Performance Category: F&B

POD’ium

A Little Info

POD’ium was launched in 2020, in collaboration with Spotify, Anchor, and Kommune to grow the podcast culture in India. Led by the country’s best podcasters, it virtually organised educational workshops to empower promising podcast creators and bootcamp workshops on how to create and distribute podcasts via the Spotify-owned Anchor app

Point of Contact

At the time, we were working with Kommune, a pan-India creator collective. When the POD’ium collaboration was finalised, the project head of Spotify connected with us to promote it. Through the collaboration’s pilot edition of Pitchfest, wherein a budding creator can pitch his/her podcast idea, the organisers wanted to create 200 new podcasts.

To achieve this, they wanted our help in reaching 8 million promising creators, who would be interested in attending podcast workshops, across India.

Strategy & Process

To grow the number of participants in the workshops, we planned to run cross-platform ads on Facebook/Instagram, YouTube, and Google Display Network for a period of 30 days. The ads would urge recipients to register for Pitchfest.

Understanding the requirements from the POD’ium team, we set up brand awareness and traffic campaigns targeting all regions in India. Campaigns – featuring Kenny Sebastian, Pooja Dhingra, Kalki Koechlin, and Ranveer Allahbadia – were run to generate workshop registrations for audiences interested in comedy, food, storytelling, and self-improvement respectively.   

 

To track visits directed from the ads, a dedicated landing page was created, where visitors could register via a form. The ads were constantly optimised to maximise reach and page visits. 

Results

We were able to reach 80% of our target audience while conserving 40% of the ad budget. A reach of 14 million users was achieved on all digital properties. More than 1.8 lakh people visited the website during the campaign period, with YouTube contributing to 44.3% of the traffic, followed by Facebook/Instagram (38.9%), Google Display Network (16.4%), and Google Search (0.4%).

Vir Das

''I have been raving about you and Harshith to Rosh(an) and Rohit. Would rehire in a heartbeat, and will definitely be recommending you to others. You guys have been absolute professionals. You should be really proud of the heart you bring and what you’ve built.''

RAKSHITACOO, Weirdass Comedy Requirements

About the client

Emmy-nominated actor and comedian Vir Das doesn’t need a long introduction, so we will keep it short! As an actor he’s known for movies like Delhi Belly (2011), Go Goa Gone (2013), and set to star in a Judd Apatow film next. As a comedian, he’s performed at over 100 stand-up comedy shows, eight TV shows and six comedy specials (One of which we were involved with in a not-insignificant way!). He’s supported by his team at Weirdass Comedy, who we collaborated with closely on our project.

First contact

In July 2020, his team at Weirdass Comedy reached out for help with marketing his comedy special ‘Inside Out’. A novelty concept borne out of the lockdown, it consisted of close to 30 paid online shows wherein he would interact directly with the audience. All proceeds from the series of shows were to be donated towards Covid-relief work.

At the time we were approached, the show was only going to be live for 10 days. And the Netflix special it is now known as was not in the offing.

Approach

We worked closely with the team at Weirdass Company, consulting them on the infrastructure that they were going to build.

  • Originally, they planned to tie up with a ticketing partner but we advised against it as relying on our own infrastructure would grant us more flexibility with targeting and data analytics, and hence, bring us far better results. 
  • We helped the team construct a landing page to direct traffic from the ads we would be running. 

We planned to run ads on these platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Google and Reddit.

  • We guided the Weirdass team on the various ad messaging routes based on the types of audiences that we planned to target. As part of the campaign, we created an Instagram filter that had Vir asking people what they were looking forward to doing after the lockdown.  
  • Over the course of the campaign, we constantly monitored the ads with lots of audience listening to tweak and optimise them for maximum results. 
  • Our target age group in terms of users and sales were between 18 and 34. This age group comprised over 70% of website visitors and led to around 80% of the total sales.
  • Around 21% of the total visitors returned to the website to make the final purchase, which accounted for around 78% of the total sales.
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