Tag: engagement

Josh partners with Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle TV to explore international content

Mumbai: Josh, India’s fastest-growing and most engaged short-video app has entered into a one-year strategic partnership with Deutsche Welle, popularly known as DW, Germany’s leading international broadcaster to provide high-quality content to users on Josh in an engaging short-video format. Through this partnership, DW aims to bolster its reach across Bharat with news and informational content, leveraging the Bharat-centric platform that Josh is.

Speaking on the partnership, Josh’s Head of Creator and Content Ecosystem Sunder Venketraman said, “We are looking forward to our partnership with DW TV, as we strive to leverage Josh’s reach and deep engagement with Bharat to bring to the users of Bharat news and infotainment from a global perspective. Through this partnership, we aim at empowering our users with the knowledge and global awareness using engaging formats and narratives while also ensuring to meet the local language content needs of our audience.”

Commenting on the collaboration, DW’s Distribution Manager – DW in Asia Daniel Schulz and DW Distribution Representative for India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, Jaya Oberoi said: “At Deutsche Welle, we aim to produce versatile content which is not only entertaining and educative but a conversation starter. Our partnership with Josh presents us with a unique opportunity to connect to a much younger and vibrant audience in India. The timing couldn’t be better as we are planning to expand our bouquet on regional languages with DW’s flagship programs in the coming months. We are excited to be joining hands with Josh, in our journey to distribute DW videos to the heart of India.

As DW looks at significantly expanding its presence in India, the partnership with Josh enables DW to engage more meaningfully through their content thus making news more informative and engaging. The collaboration further elevates the objectives of both brands as they aim to cater to the demand for high-quality infotainment content in a format that is snackable and engaging while also meeting the local language needs of the users. The international content from DW will be available to users in English and Hindi.

DW will be bringing information and content on diverse topics such as current affairs, climate change, history, health, and unique human interest among others, from around the world to users on Josh.

July 19, 2022
CleverTap acquires San Francisco-based Leanplum

Mumbai: CleverTap has completely acquired San Francisco-based Leanplum, a leading multi-channel customer engagement platform. The acquisition, originally announced on 19 May, was closed in a record time of three weeks. It becomes revenue accretive for CleverTap from 1 June 2022.

With this acquisition, CleverTap has strengthened its footprint in the US and Europe. CleverTap will combine the product stack of both organizations and extend its world-class solutions & technology to all its customers and prospects worldwide.

Leanplum co-founder Momchil Kyurkchiev has joined CleverTap’s leadership team as chief strategy officer. With the completion of the acquisition, CleverTap also welcomes marquee investors Norwest Partners, Shasta Ventures, Canaan, and Kleiner Perkins as its shareholders.

“We are very excited to welcome Momchil and all Leanplum employees to the CleverTap family and expect full integration of the two companies, including an integrated product in the market to get completed over the next three to four quarters,” said CleverTap co-founder and executive chairman Sunil Thomas.

“With this acquisition customers will now have a wide variety of product features and options to choose from the best of both product line-ups (A/B testing, segmentation, campaigns, journeys etc.) At the same time, the acquisition provides a much bigger growth, exposure and learning opportunities for employees and collectively we will now become a dominant force with a large global footprint,” he added.

“As we expand globally, we are looking to retain as well as grow 100 percent of the Leanplum customers by bringing all combined capability on one platform in due course. We also plan to increase our headcount in the US and Europe. Together, we aspire to be recognized as a SaaS talent powerhouse built on a strong people-first culture driven by values and equality,” added Sunil.

CleverTap chief strategy officer Momchil Kyurkchiev commented, “The Martech landscape the world over is evolving at an exponential rate and hyper-personalized digital engagement at scale is the need of the hour. I am sure that together, Leanplum and CleverTap will address this need and continue to drive innovation in this space. CleverTap and Leanplum individually have had a robust presence in terms of geographical reach, industries, and categories. Collectively we will now become a dominant force with a large global footprint.”

June 13, 2022
ALTBalaji & MX Player’s show ‘Lock Upp’ reaches 100 mn views since its release

Mumbai: The unique captive reality show ‘Lock Upp’ by ALTBalaji & MX Player has successfully managed to garner 100 million views within 19 days of its release.

