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Facebook Advertising — Customise, Connect, Change

January 16, 2017

Image Credit — https://unsplash.com/@carlheyerdahl

Love me, or hate me, but you can not ignore me — Sincerely Yours, Facebook!

Even if certain set of users won’t agree to this statement but considering Facebook & Instagram are still dominating the charts of most downloaded and most used apps, it would be better to accept that Facebook is one of those beasts which marketers can’t ignore if they’re going for a paid digital campaign especially for a consumer product category.

I know there are enough pro and anti Facebook advertising arguments all over the internet but this post is not about whether to go for Facebook advertising or not, it’s more about when you are doing it, do it right. No point in spending money without fixing the basics first.

It’s 2017 & why I am still talking of basics of Facebook advertising? I mean, even a school kid knows how to advertise on Facebook? What’s the big deal about it when it’s just so simple and easy to set up a Facebook campaign? Well, that’s the exact problem — it’s just so easy! And almost everyone is setting it up without much effort or thought put behind understanding the platform or learning the best practices.

And when something is very easy, it’s also easier to mess it up. Isn’t it?

In last 15 days I have met four startups who are spending big money on Facebook advertising and three of them have digital agencies managing their accounts. While we discuss CPA and efficacy of the medium, there is this general sigh that CPA is not coming down and the effectiveness of their campaign is decreasing with time. I got a chance to analyze their campaigns and surprisingly, I found the problems common across — ignoring the basics and one-size-fit-all campaigns.

And all it takes is 3 simple steps to fix the same.

Customize

So startup A, with whom I was interacting recently, is a food company with a potential target audience that could range in between any age group, i.e., teenagers to even 50+year old ones. Their agency was running a digital campaign for age bracket 18–45 years with same messaging and same creatives. Their logic — after all it’s a food category and anyone could potentially be a customer for this category. True, absolutely true. But what happened to the basics of marketing known as segmentation and customizing the campaigns according to each segment? The more granular we go with customization, the more effective the outputs are in digital medium. For e.g., in this case it took us a day’s exercise to go through each product variant and try to figure out the star appeal of each variant. The moment we were ready with product feature matrix, it was getting clearer to the founders that perhaps each variant needs to be targeted to a different segment, customized with a different messaging. And that’s what we did — instead of one master campaign showing different products in different units of carousel, we configured multiple campaigns with messages and visuals tailored to different audience type. Going granular and customization upto the last level was some task for sure but the results were obvious and in a week’s time the acquisition numbers were moving northward within the same budget.

Customization takes time and effort but it’s worth it. Just go for it. Go granular, go microscopic.

Connect

Are you targeting your ads to those who have liked your page as well? Of course, the logical brain tells you why do you need to especially when you have limited money? The ones who have liked your page are already getting to see your updates, so why not use the money to target new audience and acquire new customers? Start up A, B, C & D — all four had done the same. And earlier, even I used to do the same. But then after experiencing the diminishing organic reach of Facebook posts that perhaps is not even in the range of 2 to 5% these days, I had changed my targeting strategy. And I was surprised with the improvement in the conversion rate.

So, next time when you are trying to sell any new product or targeting your users for repurchase, connect with your existing base first, you’ll be surprised with your acquisition percentage and more importantly, your CPA. The rationale behind this is pretty simple — the ones who have liked your page are somewhat interested in you, the chances of them buying your product are much higher than the new ones.

When you have limited money, it’s all the more important that you prioritize it on targeting the interested ones first. Connect with your existing fan base, it works.

Change

Startup D had spent some decent money in getting their products shot beautifully. The campaigns were doing well initially but with time, the CTR had reduced. On asking, when was the last time the images were changed, the answer was almost three months back. To add to that, all the good pictures were used in first burst itself. But then why do they need to plan for second or third bursts when the first one was doing so good? Well, simply because users get bored of seeing the same thing again and again. To add to that, this phone era has reduced our attention span to 8 seconds which is perhaps lesser than that of many living creatures. And the only method to grab attention these days is through striking visuals. Visuals attract attention and new images give a fresh perspective to your ads. Be it digital or any form of advertising, a good visual evokes emotions and enhances the consumer connect. This has been tried and tested since ages in all forms of advertising but is especially true in this digital era where we literally breathe and live our virtual life through images.

Change your ads frequently, especially the images. Even if you are advertising the same product or service, just change the visuals and see the impact on your CTR. In one of my last campaigns, it moved up by 3x.

