We're lucky to be a young brand with a generic ad: OLX CEO

When it comes to buyers and sellers online, for many the line 'OLX pe bech de' comes to mind. The company has been in the news recently for posting an over 100% growth in the pre-owned car segment. As many as 200,000 vehicles with gross merchandising value (GVM) of $1 billion were sold every month as against 95,000 vehicles worth $470 sold the same time last year.

Amarjit Singh Batra, CEO of OLX India spoke to Collin Furtado about their growth, marketing plans, mobile and content marketing and future plans.

How did the tagline 'OLX pe bech de' come to become a household phrase?

When we started our first communication our focus was that we are a marketplace so how do you get people to come and buy and sell. In a marketplace you have to go get both the buyer and seller on it. It is like the chicken and egg problem, so we thought we would get the sellers first and when we looked at them our first communication was focused on to get people to sell. That actually fortunately for us got so deeply researched and made that the word 'Bech de' somehow came in that and from there we realised that this is something very powerful because people liked it.

In between we tried few other things but then we realised that it is a good thing to reinforce the message. We kept on persisting on 'bech de' from various directions because you can't communicate in one way the same thing. For instance, 'Bech de' is only known in the north of India. If you go to south India they will have a different phrase for 'bech de' in their own language. So we went out there and created that kind of reinforcement in various languages, regions and also mediums. And that actually became so powerful that after some time people started getting it on their own and came to become a generic name. Now I think it is potentially a verb. We are lucky to be a young brand that has that correlation with the name.

Will your future ad campaigns be targeted towards buyers?

We have done some buyer target campaigns in the past too because at the end of it we are true to both. But in the end buying is an easy thing which is happening for us, because there are millions of buyers which are looking for good deals. Even if don't do any marketing for buyers, they will come. But with sellers we need to constantly reinforce the message. Going forward, we will see both the communications included into our campaigns.

Do you see brands spending more on content marketing in the future than on traditional forms of advertising?

It is always like a product lifecycle. There are early adopters to the brand, there are innovators and then there are followers. Every industry goes through a certain curb. In terms of content marketing I think we are at a good stage in the country were a lot of people are experimenting and doing good stuff. We are fortune to be one the people who have done some stuff around content marketing. But I think every brand has to start thinking along these lines and if they don't do it they will face tremendous amount of problems and I will tell you the reasons why. Purely on advertising on TV, it is push content. Today people are moving to digital, OTT (over-the-top), recorded programs and so on. People are skipping ads and even on digital people are blocking ads. So if your content is not relevant and if you still wanted to push it because you have the money, you start failing after some time. That means you have to start producing more relevant content and engaging content to be able for the user to pull that content to himself or herself because it is interesting. And this is a difficult job.

Now a lot of people are doing content market, some are succeeding some are failing, but that is part of the game. We will have to move to adapting ourselves to producing good content and brands sooner or later have to join this bandwagon. TV to one extent was also considered as content, but a lot of TV ads suck. We have also made some ads which we are not really proud of. But we are fortunate to have 80% of the ads which are very good. Consumers don't want lousy TV ads so by investing in great content it will improve your larger communication plan.
I think a reverse will happen, whereas earlier it used to happen from TV to digital, now it is going to happen from digital to TV. Ad spends will go more on digital than on TV. I also see a possibility of experimenting with the same kind of budget we have on TV but working on digital ads instead. It is already happening in places like China.

What are the opportunities and challenges in mobile advertising?

From the advertiser side, because it is a limited space, we have to think more innovatively, create more positions and go a bit more different from the way it used to be on the desktop. There are many things that you can do like the use of location targeting. The advantages of mobile marketing is that it can take you to the location of the person, but the challenges would be to use it very effectively for your brand and make a strong ROI (return on investment) for you. Because in the end in our business we drive a lot of (app) installs to the business. Only after the guy instals your app will you able to target him or her. I read recently that 90% of the usage of internet in terms of time spent is on apps today.

So how do you get people to engage with your app?

The starting point is an install, after that he or she is your customer. You can manage them through your CRMs. So the question here is how do you create more interesting content to engage and educate the customer to come and join in.

There is definitely a lot of technology coming out there but I feel most of us will actually shift to mobile marketing and our major investment goes on mobile. The technology on mobile is going to get better. You will also see mobile websites, which was diminishing due to apps, now getting better. India is on the cusp of a larger growth on mobile and we are all going to be part of it and learn from it.

Which segment for OLX had the highest growth last year? What are your plans for this year?

In the cars segment for example we grew by 100%. As many as 200,000 vehicles with gross merchandise value of $1 billion are sold on our platform. Overall growth-wise we are doing very well. We are the market leaders in our space now. Earlier there were a lot of people trying to do the same thing, but now I think the pretenders and different from the contenders. I think we are lucky to be in the space where we are in people's mind and clearly are the most liquid platform in a way where people are transacting.

So from here we are looking at how do we continue to make this better. Because at the end of it we are in a space where in this large country though it has a large population or internet population but not everybody is a classified user today. Everybody is not a classified user. Our objective is to increase the penetration of classified in the market and we believe as a market leader it is our job to do that. And as we do that companies which are in a similar space will actually benefit from it.