Meet Liquor Ticker - the world's first ad ticker on WhatsApp

What was the last Indian brand or campaign you remember that did some exciting work on WhatsApp? May be that was the starting point for Cafe TC and Dentsu Webchutney, the digital agency from the Dentsu Aegis Network, when they created Liquor Ticker – claimed to be the world’s first ad ticker on the popular messenger app.

Cafe TC, earlier known as Turquoise Cottage, was looking for a low-budget campaign to promote its makeover targeting mainly its patrons. Executed by Dentsu Webchutney Innovation Lab, Liquor Ticker converted Cafe TC’s status into a running ticker and the profile pics into ever-changing GIFs (Graphics Interchange Format: an image format which animates) to show a vast variety of content - from its brand new logo to the new menu and a host of offers. Users could send a screenshot of an offer they liked to avail it at the bar.

“Our brief was clear to the agency. Promote our revamp in a way never done before but of course in a limited budget!” says Gaurav Soral, Founder, Cafe TC. He adds, “When the agency told me that they plan to use WhatsApp, I was a bit skeptical since WhatsApp doesn’t offer any official ad space! And we’re not the kind of brand that would spam its users.”

Says Gurbaksh Singh, Chief Creative Technologist, Dentsu Webchutney Innovation Lab, “We were toying with this idea for quite some time now but were looking for that perfect match. With a little play of technology, read modifying WhatsApp’s API (Application Program Interface), we created an ad space on a medium that doesn’t have any! Liquor Ticker might just open the floodgates of advertising on WhatsApp.”

Last year, Cafe TC along with Dentsu Webchutney came up with the award-winning Happy Hours Rewind where users could turn back time and extend the happy hours by tweeting more and more.