Customize, Connect & Change — that’s it. Focus on these and your basics will be in place. And if basics are in place, we all know rest can be managed, enhanced and improved 🙂

Whatever happened to writing for humans!

June 18, 2015

Whatever happened to writing for humans!

Of late I have been interviewing people for content writer positions in my current organization. I had some content strategy in my mind and the goal as product owner was clear to me — create content for user engagement and offer content that the user is looking for. Yes, the operative word was “user”, loud and clear. But as baffling as it may sound, not even a single candidate whom I interviewed in last few weeks mentioned to me the word “user” in his/her opening pitch. It all started with writing content for search engines and ended with content quality being SEO friendly. To add to that, the kind of content that I am looking to create is sort of new initiative for my target audience, so it’s important for the candidate to have basic understanding of the category. When asked about industry experience, understanding of target audience, pat came the reply — you can let us know which words work for you and we will figure out the content that’s doing well for those words in search engines and create content for you accordingly, the written piece will have all those words with right density and frequency.

Density? Frequency? Engines? What happened to writing content for humans? Last I knew was search engines were meant for discoverability but consumption of content was still done by humans. Isn’t it? And search gods like Google have anyways changed their algorithm to focus on quality of content rather than quantity of keywords inserted in it.

Then, why this focus on promotion so much more than production?

I understand the importance of marketing the content esp. in this age of too-many-of-any type of content but being a hard core marketer I can only say one thing — you try to market whatever, be it product or service or content, if the foundation of it is not in place, then your marketing can only help you just as much and not that much.

I know there are many golden rules that exist for creating engaging content, marketing the content etc but based on all my practical experiences in product & marketing, especially in digital, here is my quick list for new age content creation process:

User first — As basic as it may sound, but this is really important — put your users first above everything. Write for target audience and not for target channels. Content to me especially when I am looking for user engagement is exactly like a product. If you put your users in the heart of your content creation process, half of your battle is won. Speaking of user first, I actually love this quote by Jamie Turner:


As a simple practice when I write or approve any piece of content for my products, I generally check it on 3 quick parameters — is it offering value to my readers, is the language easy to understand for my readers and is it engaging, inspiring or thought-provoking for my readers? Yes, “readers” it is, in all three parameters.

Quality can never be outdated — Whatever changes may happen in our content search or content consumption behavior but one thing that can never be changed is the importance of “quality” of content especially in today’s age where there is a content jungle out there. You may adapt many tricks to get discovered but once the user has landed on your page and if sufficient substance is not there in your content then she will lose interest and is bound to navigate away immediately. To add to that, average attention span of readers has further reduced by more than 30% in last 3 years. While there are many methods to get your content promoted, and content marketing seems to be one of the most fashionable jargons these days but there is no substitute to the quality of content that you produce if you want your marketing to really work for your content.

Engage with readers — Again a term that we have heard quite often but it’s one of the most ignored parameters when it comes to content. Like any product or service, user engagement in your content is a must. Connect, interact, converse and accept the feedback or criticism graciously. The more the user is engaged, the easier it is for them to act or decide.

To sum it up, if the content is unique, offers value to its readers and is interesting enough to hold reader’s attention, then there is no reason why the reader won’t share and spread the word around it. “Share”, isn’t it the reason why content has suddenly become one of the most important marketing channels in the digital world?

Aided social media engagement

July 31, 2010

Actually more than aided, I felt like writing “forced” social media engagement as a title for this post :). Below anecdote is a real life example of two Indian e-commerce brands utilizing social media in different ways. For the sake of anonymity let’s call these brands as X & Y.

Brand X: An old and established e-commerce player in India which has got reasonable service level and till date as a consumer I have never faced much issues with it.

Brand Y: A new e-commerce player in the same industry but which has changed rules of the game completely in India and based on its service levels has managed to completely floor its customers. Lots of loyal customers (including me) of other similar sites have shifted their loyalty to this new brand Y mainly because of the consumer experience and customer service offered by this brand.

