The Story Behind Paytm's Marketing...

Vijay Shekhar Sharma, founder and CEO, Paytm, wears his logo on his front pocket. So far, the only other entrepreneur I've seen do that is Paperboat's Neeraj Kakkar, of whom Sharma happens to be very fond. "If Neeraj ever needs any help with his business, I'll give it to him without thinking twice..." he promises.

"Go big or go home" reads the writing on the wall of Paytm's head-office in Noida. And Sharma, 37, lives by that line. Launched in 2010, Paytm, short for 'Pay Through Mobile', has a customer base of over 100 million. What began as a recharge and bill payments platform is, today, a mobile wallet, an e-commerce destination and an aspiring payments bank.

While Paytm's recharge offering is still alive, it accounts for less than 22 per cent of the company's total transactions today. At present, Paytm's marketplace boasts a GMV (gross merchandise value) of a little less than $300 million a month; Vijay is confident the number will touch half a billion dollars by the end of this calendar year.

Paytm's marketing budget for 2016-17 is Rs 600 crore. Among Paytm's investors are names like SAIF Partners and Alibaba's Ant Financial.

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(smiles) Yes, it's true.

I write the print and online ads. For TV, I don't do the screenplay, but the copy's all mine.

I did not study in an English medium school but I now write advertising scripts in English, with nuances and all.... I am the copywriter of all Paytm ads.

The people we meet at the pitch level versus the ones who end up working on our account are never the same. Every agency has rock star creative artists whom you meet at pitches, but they don't create your ads. I say to my creative teams, "Show me what you have done, not what your agency has done."

Also, some work is done to win awards and is not necessarily created with the target customer in mind. Young brands like us need to bother about all these things.

To me, spending money on a media platform is like giving money to that platform, but not necessarily getting the returns you expect. There's always a significant mismatch between the expectation and what actually gets delivered. We may spend money on a particular type of media, say OOH or TV, or on a particular TV channel, assuming our TG will look at it. But that's an assumption. If the TG is not watching, our money is gone.

So we're conservative about the way we choose our media properties. That's why, instead of spending money on say, a newly launched TV channel, we'd rather experiment with something like, let's say... aircraft branding. In fact, on Day One, Paytm was launched with in-aircraft branding, post which we did English radio branding. We experiment more than a traditional company would. These are tricky but critical branding decisions, because we want the brand to be visible to the correct person, the correct number of times.

By conservative I mean on the pitch and type-of-media fronts. For instance, when it comes to our trade/supply side partners, we've noticed how national media brings about a lot more top of mind recall than vernacular/regional media does, but vernacular media has a lot more impact than national media does.

Spending money on national media is a necessary evil.

We've reached 100 million customers. Now, reaching out to an incremental audience is the tough part. For them, online is not the primary medium. Language communication is the way to reach them.

For this, we have to go long tail, through local media, local languages and through media that is near them. National news won't work. Will local language news work? Will GEC work? We don't know yet. So the decision to buy media and create campaigns that reach out to the 'corners', to 'the last person', is an incredibly new, challenging thing. Few days back we thought we could reach them through the mobile... while that's a fact, we're now putting an equal amount of effort in offline media and regional advertising.

To be honest, this is a tech and marketing problem, in equal measure. In fact, tech is led by marketing. Marketing plays an integral role here.

(laughs) My mornings, when serotonin levels are high, are for ambiguous topics like 'brand'. Later in the day, my time's for numbers.

The rule is - If it carries the logo and is going out to the public, I am involved. I give a lot of freedom to my advertising teams (McCann), but I review every ad for sure. I build the basic templates and decide which brand elements are to be retained... that's a role I own. After that, my marketing team takes over. In fact, all our TV ads go through the 'modifications bargain' before they are released.

The Paytm logo you see today went through 54 iterations. When I was in San Francisco, I saw a beautiful yellow billboard with nothing but a ghost logo on it, but I just knew it was Snapchat. I wanted Paytm to have a similar element that people can instantly associate with us. I worked closely with my design lead to discuss the colours of our logo.

Yes, logically, I am product head here.

Our primary demographic is the young under-30 person, but of late, surprisingly, families have started getting interested. Parents and older people are asking about Paytm. They use it mostly for utility (example, electricity bill) payments. So from 20-30 year olds we're heading to 40-50 year olds; that's a new demographic for us. That's why, though our previous ads only showed young people, the newer ones have older characters like buaji, moms, dads... we're trying to tell older people, "Paytm is for you too."

We launched our offline payments (QR Code scan option) in November last year. By February, when we saw the numbers and realised how well it was working, we decided to spend more ad money on it. We were all set to launch our marketplace campaign at the time; the script and casting were done. We were going to start shooting. But we decided to shelve the marketplace campaign and double our momentum on the offline payments campaign instead.

And since we released the QR Code ad campaign four months back, we've seen a 600 per cent hike in usage of offline payments. So far, the ad was aired on TV only on weekends (Friday, Saturday and Sunday). We now want to double the air time and increase the frequency of the TVC. The media buying trick is - getting consistent, long term media presence, instead of doing short term, 'impulse media' or 'burst' campaigns.

There is a skew towards men but it's not that big. I would say it's at around 55:45. In fact, our ads show many payments being made by women...

Our approach to advertising is to amplify what we see, not to swing behaviour.

In fact, the concept of cashback, and shopping with cashback money, is such a... erm...

Exactly! Unlike a discount, where you feel like you've got a good deal and are then disconnected from the system, cashback makes you feel like you are gaining something; it makes you come back to the system. Men just want a good deal; then they forget about it.

By the way, 85 per cent of transactions on Paytm do not have any cashback. While Cashback is a great incentive to drive stickiness, it must not be the only one.

We stand for payments. But an independent payments business is an orphan business, without a marketplace to anchor it. It's like the symbiotic relationship between a rocket (payments) and a launcher (marketplace). Our marketplace allows us to build relationships with merchants and extend our payment relationships to financial services.

We went to all the existing marketplaces to deploy our wallet. Seeing their disinterest, we decided we had to take a call to build our marketplace ourselves.

When we launched our marketplace, I had said, "Anybody who's serious about the commerce business will have to start by building their payments business..." At the time, nobody understood; today, everyone is trying to tow that line. When we were not a marketplace yet, none of the e-commerce companies was serious about being in the payments space.

The sequence is - first consumer, then merchant. If you have consumers, merchants will come. It's never the other way around. So we continue to drive user acquisition.

Our association with BCCI (title sponsorship) last year helped us reach regional customers in every nook and corner of India. After that, the merchant ecosystem accepted us.

Merchant acquisition is done via local advertising, in their cities. The offline business in this country is so big that even if a merchant ignores online, not much is missed.

I bother about my own house, not somebody else's. We're not intrusive. We don't know how one gets an advantage by doing what they have done. We're just clear that if we are getting what we need from them, they can do whatever they want. And we're getting one hell of a deal.

(smiles) In any case, technology investments are very incestuous, globally.

It worries me that we're spread out too thin. Before being good at one thing, we launch another.

(This interview was first published in our magazine afaqs! Reporter on August 1, 2016)

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