India’s network of angel investors, has invested close to half million dollars in a pre-series A round in PayTunes, a mobile advertising platform that envisions to change the way ads are delivered on mobile. The investment is co-led by PayTunes’ existing investor CIO Angel Network. Vishal Khare, Rajeev Arora have led this round of investment on behalf of IAN and will join the company board for further mentoring the team. Apurva Parekh from Pidilite and Sanjay Mehta has also invested in the current round.
Founded by Divya Pratap Singh, Rakesh Sehgal who are batchmates from IIT Delhi and Gaurav Tiwari in July last year, PayTunes provides advertisers and brands a targeted medium to reach mobile consumers through audio visual ads. Team was recently joined by Amit Naredi as a co-founder and Chief sales officer who was working as a regional sales head in Mumbai for My FM. Earlier PayTunes had raised $100K from CIO Angel Network in September last year.
PayTunes is a simple app which replaces their mobile ringtones with ad jingles from advertisers and at the end of the call, a visual for same ad is also shown. For every ad played, user earns points which they later redeem in terms of mobile recharges and bill payments. PayTunes also provides offers to its users from eCommerce, shopping and other segments to earn more points.
For Advertisers, PayTunes provides a complete ad platform with in-build ad analytics. Advertisers can selectively choose the users they want to target based on geography, demography and other parameters and push their ad from our platform's back-end dashboard through a single click.
PayTunes' selling proposition is targeted advertising.“Conventional mediums like TV and Radio lack control in terms of targeting campaigns to their Target users and exposure of the ad. We are giving an entirely different and fresh method of mobile advertising, other than static banner ads which are already in practice. We use the traditional audio ad which is broadcasted to user on mobile on the incoming call which is then combined with graphic ad to complete the audio-visual effect on the user. This makes PayTunes the only mass medium apart from YouTube with the reach of more than 2 million users daily thorugh our audio-visual offering on mobile.”said DivyaPratap Singh who started the company in June last year. PayTune app has been downloaded more than 4 lakh times and has strong foothold in Delhi/NCR, UP, Gujarat, Mumbai-Pune, Rajasthan and Bihar regions.
The company plans to utilize the investment for expanding the team and hiring more talent on the sales side, as well as in the Marketing of the product.Company also plan to integrate ‘ads on Caller-tune’ feature which will increase the platform’s reach multiple times and become more lucrative for advertisers.
Commenting on the investment, Vishal Khare, lead IAN investor said, “Currently most of the branding spend (~80% of Rs. 50k Cr Market) goes in traditional media such as TV, Radio and Print. PayTunes is building an alternate medium in the branding domain, which still manages the biggest chunk of advertising spend (~80%). While most of the consumption of these mediums is offline, all of these are trying to move to mobile to improve the user engagement and user mindspace. It presents a great opportunity for brands to reach mobile consumers extensively with the traditional audio-visual ad in its very own digital way.”
Rajeev Arora, Lead Investor in Paytunes shares that "In today's never ending race for business’s to acquire Customers – Paytunes, creates a unique channel for Companies to reach and communicate with their Key Target Audience’s by simply Converting Hand held devices to become mediums of broadcasting of content and Ads, while cleverly rewarding their user through cash & Rewards from the Advertisers. "
Market SizeAs per a recent e-Marketer report, Mobile ad spend has surpassed $100 billion which is 51% of total digital ad spending and is expected to reach 70% mark by 2019. Digital advertising spend in India is ~$1 billion out of which Mobile Advertising spend is $0.18 billion (18% of digital advertising expenditure). By 2019 the Digital Ad Spend is expected to Grow to $2.17 billion out of which Mobile is expected to contribute $1.23 billion (56% of the Digital advertising expenditure).
Currently, PayTunes is working with more than 25 advertising agencies across India and has run successful campaigns for brands like Nissan motors, Jabardast HIT FM, Vodafone, Saavan.com, Amazon and others.
Differentiator"Currently most of the mobile advertising is based on banner ads and not audio-visual. Banner ads are static ad form as compared to audio-visual ads. Furthermore to say, this kind of advertising quantifiable for for digitally active brands who have either their app or website as their main product.
However, FMCGs, Telecom, Banking and others non digital brands are still reliying on TV/Radio/Print for advertising there product.
PayTunes presents an alternate and a custom-built way to reach mobile consumers with Audio-visual content without consuming much data and further engage with them on their mobile only. With mobile consumers becoming the main focus for brands in today's age, Brands need more effective mediums to target mobile consumers and PayTunes fills that gap successfully."
