Wrap2Earn is a street-level cab branding marketplace that connects brands with cab drivers to allow cost-effective and high impact advertising campaigns. They have recently received backing from investors based out of India and the US. The company plans to use the funds to aggressively grow its current offering and gain market share within the Vinyl cab branding space across India.
“We want to strengthen our relationships with existing clientele and increase brand and agency tie-ups over the next few years. We also plan to use the funds to launch a very innovative offering in the DOOH space. With technology in the centre of things, we are striving to make the out of home advertising space more efficient for brands and agencies to spread awareness and increase top-of-mind recall amongst their target audience,” said Elmer Dsilva, Founder & CEO, Wrap2Earn, during a chat with Medianews4u.
“Measuring the impact of an OOH campaign has always been a challenge for advertisers,” observes Dsilva.
“Wrap2Earn was established with a motive to make OOH advertising less cluttered and more interesting for advertisers. The company realized how important it is for the brands to be in front of their TG at the right time and the right place – they are using cabs as a canvas for brands to tell their story. At Wrap2Earn, technology is at the heart of everything we do. We have developed proprietary technology for advertisers to track campaign impact metrics in real-time. Brands can access an online dashboard to track key campaign analytics, including the number of km their branded cabs have travelled broken down by location & time of day. Through key third party integrations, we also provide them information on potential impressions that have been gained through their cab branding campaigns,” said Dsilva while speaking about the inventories of Wrap2Earn.
“We strive to bridge the gap between OOH and digital by using QR codes, coupon codes and missed call alerts as a part of our internal branding activity too. Wrap2earn is currently the only OOH marketplace that gives the brands real-time data of how their ads are performing with meaningful insights,” added Dsilva.
Speaking about the challenges faced during the association with the driver’s community, which is a highly scattered and unorganized sector, Dsilva said, “Our driver-partner journey has been one of constant learning. We started by branding cabs that were owned by individuals and soon realized the inefficiencies in this approach. Coordinating with individuals to execute larger campaigns became very difficult and tedious.”
To overcome this challenge, the company connected with fleet owners across the country who own a minimum of 50 cabs and worked closely with them to execute many successful campaigns for our advertiser partners. This approach enabled Wrap2Earn to execute bigger campaigns a lot quicker and also helps ensure that the wraps are kept in reasonable condition throughout the campaign. Each of the driver-partners with Wrap2Earn is attached to a particular campaign via the Wrap2Earn mobile application. Their phones act as GPS devices that provide us with data throughout the campaign.
“Brands get access to an online dashboard where they can track key campaign analytics in real-time including but not limited to the number of kms their branded cabs have driven broken down by location & time of day & the number of impressions gained through their campaign,” said Dsilva.
Speaking on a challenging campaign executed by Wrap2Earn, Dsilva said,” Every campaign comes with its own set of challenges but executing a campaign with sampling activities is sometimes the most challenging. One such campaign was one that we executed for Rawpressery. We distributed free juices to passengers and had to ensure that the juices were kept cold so that they could be consumed. Also, we had to come up with a fool-proof way to ensure that there was not too much spillage, i.e. the drivers don’t just pick the bottles for themselves.”
He further continued, “To overcome these challenges, we placed temperature control bags in the cabs which could hold about 20 juice bottles at one time. We also set up multiple pick up points across the City to ensure that we were replenishing juices in the cabs throughout the day. We enabled a unique bar code system that showed us exactly how many samples have been distributed in every car throughout the day. The results were phenomenal. We delivered over 14 million impressions throughout the City through external branding. Over 4000 samples were distributed to the cab passengers, and their details were shared with Raw Pressery, who could then make contact for future marketing activities.”
Wrap2Earn have had strategic contracts with some of these cab aggregator companies in the past.
“However, over time, we have built strong relationships with fleet owners who own the advertising rights for their cabs. These cabs are not exclusive to one particular cab aggregator but tend to ply with multiple companies (Ola, Uber and Meru, etc..) simultaneously. We have realized efficiencies of going directly to the source and not having a middle man (cab aggregator company) involved. This helps us get better pricing, and we can pass on these savings to our advertiser partners. It also helps us execute campaigns with a lot more flexibility & deliver better results for the brands we work with,” added Dsilva.
Talking about the brand’s marketing strategies, he said, “As an outdoor advertising agency, there is minimal potential for marketing activities. However, we still find innovative ways to get ourselves in front of brands and agencies through digital marketing. We are very active on LinkedIn and find innovative ways to get ourselves in front of brands and agency folks. With our advent into the DOOH space, we have some very interesting marketing campaigns in the pipeline (both offline & online). We have also lined up some entertaining & interesting collaborations that we anticipate going live with by October this year.”
“We have plans to expand our current offerings more aggressively and leverage our brand and agency relationships to capture more marketing share. We are expanding our offering to advertisers, and very soon, we will own and launch our very own DOOH offering that we are excited about. We are also having advanced discussions about expanding our offerings in some other Countries geographically. We’ve built our offering and processes to scale and have a working blueprint that will be easy to replicate in other countries,” concluded DSilva.
