When ad film maker Prahlad Kakkar was directing the now- famous "lightning fast" TV commercial for Rediffmail, he didn't have a clue that his ad would send a virtual tremor through the cyberworld – and set off an e-mail brand war.

Nor could he have imagined that the commercial would yield such instant and unprecedented results for Rediff.com Believe it or not, over the three months that the commercial has been on air, the number of Rediffmail users has grown by a whopping 94 percent to touch 4.08 million.

A desi player wins

This should be considered a major victory for a desi cyber brand like Rediff.com what it has managed is not merely to get a toehold in the worldwide web; it has worsted freemail pioneer Hotmail in India. According to Microsoft, which owns Hotmail, at the last count the number of Indian Hotmail users was 2.3 million.

What worked well for Rediffmail was that its ad campaign clearly brought forth the USP of its product – the access speed. The ad also attempted a pathbreaking concept – that of marketing just one flagship service of the complete portal.

One of the four versions of the ad campaign shows a Hotmail user (the home page is a look-alike of Hotmail - but called 'Slowmail' instead!) chopping peeling carrots in the cybercafe waiting for the inbox to download; the Rediffmail user walks in, checks her mail in a few seconds, shrugs at the wisecracking salad-eater and walks off. Another script of the campaign portrays a young man drinking several mugs of coffee waiting to download.

The numbers game

Hotmail, however, is not willing to buy the figures put out by Rediff. "Registered user-base is not an accurate measure of the popularity of an e-mail service," argues Sriram Adukoorie, consumer group head of Microsoft. "There is no way of tracking inactive users, so the numbers quoted by players can be misleading." Hotmail, he says, closes all inactive accounts after 120 days. "So, our numbers are a true reflection of our 'active' user base," says Adukoorie.

And while Rediffmail might be giving nightmares to the honchos at Hotmail, it still has a considerable gap to close vis-à-vis the numero uno, Yahoo! Mail, which has 8.2 million registered Indian users. This figure, however, represents the combined user base for all its communication services including e-mail, chat and messenger. But Deepak Chandnani, country head, Yahoo! India assures that the vast majority of their registered user base are e-mail users. "Even today, Yahoo! is today the most popular brand on the Net," he claims. "Our success lies in customisation and personalisation of our communication services."

E-mail – the most marketable service

The players might split hairs over figures, but the picture is clear: e-mail has become the most marketable property for any portal. And not without reason. Practically every survey shows that e-mail is the most popular and used feature of the Internet, at least in India. For instance, the Mastercard Asian Ideals survey points out that 99 per cent of Indian Net users go online to send or receive e-mails.

So e-marketeers have their focus in place. Not only have they been aggressively marketing e-mail, but they have also been trying hard to improve their product by adding new features like auto reply, web to fax and so on.

"E-mail is the stepping stone for all new users and thus a key driver of traffic to the portal," admits Raj Raman, VP, Sify.com, the portal of Satyam. "Nearly 90 per cent of the traffic on most portals comes because of their mail service."

Which explains why Sify too has decided to aggressively market its e-mail service as a separate brand. On January 1 this year, ad agency HTA attempted a me-too of the Rediffmail ad for Sify Mail, sounding the bugle for an e-mail brand war.

"E-mail is the bread and butter for any portal," admits Rohit Verma, VP (brand marketing), Rediff.com, adding that it was the popularity of e-mail that helped a local player like daum.com overtake Yahoo in South Korea. Incidentally, Rediffmail users claim there has been a slow down in the download speeds over the last few days – attributable to the increase in user-base, you think?