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Tag: Founder and CEO

  • GUEST COLUMN: How conversational AI is helping adtech brands maximize advertising ROI

    GUEST COLUMN: How conversational AI is helping adtech brands maximize advertising ROI

    Mumbai: The role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in adtech has become pivotal over the years. It started with simple bots that helped customers with basic queries and requests through voice or text & now has evolved into sophisticated conversational AI. It is capable of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for taking voice inputs and formulating a context-specific response in real-time. After all, understanding natural language and providing a meaningful response is the key to creating a seamless experience for customers, and this is where conversational AI comes into play.

    Traditional online advertising was not successful in engaging customers

    As digitization has exponentially increased in the past years, it has become difficult to cater to customer demands manually, and automation has been widely experimented with in the adtech sector. The drawbacks of conventional chatbots ranged from being disengaged and irrelevant to frustratingly non-conversational. The seemingly robotic nature of digital advertisements led to a lot of digital campaigns going to dust.

    The result often used to be a loss in customers rather than a hike due to an uncontrolled and unthoughtful message being conveyed via the use of ineffective chatbots. A general lack of understanding of the customer’s intent and providing them with a specific solution were the topmost issues in the area of customer support. A lot of brands are now trying to implement conversational AI into their existing AdTech stack with varying levels of success. Some are doing it right, while others still have a long way to go.

    The modern-day consumer demands more than being sold a product

    Personalisation can be boosted from the very inception of a customer journey through predictive analysis. This innovation helps companies in customer personification, giving them access to a lot of structured data throughout the customer journey. The AI can analyse all the data available on a particular customer and predict what they want based on past behaviour. This enhances the prospects of call-to-action, directly impacting the revenues by 21 percent organically.

    The customer’s AI-generated avatar helps build a personalised experience in an omnichannel ecosystem for advertisements. The analysis is effective across these channels, and the consistent brand voice communicated to the customer imparts a sense of connection that aligns with the customer’s mindset. This plays a critical role in keeping them engaged as building upon previous impressions becomes easier and cost-effective due to reduced cost per acquisition (CPA). Customers are no longer just numbers on a spreadsheet; they are individuals with unique goals and needs. This is why conversational AI is such an essential technology for advertisers today.

    Conversational AI uses intuitive technologies to interact with their customers

    Conversational AI is a game-changer for the adtech industry. It is creating new opportunities for brands to maximise their advertising ROI. It offers in-depth customer insights that help adtech companies understand, adapt and respond to customer needs, thereby improving engagement and sales.

    It helps businesses create targeted audiences based on data analysis around various factors, including age, gender, location, and more. This helps deliver specific content to different groups of people, boosting engagement and sales. Predictive analysis by AI significantly reduces turnaround time, making it easier for companies to meet deadlines without sacrificing quality or spending more money on additional resources like hiring full-time employees for each department (like marketing).

    Conversational AI can analyse conversations between consumers and brands, which allows businesses to predict what their customers want next. This data can then be used to personify a consumer’s identity as part of their journey through the sales funnel so that they feel more connected than ever before.

    Summing up

    As the industry moves towards conversational commerce, it has become clear that conversational AI will play a fundamental role in driving this change. And because it’s built into an existing CRM system, the existing infrastructure can be used without having to make significant changes or upgrades. AI-powered chatbots are, therefore, the future of customer service, with the industry poised to reach a whopping $14 billion by 2025.

    The author is Amitt Sharma, Founder and CEO, VDO.AI

  • PFT is best to help M&E companies embrace cloud technology: CEO Ramki Sankaranarayanan

    PFT is best to help M&E companies embrace cloud technology: CEO Ramki Sankaranarayanan

    Mumbai: As media and entertainment companies increasingly make the move towards digital this spells a big opportunity for players like Prime Focus Technologies (PFT). It is the creator of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software, CLEAR, for the Media And Entertainment (M&E) industry. It offers streaming platforms, studios, and broadcasters transformational AI-led technology and media services powered by the Cloud that help them lower their Total Cost of Operations (TCOP) by automating their content supply chain.

    PFT works with major M&E companies like Walt Disney-owned Star TV, Hearst Television, Channel 4, Sinclair Broadcast Group, A&E Networks, Warner Media, PBS, CBS Television Studios, 20th Century Fox Television Studios, Lionsgate, Showtime, HBO, NBCU, TERN International, Disney+ Hotstar, Cricket Australia, BCCI, Indian Premier League and more. PFT is the technology subsidiary of Prime Focus, which offers M&E industry services.

