As the mobile messaging space heats up, Line debuted a TV ad in Indonesia this morning according to a message from Line’s official account on its network. The 30 second ad features a story about a love struck student seeing her crush at the library and telling her friend about it over Line, complete with emoticons to express her feelings.
The TV spot, which can be viewed on Facebook reveals the very demographic that Line tries to appeal to and by showing exactly how the app works and what it can do, the audience immediately would know what to do once they download the app.
The talent from the ad is Maudy Ayunda, a prominent teen actress who has had seven movies to her name since starting her acting career in 2006. Given her popularity, it won’t be a surprise if Line sign ups pick up among Indonesian teens.
It’s a little bit surprising for Line to launch a TV spot to promote its app because TV promotions for apps and online services are not common, but TV is still a highly influential and effective medium to reach the majority of Indonesians and with the app being broadcasted on national TV, awareness of the app will only grow.
This contrasts with KakaoTalk which is employing a more guerrilla approach by holding small but frequent events, inviting young influential people to use the app and have them talk about it on Twitter, Facebook, or on their blogs, in addition to getting their friends to use the app as well.
At the end of Line’s TV ad, it shows a message asking viewers to use Line on Samsung Galaxy Station, which doesn’t seem to be a proper product name. A quick web search only reveals docking stations for Samsung’s large screen Android devices, which doesn’t really make much sense as far as the message is concerned.
What’s clear though, is that Line and Samsung obviously have signed a cross promotional deal to push the usage of the app across Samsung’s line of Android devices. Of course, this undermines Samsung’s own ChatOn messaging app and will further stunt its growth, although there’s really no growth to speak of since nobody uses ChatOn anyway.
