India's PayTunes offers targeted audio ads as ringtones
Indian audio-visual mobile ad platform PayTunes is running brands' audio ads as ringtones on phones belonging to its app users. In turn, users are paid with reward points that can be used to take part in contests to win prizes. The app allows advertisers to target users according to their geography, demographic, gender and the time of day. Those near to the user will also hear the ad. Currently running 1.2 million ad impressions daily, the company plans to expand its user base and improve its redemption plan by partnering with telecoms operators and mobile manufacturers.

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As e-commerce companies and apps are trying hard to habituate the users to spend on their platform, PayTunes aims to reverse the trend by incentivizing the user by giving them lucky draw participation ticket and free recharges.PayTunes is a new age audio-visual mobile ad platform where advertisers can selectively target their audience with their audio and visual ads. Its a platform which runs audio ads of brands as ringtones on phones of its app users, and in return pay them with free reward points which users can later use to take part in daily contests and win exciting prizes worth thousands of rupees like free recharges, pen drives, mobile phones and bikes etc.Speaking of its appeal, its CEO and co-founder Divya Pratap Singh says "Its a mass product having a great appeal in low-mid income category smartphone users. A user can get prizes from Rs. 100 recharge to mobile phones, motorcycles from the app just by allowing it to change their ringtones. Why won't anyone have it?"With this ad delivery technique, the app aims to target the phone user as well as people in the close vicinity of the user when he/she receives a call. This essentially makes a case for a distributed ad-delivery network of users broadcasting audio ads even in areas and times where users aren't engaged in any other communication medium."Imagine our users travelling in Bus, Metro or their office elevator and broadcasting the ads to the people near them even if the intended recipients aren't using their phones or any other device. This is the power of this medium” says the chiefSales Officer, Amit N Naredi , who recently quit his job as Regional Sales Manager (Mumbai) from My FM to join PayTunes as a Co-Founder. "The app gives multiple customized features to the advertisers such as selecting the Geography, Demographics such as age and gender of users and time of day for delivery of their ad-campaigns. This minimizes the wastage in rolling out of campaigns by a pin-pointed delivery of ads to the targeted user at relevant time which otherwise is an issue in traditional advertising with FM, Print and TV" adds Amit.Indian ad-industry is a Rs. 50,000 crore industry with TV managing the highest share followed by Print, Digital and FM. Digital is increasing at a rate 30% per year, and Mobile advertising spend is 60% of the digital. PayTunes places itself between FM and Digital pertaining to the audio-visual ad features and its digital deployment and analytics features.Smartphone users in India are increasing in a rapid pace. Recently India became the 2nd biggest market for smartphone users worldwide and should reach 400 million mark by the end of 2017. Sanjay Mehta, an Initial investors in PayTunes says “Mobile device will take the centre place in majority of commerce activities in upcoming years. An avg user is spending almost 3 hours a day on mobile; brands need to look for ways to reach this user who is spending lesser time on TV and Radio going forward which will become a challenge for non-digital brands like FMCGs”PayTunes is running a number of 1.2 million ad impressions daily. Launched in October last year, the app has managed to have more than 7.6 Lacs users in total and 2.2 active users phones till now. "We've managed a strong user growth and a very high retention rate of above 60% which is much higher than the industry average. This proves the acceptability for this product among users" says Rakesh , batchmate of Divya from IIT Delhi and CMO of PayTunes.The team has some ambitious plans like tying up with telecom companies for better redemption plans and extending the usage and its reach by teaming up with mobile manufacturers. The company has initiated discussions with some of the leading mobile manufacturers and telecom companies for this already."Such an audio visual ad-delivery platform on mobile which gives one click scale to the brand managers has never been tried before and we're going strong in establishing this new medium. Digital is the way for advertising, and we have built a revolutionary product keeping this in mind." says Divya.