Amazon Pay bets on Asia Cup through CTV, considering to spend on ICC CWC ‘23 in October

Anuradha Aggarwal, CMO speaks about the recent campaign starring Ayushmann Khurrana.

Online payment service Amazon Pay released a new campaign “Bill Payments Ka Smarter Way” featuring Ayushmann Khurrana. The campaign highlights how customers can manage all their bills at Amazon Pay with timely reminders and avoid late payments.

Anuradha Aggarwal, director of user growth and CMO, Amazon Pay India, said, “In this campaign, we have highlighted the core customer insight that one of the biggest pain points of customer payments is bill payments. Customers do not have a simple and easy way to pay bills. Khurrana shows us that such solutions existed all along, but we just did not notice them.”

Currently, Ayushmann Khurrana is becoming a top choice for the  Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) category. He is the brand ambassador for ICICI Bank, Pine Labs, and now the actor did a TVC with Amazon Pay.

Why is this the case? Aggarwal says Khuranna was the ideal choice for the brand as the actor embodies the qualities of an accessible, modern, and relatable everyman. “It came as a recommendation from the agency, and we believed him to be a good fit for the brand."

There were other reasons why Amazon Pay chose Khurrana. “We have kept in mind that he’s not associated in the consumer’s mind with any other fintech platform. I believe advertising doesn’t mean association, association is built over time over scale over the quality of ad communication,” she highlights.

The media mix of the campaign includes television and digital. For large-impact properties like the Asia Cup the major focus is on connected TV (CTV).

“We believe the major TG we’re serving is on CTV, and our media team has recommended us. This will be a TV-heavy campaign, so we’re investing accordingly,” she states.

Even though Disney+ Hotstar is streaming Asia Cup matches free on mobile phones which could provide the brand much greater visibility and read on mobile devices, yet, the brand is betting on CTV.

The brand is also considering partnering with ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup 2023 starting from October.

The online payment app has recently launched ‘Pay with Alexa’ feature, through which customers can make voice-based bill payments. It can work with devices as well as mobile phones.

Aggarwal states, “Alexa works with Amazon Pay, and it becomes a hassle-free experience without any more information. It works in a natural customer engagement route and it's a solid platform that we’re working on.”

In the past campaigns, the ads were intended to build awareness, but this campaign was designed specifically to create awareness about its bill payment feature.  

“Awareness will be on top of our marketing funnel as we always want to be on top of customers’ minds, that’s why with this campaign we picked the bill-paying problem by stating the features we offer. The reality is that we always want to be on top of the customer’s mind. We’ve never advertised bill payments before and always advertised payments. This campaign was a way to create awareness for this service,” she adds.

Amazon as a brand has a lot of brand value attached to it. We use it for shopping, for binge-watching our favourite content on Amazon Prime. With its pay feature, how has its popularity worked for the brand?

She answers, “It helps us to create awareness and the big point is that we’re inside the Amazon app, so there is a goodwill attached with us. Apart from that, we get the usage from the e-commerce platform, video streaming platform and other services. The prime members of the platform also get extra services. It has helped in visibility as whenever anyone uses Amazon they see us all the time as people pay more on shopping rather than on bills, and that becomes a symbiotic relationship."