Picture this: A board is seen on the bus stop that reads, ‘Games are more exciting at home. Drive Safely’. The ‘excit’ of ‘exciting’ is written in a contrasting colour for a deeper brand recall and impression. But can a passerby understand why an internet company suggests people to not use the internet? Well, that's the trick.
Excitel, an internet service provider, launched a ‘Drive Safely’ out-of-home (OOH) campaign where they placed billboards in 300 locations throughout Delhi in order to change how commuters behave on the road. The message was to encourage people to leave calls, conversations, and games at home in order to make road trips safe and pleasurable.
But why did the brand do so?
Varun Pasricha, Chief Operating Officer, Excitel, shared, “India is one of the worst countries, when it comes to road safety. We have the highest rate of motor accidents. The drivers generally have a phone hanging on a clamp with the windshield and are doing a video call or watching videos.”
Hence, the brand, via this OOH campaign is suggesting to not consume internet while on the road as it's coming from their mobile service provider. Once inside, they could use the wifi.
The brand wanted to invest in an OOH strategy because according to the executive, “When you have limited resources you develop a muscle to spend those resources right. So, we never had unending millions of dollars from investors to blow. Every investment that we did, had to either create an impact or create a ROI which we could measure tangibly. In OOH, we've tasted success. And we are very intent on replicating it.”
Right now, Excitel’s marketing mix consists 50 percent digital and about 30 to 40 percent OOH or BTL. Ten percent is spent opportunistically during cricket matches and the remaining 10 percent is kept for events.
This ‘Drive Safely’ OOH campaign cost about Rs 4-5 crores, but this figure is spread over a period of time and doesn’t represent one bullet investment in one go.
Perhaps, it's not an advertisement with a call to action. It's not an advertisement which has a performance return built into it. However, according to Pasricha, this is something which helps in building awareness and unaided recall.
He said, “Eventually, when you think about a category, it resonates. When you're able to saturate a person's mindset with seven, eight, ten impressions, then over a period of time it will not lead a person to probably consuming Internet connection right then and there but chances are that few months later when they’re genuinely making a purchase decision, they will probably give a little more weight to Excitel than they would have.”
“We've never wanted to be the cheapest but a value product. So maybe we charge 15 percent more than the cheapest plan offered by others, but then we give the value, which is five to six times more,” added Pasricha
This campaign suffices the objective because people associate with brands that stand for a cause or something more than just the functional attribute. Excitel was very clear that they need to create a space for itself, said Pasricha.
“That's why we had zero interest in saying, 400 Mbps internet at 400 rupees because there are 20 other ISPs which could say that. But to take a road safety position, I don't think any ISP would have thought about it straight away.”
In the coming fiscal, the internet brand wants to be the first amongst the top two players people think about in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Kanpur and Lucknow. So, when one thinks about broadband connection at home, Excitel wants to be one of the places where a consumer calls up and leaves their number themselves.
