Radiowalla is a provider of bespoke audio and digital signage solutions, transforming in-house communication and customer engagement for brands across sectors. It has a pan-India presence encompassing nearly 30,000 retail outlets and a growing footprint in Digital Out-Of-Home (DOOH) advertising.
– Key Differentiators :-
– 1. In-Store Radio Excellence
Radiowalla curates tailored audio content to enhance the in-store experience, trusted by companies like Landmark Group, Reliance Value Formats, Jubilant FoodWorks Ltd. (JFL), and Hardcastle Restaurants. The service looks to ensure that customer engagement is both impactful and brand-aligned.
– 2. Corporate Radio Solutions
Radiowalla’s corporate audio solutions are utilised by corporations, including Amazon, to engage employees and deliver critical communications effectively. The localised, content aims to help organisations foster a cohesive workplace environment.
– 3. Expanding Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) Network
Radiowalla looks at inovating in the DOOH space, with digital signage solutions gaining traction in key regions such as Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh. This technology looks to empowers businesses to captivate audiences with displays.
– 4. Market Leadership in Audio OOH Advertising
Reaching over 100 million consumers monthly across 7,000 stores, Radiowalla operates what it claims is India’s largest audio Out-Of-Home (OOH) advertising network
– Led by CEO Harvinderjit Singh Bhatia and co-founders Anil Srivatsa and Harpreet Singh, Radiowalla is dedicated to pushing the boundaries of audio and digital media innovation. As a publicly listed company, Radiowalla aims to continue to pioneer solutions that redefine consumer engagement and elevate brand experiences.
Medianews4u.com caught up with Harvinderjit Singh Bhatia, CEO & Co-founder, Radiowalla
Q. Could you talk about the progress that Radiowalla made in 2024 in offering audio and digital signage solutions for in-house communication and advertising? How is the festive season progressing for the company?
2024 has been a momentous year for us. We have seen rapid growth in our service offerings across regions. In the first 6 months itself, we have added 80+ clients and approximately 2000+ stores have been added, thereby taking the total store count to 30,000. We have signed up some key logos ( for example Levi’s, wrangler, Lee, Bloomrooms, Forever new etc) and expect the growth momentum to sustain during H2 as well.
The festival season has been especially good in terms of advertising. We have seen brands using in-store radio as a key medium of festival offer communications. In fact, we have grown over 100% YOY H1 and that is even before the start of festival season. For the full year, we are expecting to maintain the growth momentum
Q. Radiowalla claims to have an advertising reach of 100 million monthly footfalls across 7,000 stores. What is the gameplan to grow this? What role will third party advertising campaigns in stores play in this?
Our advertising reach is a function of footfalls in grocery stores and the network that we work with. We are working on most of the large grocery chains in the country and will continue to expand our partner footprint in India and also explore similar opportunities outside India as well. Advertising helps grocery chains monetise a hitherto unproductive asset of In-Store Audio and generate additional revenue and creates a win-win for everyone involved.
With our advanced technology solutions which bring transparency for all the partners, we are determined to create the largest retail media network in the country providing brands the power to target customers right at the point of purchase. Radiowalla is the only In-store audio medium which is empanelled with DAVP thereby enabling the Governments and PSUs to advertise on our platform. This is important for the third-party advertisers like banks and credit card companies, insurance companies, PSUs like BIS, LIC etc and Government departments like Tourism as they can continuously and effectively reach the targeted consumers.
Q. How are the proceeds from the IPO being used for investing in tech, enhancing its cloud-based infrastructure, expanding the sales team etc?
We are investing into various aspects of creating industry leading technologies in the space of customer engagement. First up is an option to provide HD quality music for high-end fine dining locations and pubs.
We are also investing into AI created music as well as using AI for curating playlists. This will make the services accessible to even standalone stores with no need for manual intervention. We are working on programmatic advertising for in-store radio. Once successful, all these will be industry firsts in India.
We want to be at the forefront of technology innovations in the industry and will keep investing resources into new technologies going forward as well. At the same time, we are making our backend technologies more robust to continue with the next stage of growth. We currently service 30000+ locations and are preparing the infra to cater to the rapid expansion in location counts. We are seeing a lot of inbound enquiries from retail chains in non metro towns. Accordingly we are augmenting our sales and business development teams in these cities.
Q. Having gone public does the challenge now lie in being accountable and profitable? What are the P&L goals and challenges?
Our idea is to achieve growth that is scalable, sustainable and profitable. Profit is definitely a priority here and we have to balance investment in long term growth with sustainable profitability in each of the segments we operate in.