    IndianTelevision.com caught up with Prime Focus Technologies founder and CEO Ramki Sankaranarayanan to find out more about the company’s plans and growth strategy.

    What are Prime Focus’ focus areas for 2022?

    Driven by the need for velocity in a changing landscape of ever-increasing volume and variability, we feel that our customers are incredibly busy meeting their supply chain demands. One of the toughest challenges facing them is the coordination amongst vendors globally to meet the launch windows and yet be in control.

    With leading brands going global with their streaming platforms, there is a massive demand for content, not just for bringing back catalogue but also for commissioning originals worldwide. And we play a role in both. We endeavor to help our clients manage their supply chain on the Cloud.

    We enable bringing catalogue back to streaming platforms faster with AI (Artificial Intelligence) by discovering content segments, preparing cut downs, compilations and marketing clips, conform and create new versions, and re-time subs/dubs. We want to automatically generate, transcribe, and trans-create subtitles for our customers to expedite the entire process. In addition, with modern MAM, onboarding vendors, tracking consumption, reviewing vendor-specific dashboards, and more, we believe bottlenecks can be avoided, and our customers can take control of the supply chain.

    With originals, through Vision Cloud, we are looking at AI Everywhere across the content supply chain — Segmentation, Content Discovery, Conform, Content Localisation, Subtitle Retiming, Compliance and more.

    Our concentration is also on providing support for a complete spectrum of mastering, compliance, localisation, and versioning services specialised in managing projects to deliver the highest quality while adhering to tight turnaround times. We are hyper-focused on helping customers meet all these challenges, focusing on content supply chain automation in 2022.

    As we mark 100K hours of AI processing this year, what is worth mentioning is that our ‘Making AI work for you’ proposition has been hugely successful as our AI data and action tool kits have become one of the best in the entire industry.

    What is the strategy to grow the business?

    PFT believes in continuing to invest in innovations required for automation so that we can reimagine the supply chain with the application of AI in business processes wherever applicable. In addition, we focus on making AI work for our customers to ensure dramatic cycle time reduction and drastic reductions in reducing the TCOP further and let them take complete control.

    Further work order automation will undoubtedly expand our purview to manage tasks, internal resources, assets, and workflow orchestration across the multi-vendor supply chain for content versioning, localisation, QC, mastering, and delivery.

    PFT has been working closely with media and entertainment (M&E) companies to evangelise the benefits of moving to the Cloud and address dilemmas related to that important decision. With over 13 years of highly successful global hybrid cloud deployment experience, PFT is the best place to help M&E companies embrace cloud technology to drive business outcomes like greater efficiencies, lower cost of operations, and net new revenues. In addition, PFT shares its wealth of knowledge and best practices with customers wanting to make that ‘Journey to the Cloud’ but may not know when and how.

    What trends are we seeing in technologies used by the media and entertainment industry this year to improve their P&L?

    The M&E industry has been harnessing AI and extensive data processes for quite some time now. The industry had its initial issues of business returns not being significant compared to the AI/ML (Machine Learning) introduction costs. However, the missing point was that any M&E enterprise’s business problems in their totality could not be solved accurately by any one or more off-the-shelf AI solution in the market.

    The experiments with limited resources, budgets and the choice of available AI offerings hit a wall with the search for a complete solution that has adequate accuracy to make AI work for the business use cases.

    We are witnessing an acute interest in AI now, more than ever, and people are cautiously exploring the Cloud and how Cloud can impact costs and thereby influence P&L.

    With native media recognition, Vision Cloud makes AI work for our customers by solving real-world business problems through its perfect blend of consulting and technology, providing accurate and actionable data. It fuses the expertise of home-grown models along with world-class AI engines like AWS, Google and Microsoft, all wrapped in our secret sauce, ‘Machine Wisdom’ to make AI data more accurate and actionable.                    

    There is greater use of asset management in remote post-production areas (to continue to enable remote work in the post-pandemic era). Post-production and workflow have drastically changed. The need to ‘go remote’ has accelerated the need to embrace Remote Postproduction. In addition, the pandemic has made the industry successfully embrace virtualised edit workstations.

