Will star star really be a star?

BY IMPACT Staff

Mogae Group Chairman Sandeep Goyal bets big on interactive platform from Tango Media; says its sharp call-to-action route to brands will be to mobile what hashtag is to social media

BY SRABANA LAHIRI

Sandeep Goyal, Chairman of the Mogae Group, is meticulous about demonstrating how Star Star - the latest technology piece from his agency Tango Media - will work to bridge the last mile between brand communication and the customer through mobile. The platform is based on a simple premise – that people find it tough to remember numbers, but they can easily recall names – and allows the customer to connect with the brand in real time, both from feature or smartphones.

“To understand Star Star, one very simple thing you have to look at is that all advertising is actually in two parts. One is brand-building and the second is customer response. When a brand is new, you spend   a lot of money trying to build that brand. That creates a buzz for a few months. You want as many  people to remember that your brand exists, then get as much traction at the customer level, if both things happen… But once your brand is better known, then 95% of your advertising energies are focused on getting customers to take some kind of action to benefit the brand. We have seen the short codes and missed call systems. We have seen entreaties to visit the brand’s website. But all of these fall flat. Customers don’t remember these calls-to-action, as they don’t remember numbers by heart. But people remember names like Uber and Domino’s; I remember all of those names, because the brands have spent a fortune advertising them. I find it easy to dial them,” explains Goyal.

HOW STAR STAR MATERIALIZED

Goyal says Star Star was born when he couldn’t find the crucial brand-consumer connect, even after 30 years of being in mobile and mainline advertising. Brands advertise spending crores, but when a customer has to call the brand, he doesn’t remember the number. “I was trying to do a campaign for mobile, but in isolation of the brand’s advertising money spent on various media, such as TV, Outdoor, Press and so on,” he says, “How do we connect all of what has been spent on mainline media to the device that actually the customer is carrying 24x7? I finally figured the missing link and simplified the process: Remember names, not numbers. Depending on different campaigns and different places, I can use just a simple keyword to get response.”

It took a highly qualified team and three years of research and sharpening the product to make it market-ready. Star Star now allows the customer to reach the service he is seeking like a cab or a pizza delivery very easily, creating a great call-to-action business. Several brands are already on board the Star Star platform, and many more are waiting in the wings. “We have ** STAR, which is Star TV. Right now, we are talking to many other brands at Star, like Star Utsav, Star Plus, etc…

There are many where we haven’t still got a written contract, stamped, sealed, signed and delivered, but in the pipeline are a motorbike company, e-commerce brands, a cereal brand, a home service company, a wedding planner and others…,” reveals Goyal. Meanwhile, some brands have chosen to use generic terms like ** WEDDING, without taking the actual brand name, and have bought such domain names from Tango Media. Similarly, dialling **RIDE or **TEST takes the consumer to a motorcycle brand’s YouTube page, where there is a video about it and a prompt to download the app. At Goyal’s insistence, we dial **RIDE and the pop up is: “--- has registered your request for a test ride and will connect shortly.” A link below the text takes us to the full catalogue of the brajjjjnd, and details about its products.

MILLIONS OF PINGS & POTENTIAL

Right now, there’s a campaign running for Vodafone on Star Star. “Vodafone has reserved the domain name APP… so for any Vodafone service, one has to dial **APP (**277 on the mobile number pad). The message that pops up is ‘Introducing the all new My Vodafone App for everything. Vodafone,’ along with a link to the app. It is a current campaign on TV too, with the new ZooZoos saying what you can do with your Vodafone app. We get about 1,00,000 pings a day. And these are only Vodafone customers. Hypothetically, if they were not Vodafone, and they were Samsung or Micromax running **4G, for example, they could have got half a million pings a day, which means 15 million pings a month! Do you understand the kind of numbers we are talking about? No other call to action can come even within miles of this kind of response,” claims Goyal.