We have been a profitable company for the last four years and the focus now is to improve the margins as we keep a robust growth of revenue from hereon. We have grown by over 35% in revenue in the first half of FY25. We always believe in transparency with our shareholders. We had some Angel Investors in the company and we had been actively engaging with them on the performance of the company.
Q. Could you talk about the plan to grow partnerships with the 563 clients like Landmark Group, Reliance Value Formats, JFL and Hardcastle?
With a very large retail client base, we are now focussed on upselling our services to them and adding more revenue per client. We are engaging with existing clients to market our solutions in Digital signage and advertising. The good part is that we engage with these clients very regularly for existing services so it opens up opportunities of additional business from them. We have recently signed up with Max Fashions (A Landmark Group brand ) to manage content across 220+ screens.
Q. What have been the learnings from doing content management projects with Jeeva and Mia by Tanishq?
What we have experienced from our first few clients in digital signage content management is that these are operations heavy services. The devil, as they say, lies in the details. We see the services as a core area and can win in that market based on superior services and optimisation of costs across our service offerings.
We are investing to develop our on-ground and backend teams to ensure our service levels are the best in the industry. This will help us build credibility with a larger client base. We are very bullish on this business and expect a rapid ramp up in revenue and client count here going forward.
Q. As D2C shopping grows, is the business from shopping malls coming under challenge?
On the contrary, we see most D2C brands looking to establish offline presence. Eventually brands have to be present wherever their potential customers are.
So offline is not something that they can ignore ever. It will all be a matter of where the brand is in the evolution journey. We work with many of the D2C brands that are now expanding their off-line presence for example Mokobara, Damensch etc
Q. How is the customer experience enhanced with curated audio content that is tailored for in-store environments? The company delivers nearly 20,000 playlists everyday.
Every brand wants to project a certain image to its customers. How a customer perceives a brand is based on a combination of factors such as the look and feel of the store, product placement, colour palette used, store staff and also music playing in the store.
Music plays a very important role in defining the brand perception and we are proud to partner with many brands for this key branding element. Music is a ‘Must Have’ for a retail environment and not just ‘Good to Have’. We deliver thousands of curated playlists everyday depending on brand, location, language, country and so on. This allows our clients to achieve their branding objectives and allows them to focus on other important aspects.
Q. What role is AI playing for Radiowalla in areas like offering audio programmatic advertising solutions?
We are investing into AI created music as well as using AI for curating playlists. This will make the services accessible to even standalone stores with no need for manual intervention. AI use cases are evolving rapidly and we would like to be at the forefront of AI usage for in-store audio. We have started creating music using AI ( some sample tracks have been uploaded on our Youtube page) and will start deploying such music in actual stores in the next 2-3 months. We expect about 10% of our music database to comprise AI generated music over the next 12-15 months.
This will enable virtually unlimited music options for our clients and also reduce royalty costs, both for the client and for Radiowalla, thereby further improving our margins. Secondly, we are working on AI tools to enable music curation. This will allow standalone stores to design their own playlists easily and reduce any manual dependence.
Q. Could you talk about the progress that the Corporate Radio division has made through partnerships with companies like Amazon?
Corporate radio is a niche space and we are happy to let you know that we have made good progress in this space. Our corporate radio projects in India and Mexico are going on smoothly. We have recently launched a pilot project in Brazil. This is a three-month pilot and we are also in talks to launch another pilot project. That should happen by January-February 2025
Q. How has digital made OOH more attractive for advertisers and how is Radiowalla leveraging this by expanding its digital signage network in regions like Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh?
Advertisers are looking at DOOH very seriously due to persistent issues with static OOH. We are expanding our footprint of DOOH screens and have taken Gujarat as a focus region in this respect. Our DOOH network has reached 12 screens (nine in Gujarat and three in UP) and another four screens are coming up in different cities of Gujarat.
Our Gujarat screens are at very prime locations and spread across different cities right from Surat, Gandhinagar to industrial cities of Morbi, Bhavnagar etc. With this deep network in Gujarat, we are working to become the preferred media partner for advertisers with a state wide footprint.
Q. Could you talk about new measurement tools that allow companies that use Radiowalla’s solutions to more effectively track ROI?
We are working to integrate programmatic advertising for Audio ads. This would provide a third party validation of ad playout at stores and enable effective tracking of ROI. This has never been done in India and even in the US only one company has done this so far.
Additionally, we are working with our retail partners to provide more data points to advertisers to enable better measurement of outcomes
