Impact & immediacy of offline medium is currently unmatched: Prasun Kumar

Property portal Magicbricks recently launched ‘The Great Indian Buyer’ – a series of six webisodes that pays a fun-filled ode to the nation’s endless love for great deals and offers. This is said to be a first-ever in this category. 

Flavoured and packed with great insights and laced with humourous slice of life situations, these webisodes were developed to promote the 21-day online property extravaganza – ‘Dream Home Festival Season 2’ – from Magicbricks. Instead of doing fictional depiction of the facts, a stand-up comedian’s act was chosen as the format for these webisodes, which were directed by Arshad Iqbal and produced by Advent Productions. 

In conversation with Adgully, Prasun Kumar, Marketing Head, Magicbricks.com, speaks about property brands going the digital way, hiring stand-up comedians, the idea behind the webisodes series and much more. Excerpts: 

In what way exactly is Magicbricks utilising the digital medium to rope in more buyers?
We are a digital platform. Acquiring and servicing customers online is a natural part of our business. Majority of activities that we do in the consumer lifecycle is on the digital platform. 

There are many channels within digital that allow Magicbricks to reach out to a new set of buyers. Every channel is utilised to gain more buyers for the website from an overall business perspective, thus making our website more effective for response generation. We mostly run 360 degree integrated digital campaigns on various channels of digital, which includes, and is not limited to, channels like search, social media, content marketing, display advertising, remarketing, etc. Benefit of the medium is that we can target all sets of consumers that are in different phase or stages of their home buying journey simultaneously. For example, we can target a buyer who has already shown internet in buying a property through remarketing, while a new consumer can be influenced, engaged through SEM, Social/ display platforms. 

How and why did you arrive at the idea of launching Webisodes?
DHF in itself was a novel concept, where we created a platform for the consumers who were fence sitting, waiting for the right price/ deal, or consumers who were in active search mode, but might have not yet taken the final decision. This was a ready platform, where they could just come and get offers across 400+ projects across the country. 

The challenge was to communicate a deal/ sale proposition in an environment, which is a classic deal/ festivities month in India. A time when every brand, including large online players like Flipkart, Amazon, etc., as well as other categories like automobiles, consumer electronics get into creating sales platforms and related communication. 

Our key objective was to break this clutter and not get lost in this communication overload. We also wanted to communicate the proposition in a fresh/ clutter breaking manner, which also would be a first in the real estate category. With this thought and the insight that bulk of our consumers are online as the almost entire discovery process has moved online, we thought it is worthwhile to do an intervention online. While we could have taken the TV route, we decided against that and instead chose online media like FB and YouTube. Webisode as an idea got developed there. We wanted to differentiate and communicate a deal based proposition to the consumer in a very fresh way. It was a series of six webisodes, a ‘first- ever’ in our segment. 

The objective of making these webisodes was to convey to the audience that the core of the Dream Home Festival Season 2 stems from our genuine understanding of The Great Indian Buyer. Since the brand knows the Indian buyers well, it has designed the entire Festival as per their desire. 

Instead of doing fictional depiction of the facts, a stand-up comedian’s act was chosen as the format for these webisodes because such acts are quite popular amongst the net savvy audience. Also, this format is free from the need of sequential viewing; you can watch them in any order and still get the message clearly. 

How far do Webisodes actually work out or influence the viewer to buy a property from the portal?
The webisodes reached out to more than 16 lakh consumers and we got a huge amount of engagement in terms of shares and comments, which clearly indicated to us that webisodes were getting extremely popular and were pulling in a lot of eyeballs. We had six webisodes prepared to capture the unique propositions of DHF itself. At the end of the campaign, the 1 Lac+ buyer responses and the increase in site traffic that we got is a testimony that the idea definitely worked. 

What do you aim to achieve from the Webisodes?
Through this series of webisodes, we wanted to bring in freshness, break clutter and engage the consumer. Every webisode aims to aptly capture the psyche of an average Indian buyer with dollops of subtle nuances. The launch webisode is a mirror image of the efforts an Indian buyer makes to get discounts and deals. Then there were follow-up videos – one each on the four sub-events within the Magicbricks Dream Home Festival Season 2.  

What was the response to the first season of Magicbricks Dream Home festival in terms of inquiries, actual buying of property?
In DHF season 1, we had a Buyer Response generated of approximately 35,000. In season 1, we had 150+ projects featured by around 60 developers. 

The ‘Great Indian Buyer’ series was created specifically for Dream Home Festival Season 2 and hence, it concluded with the conclusion of the event itself. However, since the content actually mirrors the behaviour of typical Indian consumers, it would not lose its relevance. From that perspective, it is ageless! 

What was the kind of investment in producing such webisodes?
Webisodes by its very nature of being online are not as costly as a TVC. The approximate cost of a webisode could be a tenth the cost of a TVC, but they have the potential to go viral and give equal impact. 

How did it translate into buying and selling?
We got more than enough responses on demand as well as supply side. On demand side, we generated more than 1 lakh buyer responses, who were interested in immediately looking at the properties. On the supply side, there were 400+ projects being showcased by 100+ developers. 

We grew our response on the supply side by 5X and on the demand side, we grew by 4X over previous season of DHF. 

How did you zero in on Jeeveshu Ahluwalia?
Jeeveshu is one of India’s wittiest stand-up comedians, who has performed at comedy gigs all around the globe. Winner of ‘Radio Mirchi Comedy Ka King 2014’ and a well-known face in television commercials made him an automatic choice for anchoring webisodes. 

Apart from the webisodes, how have you planned to promote the second season of Magicbricks dream home festival?
We also used Radio, OOH, print advertisements, and social media to amplify our DHF season 2 apart from webisodes. 

Comparison of cost & effectiveness factor using digital media vis-a-vis traditional media for similar purpose.
Every medium has a role depending on the objective of the brand/ campaign at that point of time. From a cost effectiveness point of view, digital is definitely cost effective and you get to see the responses real time. That is the strength of digital. Offline medium has its own role to play. The kind of impact and immediacy that offline medium can provide is currently unmatched. 

How do you differentiate yourself from other players in the market?
With more than 80,000 projects and over 1.4 million listings across cities, Magicbricks is India’s No. 1 real estate site and market leader in offering latest tech innovations to its customers. We have been in the business of online realty since over a decade and constantly leading the segment. As part of our long term strategy we are now moving beyond listings and offering our customer more innovative ways to simplify their property buying experience. We recently launched an app called ‘PropWorth’ for property prices where users can find current prices of projects across cities. This is the only such app available in India. 

Are you kind of gradually moving away from using traditional media?
We believe that it is best to use a combination of traditional media, along with the digital media to gain traction for the brand across our consumer base who consume both.

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