“The biggest thing is that people can use it for more purposes… just by using the name, or the product name or the category descriptor. Hashtags are just a two-three-year-old phenomenon. Before that, no one knew about them. Now people use hashtags like regular punctuation! The same way, Star Star is going to be to mobile what hashtag is to social media,” asserts Goyal, who has filed a patent globally for Star Star. “It’s a patented technology; it appears very simple but requires one hell of a lot of technology. We can also do a lot with Star Star, in terms of customized and intelligent responses for a consumer. The system is intelligent enough to marry Telco APIs to the customer who is coming in, and send a message according to his profile.”

When customers dial a brand name, calls land on the Mobile Switching Centre of Telcos. “If you dial Vodafone, for instance, they land on what is called the MSC, or Mobile Switching Centre, of Vodafone. The server there recognizes it as a message for Star Star. The server pings my server, indicating a Star Star message. My server decodes it and figures out which brand’s message it is. It then pings that particular brand server, where a campaign manager is sitting. This manager decides what messages he wants to send out to the consumer – maybe different customized messages to consumers in different places, and perhaps customized messages for people owning different brands of cellphones such as Apple and Samsung. The decision on what message to send out is taken by the brand manager or the media agencies of the client. The return SMS is an enriched SMS, based on the decision taken by the brand. The path taken is Mobile Switching Center of Telco to server of Tango to server of client, back to server of Tango and back to Switching Center, and back to consumer.

There are two commercial transactions happening here - when a customer pings the Telco, it is like a missed call. The return path is an SMS. The brand pays for both the ping as well as the SMS.

CHALLENGES BEFORE STAR STAR

By virtue of their work primarily having to do with mobiles, the Mogae Group is one of the rare companies to have its own data servers inside telecom operators’ premises. Ask Goyal about challenges in the way of Star Star, and he says that all the challenges have been overcome in the last two years of working on the product and getting it operational. Among the hurdles, he lists getting the requisite permissions and licences as most tedious. “We had to be within the TRAI guidelines and operating in 23 circles, we had to deal with prepaid, postpaid, roaming - a million issues likewise. Getting this product operational in itself was the biggest challenge,” he adds.

Meanwhile, apart from a JV with German company Zeotap for programmatic advertising on mobile, Goyal has also tied up with Israeli start-up Idomoo to help advertisers create personalized video advertisements for individual consumers. Mogae Media continues to be a leader in the mobile monetization space, partnering customer Airtel to monetize its huge customer base, processing data  procured from them and sharing it with third party brands.

Goyal is known to spot opportunity and capitalize on it – in 2003, he set up Dentsu India in a JV with the Japanese giant, and exited it in 2011, in a neat Rs 250 crore+ deal. He then adhered to a five-year non-compete clause before venturing into advertising again through Tango Media.

Now, he is upbeat about Star Star, and convinced that it is his next big game-changer.

 Q&A 

Q] What are your expectations from Star Star, going forward, as you say it has huge implications?

I think it’s going to be a very big success. The numbers involved in this could run into millions of calls in a day. That’s what you need to understand. I can guarantee that by end March, we should have sold at least a 100 clients and about 300 to 400 domains. If you have 100 campaigns running at the same time, that’s 15 million pings in a day.

Q] And in terms of revenues for Tango Media… how does it stack up?

It costs the brand roughly Rs 2 for one call and return SMS. Take about half a million pings from a brand in a day, and that’s Rs 10 lakh earned.

Q] How would you value the property a year later... can you think of a ballpark valuation figure?

In a running 12 months period, Tango will certainly cross revenues of Rs 100 crore. It could be much larger, but even being very conservative, it would be Rs 100 crore of real revenue. It will give us a dramatically large corpus. The valuation of a company like ours can go through the roof.

Q] What else are you looking forward to in the next year? What are your plans, apart from this?

The big one which we are doing, we are almost on the verge on closing is our JV with a German company called Zeotap for programmatic advertising on mobile. That’s a big one. The JV is almost done. In the New Year, we should sign the JV and get it operational. We will be the first in the mobile programmatic space. We are different from other agencies as they represent the demand side of the platform, while we represent the supply side. Besides, our offering will be enriched with analytics from the Telcos too.

Feedback: srabana@exchange4media.com

Tags : Impact Feature