The show is currently streaming on ALTBalaji and is hosted by actress Kangana Ranaut. To create an exclusive user experience, MX Player & ALTBalaji has introduced two new features: Super Voting/for Loyal and Super Fans and Khabris on the apps.

Other features that will soon be introduced on the app are the audience suggestion poll and contestant chat. Additionally, MX Player & ALTBalaji will unveil the highly engaging ‘appeal box’ for a wholesome interactive experience.

ALTBalaji & MX Games are innovating and providing audiences with a chance to predict and win. Speaking on the new features, MX Media’s CEO Karan Bedi said, “At MX, we are always attempting to entertain our audiences with exciting and unique concepts. Our user-first approach in offering such content has made MX Player India’s largest entertainment platform. Our latest hit reality series, Lock Upp has something for every user.”

“We have introduced dynamic interactivity so that they get a chance to get involved with the contestants and increases the likelihood of building a long-term connection with them. To ensure our proposition succeeds, we believe in giving people more of what they love to build compelling connections,” Bedi added.

“A user who predicts elimination before it starts builds an emotional investment in the outcome and creates their unique personal journey with their favourite contestants on the show. We have lots more in store to create an entertaining real-time engagement for our users,” he said.

“AT ALTBalaji, the focus is always on introducing content that appeals to the mass audiences. With Lock Upp, an ALTBalaji Production, we have created multiple milestones with massive audience engagement topping the lists across all platforms. Extra-ordinary audience interactivity is a USP that ALTBalaji is looking to innovate even further. On the same lines, we are happy to introduce the concept of super fans where the ‘aam aadmi of India’ will have super-power to decide the fate of the contestant in the show and we will also give a super fan a chance to become a Khabri and intermingle with the contestants. To connect the audiences directly to the show, there is much more in store for everyone to stay engaged,” Czarina Ekta R Kapoor shares.

For example, the accurate winning prediction, team captain prediction or an elimination prediction will help users regularly earn points and prizes. This interactivity feature increases the chances of audience involvement in the show and helps them stay connected to their favourite contestants. The results will be announced on the show.

March 22, 2022
MX Player’s super-app format offers advertisers a well-rounded opportunity: Karan Bedi

KOLKATA: Indian audiences have acquired a taste for premium originals offered by the over-the-top (OTT) platforms in recent times, and their appetite has only grown stronger in the wake of the Covid 2019 crisis. Exploiting the huge opportunity, MX Player has witnessed 5X increase in engagement during this period, thanks to its library of originals. The user and engagement growth has translated into monetisation, with at least 150 new brands coming to the platform, MX Player CEO Karan Bedi said.

Bedi is pleased with the platform’s performance this year across all metrics. But he mentioned that when Covid2019 swept the country initially, high anxiety was prevalent in the market. However, stakeholders soon saw the silver lining in terms of users and engagement, with the platform registering significant uptick on the revenue front within a few weeks, overcoming the concern of decline in ad-spend.

“We have had a lot of retention of users. Along with high growth, users stuck with us because of the content we were putting out. We had a very large set of users returning to watch more and more content. Initial concern was users may come and go away but that has not played out with MX Player,” Bedi shared.

Read more news on MX Player

Bedi noted that the pandemic has brought about an unprecedented acceptance of OTT services. Viewers are now experimenting with previously unexplored genres and languages, especially with online content that has become the new mainstream. MX Player majorly caters to audiences in the 18–24 age bracket, followed by the 25-34 years group, with a sharp focus on tier-2 and tier-3 markets going beyond the metros.

MX Player has added new features to the platform in recent times including music streaming and casual gaming. Bedi highlighted that they have always maintained MX player is not only a video OTT platform, but it also aims to address the different needs of users – more precisely, all entertainment needs. Hence, the experiment around new features has yielded positive results in terms of engagement and revenue, he claimed.

It’s also worth pointing out that MX Player forayed into the short video space within a week after TikTok was banned. MX TakaTak was built entirely from scratch in the space of one week. While two-three smaller players tried to bridge the huge void, Bedi claimed that MX TakaTak had the highest growth owing to its scale, content, and technology.

