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Airtel on promo binge for `virtual office concept'

Ratna Bhushan

NEW DELHI, March 14

AIRTEL, the cellular phone service owned by Bharti Cellular Ltd, is unveiling an advertising and promotion package to promote the concept of a `virtual office in the subscriber's pocket'. The exercise, which gets underway on March 15, will last for a mon th and has been put together on a budget of Rs. 25 lakhs.

The campaign, comprising a series of six ads, has been developed by ad agency Rediffusion DY&R. The advertising has been created to announce what AirTel sees as a `milestone in the history of the Indian cellular industry'. In other words, a single 10-dig it mobile number to access various modes of communication. The campaign will run in mainline dailies and periodicals.

The promotions, targeted at the younger generation, will comprise roadshows, contests and demonstrations at Connect Points and outlets, sources at AirTel said. The promotions will be contracted to an event management company, and AirTel proposes to tap d istribution channels and its vendor base to carry forward the concept.

According to company sources the big challenge would be to make consumers use the new services being offered. Therefore the advertising and promotional activity has been geared to educate the customer.

``The intent of this package is to throw light on things to come. It's about image creation,'' said Mr. Sanjay Kapoor, Chief Operating Officer, Bharti Cellular Ltd. Therefore the advertising steers clear of technical jargon and addresses the concept of v alue addition in the customer's personal life.

``The advertising has been consciously tailored along the lines of emotions, and touches on human life aspects. Since the idea is to involve the family, the campaign is not technology-centric,'' Mr. Kapoor added.

The new service, a 10-digit mobile number, takes AirTel beyond conventional value-added services. With the single digit number subscribers can receive and send faxes, e-mail, text messages (similar to the service offered by pagers) and access messages on the voice-mail box. All services come enabled with roaming facility.

For example, while the fax messages can be retrieved from any fax machine worldwide, up to 160 characters can be recorded on the e-mail service. If the number of characters exceed that limit, the e-mail messages are broken into parts. ``This is a fresh c oncept, and through it we are offering convergence of extreme convenience. Subscribers can have access to various modes of communication through a single platform,'' Mr. Kapoor explained. According to him, the service addresses multiple segments includin g corporates and first generation entrepreneurs. The service is being made available to AirTel subscribers at a `nominal originating charge' beginning April 1, sources at AirTel said. The details of the charges are yet to be firmed up.

What led AirTel to introduce the single digit number was the response that its SMS (short message service) generated from the time it was introduced last May. From an initial 60,000 messages a month, AirTel now clocks a claimed 125,000 messages a day. Ba sed on the reactions gauged by the SMS service, AirTel conducted focus group studies across a cross-section of people and saw an opportunity for this service.

The service, which took three months to put together, required increasing capacity besides condensing the services offered and configuring them to a single number.

The new AirTel campaign.