DSP Message Board / Wealth Management

Background

DSP BlackRock is part of one of the world’s largest mutual fund organisations. In India, they wanted to reach out to a wide audience and communicate their core offering of wealth managed in a different way. 

Idea

Data-sourcing services such as Just Dial (the yellow pages of the mobile industry) agreed to collaborate so that every time they were called for financial-related information, they would respond with an SMS message from DSP BlackRock.

Quite simply, the phone number callers requested requested were texted back to them with a few added commas. These broke up the phone number to make it look like a vast sum of money. So the recipient would get the number but in a way that immediately associated it with considerable wealth.

Results

The activity led to a huge response from prospects in terms of both call-ins and web visits. The website which showed a jump in visitors of almost 50% compared to the previous month.

The low-cost innovation yielded led to DSP BlackRock Mutual Fund increasing its share of market by 3.6%, a huge number, considering the size of the Indian market.

Our Thoughts

Often, in the rush to embrace the new we forget the old. So we get excited by how our mobile phones can bring print to life through QR codes and augmented reality forgetting SMS. I love this because it is a demonstration of real creativity at work – someone rejecting the tried-and-trusted (which, in this case would probably be press advertising) and finding a solution which is not just new but which is relevant, cheap and stunningly successful.

For the same client, Taproot also created a radio commercial we simply did not have space to feature. But, again, they turned the phone number into money. This time not by adding a comma but by reading out DSP BlackRock’s number (1800 200 4499) as if it was a total sum: eighteen billion, two million, four thousand, four hundred and ninety nine.)

Nice to see the guys who gave us big ideas like ‘Educate India’ and ‘ A Day In The Life of India’ for The Times of India have the same approach to the small briefs with the tiny budgets.