Brand Y being a new brand was already present on social media platforms but Brand X didn’t have any such strong online social presence. Now with all this hubbub of social media, fans on Facebook and followers on Twitter, X also decided to strengthen its fan base but instead of taking the straight route decided to take a shortcut and launched a promotion campaign which said – become our fan on Facebook and get Rs. 500/- worth of our voucher absolutely free. Mailers, messages and those standard blah blah blahs to promote this campaign went live. And as expected, their fan base started to multiply on an hourly basis…tens, hundreds and thousands…so much so that finally X decided to put a cap of first 5000 fans for their free vouchers. The brand was trusted and the promise made by the brand was loud & clear, to add to that this incentivization to consumers helped the campaign to achieve what it aimed at. Within few days only the fan base swelled to thousands. Now it was the time for customers to get their incentives but lo’ when the vouchers came it was not as fair as the campaign claimed it to be. Constraints applied were – the voucher was not valid for the entire e-store, there was a special section created to redeem that voucher and none of the products available there were less than 4 times of the voucher amount; the voucher was valid for hardly few hours; due to traffic on the server, website was going down often whenever one tried to redeem the coupon code and from such a limited catalogue,  lots of products of lowest price were marked as “sold”.

Well, didn’t take much time for customers to realize that this was just another marketing gimmick from this trusted brand and the voucher was just another trick to garner some fans and build up the metrics. And the decrement in fan base started to happen at a pace faster than what it had taken to build it up. Realizing the con, consumers started to quickly click “unlike X” and write negative comments about the brand openly on platforms like Facebook & Twitter. Not only X lost the chance to impress the new customers, it also lost the trust of loyal customers who had clicked on “like” because they had genuinely liked the brand. Fiasco, negative publicity and bad word of mouth far sooner than imagined by the brand!

X understood the harm done and decided to take some quick steps – they launched a better redemption store, better discounts and quick responses to all online grievances. But the fact remained that X’s customers were annoyed and the damage to the brand was already done.

And the status of fan count for both these brands as on today (almost 2 weeks after this promotion): While X is at a count of some 6k+ fans, Y is at a count of 1.06 lacs+ fans.

So, what would be quick takeaways w.r.to social media engagement from this case study?

  • Don’t jump into social media unnecessarily and that too without a proper thought through plan. A promotion which can work in other mediums may not work in this medium.
  • While social media is excellent for customer engagement but if things go wrong, it is an equally powerful medium for customer “disengagement”
  • You know that negative word of mouth on this medium spreads like fire! And why not, after all it’s in human nature to crib more than praise 🙂 ?
  • Don’t incentivize your customers as tool for engagement, empower them and give reasons in terms of products and services for them to be engaged in your brand.
  • Number of fans or followers is not just yet another marketing metrics which can be increased through some formulaic route; let it grow organically as much as possible. The more natural positive progression it will be, chances of your fan base following a stable track will be higher.

Note: Why am I not revealing the names of brand X & Y? Well, first of all if you have been following Indian e-commerce industry on social media then I’m sure it’s not difficult for you to guess the brands I’m talking about. Secondly, earlier I used to like this brand X and since X tried to correct its mistake very quickly in this case, so I thought not to openly mention their name and generate another negative page about them 🙂

Recent posts at Pluggd.in

July 30, 2010

Have not updated my new posts on Pluggd.in here, so providing the links to some of recent posts at PI:

WoMM – The Evergreen Strategy for Free Marketing: “Word of mouth” marketing is an age old concept now and from bigger organizations to start ups, almost everybody wants to take this free marketing path. While some think that WOM is something which will happen on its own, some go ahead & incentivize their customers to spread the word and then there are some who take extreme steps of contracting paid outsourced help to create positive word of mouth for their brands. Despite this being “known-by-all” concept, how many startups are there who genuinely have been focusing on this free marketing route and targeting the consumers who can be influencers for fresh leads? Read More…

India to overtake China in mobile market by 2013 [Report]: As per a latest report by London based Informa Telecoms, India’s mobile subscriber base is set to rise to 1.159 billion by the end of 2013, thus making it the world’s largest mobile market. While India is poised to have phenomenal growth, the market in China is actually set to slow down. By the end of 2013, the number of active mobile subscriptions in China will be 1.106 billion. Read More…

Voice Blogging Service by Airtel – Voice is a Commodity: Bharti Airtel has officially unveiled its voice-blogging service now enabling Airtel subscribers to share recorded voice updates with their friends and family members. Read More…

Oyegirl.com – Online shopping portal exclusively for women: Joining the ecommerce trail now is Oyegirl – an online shopping portal for women. Though Oyegirl.com is yet another online shopping portal but this one is different in a way that it’s targeting only women and as their introduction reads – it is India’s first ecommerce portal exclusively for women. Read More…

Indiatimes launches HiBuddy, Voice Blogging Service: We had earlier written about voice based blogging service by Airtel. Now Indiatimes has introduced a similar voice-based social networking and blogging platform, called ‘HiBuddy’ for Reliance mobile phone users. Read More…

