Brands love to leverage the unbelievable reach of Truecaller: Tejinder Gill

Truecaller today has grown to 230 million monthly active users globally, out of which 170 million are from India. The brand is quite popular and people have by and large understood the application and its usage. With the Indian Government banning 59 Chinese apps, an opportunity has opened up for other players to engage with their audience.

Truecaller, in a bid to leverage the current situation, has been upping their game to help brands reach their audience through their platform. It is a win-win as brands are also looking for the most cost effective medium to engage with their audiences on a continuous basis. While helping brands reach their audiences is the key objective, at the same time Truecaller also wants to build trust by making the communication safe and efficient.

In conversation with Adgully, Tejinder Gill, VP, Global Ad Sales, Truecaller, speaks at length about the company’s growth in India, how it has been delivering ROI for brands, focus on three core pillars – Community, Communication and being Contextually, the road ahead and much more.

What is Truecaller’s long term strategy in India?

India is the heart of Truecaller. We are a globally 230 million strong community, with 170 million active users in India. We are of Swedish origin, but we are India-focussed. In fact, we are India-first and scaled to other geographies later. In India, we identified and blocked 8.5 billion spam SMS and blocked 29.7 billion spam calls in 2019 alone. From a long term perspective, India will continue to remain the largest market for us to roll out new products, features and services. We will focus on three core pillars – Community, Communication and being Contextually relevant to all our consumers and businesses.

While the downloads are increasing, how many users really use this mobile technology effectively? Are these downloads coming from smaller towns?

Truecaller strives to be the central app of communication that is safe and efficient. The reason we have 120 million daily active users and 170 million monthly active users in India is because these users are using Truecaller for much more than just Caller ID. They are using SMS, Chat, Group Chat, Payments, VoIP calls, Flash Messaging, phone book backup and restoring or even applying for instant digital personal loans. Our DAUs open the app several times a day. Reach is pan-India – anyone who has a smartphone and data. Thanks to democratisation of data costs, this means India onboards hundreds and thousands of new smartphone users every day and we are amongst the top 3 apps which get downloaded on a new phone from the Play Store. 60 per cent of our users are from Tier 2 & 3 towns, because calling is still the primary usage of a phone and Truecaller is the breath of Bharat.

How do you plan to address the safety and security aspect of the platform as there is still a fear when some external party is monitoring your calls?

There are two aspects to this – first is safety and privacy of user data. As a Swedish company, we have a strong lineage here because of GDPR compliance. Even in India, we were amongst the first companies to localise all data, far ahead of data localisation requirements. All our data for Indian users is stored on servers in India using the highest levels of security.

As for the second aspect – monitoring of calls – we are not a telecom service provider, so we do not control the security or encryption of the call itself. What we can ensure is that our user data remains secure. 

With as many as 59 Chinese apps banned by the India Government, suddenly there is a huge window opened up for advertising opportunities. How is Truecaller leveraging this opportunity and what is your strategy to attract more brands to use your platform?

As a company, we always focus on our strengths and the unique value proposition which we bring to the advertisers. Brands love to leverage the unbelievable reach of Truecaller in a single day, while also being able to contextually target audiences. Our association with advertisers exists since the last 4 years and these brands continue to find strong value in our platform which delivers amazing efficiencies and results across the marketing funnel. 

In Truecaller, there seems to be a very limited and a small time span available to look at the advertisement. How are you planning to ensure that it catches the eyes of the person making or receiving the calls?

When it comes to advertising, we’ve always thought about the interests of both the user and the advertiser. A quick example: we don’t carry any political, suggestive or objectionable advertisements – we never have, since day 1. At the same time, we don’t have intrusive advertising either, which means ads on Truecaller will not take over your entire screen, auto-play or be unskippable. So, the advertising is discreet and it won’t come in the way of a user trying to use Truecaller. We help brands to capture scalable ‘micro-moments’ with consumers at the right time, multiple times a day, with the right message. 

With Truecaller reaching a sizable audience, can the messaging be targeted based on various demographics? How, when and at what frequency can an advertisement be served?

We were the first in-app mobile platform which went 100 per cent programmatic, offering our advertisers a brand-safe environment and transparency. We launched a new model early this year, where brands can choose the targeting, reach and frequency as per their budgets. This has been a great hit for us since day 1. We are almost getting booked for August 2020 now, because brands are realising that we can deliver a cost per reach for less than 10 paise. We can help brands deliver contextual messaging as per the persona – targeting a user in a Tier 2 city, for instance. 

What are the various options available for advertisers to promote their brands? Is it purely static or do advertisers have other options available to make it more engaging for the end consumer?

Our full-funnel marketing solutions help advertisers to target 120 million users every single day, and that too multiple times, to build a top-of-mind recall. The highly impactful ‘After Call Screen’ impact property has a new flavour, where you can deliver a micro-moment/ story using a 6-second video ad. On the After Call Screen, we feature only one brand, giving the exclusivity to the advertisers and simultaneously delivering a great consumer experience. Due to this, our CTRs are multiplying YoY. Do note that in the interests of consumers, even these video ads are fairly small. They don’t take over the entire screen. And while they do auto play, they play without any sound in a small banner window. 

Could you elaborate on your pricing strategy and the overall reach that your platform is offering?

As I said earlier, our platform can help a brand reach a 120 million premium audience in a single day. You can choose to target users through a 24-hour impact or choose a reach-frequency model in an efficient way. We are currently delivering reach for less than 10 paise. There are not many places you can head to for that kind of reach, that fast, and at that low a cost. 

These days, many users install ad-blockers to block advertisements on their phones. Will this prove to be a hindrance as people get irritated with advertisements?

Ad-blockers typically apply to mobile browsers. While we understand the motivation behind this move by users, there needs to be a balance. Truecaller provides a very valuable service to millions of users in India and all core features are completely free and unlimited – they always will be! In return, we sell advertising and it forms the primary revenue stream for us. Roughly 70 per cent of our revenues come from advertising. The remainder comes from Premium & Gold subscriptions (we had 1 million paying customers as of October 2019 – that number is likely up by 50 per cent now). For the bulk of our loyal users who use the app for free, we deliver unobtrusive but relevant advertising. Unlike some other free apps you may have seen, we won’t have ads that take over the entire screen or ads that the user can’t skip/close. Finally, you should also know that Truecaller has never carried suggestive, provocative or political advertising since day 1. 

How do you promote your offerings to advertisers? Are you planning any campaign to create awareness and push for brands to leverage the Truecaller platform?

We have multiple channels through which you can advertise on Truecaller. Firstly, we have a direct sales team across India which can help you solve business problems and provide relevant brand solutions. From Day 1, our strength has been to deliver scalable reach and depth at the most efficient cost. This has been our mantra to success. We also get a lot of users through word of mouth. Some of our larger advertisers continue to be our partners and believe in the platform while we are also getting a lot of traction from newer verticals like Gaming, OTT and Edu Tech. Secondly, you can also run an online marketing campaign using our self-serve platform. 

Today, everything is about RoI and being performance-driven. Are you implementing any processes or tools to evaluate performance? How can clients monitor the campaign running on your platform?

Advertising has existed for several decades and the core of marketing remains the same. Brands that have not invested in themselves are seeing the biggest hit in tough times. The brands that have been with us for the last four years and have invested in the ‘Top of the funnel’ are also seeing great results down the funnel through quality of clicks, better engagement and Click-to-visit ratios.