Tag: Crayon Data

  • Serial entrepreneur Srikant Sastri to mentor digital news venture Nyoooz.com

    NEW DELHI: In an age when most established news organisations, including the new-kid-on-the-block Republic TV, have digital news portals to augment reach, one of the first few to get into this space, news media veteran Alok Verma and his Nyoooz.com have roped in serial entrepreneur and co-founder of Singapore-based big data company Crayon Data Srikant Sastri as a mentor.

    Sastri, who has also joined the board of Newzstreet Media Private Limited, parent of Nyoooz.com, will help the company sharpen its focus on micro-revenue opportunities and a methodology to deliver value to its clients.

    Apart from Sastri, Raja Shukla has joined Nyoooz.com as the national sales head. Raja, an accomplished media sales professional, will drive the digital sales and content-led sales both at the national and city levels. His earlier stints had been in organisations like Gram Vani, Zee Media, The Indian Express group and The Times of India group.

    Commenting on the new leadership team, Nyoooz.com founder and editor-in-chief Verma said, “Srikant Sastri will help Nyoooz.com to focus on quantitative and qualitative improvisations in the way local news content is generated and served using technological innovations and will mentor not only the team, but also me, while Raja’s presence will add more zing to our sales as we look to consolidate our core base and also explore spreading wings.”

    One of the early entrants into the digital space, Nyoooz.com serves contextual and relevant local news for and from tier II and tier III cities in India with a primary focus on Northern India. Presently, the company serves and covers news of and from about 70 cities and has an audience reach of 3.5 million in text news and 6 million in video news, including latest blockbuster the IPL 2017 cricket matches.

    Verma, a journalist of over 30-year standing, has held senior news management positions, including that of the editor, in media groups such as TV Today Network, Zee Media and Star India. The entrepreneurship bug bit him when he sensed the importance of the digital space.

    Nyoooz.com curates all important news stories of target cities from trustworthy and competent publishers from across the web. It uses its TrueView algorithm’s to scan and fetch news published about 70 individual cities across India. Subscribers can customize their unique news feed after registering to gather news from the cities they love.

  • Crayon Data collaborates with GroupM, Mindshare for India foray

    Crayon Data collaborates with GroupM, Mindshare for India foray

    MUMBAI: Mindshare and GroupM have inked a global alliance with Crayon Data for the latter’s foray into the Indian market. The development comes hot on the heels of last week’s announcement of Ratan Tata investing in Crayon Data.

     

    The Singapore based big data start-up has built a proprietary big data platform called SimplerChoices that allows it to ingest, curate and algorithmically predict the tastes of millions of consumers.

     

    Together, GroupM, Mindshare and Crayon Data aim to map the taste of millions of Indian consumers, which will allow enterprises to target consumers more precisely. 

     

    “GroupM is changing the way marketers approach the business of media. Together with the WPP data alliance, bringing the Crayon Data proposition to India reflects our ambition to know more deeply than anyone else the tastes of Indian consumers and use that to help our clients target them better,” said GroupM India CEO CVL Srinivas.

     

    Mindshare South Asia CEO Prashanth Kumar added, “Through this alliance, Mindshare’s proprietary data and research are further enriched with Crayon Data’s analytics. This will help us bring in both agility and adaptive solutions for our clients. Understanding the tastes and mind-set of consumers is extremely important and will be a great advantage for us especially since there is a strong focus on digital. In our journey to understand our consumers even better, this will be a great advantage.”

     

    Crayon Data founder Suresh Shankar said, “As life goes digital, and choices proliferate in every aspect of our life, we will move to a world centred around personalisation, where companies understand tastes and preferences at an individual level, and use that to make choices simple and relevant for their consumers.”

  • Mindshare promotes Sanchit Sanga as Digital Services head

    Mindshare promotes Sanchit Sanga as Digital Services head

    MUMBAI: Mindshare APAC has promoted Sanchit Sanga as Digital Services head for Asia Pacific.

     

    Based in Singapore, Sanga takes on the role after two years as digital leader for south Asia & south east Asia. His role is effective immediately.

     

    In his new role, Sanga will focus on the continued development and delivery of Mindshare’s digital services to marketers, working closely with the regional in-market digital leads and global teams.

     

    Mindshare continues to focus on expanding its digital services from digital performance product integration to working with GroupM partners like Vocanic to offer innovative social solutions, to building an in-house mobile marketing practice partnering with innovative start ups like Footmarks.

     

    As part of the drive to continually raise the quality of the digital product, Mindshare has increasingly focused on aspects such as precise audience targeting and multi-screen planning, working with partners like Crayon Data, Xaxis and the Mindshare Trading hubs.

     

    Sanga said, “‘I am excited to take on this role and become even more involved in Mindshare’s digital marketing ambitions. Having worked in the digital space for 15 years, I can think of no other agency globally which has the intellectual and organizational backbone to consistently win in this evolving arena. I’m especially looking forward to driving the ongoing expansion of our digital services offering both across the region and globally. Our products are increasingly involving cutting edge partners to drive excellence in digital innovation, and this makes this space an incredibly exciting opportunity as we work with our clients to deliver more and more effective growth and revenue driving options.”

     

    Global Growth Markets, Mindshare Worldwide global growth markets CEO and Asia Pacific chairman Ashutosh Srivastava said, “We are privileged to have highly talented people like Sanchit in the Mindshare family. Over the years, Sanchit has developed trusted relationships with our clients, which continually assists us to lead the industry in digital thinking. It is an exciting time to be in our business, where our understanding of media, technology and effective data usage is becoming more and more central to brand success.”

