The idea of Pickcel emerged when a group of old friends was having an evening tea at a local restaurant. The place seemed to be pretty good with a nice ambiance and lovely food. The only thing lagging was a crowd of customers. Despite the place being beautiful, it did not have many customers. Particularly the group was the only people in the restaurant at that time.

Seeing this, the idea pricked into the minds of-Subrata, Debnath Basudev Saha, Abhijit Chaudhary and Rajesh Bhattacharjee. From this day, they started on a project that focused on marketing local business to the local people. The sole motive behind this was to promote local business to the local crowd, as they otherwise too, targets local population to expand their customers.

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Digital media options, print ads, SMS, and social channel are not the choices as they are neither affordable nor practical for the local crowd. Keeping all these aspects in mind, Pickcel was born as an advertising platform for local business to accelerate sales in an accessible manner. It helps to bring digital advertising to a hyper-local level where you can “pick” and “sell”.

The New Generation Marketing

Pickcel is designed to publish ads and promote brands across digital screens that are installed in commercial establishments and apartments. Every typical Indian neighborhood has restaurants, salons, retail stores, etc. that are either closed or show cable DTH content. These screens can be used to publish ads about local business, say a pre-school in the neighbor locality.

Small business can select screen in which they want to post their ads. They can also upload ad content and launch their offer campaign within no time. About 20 million digital screens across the country can post and promote ads for local business.

The Founder’s Story

All four co-founders had been working with many companies and had a strong background in building products. The team wanted to create their product and own it from production to support. This led to the birth of Pickcel- which started in may 2015 with an initial investment of 1.2 crores.

Pickcel’s first customer was Unilever, for whom, the company is working on internal communication shifting it from traditional emails to digital screens. Another partner is Narayana Hrudalaya Hospital- the product is helping them to promote their services at the screens they control on HSR layout.

The Growth Ladder

The company is hoping to be profitable targeting almost 500 clients in the year 2016. They are already working with some of the big brands such as VLCC, Big Bazaar, Lakme, along with a Chennai- based FMCG company Watanmal which serves in Africa.

The Bottom Line

With the advertising market reaching heights in the coming future across the internet, Pickcel remains confident and motivated towards their unique and compelling marketing style.