    • Footage required for a project has grown, and the I/O departments have expanded in size. Round-the-clock interventions have become more demanding for storage management, ingesting and restoring content for postproduction. There is an acute need to run postproduction workflows on the Cloud — create work orders, tasks within the postproduction process, etc. Collaboration is vital— share media and metadata, seek review and approval even from the remotest locations.

    CLEAR offers remote postproduction Adobe workflows with automatic, single-click backups from home to the Cloud and restoration to “my workspace” with different iterations every day.

    How has Covid-19 impacted the increased use of technology and workflows?

    Covid has impacted virtualisation at large in such a positive way. With new tools and techniques in production and postproduction, we have ensured non-stop workflows. In addition, cloud technology has made remote postproduction so easy and manageable.

    Using online tools for collaboration helped deal with the inabilities of being face to face during the pandemic, with reviews/ approvals of dailies/cuts managed effortlessly. Editors can collaborate on projects, share media and metadata, seek review and approval regardless of where they are, use visual mark-ups and free-hand annotation, and chat and share notes.

    In our case, over 600 editorial staff and thousands of artists continued working from home, generating Academy-winning work, all during the Covid times, thanks to technology and workflows. In addition, Prime Focus’ DNEG (VFX), animation, and stereo conversion arm, won its sixth Academy award in the last few years, substantiating that increased use of technology and workflows have been so much for the better.

    How important is Cloud technology, and how long did it take for you to develop CLEAR?

    Cloud adoption is already mainstream; if you are not on Cloud even now, you are already behind your competition. In 2022, more than $1.3 trillion in enterprise IT spending is at stake from the shift to cloud, growing to almost $1.8 trillion in 2025, according to Gartner.

    Cloud has explored and enabled new possibilities, making AI possible. With agility, it has helped to centralise business processes in the supply chain while adhering to utmost security standards. It provides flexibility and scalability, and those who were already on Cloud before the pandemic could adapt to remote working more easily than the others. It drives collaboration efficiency, and it offers better insights from big data.

    We are in the third generation of CLEAR. We started in 2008; CLEAR was born in the Cloud solving for 4Vs (variety, variability, visibility, and velocity) in the content supply chain. The 4 Vs are imperative for us in producing content as each holds its own forte’ Variety for PFT ranges from the genre, location, and talent to consumer preferences. Through velocity, we refer to our solving complex problems in lesser times in the digital age in tandem with consumer choices. Of course, we also believe in creating everything new; our variability is in new challenges, choices, suppliers, or content. Lastly, we believe visibility is essential to ensure transparency of all processes across the production supply chain.

    Deployed globally, CLEAR is now a leading choice for content enterprises to deliver compelling results and offers never-before-seen advantages to media and entertainment businesses in managing their content.

    Today, digital has made everybody a content creator. What is Prime Focus Technology’s strategy to enable companies to manage digital assets easier?

    Thanks to Cloud, best-of-breed tools are available today to the content creators worldwide – they can store, edit, manage, and distribute content. Cloud has made it viable for any creator to pick the world’s best application for every need, every user, and business case. Moreover, some of the best tools are now in the power of a browser with commercially easier and pay-per-use models.

    PFT believes in leveraging the power of AI to manage digital assets. Our CLEAR Vision Cloud, a Media Recognition AI platform, is a fusion of home-grown AI engines (over 35 & counting) and best-of-breed AI models enveloped by PFT’s unique Machine Wisdom layer. Some use cases deployed for our customers include

    · Conformance: Automatically conform regional edits, subtitles and dub tracks on global masters in a multiple frame rate baseline.

    · Segmentation: Eliminate play-out errors drastically and increase monetisation by auto-generating frame-accurate segmentation metadata.

    · Localisation: Automatically generate, transcribe, and trans-create subtitles in over 60 languages.

    · Marketing: Locate the right clips needed to build a variety of cross-platform promo material with the high-quality discovery of data automatically.

    · Content QC: Automatically quality-control the bag and tag versions of several promos daily to deliver 100% quality and prevent leakage in your advertising revenue.

    We make AI work for the customers by providing suitable learning to the AI models for specific content and business needs, altering the models to adjust for the specific nuances.

    What’s the importance of metadata in content discovery?

    Metadata is the key to transforming any audio-visual content into a dynamic asset. Tags have changed decision-making from days, weeks, and often months into seconds. Metadata aims to facilitate quick searches for specific content, making the quality of the tags used extremely important. The value of metadata in our current time is even further enhanced because the quantity of content that already exists and what is now being created are so extensive.

