Inside the mathematics of Unacademy’s marketing journey

Ahead of an expected IPO in the next two years, edtech company Unacademy recently announced a slew of cost-cutting measures, including disassociation with IPL. The news comes in times when several edtech players are under the radar for their exorbitant marketing expenditures while they continue to run in losses. Unacademy, too, got massive online flak as it reportedly fired 1,000 employees in a cost-cutting exercise earlier this year. As the brand sets to rework its tunes and make changes in its marketing strategies, here’s looking at Unacademy’s ad and marketing journey thus far. 

The Unacademy Story

Unacademy started off as a YouTube channel, established in 2010 by one of its founders – Gaurav Munjal. An engineering student himself back then, Munjal was giving coding lessons in Java through this channel, which became a massive hit. Munjal himself became one of the most followed people on Quora. The platform’s success motivated Munjal to develop the platform into something bigger. In 2015, with the help of the other co-founders – Hemesh Singh, Roman Saini and Sachin Gupta – Munjal registered Unacademy as a brand under the parent firm Sorting Hat Technologies Pvt. Ltd. The portal offered free classes during the first three years of its operation and started a subscription model only in 2019.

Munjal wrote in a blog on the brand’s third anniversary, “The idea was of the Unacademy Educator App and a platform. The educator app would bring down the learning curve of making educational lessons from 3–4 hours to 3–4 minutes. It would make it super easy for educators to create educational lessons, which will go on a platform. The Unacademy platform. Where Educators can teach, students can learn.” 

Ever-mounting Marketing Spends

In early days, Unacademy was mostly doing BTL marketing, with its first ATL campaign coming only in 2019. In its first year, Unacademy had spent Rs 6.97 lakh on marketing and other promotional activities, as indicated in its financial statements submitted to the Ministry of Corporate Affairs. The figure stood at 411.29 crore at the end of FY21. 

As evident, the marketing spends from the brand kept on growing as the brand gained more popularity. 

Branded Content

Unacademy focused a lot on branded content as well, since very early days. It launched numerous properties including Chamomile Tea with Toppers, Aspirants, Kota Factory, Officers on Duty, and Unacademy Unwind. It’s first ATL campaign, ‘Let’s Crack It’ too turned into an anthem. The brand also organised hosts of comprehensive summits with the likes of Dr Kiran Bedi among speakers. 

Its YouTube channel too, has been curating some veru dievrsified and engaging content including omprehensively shot videos from a day in the life of various civil service officers. 

Going ATL

While the starting years were all about digital and social media marketing for the brand, its first ATL campaign ‘Let’s Crack It’ came out in 2019. Created by McCann and directed by Suresh Triveni, the three-film series was an “ode to their (students’) persistence, determination and passion towards achieving their goal of cracking the exam they are preparing for,” as voiced by Munjal in another blog. 

From then on, Unacademy has been quite aggressive on its marketing pitch with online remaining a key channel. The brand also launched a podcast with the same name led by Cyrus Broacha in 2020, which was streamed on Gaana. Other than that, it targeted other OTT platforms like Jio, Cricbuzz, Inshorts, Daily Hunt, etc to reach out to its potential customers. 

The IPL Connection

The biggest association for Unacademy came in the form of IPL, the super bowl of India – an advertising haven. The brand was chosen the official partner for the men’s cricketing series in 2020 and signed a three-year contract (ending 2022) with the BCCI. It, reportedly, spent onwards of 120 crores over three years. 

Along with sponsorship, the brand spent Rs 30-35 crore on brand activation in 2020, as per reports. Its campaign ‘Cracking the Game’ very interestingly merged cricket with its courses. The brand also leveraged the opportunity to connect with their consumers through digital activations such as ‘Unacademy Ask the Expert’, ‘Unacademy Learn from the Best’, ‘Unacademy Fan of the Match’, and ‘Unacademy Cracking Sixes’. 

In 2021, the brand launched another interesting IPL campaign ‘Mistakes – The Greatest Teacher’, drawing parallels between on-field misses in cricket matches to the academic mistakes in real life. The campaign instantly started trending on social media. 

Additionally, the brand ‘hijacked’ the commentary box with innovative TVCs, which were in the form of a casual commentary box banter. 

In 2022, the brand took a quirkier tone to ask ‘is baar IPL se kya seekha’, featuring MS Dhoni. In keeping with precedent, the film drew an interesting correlation between cricket and education and the need to stay focused.

Now, as the brand bids adieu to the IPL pitch and gets more serious about its cost-cutting measures, it will be interesting to see its new marketing strategies pan out henceforth.