Executive Dossier

Fintech is going to be a major disruptor for rural: Impact’s Sanjay Kaul

Published

5 years ago

March 25, 2021

MUMBAI: It is said that India lives in its villages. With more than 65 per cent of its population residing in rural areas, it would not be a stretch to state that Bharat represents the real India – that is, more than 800 million people. It is little wonder then that ‘Go rural’ is the marketer’s new slogan and companies, both Indian as well as multinational, have their vision firmly set on the rural markets.

In a free-wheeling conversation with indiantelevision.com’s Anupama Sajeet, Impact Communications founder & CEO Sanjay Kaul, who also serves on the advisory board of Rural Marketing Association of India (RMAI), talked about some of these issues including the challenges, the possible disruptions in the market and the way forward for the industry when it comes to rural India. Kaul has recently stepped down from his position after leading the marketing agency for over two decades.

Edited excerpts:

On how rural marketing has shaped up over the last two decades.

The transformation is tremendous. Rising incomes, the advent of new technology, and the increase in media penetration have fuelled the demands, consumption, and aspirations of rural India. Earlier, the content dissemination was slow because of the low penetration of mobile phone technology. We just had wall paintings or billboards. The reach of newspapers was limited. All this has changed now. The advent of technology, banking, ATMs, government initiatives like Jan Dhan Yojana, have changed the way a rural marketer now approaches these areas.

On the investments witnessed by the rural market from FMCG and BFSI sectors.

FMCG is a $1.1 trillion sector in 2020, out of which 30-35 per cent comes from rural areas. Companies like Unilever, Dabur, Colgate – up to 50 percent of their sales come from rural areas. Even Maruti, Hero MotoCorp – more than half their sales happen in rural India. So those who got on to the rural bandwagon early have an advantage. Most of the major FMCG companies see rural as their “next growth” destination.

The rural FMCG market in India is expected to grow up to $220 billion by 2025. The opening of accounts by the government proved to be a game-changer for the BFSI sector. Next, fintech is going to be a major disruptor in the future for rural. Most of the banks, even traditional ones – whether it's HDFC or SBI – all have tie-ups with fintech companies to enhance their rural reach. Especially in these uncertain times, BFSI has a great future in rural areas with fintech collaboration.

On consumption trends and the march of e-commerce.

There is a misconception, that rural areas have not been able to keep up with the urban areas when it comes to e-commerce. In fact, both Amazon and Flipkart have got a majority of their sales coming from tier-2 and tier-3 cities. Consumer aspirations are shaping up and there is a demand for more and more branded products. Since most brands do not have all the range of products available in stores in small cities and towns, a lot of the transactions take place through these e-commerce channels. Experts are pegging rural as the major driver for the next fiscal.

On the challenges faced by brands trying to expand their rural footprint.

There are two major issues – trust deficit and logistics. The companies are trying to overcome these hurdles. Amazon has tied up with post offices for logistic support, which helps service certain inaccessible pin codes. The trust barrier still exists when it comes to online shopping. One way out would be to create hub models locally for trust fulfilment, then maybe the deficit factor can be reduced. The logistics challenges can be overcome through micro-distributors who are already supplying to village outlets. They can be used as fulfilment centers, which these big e-tailer companies can leverage. Myntra, Flipkart and Amazon have already tied up with large distributors who serve as their last-mile fulfilment centers.

On the next big opportunity in rural and the way forward for the industry.

Earlier, we used to do BTL activations by aggressively reaching out to people. Now, the ‘digital first’ strategy has to be leveraged along with a physical presence. We saw how the local kirana shops took off during the pandemic. There is a lot of investment the companies can do to do to build up these channels and not just be dependent on the wholesale distributors. Technology-enabled solutions will also make a difference. One can scale the communication, marketing operations, distribution in a feasible manner when it's technologically enabled. Today the challenge for brands is not just to make the product available to the rural user. Consumers are spoilt for choice in every brand category. Brands need to remain engaged with the customer constantly.

On his future plans.

My new journey would entail a technology-enabled rural market development company. One needs to create a demand for the brand in the rural market areas and then grow the brand with persistence. It will all be technology-based and an aggregate model for all the brands, which will be a first of its kind in rural areas.

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Executive Dossier

Game on, fame on as Good Game hunts India’s first global gaming star

Published

3 weeks ago

January 27, 2026

indiantelevision.com Team

MUMBAI: Game faces on, pressure high India’s gaming ambitions are levelling up. Good Game, billed as the world’s first as-live global gaming reality show, has officially launched in India with a bold mission: to crown the country’s first Global Gaming Superstar.

