http://125.21.241.77/wap/Maruti/Affle_flash.

swf Advertiser Maruti Suzuki Agency Affle Campaign Period Apr 2010 Jul 2010 SUMMARY Maruti Suzuki (Maruti) is the largest automobile company in India. Through the last several years Maruti has invested significant marketing efforts to build its brand in India to maintain its position of preeminence. One of the key communication platforms used by Maruti to build its brands has been through on ground and on air sponsorships of top sporting events in the world of cricket & soccer. However in the last few years both the consumer demographic of Maruti car buyers (more youth buying Maruti brands now than earlier) and the media consumption patterns amongst the youth (growing use of mobile to meet content/media needs) have changed. These changes triggered Maruti to partner with Affle to leverage the Sports Sponsorship platform for Maruti on mobile, and make the Marutis brands integrate with all consumer touchpoints for sports content on mobile. Affles plan involved sponsoring the two biggest sporting events in India in 2010 the IPL cricket league and the FIFA world cup across mobile platforms which involved integration with voice based content of these sports, branding of SMS/SMS2.0 based communication for these events and innovatively leveraging the power of mobile internet. This resulted in Maruti reaching out to over 7 Million unique users during times when they were consuming sports content related to these events on the mobile and grow its Top of Mind recall scores by over 25% and unaided awareness by over 15%. The impact of this campaign was thus staggering from a branding perspective and also helped Maruti get over 30,000 valid requests for test drives for Maruti cars which further enhanced the ROI

STRATEGY India is a land of many religions, the biggest of which is cricket. Soccer hasnt historically been a very popular sport in India, but is starting to catch up with cricket among the urban youth. This is why when Maruti Suzuki, the leading car manufacturer in India, approached Affle for an annual mobile advertising strategy, Affle drew up a plan for sponsorship of two of the biggest and leading sports events in the country, the Indian Premier League for cricket and the FIFA World Cup for soccer. This was thus the ideal platform for Maruti to amplify its association with sports, and connect with its target audience during times when they were consuming sports related content on their mobile.

Maruti had a two pronged communication task: a) To build recall for the newly unveiled K Series technology and announce the launch of the new mass vehicle Eeco While K series was an overarching communication reaching a large set of users; Eecos communication had to be restricted to SMEs. A consumer deep dive from Affle suggested that Indian Premier League was the best platform to reach these 2 disparate set of audiences. A key thing to note is that Maruti was not part of any TV/Ground sponsorship whilst there direct competition, Hyundai, was. Mobile became the medium of choice for Maruti to do a guerilla surround around the IPL without spending the big bucks typically associated with the mega IPL carnival. b) To reposition itself among the upwardly mobile, ubercool, financially independent young generation - Soccer in India enjoys a premium fan following. It is more or less restricted to the younger generation in metros and suburbs. Affle hence suggested the 2010 FIFA World Cup to be an ideal platform for Marutis second line of communication. Channel identification for these two events 1) Indian Premier League - After close analysis on how cricket content was getting consumed on mobile, Affle suggested sponsorship of cricket on the two media which are most