Facebook reaches 12 million user base in India: While Facebook crossed 500 million user base mark worldwide, it has also shown very positive growth in India and has touched 12 million mark as on yesterday. Users in India are uploading more than 53 million photos in a month and even mobile usage has increased nine-fold in the past year. Read More…

Consumer Confidence Index – Indians are Super Confident: While it was 127 in last quarter, it’s 129 for this quarter; Indian consumers remain most upbeat in the word despite food prices crisis at home and improving outlooks elsewhere. With a two point increase, at 129 points Consumer Confidence Index is the highest in India in the latest Nielsen Global Consumer Confidence Survey followed by Indonesia and Vietnam both 119 index points. While India is ahead for last two quarters, but up till Jan’2010 it was actually Indonesia which was topping the list. Read More…

Ebooks booming globally but print yet to stay in India

July 28, 2010

In my last post itself, I had written about ebooks picking up faster than estimated internationally. But as I had thought, the trend of physical vs. ebooks sales does not seem to be following the same curve in India. Here is an update on e-book industry in India which came in press recently – Craze for ebooks yet to catch on in India

So, Indian publishing industry is still gung ho about the printed books only. Despite the prices being dropped in India, Amazon Kindle has managed to sell only 2000 numbers locally which is very meager if we compare it with overall Kindle sales globally. We even have a more economical version of ebook reader ‘PI’, but even there the sales do not seem to be impressive enough to give reasons to publishers to launch digital version of their books.

Predictable, isn’t it? Despite being so heavily into digital medium,for everything else, somehow as a consumer this whole digital book stuff and a separate device to read such books always leaves me wondering on the feasibility of overall ebook industry in India on a larger scale. Not that it would never pick up, in fact Indian consumers are undoubtedly the most unpredictable ones, but I think digital book adoption is still years away as far as Indian market is concerned. Now think of these points:

  • In a market which is so heavily dominated by movies or books piracy and considering the price conscious mass consumers of India, isn’t a separate device and that too of minimum Rs. 10k to read digital books a difficult blockage for e-book adoption?
  • Even if you buy one and the device needs internet connectivity, then where are such easily accessible connections for you to download the books on the go?
  • I’m not even sure how many consumers actually pay for original copies of printed books in India? Will this digital version of the books actually accentuate the chances of digital piracy?
  • Will it help if text books are launched as digital versions in some high end schools for better market penetration in India?

Don’t you think that as far as this industry is concerned, the buying behavior of Indian consumers will take some time to change and adapt to the digital world? Well, ebooks are definitely outselling physical books globally but from the current state of this market in India, seems like print industry is definitely going to stay for some time now. And I’m happy for the same because as I always say, I prefer to read books (esp. fiction ones) in a printed book format only :-). Thank god, Indian consumers like me don’t need to worry about changing our consumption pattern so soon.

E-books outselling hardcover books: Slow extinction of physical book industry?

July 21, 2010
Until few months back, Amazon used to sell 48 Kindle copies for every 100 physical copies of books that it offered in both formats. But the figures definitely seem to have taken a dramatic change now.

Amazon.com, one of the US’ largest booksellers, announced on Monday that for the past three months, sales of books for its e-reader, the Kindle, has outnumbered sales of hardcover books (via).

Now Amazon is selling 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books, including hardcovers for which there is no Kindle edition. The figures do not include free Kindle books.
As far as overall digital book sale is concerned, even there is an upsurge. In past four weeks, sales rose to 180 digital books for every 100 hardcover copies. Amazon has 630,000 Kindle books, a small fraction of the millions of books sold on the site.
The growth rate of Kindle sales tripled after Amazon lowered the price of the device in late June to $189 from $259 and as per the Association of American Publishers, e-book sales have quadrupled this year through May.

Amazon had earlier also predicted to sell more of e-books as compared to physical books  and the recent statistics undeniably cast a notable change in favor of their estimation. There is definitely need for this product in certain consumer segments, moreover e-books are eco friendly and easier to store as compared to the physical ones. So, does this mean physical books are on their slow path to extinction now? What about avid readers like me who still prefer to read the physical books? Will the affordability, accessibility and convenience factor to store books affect my consumption behavior? Though Kindle as such has not been doing that great in India but considering the book market in India (India is the world’s third largest English language book market and has been growing at about 10% per annum for several years) and availability of more affordable products like Infibeam’s Pi, will the global trend of e-book outselling physical books apply to Indian market too? Would be interesting to observe some statistics from Indian e-book sellers to come out with a better comparison between international vs. domestic market but as of now from all the global trends, e-books definitely seem to be picking faster than estimated and that too in a short span of time.

