How Dailyhunt is fortifying its vernacular base to see growth

Dailyhunt, a leading news and entertainment content application, makes a strong case for promoting and respecting the regional languages of India in its digital campaign, ‘#HarBhashaEqual’. Conceptualised and executed by Mumbai-based, full-service digital agency, What’s Your Problem, the campaign aims at highlighting an in-built bias against our vernacular languages and seeks the support from the youth in India to seek linguistic equality in the country.  

With presence in 14 different languages, Dailyhunt seeks the support of Indian youth to make ‘#HarBhashaEqual’ a movement that goes beyond the film. ‘Is your language inferior to another?’ is the overarching theme of this highly innovative campaign. It’s a unique social experiment where pairs of speakers from different regions talk about their most significant accomplishment to a heterogeneous audience. Each pair is shown having one English language speaker and one local Indian language speaker addressing a bilingual audience. The film begins with each speaker narrating key achievements in his/her life, and the audience is then asked to guess who the real achiever is. 

In a rather ironic culmination, the audience ends up pronouncing that the real winners are those who spoke in English – representing the deep-rooted language bias that exists in India. The film ends with a beautiful song about linguistic equality that asks the ambitious Indian youth why they should be hesitant just because they can’t speak English. 

The campaign video is directed by Cannes Lion-winning director and renowned feature filmmaker, Bauddhayan Mukherji from Little Lamb Films. 

Agency speak 

Amit Akali, Founder, along with Mihir Chitre, ACD and the creative mind behind the campaign at What’s Your Problem, shared, “We are excited to partner with Dailyhunt for this unique social experiment – a compelling way to bring forth the obvious linguistic bias in India. We live in a country where a large majority of people subliminally equate intelligence and achievement of a person with the language he/she speaks. Consequently, a host of talented young folk remains largely un-recognised purely because of their inability to speak in English. The campaign attempts to bring this issue to the forefront. The ‘#HarBhashaEqual’ campaign can be best described as an honest attempt to make India a level-playing field for its youth.” 

Further elaborating on the campaign’s objective, Chitre said, “The objective was to create brand love for Dailyhunt while stating the brand’s USP that it provides news and entertainment in 14 Indian languages. I think the best way to create brand love is to come from a consumer insight, which we did. The client brief was to create brand love. To make Dailyhunt loved by the youth of this country. I think this idea is achieving that.” 

Tejas Mehta, Business Head, What’s Your Problem, added here, “Dailyhunt became our client a year back and we worked on their brand campaign. Dailyhunt is a big brand with humungous traffic. It’s one of the most downloaded apps in the country, but at large people don’t know about it. The presence largely comes from the regional space. The consumption happens in Tier 2 and 3 markets. The entire attempt was about how we go about ensuring that people know about Dailyhunt; it’s is not just about creating awareness, but a meaningful awareness. We in WYP believe that brand purpose should not just have campaign, but it should have a purpose.” 

Client Speak 

Umang Bedi, President, Dailyhunt, explained, “In the societal fabric of India today, our individual identities are layered. A vital aspect of our identity is the language we speak, yet in a country with so many local languages and a celebrated legacy of rich cultural and linguistic history, the question that keeps popping up is – do we look at all languages equally? The answer is sadly ‘No’. The ‘#HarBhashaEqual’ campaign is an attempt to initiate a much-needed debate on this issue. It reflects our commitment to restore the importance of each regional language in India. This campaign is a good way to connect with the youth, across Bharat typically, millennials between 17 and 30 years of age and enlist their participation in this historic movement that goes beyond the film.” 

Bedi further said, “For over a decade, Dailyhunt has been concentrating on empowering people across the country, the real Bharat, not just in the metros – with knowledge and information by offering news, information and entertainment in local languages. ‘Language Equality’ has been a part of our existence since inception; hence, this is a natural theme for us.” 