popular amongst cricket information seekers on mobile - SMS & Voice. This was in line with how the mass target audience of the Maruti brands was accessing IPL content on their mobile device. Affle created a simple to participate contest, with cool giveaways, around cricket, with prominent Maruti branding to ensure association, branding and build participation. The chosen media of Voice & SMS were used to amplify this communication. 2) FIFA the young urbanite in India is getting technologically savvier close to 90% of Mobile Internet users are in the 15-35 age group, the demographic, that Maruti wanted to connect with. In addition to browsing, this bunch is an avid SMS user too. Affle recommended that Maruti capitalize on the hype around the football World Cup by sponsoring mobile internet content related to the World Cup, on the largest sports and news portals in India - Mobile ESPN and NDTV Active. In addition it was recommended that the campaign pivot be Affles SMS2.0, as that is the preferred way over 3Mn young Indian upmarket audience to connect with each other and consume contextual content. EXECUTION 1) Indian Premier League a. On SMS SMS is a primary medium through which mobile users access live sporting content in India. The usual content access on SMS could be either in the form of SMS alert messages or through rich interactive content like that delivered on Affles SMS2.0. To meaningfully brand the IPL SMS experience for users, Maruti decided to sponsor both these properties on SMS. On Affle's SMS2.0 service, Maruti created a branded cricket zone such that all content related to cricket consumed by users on this service, during the campaign period appeared in a Maruti branded zone. Affles SMS2.0 is a popular upgrade to the native SMS application which blends browser like rich content on the Messaging and Message Sent screens and is used by over 3Mn users in India. In addition Full screen brand creatives were run for Maruti promoting the contest, so as to maximize recall & participation. User interactivity options enabled users to register their answers through a single click and this ease of navigation contributed to phenomenal results. Moreover, users who had opted in for IPL related SMS content on their mobile, got their daily content tagged with Maruti contest branding. SMS alerts were also sent out to users who had subscribed to cricket alerts on the Airtel network (largest Mobile Network Operator in India with over 140Mn users) which were tagged with the contest ad and an IVR number where users could call-in for free and participate.

b. On Voice Given the low literacy levels amongst a lot of mobile users in India, voice is the only platform that potentially reaches all mobile phone consumers. All mobile network operators thus create multiple voice based IVR zones for Music, Movies, Cricket and News etc. The popular IVR zones get upto 500,000- 1,000,000 calls on a day. Affle helped Maruti ride on this phenomenon by helping create branded voice portals sections for top mobile network operators like Airtel & Reliance in India. Thus users calling popular voice portals heard a prompt to participate in the Maruti IPL contest or listen to the Maruti branded cricket score update. E.g. When a user called a popular IVR number like 543210 on Airtel he would hear a prompt like Press 1 for the Maruti IPL updates, Press 2 to participate in the Maruti IPL contest, Press 3 for Movies etc.. On choosing the Maruti IPL update option he would hear the score followed by a voice ad for the Maruti IPL contest. The user could just by a few clicks on his keypad participate in this contest. 2) FIFA a. On SMS Whilst the interest in soccer as a sport is on the rise, knowledge of soccer among most of the audiences is iffy at best. Soccer related trivia, however, is a big draw with the younger generation in India. Affle hence created a special FIFA content feed on SMS2.0 with trivia and latest FIFA World Cup tournament news which was branded by Maruti. Additionally, keyword matching was done and thus whenever words such as soccer, football etc. where typed onto the SMS screen, the current banner was replaced in real time with the Maruti banner, which blew upto full screen once the SMS was sent. All these measures ensured that whenever the young upmarket audience were consuming FIFA content on SMS2.0, it was displayed with the Maruti brands seamlessly integrated into it.

b. On Mobile Internet Given the high reach of mobile internet amongst the target audience for the Maruti FIFA campaign, it was decided that Marutis communication would be delivered on this media in clutter breaking formats to maximize impact and recall. Thus to maximize the impact of Maruti branding during the FIFA World Cup, new innovative advertising formats were developed by Affle for the MobileESPN portal, which is the largest sports portal in India on mobiles. Maruti hence became the first automobile advertiser in India whos campaign was present with unique advertising formats on mobile internet like: i. ii. iii. iv. v. Interstitials Expandable Banners Text Links A Maruti Zone on ESPN Logo presence on Goals section

Adherence to MMA guidelines and best practices Utmost user privacy and security was maintained & no intrusive advertising was served to the users. Personal participation details were not shared without the consent of the user. The FIFA content feed on SMS2.0 was live on only those handsets where the users had opted-in to receive sports content making the campaign was fully compliant with MMA guidelines and best practices. CREATIVITY 1) Indian Premier League - For the Indian Premier League, the creatives were designed in the Zpattern, ensuring ease of navigation and retaining interest. For example, for the contest during IPL, the title was Maruti Cricket Contest, followed by Win A Cool Phone, the contest question, and finally a 180 degree view of the car. The creatives were in Marutis registered colors. Participation in the Maruti IPL contest on both SMS and Voice was activated with single click interactivity, thus significantly enhancing participation for consumers. 2) FIFA Rather than passive, regular, banner communication, interesting formats of advertising were developed by Affle for Mobile ESPN, the leading mobile sports portal in India.

