Click on Reliance Mobile GSM banner ad to make a phone call

Within 24 hours of the launch of the banner ad campaign promoting its GSM services, the mobile operator received 26,000 call requests

Reliance Mobile, which has positioned its GSM services on the plank that people must act on their impulse to connect or talk to each other, is using online banner advertising to help users to do so.

Its banner ad enables the user to make a one minute call to a friend between 9.00 am and 9.00 pm for free. The user is required to enter his friend’s name and mobile number, apart from his own details inside the banner and press ‘call now’ to connect with his friend. In the back-end, a click on ‘call now’ is routed to a server, which dials and connects the two mobile numbers.

The online campaign went live on June 8 across various websites such as Rediff.com, Yahoo.co.in, Indiatimes.com, NDTV.com and IBNLive.com. “Within 24 hours of the launch of the banner campaign, we received 26,000 call requests. Of that, 10,000 are unduplicated users,” Vishal Chinchankar, assistant vice-president, Reliance Mobile, tells afaqs!.

He adds, “It is just a brand building experiential campaign, not meant for generating leads. In fact, the idea was to extend the TV campaign, which urges consumers to use their mobile phones to connect with their friends, to the online medium and bring alive the proposition of staying connected.”

The mobile operator is targeting to reach 45-55 per cent of the online audience within a period of three to four weeks. It will serve about 250 million ad impressions across various websites and also use the services of some ad networks such as Komli Media, Tribal Fusion and Network Play to get the reach.

The company plans to utilise other formats of online media to strengthen its positioning of staying connected. It will unveil special voice cards on e-greetings website, 123greetings.com, and introduce branded scraps or messages on social networking website, Ibibo.com. An online game to promote the GSM services will also be developed and made available on Zapak.com.

Reliance Mobile has also developed a special microsite, Goforit.co.in, where it is offering a facility to send video messages.

Apart from online marketing, the company will also resort to mobile advertising. It will run mobile ad banners across various mobile sites and use SMS marketing as well.

Chinchankar reveals that Reliance Mobile will spend 3-4 per cent of its advertising budget on online marketing.

Reliance Mobile has more than 8 crore customers, including both CDMA and GSM users, spread across 20,000 towns and 5 lakh villages in India.