Google: SOCIAL PROFILE BECOMES BRAND PLATFORM

Credits & Description:

Advertiser: GOOGLE
Agency: MAXUS GLOBAL
Category: Best Use of Mobile Devices
Business Group Head: Arpan Priyamvada (Maxus)
Business Group Head: Megha Ahuja (Maxus)
Client Leader: Eeshita Ghosh (Maxus)
Associate Business Director: Gauri Sharma (Maxus)
General Manager: Mausumi Kar (Maxus)
Business Executive: Sukriti Sood (Maxus)

Strategy
YouTube had championed the Olympics spirit in the digital space during the Olympics season but in India needed marketing support to reach out to users on mobile to popularize a special song it had created to show support to the Indian contingent of Olympic players. During the campaign period an all-round Olympics frenzy had resulted in most brands pushing the ‘Olympics story’ or riding it in their advertising communication, rendering the Olympic conversation noisy. This posed a challenge for YouTube when reaching out to the mobile user with its India Olympic-Anthem. The common ‘download a ringtone’ message was sure to be less effective, considering the over-used ‘download’ tool on the one hand and a multitude of Olympic themed downloads on the other hand. We partnered with RockeTalk, India's largest social mobile-application effectively to address this challenge by creating the “PRBT” to catch the attention of its 8.6 million monthly-active base.

Execution
The PRBT or the Profile Ring Back Tone is a conceptual innovation done for YouTube on RockeTalk, a social version of the CRBT or the Caller Ring Back Tone. Unlike the CRBT or the Caller Back Ringtone, which plays every time a user is called and can be heard by the person calling, the PRBT (Profile Ring Back Tone) sits on the user’s social profile page and plays every time a visitor or friend visits it.The user journey was kept simple without taking away its social dimension. Users within RockeTalk were invited to take a pledge supporting the Indian Olympics team and urged to set the YouTube Olympics Anthem as their Profile Tone to show their support of the Olympics spirit. Users set the YouTube Special Song as their PRBT and every time a friend or a follower landed on the profile, they could hear the profile tone.

Effectiveness
Within the short period of Olympic weeks, 134,430 users set the YouTube Olympics song as their Audio profile. But more significantly, this produced 2,813,581 'listens'. These millions of users were not listening to the song because a friend or contact had set it as a profile tone. What it really managed to do is to put the brand in the middle of a user conversation, effectively by the user himself.