Facebook launches ‘missed call’ in India

India is Facebook’s second-largest market, but generates only 0.23 per cent of its total revenue. The social media giant obviously wants to increase its revenue from a country of more than 1.3 billion people.

The glitch: a vast majority of ‘money-wise’ Indians with pre-paid phone contracts do not like spending their well-earned rupees on making calls and text messages, and mobile is the only realistic way that the social media giant has any hope of cracking the Indian juggernaut.

A smart Facebook has therefore decided that, when in India, do what the Indians do: Give a missed call.

Missed calls are a popular workaround for people in India and a number of other South Asian countries – dial up a friend and then hang up. In its quest to dial up the money from money-wise Indians, Facebook is using a new mobile-ad format unique to the country by deploying ‘missed call’ ads.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s India visit has coincided with its announcement that the social media platform is testing a new ad format tailored to the country’s unique mobile behaviour: the missed call.

“When it comes to mobile communications in high-growth countries, necessity often breeds creativity. In India, for example, there is a “missed call” behaviour that started as a workaround for the high cost of voice calls. Somewhat similar to a collect call, people dial a number and hang up before connecting to save voice minutes. Often the call is used to send a signal to a friend or family member, such as ‘I’m outside,’ or ‘Call me back.’ Some businesses have recently begun sending recorded messages or SMS messages to people who place a missed call to them,” Facebook says in a blog post.

“We’re testing an ad unit in India that builds on this behaviour. When a person sees an ad on Facebook they can place a ‘missed call’ by clicking the ad from their mobile device. In the return call, the person receives valuable content, such as music, cricket scores or celebrity messages, alongside a brand message from the advertiser – all without using airtime or data. We’ve seen positive results in early tests with advertisers like Garnier Men and our partner ZipDial, and plan to scale this product in the coming months with additional partners and markets,” says the world’s largest social media platform.

ZipDial is a Bangalore-based start-up that operates a missed call platform for advertisers to reach Indian consumers. The start-up has previously worked with Indian and international advertisers, such as Unilever.

Facebook isn’t the first to spot the ‘missed call’ habit or the first to leverage it – but it has the largest follower base to realistically test it out. Several technology companies in India have, in recent years, tapped the practice for sports polling and brand campaigns.

A big factor in the favour of this approach is that it works with feature phones that do not have access to the Internet.

Facebook has a tie-up with Bharti Airtel, one of India’s largest telecom operators, and it has been placing content for a while now on Airtel’s Indian customers with feature phones. Facebook claims that says that a massive two-thirds, or 66 per cent, of Indians reaching Facebook on mobile devices use feature phones.

“When you think of how people access the Internet, you might glance at your smartphone or computer and imagine everyone around the world using similar devices. However, roughly 7 out of every 10 people in the world, many in high-growth countries like India, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, South Africa and Nigeria, use far simpler devices, like feature phones, to access the Internet,” it insists, and cites eMarketer’s January 2014 study titled ‘Worldwide Mobile Phone Users’ for the data.

“The rate of people using only mobile devices to access the Internet is skyrocketing, especially in high-growth countries. More than one billion people access Facebook on mobile every month and many do so across multiple mobile devices. In many countries, a majority of those people experience Facebook on a feature phone: in India 66 per cent, in Indonesia 71 per cent and in South Africa 68 per cent,” it says, citing Facebook’s internal data for May 2014 as the source of the stats.

Will it work? Facebook certainly thinks so. “People in high-growth countries increasingly want to be connected to friends, family, news outlets and brands. However, given fragmented media options and the expense of Internet connectivity, reaching people in certain countries has been a challenge for advertisers,” it says.

“Last year, Facebook provided advertisers with the ability to place and target ads on feature phones. Since then, we’ve improved ad delivery by optimising for low-bandwidth connections and offered enhanced features that give brands more storytelling options. Advertisers can reach millions for people – some for the very first time – on any device and in any country,” it adds.

Using local insights to find new solutions is the way forward, it maintains, and will use the ‘missed call’ format to ensure that it doesn’t miss out on the multi-billion opportunity in India and some of the other emerging markets like Indonesia, Nigeria, South Africa, Turkey and Latin America where Facebook is planning to replicate the format.

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