How Truecaller Helped Spotify and Zoomcar Reach 500 Million Impressions in a Day

• Spotify capitalised on Truecaller’s brand solutions to maximize the brand visibility and saw 30% more clicks in a single day for its launch campaign.
• Zoomcar managed to achieve over 400 million impressions for its brand campaign after using Truecaller
• India is the largest revenue contributor for Truecaller globally

When Swedish mobile app Truecaller started buying and selling ad inventories programmatically in 2017, a lot of people were not aware of its potential. Fast forward to now, Truecaller’s programmatic platform has helped brands like Spotify and Zoomcar to capitalize on the platform’s 100 million daily active premium smartphone users in India, to send out their communications and see close to 500 million impressions in one day for their campaigns.

Spotify launched in India in February this year and during the launch phase, the music streaming app capitalised on Truecaller’s brand solutions to maximize the brand visibility and saw 30% more clicks in a single day. By using Truecaller’s contextual capabilities, Spotify’s launch campaign, ‘There’s A Playlist For That’ ended up delivering over 500 million impressions in a single day.

Similarly, Zoomcar again used Truecaller to reach out to its users across major cities, to promote its three-day offer of 100% off on bookings made towards the end of May, earlier this year.

The numbers from both the campaigns are impressive. Both Spotify and Zoomcar saw 500 million and 400 million impressions respectively for their campaigns.

We recently spoke to Tejinder Gill, Vice President Global Sales, Truecaller to understand how the programmatic ecosystem has evolved in the country in the past few years. Sharing his views on some of the biggest advantages of using programmatic advertising, Gill said, “When you look at it from a publisher’s lens, programmatic has helped us get better yield. We get more money for our inventory and everything can be optimized automatically at the back-end. We’ve now also started offering guaranteed deals called ‘Programmatic Guaranteed’ through which we can sell all our premium inventories like Roadblocks programmatically.”

Gill further shares that moving to programmatic has also helped in bringing about a lot of operational efficiencies. “We no longer need a big team. Currently, three people are managing ad operations and programmatic for Truecaller globally, which includes large markets like India, Middle East and Africa. On an average, these people manage over 100 campaigns a month, which means three campaigns per day, which is a pretty high volume,” adds Gill. It has also helped in regularizing payment cycles, he shares.

Gill believes programmatic is very helpful for marketers too, who now know exactly where their campaigns are running, which has given them a lot of confidence and control over their campaigns. “They are also getting better insights and are able to optimize their campaigns. They know how frequently we are reaching out to consumers and what geographies they are from,” he explains. The fact that the pricing is transparent has also helped win over a lot of clients, shares Gill.

Speaking about how Truecaller helped them reach their target audience and drive effectiveness, Varun Jha, Chief Marketing Officer, Zoomcar, said, “Through Truecaller, we managed to achieve over 400 million impressions for our brand campaign. By tapping such a large quality audience through Truecaller, we were able to generate user interest that led to direct conversions during our campaign. Having witnessed such exceptional metrics, we would surely partner with Truecaller in the future for our brand promotion.”

Sharing her experience, Neha Ahuja, Head of Marketing - India, Spotify said, “Being recent entrants to the Indian music streaming landscape, collaborating with fellow Swedish app Truecaller truly accelerated our launch campaign in India. It helped us gain scale and connect with potential 1.3M users who clicked on our ads through Truecaller.”

Gill also feels that programmatic has evolved a lot in the last few years. He shares that close to 70% of marketers are today choosing to transact programmatically. Moreover, during the first phase, only display ads were available programmatically. However, today, YouTube mastheads, and inventory on Facebook and Google can be bought programmatically, which is leading to the entire ecosystem moving towards programmatic.

So how important is India for Truecaller in the global scheme of things? ‘Very’, says Gill who shares that India is the largest market for Truecaller globally. “India is far ahead of the curve in terms of programmatic when compared to a lot of other markets like MENA and Africa. We are also the largest revenue contributors and will continue to grow as we scale up,” he adds.