www.releaseMyAd.fm is an online platform launched by an Indian advertising agency, which allows businesses to book commercials on 24 radio channels across 86 cities in the country.
It offers a mix of media planning, buying, creative services and reporting for different business categories.
Asia Radio Today speaks to its founder, Sharad Lunia.
1. What’s new about releaseMyAd? Has this sort of service not been available to radio advertisers in India before now?
releaseMyAd.com started in 2009 as an web based Ad Agency enabling businesses to place their advertisements in Indian Newspapers. Over the years, we have grown to over 1 lakh advertisers who have used our services across the country. While servicing these businesses, we identified a customer need for exploring new media for promotions. Radio having gained widespread adoption in the country, and available in over 85 Indian cities provided a strong reach and posed as a viable option for our customers to market themselves through. releaseMyAd.fm is a first of its kind initiative through which local businesses can launch effective radio campaigns. Prior to our platform, servicing local businesses posed as an interesting challenge. Their smaller ticket sizes did not support access to specialist agencies for campaign planning, media buying and ad development. Even the radio station sales teams allocate more time to bigger spenders compared to smaller advertisers. Our platform aims to fill this void by helping educate local businesses on radio advertising and effectively planning and buying media space for their advertising campaigns through our Internet-based platform.
2. You’ve been testing the platform for the last few months. What issues has that thrown up and how have you resolved them?
Understanding user interface & behaviour – Given our customers are online, we have repeatedly worked on iterating our user interface after gathering beta feedback. This development was critical & took multiple rounds to finally help settle towards a solution which was both comprehensive in its offerings, yet simple to use & understand for local advertisers. Our initial observation, was towards providing an Instant booking platform similar to our Newspaper Ad Platform, however on engaging with our customers we realised that the time taken from intent towards sale for radio was around a month for the B2B segment. Thus we re-modelled the site structure & processes to accommodate servicing our clients’ needs better.
Discrepancy in pricing of ads – Radio advertisement rates are dependent on multiple factors such as business category, budget & location. These variables tend to not be incorporated in the publicly available general rate card making budget estimation difficult for advertisers. To help resolve this, we researched and took out average operating rates for each of our partner radio stations and made them accessible on our platform. These rates were more accurate measures to help advertisers seriously evaluate the medium towards their advertising needs.
3. Which stations can advertisers book through releaseMyAd.fm?
We enable advertising across all 25 private FM operators in the country. These include Radio Mirchi, Radio City, Big FM, Radio One, Red FM among others.
4. How easy will it be scale up your platform when phase III is rolled-out (839 FM frequencies)?
The government is expected to launch Phase-3 auctions for radio spectrum soon. Radio is expected to cover 294 new cities and towns having a population of at least 1 lakh residents. This tremendous growth in reach would also translate to more local advertisers, across various budgets, which are looking to promote their businesses effectively through the medium. Given our online platform, scaling our solution to accommodate the newly added cities would be quite simple for us.
5. What’s your business model? How do you make this pay?
We charge the same ad rates as our media partners; there is no additional charge for our services. We are paid by media houses, in proportion to the business generated for them, just like an offline agency would be paid. This varies from 10-30 percent of the transaction value, depending on the volume, media and our share.
6. Where do you see the service developing? What are your future plans?
Small- and medium-sized enterprises usually don’t have dedicated marketing teams, and most staff are occupied with meeting the demands of day-to-day operations. It is difficult for them to find a partner who can help them market their businesses effectively within their budget constraints. releaseMyAd seeks to be an advertising network catering to such businesses. Our strategy is be a web-based advertising agency, and we keep evaluating media avenues with a view to its effectiveness and affordability for such businesses. Offline media offers tremendous scope and still enjoys very strong reach and impact. However, there are several difficulties that local businesses face in advertising on this medium. Our objective remains to identify the unique inefficiencies within each medium, and improve customer experience by eradicating these inefficiencies by harnessing technology and the Internet.
releaseMyAd is working on vertical offerings for cinema advertising, search engine marketing and print magazines – all of these have great potential.