In a freewheeling interaction with Adgully, Umang Bedi speaks about the genesis of the latest campaign, Dailyhunt’s performance so far, the company’s vision and much more. Excerpts: 

What is the story behind making #HarBhashaEqual?
Before starting with the campaign – #HarBhashaEqual – let me take you through my personal story, which really changed my perception. I was on an Indigo flight, in row 13^th which is a premium row, a paid seat and an offer to pre-book your meal. There were these two individuals next to me who were not speaking in English. Initially, I thought it was really not surprising that they would have paid Rs 1,000 extra for the seat and Rs 600 for the pre-booked meal. Later, when I started talking to them, I realised that they were actually much evolved users and had gone out and really created successful businesses for themselves. I had this bias towards them because they were speaking in their native language. After that, when I walked down to the air hostess and share this instance and asked her take on this, then she replied that ‘Sir, do you realise when we get into the aircraft ,we use various languages to make our passengers comfortable and inform that we understand them. She also told me that 60-70 per cent of all the sales in the flight really happens in local languages, which really shocked me. 

That time, I realised that despite the linguistic diversity in our country, it’s ironical that we judge people by the language that they speak. When we do that, we really act against the idea of equality in India, which is a secular nation. A local language consumer is not from the low socio-economic status, which is how people in Tier 1 India perceive them. 

The idea came to us from there and I think after that when we spoke to various people in the ecosystem, we saw that this bias really exists all around in our society. So, for us the campaign was really a thought – can we launch a ground breaking digital campaign to promote language equality in India and seek support from the Indian youth to make this a movement that goes well beyond just one film. I think it’s just a start of a national movement. It will take various shades and avatar as it goes forward. It’s going to be something which is really amazing in terms of creating an impact. 

How are you making this campaign more sustainable?
The biggest truth point for us is that we are a local language app for Bharat. Our biggest endorsement in this is that even today where the Internet is all about English users, our focus as a company is to empower Local India. Virendra Gupta (Viru Bhai) started this company and he is my partner in crime. We both come from small towns and share the same ideology as to how do we empower local India. From day one, he pivoted on local language before it became a very big part of the Internet. It finally happened with Jio bringing down the cost of data. 

Our biggest commitment is that we are a local language app and 90 per cent of the consumption of all content in the app happens in non-English language. English is only 10 per cent of the total consumption. What we are looking at now is how we can really make this is as a nationalistic movement. 

It’s a pure digital campaign. I think we are in Version 1 and this hopefully becomes a national movement which would take various shapes and shades. We will do our own bit to make this campaign more successful as we go forward and will keep adding more elements to it as we scale up and will get more traction coming into this. 

How do you view Dailyhunt’s performance?
Ever since I come on board as an entrepreneur and partner in crime with Virendra Gupta, Dailyhunt has really exploded in terms of growth. We are today the fastest growing app in the country. Last month alone we added 5 million new users on the app and 6 million new users on the mobile web interface. Further, we are fuelling this journey of Dailyhunt 2.0 strategy, where our mission is really to be the largest Indian local language app empowering the next billion Indians who are coming online to socialise, discover and consume content which is not just informational but enriching and entertaining. 

For this, we are building Dailyhunt’s 2.0 app in local languages which is built for Bharat: leveraging our sophisticated artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithm that is moving to blockchain to drive deeper engagement. Today, we have 100 million users across the globe making us amongst the largest Indian entity in terms of digital media. We have a time spent of 25 minutes per user per day and we have a substantial revenue business. As we are growing, we are extending Dailyhunt’s strategy. 

We are doing three things at Dailyhunt. First, we are extending our secret sauce, which is our AI and machine learning algorithm now moving to blockchain to engage more users around video. We are getting into local and hyper-local videos around news, entertainment, astrology, Bollywood, cricket and many more. Secondly, we are driving massive reach in distribution with strategic partnerships, where we can see our app in the hands of the users who are coming online. Thirdly, we are building strong monetising model for our advertising partners as we are pivoting to video advertising. Recently, we have launched our self-serve advertising platform in Beta which will help small business to grow. 

Which are the key markets for Dailyhunt?
I think our traction base reflects on the demographic elements of India. So, when you think about India, the consumption really comes from Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, Gujarati, Odiya, and Bengali. The consumption on the app really reflects the demographic population in these regions. 

Going forward, what are your key strategies to further grow Dailyhunt?
The first strategy is to go more local and hyper local. We also intend to fortify our local video offering in short format. Moreover, we intend to build a social frame work around. We don’t ask users for their login details, unlike other social platforms. We work on the content graph rather than social graph. One can build a network around the content.