The Screen Nobody Thought to Advertise On

The Brief: Launching Airdopes 701

In a category that no longer rewards repetition

boAt came to us with a launch that mattered. Airdopes 701 ANC needed to enter India’s most contested audio category and communicate one specific benefit, active noise cancellation, in a way that felt natural, contextual and impactful. A standard performance media playbook was not going to land.

The brief was specific: cut through, do not interrupt. Find a way to make the product’s core promise, “calm in a noisy world,” register inside a real human moment, not just inside a feed.

The Challenges

Declining CTRs. Rising CPCs. A market saturated with sameness.

The TWS market in India has matured into one of the country’s most crowded performance categories. Lookalike products. Repetitive creatives. Acquisition costs rising faster than incremental category growth. Traditional performance platforms, the ones every brand in the category now buys with the same precision, were showing the same pattern across the board: declining CTRs, increasing CPCs, and diminishing returns on identical placements.

boAt did not need more reach. It needed a fresh performance lever. One that could guarantee visibility, sustain engagement and translate into business impact, without inflating the budget to brute-force its way through the clutter.

Three to five minutes of unhurried attention, hiding in plain sight

We started by looking for screens with attention, not screens with audience. The two are not the same thing.

Rapido users, we noticed, repeatedly check the Captain on the way screen while waiting for their ride. Three to five minutes of phone in hand, map open, nowhere else to be. This is one of the rarest commodities in mobile advertising: focused attention with minimal distraction, occurring as a predictable behavioural pattern, on a screen that no FMCG, BFSI or D2C brand had thought to claim.

Most media plans don’t include it because most media plans don’t look for it. That was the opening.

Placing boAt inside Rapido’s ride-tracking moment

We placed Airdopes 701 inside that moment. Through an industry-first Map and Top Banner integration on Rapido’s live ride-tracking screen, the brand appeared exactly where the user’s attention already was, during the three to five minutes between booking and pickup.

The execution did not interrupt the ride. It became part of it. High-impact GIF creatives within the Map Top Banner placement carried the product’s calm-in-chaos promise, with clear CTAs leading directly to product discovery. The message arrived in the precise context where it made sense: when your captain is on the way, calm should be too.

This was contextual placement, not contextual coincidence. The ad sat inside a behaviour, not on top of it.

A new benchmark for in-ride advertising

Between July and December 2025, the integration delivered numbers that have since set a new benchmark for in-ride advertising in the country.

• 7.5% CTR on a ride-hailing app, sustained across six months of live placement.
• 7.24 million impressions delivered against boAt’s core launch audience.
• 543,000 clicks routed directly into product discovery.

The campaign proved that contextual, platform-native media can outperform conventional performance channels when it is aligned with how users actually behave, not just where they happen to scroll. For Airdopes 701, the launch found its moment. For the category, a new benchmark for in-ride advertising now exists.

The best media is rarely the most obvious media. Sometimes it is the screen everyone has already scrolled past on the plan. The question worth carrying into the next launch is a simpler one: where is your brand’s moment hiding?