The startup story of ReleaseMyAd

ReleaseMyAd is a new advertising platform, a startup that gained popularity in a short term – solution for every advertising need. Read this article to learn about various factors of the startup and its success story.

Introduction

ReleaseMyAd, an online advertising platform assists businesses and individuals to advertise on any mass media. It caters to all your advertising needs, whether you want to advertise in newspapers, radio, in-Cinema, or magazines, it will help you out in every medium. It is soon going to extend its advertising services through television too. Anup Ostwal & Sharad Lunia are the head – business development of the advertising platform.

After two and a half years of finishing graduation from Wharton School of Business, Pennsylvania, Mr. Lunia returned to Kolkata and set up his startup releaseMyAd on 14 February, 2009.

He started to build an online advertising platform which was totally tech-based to benefit advertisers at gauge for offline mass media. Its motive was to make the advertising process simple and hassle free for individuals. This online Ad platform simplified booking classified advertisements in newspapers. Newspapers liked majority reach coming from both English & dialect readers.

It offers all conventional media choices to small and medium-sized businesses and nurturing startups within their budgets so that they can effortlessly advertise through radio, newspapers and theatre which lets them reach to their target audience successfully.

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Craftsvilla, at an early stage used the advertising services of releaseMyAd to execute a media buying @ INR 1,00,000,  and recently, the entire Miss Ethnic Campaign featuring Ms. Kareena Kapoor across Print, TV & Theatre was executed by releaseMyAd.

The purpose of launching this start up on Valentine’s Day was to facilitate couples to wish their valentine through the medium of Newspaper Ad and also to encourage couple for this it launched a 14-day campaign on Facebook. After completing 14 days, it had twelve new customers.

Challenges faced by ReleaseMyAd

1. Persuading the media buyers

It is a quite difficult job to aggregate media options in a single platform and then convincing media owners to realize the effectiveness of an online portal as a viable acquisition medium.

2. Persuading advertisers to promote online

It was a difficult task to persuade the advertisers for an online platform. Advertisers mostly prefer meeting media representatives personally and then talking about an advertisement campaign with them.

3. Facilitate communication via an online platform

It is not an easy task to get all the things done perfectly. ReleaseMyAd had to build an effective UI to make things easier & change the traditional way of media planning & buying. They had to build a technology based arrangement helping companies or individuals to self-serve on their own for most of the requirements. To deal with the issue of interaction, the system is created in a manner that it also facilitate one to one interaction where the client might require.

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Journey of the growth of the start up

It is the first initiative of its kind in the industry. As the customers of this website are online, they constantly interacted on user interface after getting all the beta response. It offers media buying plans for every budget size.

Having an annual turnover of INR 32 crore for the last year, the startup has provided service to around 2.2 lacs advertisers till date. This year they might cross the INR 80 crore mark.

Though local advert/media vendors throughout the country are its foremost competitors, there is a vast difference in their processes with those of the competitors. Their business dealings are not relationship driven, rather they provide a greater transparency and a better picture of pricing. They function independently i.e. free from personal relations. Moreover, they cumulate all media options with very relevant data which is quite unusual.

In an online world, releaseMyAd offers a platform that is affordable and easy to use for customers. With their notable price checking, and multiple seller enquiry system, they give much greater price plans than any other agency. This startup has made the advertising easy, effective and affordable in every manner.

The market in India vs the market of rest of the world

Our country is developing very dynamically. The India’s market is totally different from rest of the world. This is because the literacy rate is continuously rising and thus newspaper readers may be less somewhere else, but in India, it has a really solid presence which will have a upward graph in the near-term years.

By the end of 2019, even though the internet advertising might have an upper and seemingly much remarkable annual growth of 28 percent, its ad revenues speculated to come up to INR 100 billion which is merely the 1/3rd of that in print media which is assumed to reach an INR 314 billion mark in the next few years. This shows that digital media is still only a smaller portion of the whole advertising business.

Advertising through radio and cinema segments also show a considerable growth rate in the upcoming years at 17% and 12% respectively.

Future plans

1. It is visioning to match the right advertiser with the right media option by building back-end Customer Relationship Management systems categorizing advertisers based on their marketing objectives, target locations, budget, requirements and advertising frequency.
2. Efficient sale of last minute Ad inventory : It intends to improve its last minute inventory sales transactions, thereby, enabling better pricing for its customers.
3. Iterative learning knowledge base: It seeks to develop a perfect iterative learning knowledge base to recommend which media works for which objective and budget- standardized into packages.
4. Dynamic Ad Pricing Data: releaseMyAd intends to maintain a dynamic internal advertisement pricing providing knowledge to help better negotiate lower prices from media owners for all our customers besides further aggregating Small and Medium-based ad buying for which we intend to foster the RMA partner program.

The revenue model of releaseMyAd

As a marketplace, it earns commission on the basis of the volume of business transacted via its platform by its media partners. This commission ranges between 10-20 percent.

This startup solves three key issues with an ease that other ad companies face:

1. Media Discovery:

The success of any mass media campaign greatly depends on selecting the correct media option. ReleaseMyAd helps its clients discover the right media option for their objective by offering over 212 Newspapers, 27 Radio Stations, 19 Multiplex Chains, and all the leading magazines.

2. Lowest Pricing:

As the availability & pricing for advertisements fluctuates widely with demand, it offers the services at comparatively lower prices for every potential advertiser. To ensure the lowest prices, it floats an enquiry across multiple publishers & advertising representatives or agencies throughout India to obtain the pricing information.

3. Service Delivery :

Generally, traditional media agencies follow manual processes. However, with the new tech-based platform, system, and processes, it is enabled to service huge volumes of ad placements. Therefore, it ensures a glitch-free smooth run of advertisements placed across all the ticket sizes.

Conclusion

The fact that this startup is completely technology driven & is innovating in the offline advertising world, sets it apart from the other ad/media agencies.