Blending esports with mainstream entertainment, the show brings together competitive gaming, creativity and on-camera performance in a format that tests more than just joystick skills. Contestants will be judged on gameplay, screen presence and their ability to perform under pressure, reflecting how gaming has evolved from pastime to profession and pop culture currency.

Fronting the show are three high-profile ambassadors: actor and entrepreneur Samantha Ruth Prabhu, Indian cricket star Rishabh Pant, and gaming creator Ujjwal Chaurasia. The winner will take home Rs 1 crore ($100,000) among the largest prize pools for any Indian reality show along with the chance to represent India on a global stage.

Backed by a planned annual investment of up to Rs 100 crore, Good Game is also courting brand partners, promising a minimum reach of 500 million among India’s core youth audience. The creators position the show as a bridge between entertainment and interactive culture, offering long-format content, community engagement and commercial scale.

Auditions are now open to Indian citizens aged 18 and above, inviting amateur and professional gamers, creators and performers alike. Shortlisted candidates will be called for in-person auditions in Mumbai on 14 and 15 February, and in Delhi on 28 February and 1 March 2026.

With big money, big names and even bigger ambition, Good Game signals a shift in how India views gaming not just as play, but as performance, profession and prime-time spectacle.

Digital

SpotDraft hires new CMO and CFO to fuel global push for its AI contract platform

Published

2 months ago

December 3, 2025

indiantelevision.com Team

INDIA: SpotDraft has strengthened its senior ranks as it gears up for faster global expansion, naming Alon Waks as chief marketing officer and Amit Sharma as chief financial officer. The appointments follow the firm’s $54 million Series B round earlier this year and mark a push to scale across the Americas, EMEA and India.

The AI-powered contract-lifecycle-management platform has posted 100 per cent year-on-year growth in customer acquisition, counting Apollo.io, IPSY, Mixpanel, Oyster and Panasonic among its global clients. The firm processes more than one million contracts annually, with volumes up 173 per cent and nearly 50,000 monthly active users.

Waks, a veteran of Kustomer, Bizzabo, CreatorIQ, LivePerson and ZoomInfo, will steer global marketing and category positioning as legal teams adopt AI-driven tools. Sharma, who has led finance across scaling tech firms since 2016, will guide financial strategy, investor relations and market expansion.

Both hires aim to sharpen SpotDraft’s bid for a larger slice of the fast-growing legal-tech market, expected to exceed $63 billion by 2032. Co-founder and chief executive Shashank Bijapur said the company is focused on scaling go-to-market operations in the Americas, deepening leadership in EMEA, and accelerating AI capabilities for general counsels and legal-operations leaders.

Clients report shorter deal cycles and better alignment between legal and business teams. “What used to take weeks now happens in days,” said Abnormal Security senior legal operations manager Susan Koenig. DeepL head of legal operations André Barrow, said SpotDraft has helped reframe legal “from a cost centre to a generator of revenue”.

Executive Dossier

Outdoor Ads Get Smarter as LOC8 Shifts OOH from Visibility to Attention

Published

3 months ago

November 28, 2025

indiantelevision.com Team

MUMBAI: Out-of-home ads were once the wallflowers of marketing seen by everyone, noticed by few. But in an age where attention has become the world’s most fought-over currency, even billboards are getting a brain upgrade. Enter LOC8, OSMO’s AI-powered attention engine, quietly reshaping the old OOH playbook by measuring not just who could have looked at an ad, but who actually did. The shift is subtle but seismic: impressions are out, impact is in and data, not gut instinct, is calling the shots.

In a landscape where marketers question every rupee spent outdoors, LOC8 is turning lampposts, flyovers and traffic islands into precision-mapped attention laboratories. By crunching dwell time, visibility zones, perceptual size and real-world obstructions, the platform is dragging OOH into a future where creativity meets computer vision and where the best ideas aren’t just eye-catching, but eye-measured. From automotive facelifts to FMCG novelty and real estate trust-building, the message is clear, outdoor has stopped shouting and started listening. Indian Television Dot Com explores more about it in an Interview interview with OSMO co-founder Nipun Arora.

On how OSMO is shifting outdoor advertising from a visibility-led medium to an attention-led one through LOC8.