a. Interstitials - When users logged onto the MobileESPN site, a full screen Maruti ad was shown for 2-3 seconds, thereafter being reduced to a banner. Consumers could click on both the banners to get to Marutis WAP page. b. Expandable Banners The top banners on ESPNs FIFA page were expandable, which occupied the full phone screen when the cursor rolled over the banner. Clickable banners led directly to the Maruti wap site where users could access detailed content, including booking for test drives. c. Text Links With a new communication every 3rd day were placed on key zones creating another entry point for a brand conversation with Maruti d. Maruti Zone on Top sites - Clickable banners led directly to the Maruti WAP site where users could access detailed content, including booking for test drives. Managing ad fatigue - A series of options were used, both at the time of IPL and FIFA, to ensure that the campaign freshness was maintained at all times and there was no creative fatigue. For the IPL campaign, new contest questions were served every 2nd day to the users on both SMS and Voice. For the FIFA campaign, 4 sets of creatives were used for Maruti each communicating pro-youth sentiments as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4. For the financially smart youth Cool yet intelligent Good Investment Great mileage

RESULTS AND ROI The 2 campaigns together recorded more than 20 million impressions delivered across all channels. Based on Marutis assessment, the campaign was a phenomenal success, meeting all the Key Objectives which were set forth at the time of the launch, elaborated below. 1) Maximize reach This multimedia mobile campaign reached out to over 7 Million unique users during the two phases of this activity. The highlight of this was that none of this reach was achieved through push based advertising and all Maruti communication was seamlessly blended with the sporting content for the two events 2) Build Consumer Engagement The campaign delivered 20 Million impressions with Click through Rate of 7%. Given the unique interactivities associated with each click all these clicks led to building enhanced engagement with the brand. Between IPL and FIFA, over 1.2 million consumers interacted with the Maruti to book test drives, download Maruti content or know more about its brands 3) Lead to Test Drives which would eventually translate into purchase

A total of 1.2 million contacts were initiated by users with Maruti, some of which would eventually translate into purchase given the fine grained targeting of the campaign. Out of all these contacts 18,000 were calls made in real time and 12,000 requests were made for a call back from Maruti. Given the usual conversions seen from test drives to purchase (exact data on this is confidential) this campaign was a phenomenal success as it drove very high ROI while it also achieved the said objectives of building audience anticipation and engagement. The campaign was a defining moment for Maruti on mobile as a medium and sponsorship of an event as the results generated from this were significantly better than all media formats in terms on the ROI generated. 4) Overall increase in brand scores The primary objective of this campaign was to build association for Maruti with leading sports events and enhance brand scores such that the this guerilla marketing strategy from Maruti could help it to outperform its competition who had invested significant marketing dollars to buy on-air sponsorship of top sporting events like the IPL. Thus a true measurement of the campaign efficacy could be gauged by analyzing scores from the Brand Track audit done by Maruti through an independent research agency every month

IPL During the time of IPL, following were the key success parameters as observed in Marutis brand track audit Campaign Brand Parameter % Increase during campaign period 17.3 268 33 14

IPL

Eeco

Enquiries Inbounds TOM Amongst all Cars Unaided Awareness

FIFA World Cup During the time of IPL, following were the key success parameters as observed in Marutis brand track audit

Campaign

Brand

Parameter

FIFA

Swift

Enquiries Inbounds TOM Amongst all Cars Unaided Awareness

% Increase during campaign period 10 121 18.5 2.5

The success of this branding campaign can thus be best measured by analyzing these scores which clearly show that a) The TOM within all cars increased by 33% during the IPL leg of the campaign b) The number of enquiries generated went up by 17% during the IPL leg of the campaign c) Unaided awareness upped by 14% during the IPL leg of the campaign

C S S UD E A E T IS