  • Share of news channels in total AdEx is encouraging: CVL Srinivas

    Share of news channels in total AdEx is encouraging: CVL Srinivas

    NOIDA: “Indian news industry is as vibrant as the different cultures of India,” said GroupM south Asia CVL Srinivas as he presented the keynote on Innovations in news selling at the 7th Indian News Television Summit.

     

    Srinivas, sharing a media agency’s perspective on news and brands, added that the news industry today needs a lot of balance especially in terms of reportage, content for different audiences across platforms. 

     

    As for the AdEx, he informed that in the country the advertising expenditure for television stood at Rs 16,000 crore. “The news channels take 13 per cent share of the pie which is encouraging as the viewership of news channels stood at 10 per cent,” he stressed upon.

     

    Talking about the ad spend growth in the country, he informed that the television medium was growing at a rate of 14 per cent overall. The Hindi news genre was growing at 15 per cent, closely followed by regional news at 10 per cent while English news genre stood at seven per cent.

     

    Moving then onto brand research, Srinivas felt that today brand research is undergoing a radical change and old measurement methods are being questioned. Throwing some light on GroupM’s one such initiative, Social Command Centre, he said, “It is a virtual conference room that monitors the digital space and provides rich insights about consumers and brands.” And stated the example of Nestle which uses the tool to monitor chatter and gather buzz around the brand digitally. 

     

    Honda using the popular comedian Kapil Sharma to launch a series of campaign online, which garnered 1.5 million hits, was another example, he highlighted upon. He went on to say that cause-based marketing should be initiated and brands should ask themselves, how do we evolve ourselves to become more meaningful entities?  “Once brands are able to answer the same, there will be a lot of headroom for improvement and growth,” he opined. Providing another example, he said an agency called Crayon Data was able to come up with tastegraphs that showed the purchasing and behavioural pattern of different audiences in well-segmented clusters.

     

    He further went on to add that the evolving Indian digital space sees 220 million Indians active on the digital front spending  almost 200 minutes a day online either checking mails or watching videos. “This implies that the new medium cannot be ignored,” he informed.

     

    According to Srinivas, news broadcasters need to keep in mind a few things for the future such as co creating socially responsible agendas with brands, invest more in digital, adopt new metrics such as consumer sentiment, social buzz, social impact, viewers’ profile and lastly getting into big data.

     

    In his closing remarks, he said that while the upcoming digital environment has caused a big disruption to some it will provide a huge opportunity to the news industry and sky is the limit.

  • Mindshare partners exclusively with Crayon Data

    Mindshare partners exclusively with Crayon Data

    MUMBAI: In a landmark move, Mindshare has entered into an exclusive partnership with Crayon Data to power its planning, insights and consultancy offering.

     

    The main aim of combining Mindshare’s proprietary data and research with Crayon Data’s big data collection and analytical capability is to offer greater adaptive solutions for marketers. And provide ability to not only identify different consumer profiles and segments, but also target and track those profiles across a complex range of media channels, including social media and video.

     

     For Mindshare, the partnership continues its focus on developing leadership in Adaptive Marketing, a shift that is impacting how the agency thinks about services, products and ways of working. Mindshare’s core DNA is about disruption, provocation and speed, working with open source partners to continuously re-define how media agencies should behave.

     

    With this in mind Mindshare has consciously entered into a range of strategic partnerships across new emerging domains such as big data, mobility, online video, cross screen measurement, advocacy and social content. The agency has re-structured its approach to bring data, content, technology and accountability together in a way, which has unlocked dramatic growth opportunities for both clients and partners.

     

    Mindshare’s Products, Partnerships & Services council chairman and APAC chief client officer Sudipto Roy said, “One of today’s key business challenges is the complexity surrounding the collection of data making traditional database processing and management tools ineffective in helping clients make optimal decisions about their customers’ needs. It’s a fundamental requirement of business success. Without the ability to support customer needs, organisations fail.”

     

    “We are looking at this collaboration to dramatically transform the way consumer insights are mined and connected to our clients’ categories. For one FMCG company, we were able to unearth consumer connections and interests in a way that is almost impossible to do through standard research based methods. For a B2B client, we were able to unlock and profile a million potential leads with exact identification of what they would be likely to buy. This is a game changer; both for insights and for performance/ CRM based initiatives. It’s not a surprise that Crayon Data was recently chosen as one of the top five companies by IBM’s Watson Developer Challenge.” he added.

     

    Crayon Data is one of the fastest growing “big data” startups founded with a vision to simplify the world’s choices. The SimplerChoicesTM engine simplifies the decision making process for marketers, using proprietary algorithms to sort the complexity and present meaningful connections between data points and providing predictions of what consumers really want. The foundation of Crayon’s Choice Engine is the Taste Graph (B2C) and Interest Graph (B2B).  Crayon’s taste graph (for B2C companies) already has over 550 million taste nodes reaching close to a billion through 2014. The company’s interest graph (for B2B companies) has extensive information on over 10 million enterprises, with 500M data points.

     

    Crayon Data founding director Suresh Shankar said, “Media, analytics and behaviour is all going digital, and choices are proliferating in every aspect of our life from media to daily decisions. The partnership seeks to marry Mindshare’s media data sets and expertise, and its innovations like Loop Room, with Crayon’s choice engines, algorithms, and taste/interest graphs. This partnership forms part of a big transformation and caters to our mission of turning the misery of choosing into the magic of choice.”