On the night of November 8, 2016 Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the decision to demonetise old Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes. While everyone was rushing to ATMs to withdraw whatever Rs 100 notes they could get their hands on, Paytm rushed to their ad and media agency to create and place an ad on the front pages of all leading publications congratulating Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the decision and with a play of word in its tagline to 'Ab ATM nahin, #Paytm karo'.

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Speaking to the Zeebiz team Sudhanshu Gupta, Vice President, Paytm said, “We have launched a 360-degree media campaign that includes heavy advertising in national print, television, radio and web-based media. Multiple creatives have been introduced in the market as our brand is extremely topical to the current situation.”

The growth of Paytm can be seen in the traffic and transaction numbers on the first two days itself. It had a 435% increase in traffic on day one itself and offline payment transactions increased by 400%. Even the transaction amount has increased by 200% of the average ticket size.

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Apart from the print ads which it rolled out post demonetisation, the company along with its agency McCann Delhi rolled out a TV campaign called 'Drama band karo, Paytm karo' on November 12. The campaign however was tweaked to 'Chinta nai, Paytm karo' by the company after it received backlash on social media.

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This shows Paytm's huge leap ahead of competition after demonetisation. The brand even tried to push its users to grow its acceptability by putting up print ads which gave instructions to users how to teach your neighborhood kirana store to accept Paytm and encouraged them to stick a cut out of 'Paytm accepted here' on the shop.

The company had also put their spends in offline marketing as they announced the hiring of 10,000 agents to expand its offline merchant network to over 20 lakh touch-points by the end of the current fiscal.

“We are putting a lot of efforts on offline marketing through way of commission marketing. With this we expect to get a lot of small vendors and retailer shops to use the digital payments system,” said Deepak Abott, Sr VP, Paytm to Zeebiz.