Saavn Launches Its Own Advertising Platform Called Impact

Saavn, the popular music streaming service which caters primarily to Indian and South Asian music listeners, has launched its own advertising platform to help monetize the service. Saavn is freely accessible to its users and the website has decided to go the advertising way to make revenues. Saavn is very popular among Indian audiences and Indian music aficionados around the globe. The service claims that it has 10.5 million unique listeners.

10 million is a huge number and can serve as the perfect target audience for Indian advertisers as the service is primarily used by Indians residing in the country. Saavn has reached this number by being easily accessible and providing a specific service which was lacking in the Indian ecosystem. They were followed later by Dhingana, Gaana and now Hungama. Saavn is accessible on all major platforms. They have apps for iOS, Android, Blackberry and even the feature poor J2ME platform.

The platform has been designed to give advertisers a 100% share of voice on Saavn’s platform, both mobile and the desktop web. The units which are available for advertisers are custom skins, web display, web audio, mobile spotlight,  mobile display and mobile audio.

Co-founder and CEO of Saavn, Vinodh Bhat spoke about the new development.

“The Saavn Impact model is based around engagement, curation and social sharing rather than the archaic click-through. Brands are able to measure ROI in meaningful ways such as increases in perception, awareness, recall and purchase intent.”

Saavn has already signed up brands like Samsung, Pantene, Pepsi, Lays, Nokia, Vodafone, Airtel, Hyundai, Domino’s Pizza, Nielsen, MakeMyTrip, Max New York Life, Google, Intel and others. These are pretty big brands and the advertising money thus generated will get the service good revenue if they can sustain their user base.

However, what no seems to be talking about is how the consumers will react to it when Impact goes live with advertisements on Saavn. One of the key problems I see users complaining about is the sudden appearance of ads all over the services. I am not sure how intrusive these ads will be, but what if the users react negatively. Who can blame them? After all, they have not been subjected to ads on the service before and it depends on how Saavn will choose to display the ads. If there are ads at the start of a song, it will surely increase the irritation, in a similar way how many Youtube users get irritated by the ads which show up before a video. Maybe their users won’t mind, maybe they will but this seems to be the key challenge for the company, in my opinion.

What are your thoughts on this development? Share them with us in the comments.

Disclosure: Saavn is an advertiser with WATBlog

Story Source | Afaqs

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