“Our super-app format promises all forms of entertainment to the user and allows us to offer our advertisers a well-rounded opportunity to suit their marketing goals – including impact, reach and engagement. We have been successfully catering to categories like FMCGs, F&B, mobile handsets, gaming, e-commerce, SMB, social media and service apps, auto and BFSI,” Bedi stated.

“To give you an example, one of our most seamless branded content solutions was with Smule on our flagship music reality series – Times of Music. On the live streaming front, we’ve had associations with Blenders Pride Fashion Week, Oneplus TV + 8T launches. We’ve hosted content for brands like Skoda and Oppo, among others, and for gaming sponsorship, we had Duracell. We’re also looking at scaling monetisation for our recently launched short format video platform – MX TakaTak,” he added.

MX Player has a unique positioning in the market, being the only platform with premium originals not locked behind a paywall, which could be lucrative to many brands. Bedi is quite pleased with the AVod business model that MX Player is based on as it has scaled up courtesy of its swelling user base; he has no intention to abandon it for the subscription. He pointed out that the key factors behind a successful AVoD service are scale and technology.

Additionally, the platform is deepening its library in regional languages. It is now seeing a lot of action happening in other regional markets like Punjabi, Bhojpuri, Bengali along with the core ones like Tamil, Telugu, Punjabi and Marathi. It is also making its presence stronger on the international stage, with a higher focus on the Middle East market.

November 25, 2020
Unified measurement system, branded content & engagement concern marketers today

MUMBAI: At the recently concluded Indiantelevision.com’s BrandVid 2019, marketers discussed various issues such as the need for introducing a unified measurement system to check the impact of a content piece including that on sales as well as the impact of branded content. The session “Moving the needle from exposure to engagement: Still the challenge” saw L’Oréal India head of media Neel Pandya, Colgate-Palmolive associate director and head – integrated marketing communication and e-commerce marketing Priyanka Gandhi, Syska chief marketing officer Amit Sethiya, Mondelez India Foods Pvt Ltd senior category manager – equity and activation | chocolate marketing Sameer Yadav, and ITC Limited head—consumer health care Sanjay Srinivas touching upon the various aspects of brand engagements metrics. The session was moderated by Tonic Worldwide chief executive officer Chetan Asher.

Pandya reaffirmed that it is time to move away from exposure and focus on engagement. “It’s no doubt that you can’t go away from reach, it will be a primary metric to measure any kind of content you are creating but more and more organisations are going into measurability, which is more of engagement.”

Priyanka Gandhi noted that engagement helps in driving certain other metrics in the favour of brands. “You define your metric based on what your brand objective is. For example, it could be short-term metrics like awareness, or long-term metrics like favourability towards the brand. Those are the things that you want to achieve by driving engagement through content.”

Sethiya added, “It's great that we are talking about engagement because talking about exposure has got no merit because it's a clear variable of your investments. I think engagement brings a lot of efficiency and efficacy of your activities.”

However, the other two panellists were of the view that the requirement for engagement depends upon the category of the product and the objective a brand wants to achieve with the branded communication.

Yadav said, “I think it will depend on categories and it will depend on the purpose of doing it (branded communication). In some cases, exposure might be good enough while in some cases engagement alone would be good enough.”

Srinivas made an interesting point as he compared connectedness with engagement. “The challenge here is do we really have the right kind of insights to generate content that communicates. Going beyond that, there is also experience. In today’s time, engagement and experience go hand in hand to get brand conversions. We struggle today because we don’t have the right kind of metrics to understand if what we put out there is engaging audience or we are just getting proxies.”

Srinivas added that we should not just look at engagement in the form of social media shares. “Sharing something I like doesn’t mean that I am connected to the content. I share it because I want to connect better with my friends on social media. But does it really measure my connectedness with the brand in question?”

Adding to this, Pandya also vouched for the need to introduce a unified measurement system that can give marketers a better insight into the functionality of their content so they can create better communication strategies. He also noted that one should not be focusing on driving sales on the back of branded content.