Movie Marketing: Rajneeti

June 7, 2010

Had sort of stopped updating any post on movie marketing, as for past few months most of the Bollywood releases have been doing almost the same stuffs for promotion – websites, social media, television presence, reality shows participation, some general on ground events, radio messages etc. Their marketing strategies looked repetitive and formulaic. But with Rajneeti, things seem to be different. Not only the movie is in news because of its political semblances but their promotion campaign which is revolving around the integration between reel theme and real issues is also attracting enough eyeballs amongst interested common man & the media fraternity.

After Aamir touring across India for the promotion of 3 idiots amongst mass, now its stars like Katrina Kaif & Ranbir Kapoor who are on a nationwide on-ground campaign to promote their upcoming movie Rajneeti.  Keeping the political theme in mind, Ranbir Kapoor and Katrina Kaif have been on a run, hosting debates called “Aaj ki Rajneeti” in colleges in Bangalore, Delhi, Chandigarh, Lucknow, Kolkata, Indore and Ahmedabad. The groups discuss political and social topics concerning youth. For instance, at  IIM Bangalore the discussion was on youth taking active part in politics. As a part of this discussion cum promotion drive, the team is raising issues such as whether voting should be compulsory in the country; whether a year’s military training should be mandatory for every citizen; and whether film stars should join politics. The producers have organized many such rallies in various cities and each rally attracted a crowd of about 500-1,000 people. These rallies were turned into a televised property by STAR News. For a month, 30-minute episodes about the rallies were aired on the news channel at 8:30 pm. Apart from these events, as far as outdoor campaigns are concerned, this movie has tried to create a difference by using branding properties which resemble the hoardings used in real life political campaigns. Individual cut-outs of the movie’s characters, along with signages have been used extensively in different cities, to create an impression of a real-life election campaign in progress. Also, a special video which features the cast of the movie rendering the national anthem is being showcased in theatres, prior to the screening of the movie.

Going by the buzz it has created, the marketing campaign definitely seems to be interesting enough and bit different but let’s see how does the movie perform overall on the box office? As far as the opening is concerned, Rajneeti had a tremendous opening weekend, which is second only to 3 Idiots. The movie did net business of Rs 34 crore in its opening weekend as compared to 3 Idiots’ Rs 40.50 crore (source). Public verdict on social media has been mixed – some liked it while others have bashed it. Now let’s see when do I get the time to watch it and evaluate if the movie is really different or just another saga on politics and corruption in India.

Word of Mouth: Facilitating vs. Faking it

May 11, 2010

I have recently written a post on Word of Mouth Marketing at pluggd.in

Excerpt from the post: “Word of mouth” marketing is an age old concept now and from bigger organizations to start ups, almost everybody wants to take this free marketing path. While some think that WOM is something which will happen on its own, some go ahead & incentivize their customers to spread the word and then there are some who take extreme steps of contracting paid outsourced help to create positive word of mouth for their brands. Despite this being “known-by-all” concept, how many startups are there who genuinely have been focusing on this free marketing route and targeting the consumers who can be influencers for fresh leads? Read more on “WOMM – The Evergreen Strategy for Free Marketing” at pluggd.in

As far as understating this concept is concerned, Word of Mouth undoubtedly seems to be one of the simplest marketing terms but when it comes to execution, this is one of the trickiest of the lots. See these for e.g.,

  • A popular networking site bombarding by sending emails through dummy user ids with following subject & content:
    • Subject: I’ve never seen anything like this before!
    • Excerpt from the email content: I came across this recently and since then, I’ve met some pretty interesting people and think you must try this out too. This is really good and different, just click this link and be my friend.

Well, frankly speaking one does not care a bit for any new networking site which asks you to join only because you can make friends with interesting people there! At the first look itself this mail looks just so artificial.

  • A newly launched e-commerce site sending the following message in your Facebook account again through dummy user profiles:
    • Hey there! I have been using thisxyz.com and I find it to be pretty good site for all your online book shopping needs. Collection of books there is just so great and you get some amazing discounts too. All you have to do is register and start your shopping now.

I actually landed on this site esp. because it mentioned about a good collection of books and it didn’t take me more than a second to realize that it was just another sham message, an effort by some newbie to spread the positive word without even having the basics in place. Forget the discount, the collection itself was pathetic. Even very popular books were not available and the search as well as browse functionalities were just too hopeless. Yes, the message managed to get me there, but only once. The experience was sad enough to ensure that I don’t go back there again, more so when I’ve multiple other options available.

