Hike messenger releases its first TV ad, forgets to stay classy

India’s Hike messenger today released its first ever television commercial, which comes a couple of days after it announced having crossed 20 million registered users, of which 90 percent are from India. The Bharti SoftBank funded messenger service has recently added a lot of features including the ability to send free messages via SMS to those who are not on the service, file transfers up to 100MB in size, private and hidden chats apart from the usual stickers and other services provided by rivals like WeChat and Line.

In its advertisement, Hike targets WhatsApp, which is India’s most popular messaging service that has more than 50 million monthly active users. The advertisement shows an apparent WhatsApp user, who is considered old school, traditional and not cool enough by his friends. But rather than focussing on its key advantages, Hike refers to WhatsApp as WhatsCrap towards the end of the advertisement.

While it might have all the features, Hike so far has failed to get any significant traction in the messaging space. The company has refrained from giving out its monthly active user base, which is considered to be the standard while reporting user numbers in this industry. Hike comes pre-installed on many smartphones, which might also inflate its registered user base. Only if calling your biggest rival names could make your product successful.