Concurrently, Srinivas noted that it is not completely impossible to drive sales using branded content as he cited the example of Flipkart’s ‘Hagglebot’ that let the consumers bargain for the price of a product. “It was an intervention interesting to the consumers and it was designed to drive a lot of sales. It did drive a lot of sales,” he said.

The panel also corroborated the need for brands and marketers to define their brand and communication objectives before jumping onto the branded content bandwagon. The speakers also pressed upon the need to invest better money in the production process to ensure that the content works.

Srinivas said, “The challenge is not only in terms of execution but in terms of making the creative as well. The problem is that most people have this thought that if we create a great piece of content, then I won’t have to put a lot of money behind it. It will become viral. They give the example of Kolaveri Di. But the environment is a lot different today.” He cited the example of ‘Lego Batman’ to put across the point that bigger budget productions have been successful and have driven better ROIs.

Gandhi shared that the approach of creating content has changed a lot over time with newer content creators and platforms swarming in massive numbers. So the budget should be pre-decided.

She said, “Clearly the videos don’t go viral themselves unless they are very edgy or out of the box. You need to spend the right kinds of budgets at the right kinds of places to make sure the content is discovered. You should have a consistent approach on what you want to achieve, and then find the right mix of spending the content and finding the right amount of money to spend on it.”

June 28, 2019
Guest column: How chat-based ads are winning the marketing race

‘You talking to me?’

The famous line of Travis Bickle, a lonely taxi driver in Martin Scorsese’s iconic film Taxi Driver, is known to cinephiles all over the world. In the world of advertising these days, this line is often being repeated by customers, thanks to the prominent rise of chat-based ads as the most effective medium of communication in the millennial world.

Creating compelling brand engagements has become the need of the hour for brands today. While the digital world has opened up numerous possibilities for advertisers all over the world, this very same abundance of options is also driving them crazy. Brands are trying to create the optimum communication mix by employing multiple channels such as print, radio, TVCs, video ads, social media engagement etc. to connect better with their consumer bases and gain insights to help their marketing efforts. However, understanding the millennial customer’s mind with non-personalised advertising tools is like walking into a labyrinth with general directions, rather than a customised map. While the former will only result in you losing your way as you move further, a map, as is the case with chat-based ads, will ensure that you are able to navigate, control, and conquer it.

Chat-based vs. Video ads: Identifying the perfect ad mechanism for the millennial mind

Imagine this: globally, the average consumer is exposed to 4,000-10,000 brands per day, with 56 per cent of digital ads and 86 per cent of TV ads not being seen – even once! In this era of over-saturation, the only way to keep your brand thriving is to shun the volume-driven approach and create personalised, engaging advertising efforts that make users an essential part of your brand’s conversation. This is where chat-based ads are most suited, for they do not inform, but engage users through a two-way communication. As chat-based ads are driven by the inputs of the users, there is no predefined message or conclusion and the chat ad takes a route as driven by the conversation. At one to two minutes, the user engagement on chats is also much higher when compared to the sub-10 seconds worth of engagement that video ads deliver. Even with the rapidly growing proliferation of social media, and its share of video-based content, in our lives, theengagement rate of 75 per centon personalised chatbot-based ads is much higher than the measly 10 per cent of audience interactions that video-based ads manage.

While video ads today offer an edgier style that also has a call-to-action embedded in the form of a link to the brand’s homepage, it can never be a help in the fundamental process of decision-making due to its inherent opacity. Chat-based ads, on the other hand, engage customers by distilling the rigid process of advertising into a simple and personal conversation. Perhaps, this is the reason why 90 per cent of users are reported to give a positive feedback to chat-based conversations, as compared to 45 per cent affirmative responses received by video ads.

Furthermore, the recent technological developments in the field of machine learning and artificial intelligence have made it possible for chat-based ads to offer remarkably authentic conversational experience, while simultaneously collating data and solving a user’s problem. For business purposes, chatbot creators like us have developed numerous solutions that help organisations to conduct initial communication with customers. These chatbots then store the data, thus obtained, and analyse it. The information collated by chatbots presents a rich data source that enriches future conversations by human agents, invariably culminating in positive end-results for the business. In fact, 40 per cent of chat-initiated communication efforts result in task completion, a number that in videos still hovers at 10 per cent.

