Overview of this campaign

Tamil Murasu App: Empowering Tamil Youth Through Innovation

Problem:

Tamil Murasu, Singapore’s trusted voice for Tamil speakers for over 89 years, faced a significant challenge: engaging the younger generation (15-34 years old), the youth reach stood at just 6% of the total addressable market. Additionally, the dominance of English in digital & social media created a cultural disconnect, threatening the preservation of the Tamil language and cultural identity.

The lack of sufficient Tamil-based products, coupled with increased competition for attention span from online influencers and alternative news outlets, highlighted the need for Tamil Murasu to bridge the gap and call for a robust, youth-focused digital offering to ensure its long-term viability. 

Objectives:

The Tamil Murasu App was conceived as a groundbreaking platform conceived to address the aforementioned issues. Its goals were to:

1. Rediscover, engage, and preserve the Tamil language and culture through an intuitive, bilingual digital space.

2. Target tech-savvy youth with localized content and interactive features.

3. Compete effectively with other Tamil and English-language news platforms by offering an enriched experience. 

Innovative ideas brought to life:

• A bilingual interface that allows users to seamlessly onboard and navigate the app to consume content in Tamil and English.

• Youth-centric features like Story Cards, Word Quiz, Text-To-Speech, and AI English Summary to deepen engagement and explore new ways of storytelling differentiating from traditional article-based stories. 

• Six Interactive Widgets to tap into the Tamil youth lifestyle interests in movies, events, traditional Indian remedies, horoscope, gold, and currency exchange. 

• Multimedia content, including bite-sized news videos, long-form human interest video features, podcasts, and visual storytelling, aligns with modern consumption habits.

Results for this campaign

Design Thinking:

1. Research - Jan'23  

Focus group discussions with 20 participants to learn what younger audiences need, interests, & pain points.

2. Ideation - Feb'23 

Ideated and developed design concepts and conducted a sharing session with 40+ youth across 2 events.

3. Reviews - Mar'23
The iterative design process ensured critical features were prioritised and designs were validated early on with Gen Z, youth, and broader Tamil readers and stakeholders in the Singapore Tamil community

4. Development - May'23

Once the design for critical features was ready, we began development of the app in May 2023 and delivered phase 1 within 5 months by the end of Sep 2023. Notably the Tamil Murasu app was the fastest product developed at SPH Media with the latest tech and integrated with CUE CMS

5. Launch - Oct'23

On October 29, 2023, the app was launched with a goal of 10,000 app installs in 6 months. It was heartening to see it garner 6,000 organic installs by Jan'24 without any marketing spend.

6. Digital Marketing Not stopping efforts after the launch, the newsroom also initiated a digital marketing campaign between Feb to April 2024 and garnered some 10k downloads in that period. 

Results:

The Tamil Murasu App managed to successfully create inroads to higher digital engagement:

• 27,000 installs to date, with a 15% monthly growth in active users.

• Increased youth engagement: Younger users now account for 25% of traffic, with an average session duration of 6 minutes.

• User feedback: An average rating of 4.8 on Android and 4.7 on iOS, reflecting strong affinity and liking towards the app from the Singapore Tamil Community. 
  

• High adoption of youth-focused features like Word Quiz and AI Summary.

• New audience growth: Beyond catering to loyal users and youth, the app also managed to grow new audiences who are non-Tamil and regional audiences from places like India, Malaysia, and the US.  

Contact

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