In an effort of spreading the positive message amongst the crowd, most of the companies actually forget that word of mouth can only be encouraged and not forced; it can only be facilitated and not faked. Owe it to the simplicity (at least the presumed simplicity) of implementation, most marketers just jump on to it without realizing the repercussion of over-doing it or doing it the sham way. Today’s consumers are smart enough to smell the scam and if they do, then such unnatural messages actually backfire and tarnish the image of the brand instead of building it further. Even though the word “marketing” is attached to this term, still word of mouth marketing is not about creating the word on your own, it  is marketing the word created by your consumers; more importantly it is about providing reasons to your consumers (either through your product or service) to speak up and then utilizing this buzz within your marketing framework.

Note: Like my experience with Flipkart, do you have similar experiences with any Indian or International brand where you’ve been so impressed that you’ve created the WOM for it on your own? Would love to hear your anecdotes here.

The art of communication

April 2, 2010
Sometimes even the most important thing can be communicated in such a simple way and an interesting communication always adds to the beauty of any promotion campaign.
Visited the Café Coffee Day next to my office and the two cappuccinos served for me and my colleague looked like this 🙂


Need I write anything more? Nahi na…the messaging on coffees brought smile to my face and personally speaking, I liked it.
Myntra, a Bangalore based personalized merchandising company has done a tie-up with Café Coffee Day to promote its IPL special t-shirts and jerseys in CCD outlets. Instead of the whole outlet being painted with danglers or streamers, this was the communication to me as a customer and my immediate reaction was – “what’s this about, can you tell me more details”? As a customer it appealed to me at the first exposure itself and made me curious enough to ask for details. No heavy bombardment with the messaging yet the connect with a potential customer established at the first point itself 🙂

“Paa” Marketing: Auro is the strongest marketing pull

November 27, 2009
For quite some time, I have not blogged about movie marketing mainly because of two reasons – 1.) I think like all other industries, even marketers from Bollywood were lying low due to economy as well as industry specific reasons and 2.) Like typical herd mentality, all marketers for past few months have been using almost ditto strategies again and again for their movie promotions – same website, social media, contest, reality TV presence etc. etc. Nothing new or innovative was coming out which could be discussed or talked about. But well looks like this monotony is going to be broken with the release of Paa. Not only the trailor but the promotion and presentations too are interesting enough to generate curiosity amongst the audience. Here are some of the new strategies which the marketers are using to promote this movie:

  • Brand Auro: Despite the fact that one of the biggest brands of Bollywood is playing the lead role of the movie, what is interesting is that the movie in all its promotions and appearances is focusing on Brand “Auro” and not Brand “Big B”. The promotion started with a teaser campaign with just a glimpse of Auro and at first look I actually didn’t recognize that it was Mr. Bachchan himself. Since then I’ve seen the promotion of this movie in different reality shows as well as television programs but everywhere it’s Auro who has been the focus and not the star-cast like other movie promotions.
  • Smart messaging: These days in cinema halls you won’t be surprised if you get a sweet chide like – “Stand up for the national anthem, or I’ll tell Paa”, or “Switch off your cell phones, or I’ll tell Paa”. This is how the movie is being promoted in theaters via slide shows and messages. Interesting and surely catchy!
  • Engaging properties: Apart from the regular engagement properties like on-ground events and contests, online website, presence on social networking sites like Orkut, Facebook, Twitter, channel on YouTube etc., this movie has been creating a difference through some other interactive promotions too, for e.g., the apt placement of Auro Dance within the cricket match. During the recent series, whenever a wicket was taken a small figure of Auro used to come on the screen, doing that unique “Auro dance” (you can see this dance on its official website as well). On the occasion of children’s day, contests like “Paa and I” where a child can be the father for a day or “I Love my Paa” was organized and all the contests received enthusiastic participation from the kids.

Good to see a fresh movie theme with fresh marketing initiatives. This is a low budget film and hence not much money has been spent on promotional activities but even with a small budget, I think the movie has created enough buzz in the market due to its intelligent strategies. And who needs a large budget to promote a film which has got 67 year old Amitabh Bachchan playing the character of a 13 year old kid. The most expensive element in this 16 crore film is actually Big B’s make-up which accounts to 10 % of the overall budget; no wonder his looks in the film is topic of such a high interest amongst media as well as audience. Mr. Bachchan’s make up for his character Auro is actually going to be one of the strongest marketing pulls for this movie.