Apart from the fact that it creates highly personalised experiences for the user, the alternative possibilities with chatbots, as opposed to video ads, is endless. Chat-based solutions are being used the world over to tackle a diverse range of problems, from helping out cyber harassment victims report incidents and file complaints to helping insomniacs get through the night without having to go through multiple re-readings of old WhatsApp conversations! For instance, Endurance, a chatbot specifically designed for dementia patients, apart from being a conversational companion to the users suffering from the ailment, also identifies deviations in conversational branches indicative of a problem with immediate recollection – quite a technical achievement for a natural language processing-based system.

Every era has a generation-defining advertising medium that is preferred by consumers. The post-World War eras saw the epic rise of print-based ads, which was followed by the complete dominance of radio and TVCs. At the onset of the digital era, video ads and content ruled the roost. As the era of smartphones reaches its peak, it still hangs on to the throne. But chat-based ads, with their personalised, flexible, deeply engaging, and highly-efficient approach, are quietly making their way to the top, one conversation at a time.

The author is the co-founder and CEO ofHaptik. The opinions expressed here are his own and Indiantelevision.com may not subscribe to them.

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April 10, 2018
India Today taps Taboola to drive engagement, rev & audience development

MUMBAI: Taboola, one of the world’s leading discovery platforms, has announced an exclusive, three-year renewal agreement with India Today. Under the agreement, India Today will be integrating Taboola’s personalised content recommendations, full page personalisation, newsroom and audience exchange with the goal of driving user engagement, audience development and revenue.

India Today Group is India’s leading and most diversified media conglomerate with magazines, newspapers, books, radio, television, print and internet. India Today first partnered with Taboola in January 2014 with the initial goal of introducing high quality native advertising to consumers, whereby in the new agreement Taboola will work hand in hand with India Today to integrate its full Discovery platform across desktop and mobile devices.

The partnership will leverage Taboola’s suite of platform capabilities. In addition to continuing to serve sponsored content recommendations, India Today will launch Taboola’s Personalization in an effort to increase onsite user engagement. India Today’s properties will also utilize Taboola’s “audience exchange” architecture, which empowers publisher teams to strategically manage and optimize the flow of traffic across the India Today network, driving users to relevant off-site content and high-value video pages.

“We want to double down on serving content that is tailored to users interests and behaviors, so our readers remain engaged and excited about what they are reading,” said India Today Group Editorial Director (Broadcast & New Media) Kalli Purie. “Taboola has already helped us achieve success, we look forward to working towards our goal of driving increased user engagement and audience development.”

“India continues to be one of our fastest growing markets with content consumption and mobile growth on a steady rise. We are humbled to be working with the India Today team in years to come on integrating Taboola’s Discovery platform, and go ‘beyond the widget’ to find meaningful growth around engagement, audience and revenue,” said Taboola founder and CEO Adam Singolda. “Especially in light of massive mobile growth in the Indian market, we’re even more excited to work together on connecting people with content they may like and never knew existed.”

Taboola acts as a search engine in reverse. Instead of expecting people to search for information, Taboola helps information find people at the right time in the form of recommended content. Its predictive engine analyzes hundreds of real-time signals (including location, device type, referral source, social media trends and more) to match users with content they are most likely to be interested in consuming next.

Media consumption in India is on a steady rise and the country has remained a key priority for Taboola, which has established partnerships with several Indian publishers including Times of India, NDTV, Jagran, Bhaskar, Aajtak, Amarujala, Rediff and Deccan Chronicle. The announcement of India Today follows several recent wins by Taboola with leading publishers globally including Entrepreneur.com, El Universal, and Blasting News.

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February 28, 2017
Facebook introduces an easier way to create ads and measure their impact

NEW DELHI: Facebook has redesigned its ad buying and reporting tools based on responses from businesses.

The ad buying process will start with a simple question – what’s your advertising objective? – and the Facebook tools will recommend an appropriate ad based on that objective, and then help determine how the ads performed against the objective.

