OLX.in's filmy moment

The online consumer to consumer market has carried out brand integration with the latest movie, Ghanchakkar.

Although brand integration in movies is not a new concept, what is interesting is the innovative ways in which brands now use the medium to drive home their product proposition. A prime example of this is OLX.in, the consumer to consumer (C2C) portal for used goods, which has carried out its first integration with the Hindi movie, Ghanchakkar.

The brand, which has been aggressively advertising since late last year, has seized the opportunity in the Emraan Hashmi-Vidya Balan starrer movie Ghanchakkar, which was released last Friday.

The campaign comprises two films - both showing scenes from the movie - that connect with OLX's product position in a seamless way. The first one shows a scene where Balan tells Hashmi about the things they could buy for Rs 10 crore. The voiceover then concludes with OLX's proposition, where one could sell or buy anything one requires.

The other film shows Balan reminding Hashmi about the late night drives that she enjoyed in their car. The following voiceover mentions a bigger car is a must to enjoy late night drives, with visuals demonstrating how one could upload a post for a car ad on OLX.

Apparently, the campaign was developed in house by the brand's marketing team, along with its counterpart at UTV.. Interestingly, the brand integration was planned during the movie's post production stage. Since it is a big media spender, the brand has been approached by movie production houses earlier too. However, the premise and the manner in which OLX would be integrated with Ghanchakkar interested the brand.

Explaining the brand's decision to carry out the brand integration with a movie, Amarjit Singh Batra, CEO, OLX.in, says that the idea was twofold. "Communications from OLX are quirky and humorous and targeted towards masses and the movie was in the same genre with the same target audience," he says.

Besides, the central theme of the movie revolves around money and how it is hidden and OLX is a platform that unleashes the power of unlocking money lying redundant in the form of unused products. The integration was not forced and flowed nicely to the situation. Thus, there is a great collaboration between the two brands, Batra believes.

Besides television, the two week campaign is being promoted via radio and multiplexes. On social media platforms, the campaign is being run on Facebook and Twitter. In Twitter, contests and tweets related to the movie have been created for OLX followers. The TVCs have also been uploaded on YouTube, where the brand claims to have received over 65,000 views.

After tasting the benefits of the association, OLX now plans to "carefully evaluate" more such associations that are deemed a good fit for the brand. Batra says being associated with movies and celebrities helps create word of mouth publicity for the brand. "Marketing collaborations like this might help the brand over a short term period. However, the buyer and seller would need a strong rationale to use OLX in our case. If the user derives value after using the product, only then would the website benefit from such marketing efforts in the long run," he reasons.

Batra further explains that the brand's endeavour is to make the site friendlier and easier to use so that people can have a great experience buying and selling on OLX.in. "We will continue to do our marketing initiatives and continue to pioneer the market for C2C trade for India, like we have done in the last couple of years," he says.

In fact, more than 70 per cent of the listings on the site come from categories like mobile phones, automobile, real estate and electronic appliances, resulting in a growth of over 35 times in the last few years.

OLX was founded in 2006 and is present in over 500 cities across India. The portal features more than 40 lakh ads live on the site. Besides buying and selling, the portal also offers channels for trading, organising and discussing. Late last year, OLX entered into an annual advertising partnership with Yahoo! India, where the latter's homepage would display OLX.in's link under the featured partners section.

As per comScore data for May 2013, OLX claims to have 167 million page views per month, which is around 25 per cent more than the next player. "Traffic coming from mobile sources has surpassed our web traffic already and this number is currently not reported in the comScore or any third party figures," Batra says.