%
c. Increase time spent by users to 180 million mins in a month
We were talking to people in the age group of 16-24. They are the ones who spend most of their time online, but particularly on Orkut / Facebook. Their friend list would have more than 130 friends on any social network. If they are on Facebook, they would have surely played Farmville. Irrespective of whether they are in office or at home, they would want to stay connected either on facebook or on G-chat. They would be most updated about gadgets. For them, the term ‘App’ is not a jargon. They are hardly concerned about safety on internet, therefore they won’t hesitate to swipe their father’s credit card on eBay.Their social life on internet is not a symbol of seclusion but a symbol of inclusion. You would often see them hooked to their mobile either sending or receiving SMS. They would hate to write full words in SMS. Most probably, by now, they would have bought the ‘Corby’ or any such phone which boasts of social media capabilities. If you would look at their social networks profile, then they would have uploaded some of the pics from their mobile. If they want to listen to a song on-the-go, they would simply type down songs.pk on their mobile browser and get that song downloaded then and there. They are broadcasters as well as creators of the content.
‘Coopetition’ is a term which was integral to our strategy. To simplify, we heavily and intelligently used partners’ network. Not only did we use partner networks, we also created special messages for those ad spaces. For example, specific ‘mail’ related keywords like email, email on mobile etc. were bought on ‘Google’ search engine to market email properties.
Content and contextual targeting along with site targetting was done using Google & Tyroo ad networks to target display ads as per the desired content. All through, the revamped features of Yahoo! on Home Page, Mail and Mobile platform were communicated. Specifically, the whole idea of ‘ADD’ was used to make people experience the product and Add apps to their new Y! Home page.
Step by step campaign execution:
Step a – A user sees the Yahoo! communication through display banners on various sites like (Yahoo, Rediff, Indiatimes, Tech2) / Google text ads and third party emails
Step b – After clicking on these online ads, the user lands on to a micro-site which asks the user to make Yahoo his home page. Here the user gets a demo of the new product.
Step c – User makes Yahoo his home page.
Step d – User receives a thank you message with the help of an auto generated email
The above 4 steps also apply to Y! Mail and Y! Mobile messaging.
Innovations across the media:
Social Media Optimization: A dedicated group of bloggers was selected, who just created buzz about Yahoo products across the bloggers network.
Handset targeting: Special mobile related ads were created for smart phones. These phones were selected with the help of mobile ad networks, on the basis of Yahoo’s compatibility with particular phones.
DTH advertising was done by Yahoo, on Airtel’s digital TV interactive platform.
Additional elements which led to the success of the campaign were:
1) 360 degree digital presence
Message consistency was maintained over the platforms be it mobile or pc. Due care was taken to incorporate relevant call to action as per the platform. For example, if an ad played on Airtel live, then the message was, Add Yahoo! to your mobile.
2) Integration with social networks
Instead of keeping ads away from the competitors, we joined hands with them and ran our ads across their network. It helped in two ways a) it gave additional revenue to them which strengthened the relationship in the industry and b) it let Yahoo pull users from competitors’ network to Yahoo’s network.
Results
The campaign got the all time best figures as given below:
Particulars : Projections : Actual
Y! network usage : 10% : 17%
Page views on Yahoo network : 5% : 9%
Time spent by users on
Yahoo! Network : 180 mil. mins p.m. : 230 mil mins p.m.
Source: Comscore
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Post originalmente publicado no Brainstorm #9