The updates, which we call objective-based ad buying and reporting, are part of ongoing efforts to make advertising on Facebook as simple as possible. In June, Facebook announced efforts to streamline Facebook ad types and provide consistency across formats. In July, ad products were streamlined, removing online offers, sponsored results and question ads. In August and September, it became possible for marketers to upload one image size that would work for all types of ads on Facebook, and the social site started offering a preview of how they would appear across Facebook.

Feedback received from businesses was that when creating an ad, they did not want to choose an ad unit – they wanted to meet an objective. Facebook then spoke with marketers of all types and sizes to uncover the objectives that matter most to them. They are: Clicks to Website, Website, Conversions, Page Post Engagement, Page Likes, App Installs, App Engagement, In-store Offer claims, Event Responses.

In turn, these objectives have become the new starting point for buying ads on Facebook. Based on the objective a business chooses, Facebook will recommend an appropriate ad-type (i.e., a Page post link ad to drive clicks to a website).

October 11, 2013
Nimbuzz collaborates with ‘The Bachelorette’

MUMBAI: Nimbuzz, a leading communication and entertainment platform, has associated with Life Ok to provide an innovative and interactive brand engagement module on mobile – the Nimbuzz Chat Buddy for The Bachelorette, a dating reality show starring Bollywood starlet Mallika Sherawat. The Bachelorette Buddy would reach out to over 25 million Nimbuzz users in India on their mobile phones giving Life Ok an opportunity to initiate a dialogue with the masses through a format native to the Nimbuzz platform. The Buddy was made available to all Nimbuzz users from 5 October.

Nimbuzz Chat Buddies appear as regular contacts on the chat roster of Nimbuzz users across India. The Bachelorette Buddy is an extension of Life Ok’s reality show that focusses on finding a match for Mallika Sherawat from among the 30 contestants. The Buddy intends to create one to one engagement through questions around Mallika’s eventful Bollywood career and her exciting personal life. The Bachelorette Chat Buddy on Nimbuzz gives users the opportunity to make live suggestions to Mallika on who she should date and who she could do without.

Speaking about the association, Nimbuzz head of monetisation and strategy Anubhav Sharma said, “Nimbuzz Chat Buddies have been extremely successful in connecting the biggest brands to their relevant audiences. We are extremely excited about our partnership for primarily two reasons. Firstly, this is the first time that a reality show of such scale has recognised the engagement value that Chat Buddies bring to the entertainment industry and secondly our foray into the lifestyle-entertainment space is being marked by some of the biggest names in the ecosystem including Mallika Sherawat and Star network.’’

Commenting on the launch of The Bachelorette’s biggest mobile campaign powered by Nimbuzz, Life OK head of marketing Pratik Seal said, “The Bachelorette is a unique concept that looks to capture the interest of a wide audience irrespective of their demographics. Keeping in mind the uniqueness of the format and the audience, we were looking at associating ourselves with a platform that could not only reach out to the masses but also offer engagement value that makes our users feel as much a part of the show as the contestants. We are confident that our partnership with Nimbuzz will be immensely successful in generating interest around the show.’’

The Bachelorette Buddy on Nimbuzz will be the core of the brands mobile strategy for The Bachelorette. The reality shows premiered on 7 October at 9:30 pm on Life Ok.

October 8, 2013
Star Jalsha Movies’ tricks for better audience engagement

KOLKATA: Star Jalsha Movies which recently acquired broadcast rights for Calcutta Football League (CFL) is going extra miles to woo its audiences and develop a connect. The channel has deployed ten cameras including one each on both goal posts along with helicopter shot of stadium for better connect with around 80 lakh football lovers who are watching CFL live every evening.

The channel has also put together a commentary team that boasts of two former India internationals Debjit Ghosh and Rajat Ghosh Dastidar and tollywood Diva Sayoni as star presenter.

“Big lenses (tele-lenses) have been used, backed by crystal clear capturing of sound of players, crowd and even kicking of ball. All ten cameras have the capability to show replays,” said a city based sports analyst.

Two characters of Phuchka and Goleda have been added to bring in the fun factor into the game, said the analyst.

September 16, 2013