Paytm launches campaign during IPL, PayU considers it a cluttered medium

The online wallet space is getting highly competitive as players are pumping in huge money for their marketing initiatives. With Paytm allotting Rs 500 crore on marketing this year, PayU rebranding itself with a budget of Rs 60 crore for 3 months and MobiKwik planning to spend Rs 100 crore this year on its 360-degree multi-media brand campaign; there is plenty of action happening in this category.

While MobiKwik’s new campaign which will include exposure across television, out of home, radio and digital mediums is yet to start. Both PayU and Paytm have already launched their high intensity marketing campaign. McCann, the Agency on Record (AOR) for Paytm has conceptualised their first marketing campaign for the brand. This account was earlier with Contract Advertising. While the creative duties for PayU is being handled by Leo Burnett and they won the account following a multi-agency pitch in January this year.

Watch the Paytm ad:



Watch the Paytm ad:



Strategy (IPL vs No IPL)

Paytm strategically launched their campaign ‘Paytm Karo’ during the start of the Indian Premiere League (IPL) this season. It is the associate sponsor on Sony and is also the official partner of Mumbai Indians. The brand has earmarked Rs 50 crore as the marketing budget for the IPL.

On asking Shankar Nath, Senior Vice President – Paytm, the reason behind the association with IPL, he said, “We have a slight bias towards our target group which is youth and if you are concentrating on them, there is no way, you can ignore sports.”

Other than the thematic film which talks about making everyday transactions convenient and hassle-free through the various features on Paytm, there are other host of other interesting activities which will help the brand to grab good eyeballs during the tournament. For example, in every match, the brand has 120 seconds of advertising time and there are 60 matches in this tournament. Also for the ‘Action Replay’ property, the logo of the brand revolves every time on the screen.

PayU on the other hand is waiting for the IPL to get over, so that viewership on the other channels gets back to normalcy. For the time being, the brand has kick-started its marketing activity with the launch of the video for which they have hardly done any kind of spends and it has already clocked more than a million views. The digital launch is mainly to educate people of what the brand is all about and that they are present in 18 countries and accepted over 65,000 websites in India. 

The reason behind not using IPL as a launch-pad for their new campaign, Varun Jha, Marketing Director at PayU India highlighted, “By the time we were ready with the post edits, IPL was already in the mid-way. Also IPL is a cluttered medium and I am launching a brand, therefore, you won’t see any first time advertiser in this tournament. The viewership pattern of IPL is in a U- curve, when it started it had a TRP rating of 4-5, then there was a lull and then it dipped, which will again jump back towards the semi-finals and final. So it is now no-longer that lucrative for a marketer.”

Campaign Objective:

Paytm launched the campaign, keeping the tone simple, warm and not overtly emotional. The main objective of the TVC was to portray that using Paytm simplifies the lives of a vast majority of Indians. The campaign establishes that Paytm is a simpler, more convenient solution of recharging by highlighting the various features such as mobile wallet, mobile and DTH recharges, mobile transfer and online shopping.

Jha from PayU spoke about how this online payment space is similar to what  e-commerce was doing few years back in creating the category, where a lot of marketing dollars were being spent in the category education. So the online wallet category is also in the same stage. It is beefing up and a lot needs to be spent in building the trust and creating a certain perception in the consumer’s mind. “We found that cash flow is already taking place and people are paying online, so we need to convey to them the benefits of using PayU wallet. Our objective being, first to create awareness in the category and the more we do, people will get hooked on to the product. We have two parts of our business, PayUbiz which is for the enterprises and it enjoys 55% market share in the payment gateway aggregation space. Also there is PayUmoney which is for the consumers and it enjoys the highest number of wallet transactions in the country. Our aim is to first educate the consumers and when the brand gets seeded in the consumer’s mind, then do a lot of functional films later on,” he cited.

PayU also felt the need to differentiate their two businesses, because the consumers were getting confused and here comes the re-branding part. Speaking on this he mentioned that people interchangeably used PayU as PayUmoney and vice-versa. “Hence we brain-stormed and did lot of research and came out with a new identity for the enterprise business which is known as PayUbiz. While the consumer business-PayUmoney is green in colour, the reason being the colour stands for trust and gives a go-ahead signal. This colour stands out and separates us from our competitors as well,” he highlighted.

Media vehicles:

While Paytm has kept Rs 500 crore marketing budget over a period of 12 months across TV, online and offline events. In this, the marketing budget for IPL is around Rs 50 crore which includes using the above media vehicles to establish the brand as a more credible, mass and consumer-friendly brand.

PayU on the other hand has kept Rs 60 crore for 3 months as their marketing budget for the first part of the campaign. Jha pointed that “Majority of the spends will be skewed towards TV as a medium. We have locked 350 cinema screens across 15 metro cities and will be doing radio in top 8 cities. Outdoor will start, once PayU starts with its TVC. On the digital front, there will be heavy spends, the brand being a consumer marketing company and digital marketing being our DNA. Our core TG is such that the affinity is really high in the online space. For e.g. a consumer can watch our video and then directly go to those sites, where we are accepted as a payment method. So while, TV is there for perception building, digital helps in the final conversion,”

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