Traditional OOH has long been measured by visibility and impressions i.e how many people could see an ad. OSMO, through its proprietary AI platform LOC8, is shifting that narrative more towards likelihood of being noticed. Using computer vision and machine learning, LOC8 analyzes real-world video data to measure visibility zones, obstructions, dwell time and perceptual size; bringing precision to how attention is quantified outdoors. It moves the focus from mere impressions to quality of impressions, making OOH a data-verified, attention-led medium comparable to digital in accountability.

On how marketers can use LOC8’s dwell-time, visibility and perception insights to craft more effective, emotionally resonant OOH campaigns.

LOC8 helps brands understand how people truly experience outdoor media how long they look, from what distance, and under what conditions. By quantifying dwell time, visibility duration, and perceptual size; marketers can plan campaigns that align with real human viewing behavior. This empowers creative and strategy teams to design emotionally resonant storytelling where messaging, visual hierarchy and placement are optimized for how people actually notice and process OOH creatives.

About what LOC8 has revealed through campaigns like Renault Triber and Namaste India on how categories such as auto, FMCG and real estate use attention metrics to drive outcomes.

Each category uses attention data differently but all share one common goal: to convert outdoor visibility into measurable engagement.

• Automotive | Renault Triber

For the new Renault Triber facelift, bold creative met data-led planning through LOC8. By analyzing on-ground video data, LOC8 measured real audience attention across placements factoring in visibility zones, obstructions, traffic speed and perceptual size. This enabled Renault to identify corridors that delivered maximum reach, saliency and engagement, optimizing media efficiency and ROI.

• FMCG | Namaste India

In OOH, innovation is the hook and assets are the bait. But bait often hides the hook. With Loc8’s attention metrics, we ensured the bait wasn’t a hurdle, rather it became the perfect stage for innovation to deliver its full impact! The insight proved that creative novelty, when validated by attention data, drives deeper engagement and measurable brand lift.

• Real Estate

For luxury and real estate campaigns targeting HNI/UHNI audiences, attention patterns differ especially between front and rear passengers, who are often the core audience segment for premium sites. LOC8’s ability to distinguish rear vs. front visibility plays a critical role here. It helps identify sites that offer longer viewing windows and stronger perceptual dominance from the rear seat where decision-makers are most likely seated making it a key differentiator for premium and trust-led categories. Together, these insights prove that auto optimizes for impact, FMCG for recall, and real estate for trust visibility showing how attention metrics adapt to category goals while ensuring measurable outcomes.

On how attention analytics will shape the future of brand storytelling and media planning as OOH becomes more digitised and data-driven.

As outdoor digitizes, attention analytics will inform not just where to advertise but how stories are told in public spaces. This evolution transforms OOH from a static broadcast channel into a dynamic attention ecosystem, where creativity is optimized through evidence-based insight.

On how LOC8’s data-led framework helps marketers quantify OOH impact and make outdoor a more accountable, ROI-driven medium.

LOC8 bridges the gap between intuition and evidence. By quantifying metrics like visibility duration, attention opportunity index, and visual saliency rank, it allows brands to benchmark site performance and justify investment. This data-led approach brings transparency, comparability and ROI measurement to a medium historically driven by perception.

On how OSMO ensures AI and computer vision enhance creativity rather than reduce it to numbers.

OSMO believes that technology should enhance creativity, not overshadow it. LOC8’s attention models reveal what naturally draws the human eye helping creative teams refine design cues, contrast, and visual hierarchy for greater impact. By merging art and science, LOC8 empowers creativity with intelligence.

About the creative best practices and design cues LOC8 has uncovered regarding what truly captures consumer attention outdoors.

LOC8’s visual cognition analysis has surfaced clear patterns across campaigns:

• High contrast and minimal messaging outperform cluttered designs.

• Motion cues draw significantly longer dwell times.

• The first two seconds are critical, creatives must establish focus instantly.

• Contextual alignment between the creative and its environment increases attention by over 30%.

These learnings offer a scientific foundation for creative effectiveness helping brands design OOH that’s visually magnetic and emotionally memorable.

On how attention metrics will integrate into omnichannel planning where OOH, digital and social work together for unified brand impact.

Attention can become the unifying KPI across OOH, digital and social to creates seamless storytelling continuity, where outdoor triggers digital engagement. The future of omnichannel planning lies in attention-led integration ensuring that campaigns don’t just reach audiences everywhere but truly capture and hold their focus.