    If AI techniques can help human evaluators review new or existing content and create valuable metadata, it can help organizations unlock additional value in these assets.

    Using AI to improve metadata processes can help an organisational business case. Making the most of digital content often requires M&E enterprises to move beyond basic asset management and embrace new-age, Cloud-based MAM solutions. With extensive data models and built-in tools for cataloging and metadata tagging, such solutions help organise content in useful ways, make it easily accessible, and open new avenues to monetize assets. Ultimately, they streamline and improve the overall efficiency of digital content creation, boost monetisation, and drive creative enablement.

    Finally, how important are events like NAB and IBC?

    NAB and IBC are always great meeting places. It’s excellent having face-to-face interactions with people, learn about their challenges, and get to know what’s new in the arena. There was a much-relaxed atmosphere; unlike the previous NABs, it was well organised, complete with safety measures and protocols.

  • GUEST COLUMN: Relevance of conversational AI in adtech sector

    GUEST COLUMN: Relevance of conversational AI in adtech sector

    Mumbai: Conversational AI, which allows contextual dialogue through advanced algorithms that enable superior, result-oriented, human-like conversations, emerged due to the shortcomings of traditional chatbots. Individuals were often fraught with the challenge of searching for a specific product or customised financial services online and being disappointed since all the results displayed were irrelevant due to certain mismatched algorithms. Likewise, a bot interaction cannot yield the desired outcome if the keywords do not match with the pre-programmed list. This can trigger the user to the extent that they may altogether discontinue the existing services or shift their business to another organization. Needless to say, bot responses can be predictive, repetitive, disengaged, impersonalised, and more often than not, far placed from the real solution.

    Owing to its advantages, adtech industry has been one of the fastest to leverage the benefits of Conversation AI since it has the potential to catapult the ecosystem to the next realm. These advertisements are the most effective ways of instilling a sense of personalisation that drives a long-lasting, meaningful connection between the brand and its target audience. Conversational advertising allows customers to exchange information with brands, providing the latter with unprecedented levels of insight into customer impressions.

    Conversational AI becoming critical

    Conversational AI experiences have been found to drive multiple minutes of engagement, increase conversion rates, and provide a transparent and opt-in way for consumers to share insight about their preferences by brands in categories as diverse as retail, automotive, financial services, and lifestyle, among others. Conversational advertising uses AI bots, to create natural, automated interactions that assist in accelerating purchase intent, brand recognition, and conversions when compared to static ads.

    The emerging AI tech enables virtual assistants to comprehend questions, deduce consumer intent, and answer appropriately. Customers are kept engaged throughout the conversation with customer-focused and relevant information. As conversational AI assistants can now respond to both text and speech commands, they are providing users with more convenient interaction possibilities.

    Conversational Advertising uses existing display and OLV advertising channels to build two-way connections between businesses and customers. When compared to modern digital advertising or one-way mass media, it’s no surprise that customers like the ability to respond. New age consumers are increasingly shifting from visiting stores and websites, reading reviews, and getting recommendations from social media influencers, to technology-guided mechanisms that provide the best fit within the least turnaround time.

    Evolution of adtech through conversational AI

    1) Sophisticated audience targeting

    Personalisation is one of the reasons why digital advertising is superior to traditional advertising. Finding the correct target demographic for an advertisement used to be like shooting in the dark. But now, owing to consumer data, Conversational AI sifts through terabytes of data in a matter of seconds and analyses it to pinpoint the target audience for a marketing campaign. These advertisements have the power to listen, understand and offer customised solutions.

    2) User engagement through personalised interactions

    By utilising data to drive customised interactions, conversational AI increases user engagement. When a consumer is indecisive about making a purchase, they are likely to go online and search for the products, leading to conversions only if they find the relevant information. In its absence, they will switch to another brand without batting an eyelid. This is where a Conversational AI can assist in converting the lead. By leveraging the customers’ data, it can create responses that improve user experience through deep engagement, thereby prompting an increase in conversion rates.

    3) Conversational AI-based intent analysis

    Understanding the target audience’s intent is crucial for marketing and advertisement. A conversational AI chatbot provides a broader perspective to the customer’s intent analysis by building a detailed consumer persona through its multichannel presence. It provides the quickest way to sift through large amounts of data and take action.

