NEW DELHI: Leading Bolywood and south Asian music service Saavn is stepping it up in India. The company has rolled out a pop culture marketing campaign to complement its recent data partnership with Tata Docomo.
Docomo‘s target audience in India comprised more than 80 per cent youth, resulting in a conscious effort to roll out a marketing campaign featuring American artistes Justin Timberlake‘s and Daft Punk‘s music. Saavn and Docomo have made a joint initiative to run the campaign aimed at increasing awareness levels through various touch points. The campaign will include TV, in-store, social and a massive SMS marketing program.
The marketing drive is an extension of a deal between Saavn and Docomo that kicked off earlier this month, bringing Indian mobile users a music-integrated data plan for the first time ever.
Docomo‘s subscribers will now have access to Saavn’s catalog of 1.1 million songs via a special stream-anywhere data plan – no WiFi necessary. Three monthly plans are available for Docomo’s GSP prepay customers: 500 minutes, 1000 minutes and 2000 minutes.
Both companies believe the campaign and new data service will create more value for Indian consumers to adopt smartphone data services while enjoying free social music services.
With 700 million mobile users, India boasts one of the largest mobile phone user bases in the world. This partnership marks the first-ever streaming music and carrier deal in India following a global trend of similar deals in America, Brazil, Scandanavia and France. Slacker and Muve recently teamed with carriers in the US., and Spotify and Deezer have launched similar programs in Scandanavia and France respectively.
“In India, consumers need an emotional reason to purchase data plans - music is the answer,” says Saavn co-founder and MD Paramdeep Singh. “The combination of Docomo‘s stellar reputation as a carrier, our vast Indian music catalog, and the appeal of global pop brands like Justin Timberlake, Daft Punk, Pink, Michael Jackson and Rihanna will only amplify the benefits of a worldwide shift in the way mobile users consume data.”
Content-integrated data plans are emerging as a three-way win: content providers can win millions of users out of the deal, carriers further substantiate data packages and open themselves up to a mobile advertising market worth billions of dollars, while consumers retain the freedom to consume data without being penalized.
Saavn is already credited for driving 5 per cent of data consumed in India, which is 15 times the amount of data driven by other Indian music providers. The marketing campaign is currently live in India.
