Exclusive | Indian advertising sector is growing rapidly: Saavn's Vinodh Bhat

Saavn India, a leader in online music industry, offers the largest music library of legal south-asian music across the globe. With a global footprint of 200+ million users, Saavn offers an ideal vehicle for brands and advertisers with personalized marketing solutions and tools which enables them to reach out to the consumers through rich media formats and technologies.

Adgully caught up with Vinodh Bhat, chief executive officer and co-founder, Saavn to know more about the company and their strategies going forward. 

When asked about the three key milestones of Saavn’s journey, Bhat says, “Though we’ll probably have to write a book to cover all of them,  here are some to name a few: Firstly with regard to iTunes  back in 2006, we were the first group to bring Indian music to iTunes.  In 2010, we realized that to really serve the consumer and deliver an amazing experience, we needed to create our own consumer presence and thus Saavn.com was born.” Elaborating further he said, “Secondly iPhone App  which we released about 1.5 years ago and it’s now the number one  app for Indian music globally.  Most importantly, it also brought together our team across 5 offices and also set our internal standard for product, design and engineering and third would be Facebook Partnership - Our Facebook partnership was a simultaneously a great service to Indian music lovers around the world and an inflection point in our growth.  People have now been able to smoothly share their tastes in music with their friends and also discover new music from others in their social circles.” 

He believes that the Indian advertising sector is rapidly growing, especially in digital and mobile marketing.  More and more brands find it essential to connect with their target audience and create excitement and demand for their products and services.  Google has captured consumers at the “bottom of the funnel”, which is the exact moment they are ready to buy a product or service.

When asked about the strategies adopted by Saavn to stand out differently, Bhat said that the vision that they created with the marketing community was around “true convergence”, and their unique combination of standard, custom and audio/visual units called IMPACT.  This has never before been offered in India or any other markets as on date.  He says, “In each market, we have adopted the practice of working with a single advertiser on a given day and limiting ourselves to a maximum of just 30 advertisers each month.”  

Adding further to his above stated point he said, “This provides the advertiser a complete promotional package consisting of all standard ad units, custom skins, audio ads, etc. and ensures 100% share of voice to literally make an impact on consumers’ perspectives.   There is no clutter and there aren’t multiple messages trying to reach the consumer at the same time.  Since our engagement is off the charts, consumers actually remember the advertising that they see.”  

Their customers include key brands such as Hyundai, Lay's, Pepsi, Samsung, Intel, Sandisk, Vodafone, and Domino's among others.  The vast majority of clients continue to work with the company on a recurring basis because of the unique product features, deep user engagement, and innovative ad units offered by Saavn. “We have a set of proprietary metrics we share with clients to show their return-on-investment,” Bhat said.  

He opined that to date, digital and mobile music has been a missing component in the media mix.  This is not due to lack of interest he says. Every marketer knows of the popularity and ubiquity of music in India, across all genres, generations and walks of life.  Over 200 brands have signed endorsements deal with major movie/music stars. As one of the only legitimate Indian music services, Saavn has created an environment for consumers to have the richest and most engaging experience with the music they love.  A byproduct of this has been the creation of an environment that allows brands to create positive connections to their products and services through music.

When asked how the year 2012 has been for him Bhat explained saying, “The year 2012 was great to lay the groundwork for how we work with advertisers.  Our current MAU is 10.5 million, which tripled in just 18 months.  We are witnessing approx 14,000 Saavn app (Android, iPhone) downloads on a daily basis.   At present, nearly two-thirds of our user base is from India and about 20% of the mobile user base is active daily.”

Where his plans to welcome year 2013 is concerned Bhat says, “We are very excited about what’s in store for us in the year ahead.  We plan to extend our application to Blackberry and Windows Mobile users within the next year.  It’s not about being first and more about being the best.  We are especially enthusiastic about the growing presence of smartphones in the country.  Also, we also plan to roll out our subscription service in the coming months through which users will be paying a certain amount to enjoy being premium users.  We anticipate our India user base to grow at a double digit pace. Our purpose will stay consistent.  We will continue to grow our selection and maintain the largest catalog of Indic music globally so that our users can access any track, in any market, at any time, on any device.” | By Aanchal Kohli [aanchal@adgully.com]