Tag: Fork Media Group

  • Amit Sobti takes charge as president of Humans of Bombay

    Amit Sobti takes charge as president of Humans of Bombay

    MUMBAI: Amit Sobti has been appointed president at Humans of Bombay, the storytelling platform that has built a loyal following with its human interest narratives. In his new role, Sobti will oversee company operations and strategy, with a mandate to drive profitability, expand partnerships and monetise original IPs.

    Sobti, a revenue architect with two decades across digital media and corporate strategy, most recently served as chief revenue officer at Fork Media group, where he spent over 11 years scaling businesses, creating branded content ecosystems and building new revenue streams.

    Earlier, he held senior roles at Media Pro, JSW Ispat Steel and Reliance Broadcast, contributing to high stakes strategy, marketing innovations and large scale partnerships. Known for designing playbooks that blend innovation with legacy, Sobti says his focus now lies in building consumer first growth models.

    At Humans of Bombay, industry watchers expect Sobti to marry commercial acumen with the platform’s storytelling ethos, as it looks to expand both reach and revenues.

  • Fork Media Group  launches ContextAds across India, GCC and SEA regions

    Fork Media Group launches ContextAds across India, GCC and SEA regions

    NEW DELHI:  Media tech entity – Fork Media Group announced the launch of ContextAds – a programmatic platform to enable marketers adopt a holistic approach towards digital advertising. Having delivered over 1000+ brand campaigns through the managed service route, the programmatic platform of ContextAds is an advancement to the digital advertising offering of Fork Media Group.  ContextAds enables brands to take a well-informed ad decision through its AI/ML backed platforms while helping marketers establish a stronger brand connect. Through this platform, brands get granular details like sentiments, entities, content categories, user intent and hence they don’t have to rely on just a bunch of keywords and categories to make ad decisions. 

    ContextAds is an SSP with a data management platform backed by one of its kind combinations of context and audience data married with crucial factors like content quality, brand safety, and viewability. The platform gives marketeers access to over 100+ publications across India, GCC & SEA regions. Through ContextAds, marketeers can process the image. article text, headline categorization to not only deliver context but also deliver other extremely relevant parameters such as brand safety including dynamically striking off nudity, violence, negative social trend through entity extraction. This enables brands to target audience / context or both for a particular category that marries itself seamless to their product's attributes.

    In addition to helping marketeers, Fork Media Group is also helping publishers to improve the yield optimisation of advertising space inventory on websites to minimise wasted space and maximise views. Talking about the new launch, Fork Media Group founder and group CEO-Sammar Verma says,” The platform was built with a view to solve the problem of declining yield on display for publishers. We have always viewed the conventional display formats to be broken and hence, we identified context as a key missing link in the whole chain. Through this platform, we aim to bring back the incremental value on inventory through context. Historically, context has existed in the market primarily through key-word targeting and, in our view, that approach is highly inaccurate so technologically we have taken this light years ahead with AI & ML. We have now added layers of audience to our context data and programmatic capabilities to further enhance context delivery and monetization respectively.”

    Adding his thoughts on the relevance building aspect offered by the platform, Fork Media CTO Nikhil Sheth says, “Our proprietary ContextAds technology scans content and images across millions of pages, helping you to target contextually relevant pages. Our page screening technology also ensures that your brand is never advertised on pages with any inappropriate content. Along with this, our audience targeting helps you to target right audience based on their interest and behaviour. By combining power of page context, content safety and right audience, we make sure that your reach right audience all the time.”

    Talking about leveraging a tech-forward approach, Context Ads Product Head-Santosh Khandekar says, “With ContextAds, we are aiming to revolutionize the ad-decision model while delivering a controlled and scalable media buying experience through the Private Marketplace (PMP). Our proprietary technology managed to combine the Audience with Context to get a conclusive understanding of the user's past activities and present content consumption, helping brands deliver personalized brand awareness through innovative ads.”

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  • Rishi Khiani to step down from Ant Farm to build a startup in the Job-tech space

    Rishi Khiani to step down from Ant Farm to build a startup in the Job-tech space

    MUMBAI: Serial innovator Rishi Khiani has announced that he will be stepping down from day-to-day operations at Ant Farm, a digital innovation company that he founded in 2013. While he steps down from his operational role, Rishi will continue to be a promoter shareholder in Ant Farm and its downstream companies. The move is a planned one so that he can focus on his startup in the Job-tech space.

    Ant Farm is a studio incubator that builds businesses and scales up disruptive ideas. The company had raised funding from funds such as Agnus & Bay Capital and counts prominent investors such as Ravi Dhariwal, Radhakishan Damani and Sat Pal Khattar on its cap table.

    Some of it’s successful companies are Ad-tech and Content company Fork Media Group that owns and operates Curly Tales, Hauterfly, IGN, Mashable, FameFox and AskMen, multi-category delivery startup Scootsy that was recently acquired by Swiggy, mobile fitness platform RevoFit that is backed by Marico and Hello Green, a healthy and affordable meal delivery service. The management of parent company, Ant Farm, will be transitioned to co-founder Upen Roop Rai.

    During the announcement, Rishi Khiani said “I founded Ant Farm back in 2013 when India had just seen a disruption in the startup space. The idea was to accelerate companies during their early-stage with an intensive hands-on approach backed by an experienced team in the given sector. It was a thrilling experience to build some great companies in the last eight years.”

    Commenting on his career plans, Khiani added “Given the current scenario of the economy and the job market in our country, my next startup will focus on enabling the next billion jobs. Given that ambition and the opportunity it was important to clear my desk of all other responsibilities.

    Stay tuned for some exciting updates!” Rishi Khiani, who is a seasoned entrepreneur and former CEO of Times Internet, has over 20 years of experience in media, consumer tech and enterprise space. He is known to have

    launched some of India's iconic homegrown digital brands. Rishi sold his first startup UrbanEye Media to the Network18 group in 2006. Keeping up to his innovation skills, Rishi will be entering the job-tech industry, to bridge the gap between jobs and job seekers across various industries.