    4) Predictive analysis adaptation model

    Predictive advertising is built on predictive analytics that creates ads based on what consumers are likely to do in the future. What if businesses already knew what consumers were going to look for? This would save companies millions of dollars in advertising if they understood what to advertise for? That is why AI and predictive analytics are at the forefront of advertising technology.

    Bottom line

    Conversational AI can help with various issues that arise during a customer’s interaction with the company. By leveraging ASR to translate, NLP to interpret, and NLG for dialogue generation, ML lies at the core of creating personaliaed conversations at scale. Not only does this method generate leads and accelerate the conversion rate, but it also enables seamless integration into pre-existing CRM tools for an engaging experience. With its self-learning capabilities, conversational AI is expected to reimagine adtech and customer engagement in the future.

    (About Author: Amitt Sharma is the founder and CEO of VDO.AI)

  • Raj Kundra & Akshay Kumar partner to launch shopping channel

    Raj Kundra & Akshay Kumar partner to launch shopping channel

    MUMBAI: Entrepreneur Raj Kundra has joined hands with actor Akshay Kumar to launch Best Deal TV – a 24 hours shopping channel. With a motto of Sirf Bestest, the channel promises to present exclusive products at best possible rates. The free to air celebrity channel will be available on all major cable and DTH (Direct to home) platforms from 18 March, 2015 onwards.

     

    The products available on Best Deal TV are categorized in lifestyle, home, fashion, health and beauty. 

     

    Speaking at the launch, Best Deal TV founder and CEO Kundra said, “We are pleased to launch a new and unique home shopping channel on which our products will be exclusive, aspirational and above all affordable. All products will go through our vigorous Quality Lab tests before obtaining approval. Today most brands rely on celebrities to sell their products. Best Deal TV offers the perfect combination – of quality products and celebrities endorsing them on the same platform. To me it is perfect example of a Product – Celebrity Match. We match quality approved products with celebrities, and by controlling the end to end supply chain we ensure savings of our customers that guarantee they, literally get the best deal.”

     

    Co-owner Akshay Kumar shared his experience with teleshopping. He said he saw a teleshopping channel offering astrological suggestions and when he took part in it he found that the rates quoted in the channel were bargainable, which means many customers might have been cheated. He also was of the opinion that products that are sold in the channels now available have no quality assurance. He elaborated, “When Best Deal first came to me with the idea of a home shopping channel the first thing I wanted to be sure about is that if my name is going to be attached to something, it has to be for something unique, never done before by a celebrity, and a quality which is worthy of my 100 per cent. I am happy to say that for the first time, consumers will be able to fulfill their celebrity style aspirations as far as their look and feel is concerned at very affordable prices.”

     

    Best Deal TV is expected to cater to those who admire Bollywood glitteratzi and always aspire to dress up similarly. The challenge will be pricing, as the products come with a celebrity how much impact will it leave on the price tag remains to be seen. Every product has to be endorsed by a celebrity and only then will it feature on the channel. The concept is, the manufacturer has to approach a celebrity and convince him or her in terms of quality. And if a celebrity wants to launch his or her own product Best Deal TV can be a platform. 

     

    The chairperson and brand ambassador of the channel Shilpa Shetty Kundra said, “As a self-confessed shopaholic I love the concept behind Best Deal TV. TV commerce is a growing trend, an easy and convenient way to shop from the comfort to your home. Now customers can be reassured of quality products which are being endorsed by their favourite celebrities. Best Deal TV aims to offer something, which is special to its consumers; products that solve a problem, make a difference, offer great value for money and deliver exceptional results. It makes me very proud to be a part of this transparent and top quality platform, truly making us bestest.”

     

    Former AVP of Home Shop 18 Meghna Krishna has been named COO of the company. Speaking at the launch, Krishna said the motto of the channel is to provide better than the best i.e bestest product to the consumers, “Celebrities always gain eyeballs and enhance the popularity of the product, Best Deal TV will convert eyeballs into transactions. The teleshopping industry is growing bigger and bigger, it is now a $4 billion industry and by 2020 it will become a $10 billion industry, hence the sector has a future and Best Deal TV will emerge as the ruler.”

     

    Key personalities behind the Channel are:

     

    · Raj Kundra, Founder and CEO

     

    · Akshay Kumar, Co – Owner 

     

    · Uday Kothary, Co – Owner 

     

    · Shipa Shetty Kundra, Chairperson and Brand Ambassador

     

    · Meghna Krishna, COO

     

    · Hemant Vastani, CFO