Guvera kicks off brand push, touts mobile branded channels

Sarah Homewood
By Sarah Homewood | 19 November 2014
 

Australian music streaming service Guvera is making a push with its branded channel offering.

CEO of the business Darren Herft says that previously the service didn't have the right product to market the brand with, but its time was now here.

“You can be tempted to push your brand hard because you've got some competitors that are pushing their brand really hard, but if you haven't got the right product it doesn't make sense to do that,” Herft said.

“We've had the right concept, the right strategy, the right plan, but we haven't had the product where we wanted it to be.”
Herft said in the last six to 12 months the streaming service has been fine tuning its product.

“So we're a little bit behind in going out to the market place, but, as I often say to our team, Google was the 70th search engine to come along, there were 69 other search engines before them.

“Sometimes it's great to be first to market, but you've got to have the right product,” he said.

Guvera's model is an ad-funded one, with the site focusing heavily on mobile and its branded channel opportunities on the medium.

“From day one we've been an ad-fund model. We do provide subscription music as well, you can go and certainly decide to subscribe, but we started with 'What does the market want?' You're looking at an industry that's gone from US$36 billion in 2000 to US$16 billion last year. So it's dropped $20 billion in the last 14 years, yet people are listening and consuming far more music than ever before,” Herft said.

“It's really important to understand how people consume music today and Guvera is making sure we provide products to allow people to consume music in the way that they are today."

The streaming service recently launched in India, making it the first streaming service to do so there.

Retailer The Iconic is the first advertiser to sign up to Guvera's branded channel offering.

When asked if the Australian market was reaching a saturation point when it comes to music streaming services Herft said: “The stats in Australia are hard to get a gauge on who's got what? I read certain articles saying: 'Pandora's got this,' but we're really buoyed by the user numbers that are coming to our site every day.

“We think that providing the right product is both in line with what the consumer wants from a music platform and financially viable, because it's also what a brand will engage with. We think it allows us to now move at a much faster pace, and we will be able to bring consumers to our product because of the product itself.”

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