75% of Truecaller’s 292 mn active users are based in India: Sagar Manikpure

Adgully is gearing up for the 5^th edition of its marquee IP – MOBEXX. In its 5^th year now, MOBEXX Summit & Awards 2021 will be held on November 30, 2021. MOBEXX is an endeavour to decode the mobile marketing environment and predict upcoming trends. As a run-up to MOBEXX 2021, Adgully will be bringing a series of interactions and feature reports to cover various aspects and trends seen in the fast growing Mobile marketing ecosystem in India.
Truecaller inculcates the values of fostering a safe environment for brands so the focus remains on achieving meaningful impact and constructively sustained partner campaigns. Various diverse brands have leveraged the platform for promoting their ads, including video ads, with competitive video metrics. Thanks to video ads and various languages, brands have witnessed an increase in click-through rates (CTR) by 30%. In addition to English, Truecaller currently supports creatives in Hindi, Telugu, Malayalam, Punjabi, Oriya, Kannada, Tamil, Bengali and Assamese languages. 

In conversation with Adgully, Sagar Manikpure, VP, Global Ads Business, Truecaller, speaks about the company’s engagement in the regional markets, the growing base of active users in India, offering a 100% brand safe and fraud free platform to brands and consumers, and more.

What is Truecaller’s marketing and engagement strategy to engage with customers? Could you tell us about your campaign strategy for this festive season?

At Truecaller, our biggest focus has been on driving more engagement and value for our community of over 292 million users globally. We keep our ears to the ground, always listening to what they want or would find value in and make those features and products available to them. Be it Call Reason, Smart SMS or Voice calls or some new features like Inbox Cleaner and Call Recording, we’ve been always addressing consumer needs to drive more usage and engagement on the app.
For the festive season, we are releasing Season 2 of the wildly popular ‘Jam The Scam’ series. We have already released two of the videos in the series. You can check these out on our official YouTube channel: (https://www.youtube.com/c/truecaller/videos)
What are the innovative offerings that Truecaller has planned for H2?

We recognise that our advertising partners find value in the scale of our reach, depth of our engagement and the precision of our delivery. Our ad solutions are geared towards furthering these aspects via our innovative ad formats like video ads, where we have seen advertisers use vernacular creatives to resonate better with regional audiences. We have strong performance solutions such as EasyLead and Click2Call. EasyLead is a one-of-a-kind solution to capture targeted leads and Click2Call ads funnel millions of users to brands’ calling destinations to extend engagement over calls. All these solutions are powered by our industry-leading first party data and audience cohorts.

Brands can use a combination of our 300+ out-of-the-box audience segments with the flexibility to create custom cohorts for their specific requirements. In terms of overall scale, we continue to be loved in India and outside with over 292 million users globally. In H2 and beyond, we will continue to raise the bar across all these dimensions.

How has Truecaller’s focus been on the Indian market since the pandemic struck?

As you know, India forms our largest user base and continues to be our focus market from both the consumer and business fronts. On the business front, we continue to focus on creating more value for our advertisers while recognising their challenges around the pandemic. On the consumer front, we continue to deliver on our promise of trusted communication. I am happy to share that we received so much positive feedback around how Truecaller could detect and curb COVID-19 related fraudulent activities like false donation request calls, etc., helping people save themselves financially in these difficult times.

At the company level we also worked with several NGOs to drive their fundraising activities, created COVID-19 relief to leverage our reach/ scale to drive awareness about the virus. Truecaller also partnered with MapmyIndia and FactChecker to further improve the COVID-19 Healthcare Directory for our users. With this partnership with MapmyIndia and FactChecker, the brand provided people some relief in finding the right locations and verified contacts for hospitals, beds, and basic medical facilities. Truecaller was also able to provide some assistance for medical requirements and help its mission of fighting the virus together.

What have been the developments in the Indian market? How keen are the consumers to use Truecaller Facility?

About 75% of our 292 million active users are based in India and this number is growing every day. A large majority of these users engage with us on a daily basis. This is a huge privilege and also brings with it a deep sense of responsibility to be worthy of this love. We continue to improve our core offering of enabling trusted communication, leveraging the massive scale at which we operate via advanced machine learning and AI methods. Additionally, we continue to add innovations like Call Reason (to know why someone’s calling), Call Recording, Inbox Cleaner (clean up your SMS inbox with just one tap) and more features that are in the works to make Truecaller even more valuable to our consumers in India and outside.

How are you ensuring consumers’ and brands’ safety?

The primary promise of Truecaller is to facilitate trusted communication, which is core to consumer safety. The majority of our resources are deployed towards improving on this promise. We have stringent processes and mechanisms in place to make sure that all aspects of their safety, including their data/ actions are secured and stored in a privacy safe way. In terms of brand safety, the nature of our app inherently makes it a 100% brand safe environment – something that very few platforms can claim to be, at the scale at which we operate. Brands also recognise that besides being 100% brand safe, we are also a 100% fraud free platform given that all our supply is first party.

How has Truecaller accelerated brand engagement with an extensive regional connect? What challenges have the brands faced during this process?

The primary challenge brands face in terms of Tier 3 & 4 regional connect is scale and mode of engagement. Some of these markets still face the challenge of being digital media dark and there are very few digital platforms that can provide the required scale in these markets. With 60% of our 215+ million users coming from Tier 2 & 3 markets, Truecaller is able to provide the required scale for brands to engage in these markets across different geographies in India. On top of this, brands can also create a language targeting layer and ensure that they use the right language to build the right connect with vernacular audiences. This, then combined with our ad formats and other targeting cohorts, creates a wide array of possibilities for brands to deliver on their advertising goals.