Rammohan Sundaram, CEO, NetworkPlay.

Rammohan Sundaram is the Founder, CEO and Managing Director of NetworkPlay Media Pvt Ltd, which is a Capital 18 funded company and is in the business of providing branding solutions through various touch points such as web, mobile, direct to home, research and events. As a two year old start-up, NetworkPlay has had some of the best publishers as partners in their business and has won several awards including the prestigious CMO Asia Awards that was held in Singapore recently. Ram worked with Yahoo India before launching NetworkPlay as their National Sales Head for Performance Accounts, built Tribal DDB India to the largest Internet Media Agency during his tenure as National Sales Director between 2005 and 2007 and has worked with Madison, Jobsahead.com, Encore Events, Microland and Indian Express in the past. With over 14 yrs of experience he today has built an envious organisation that is the largest brand ad-network in the internet space, mobile space and the DTH space, recently NetworkPlay also announced a JV with DMG Events to launch the world’s largest advertising and technology event ad:tech, which is scheduled to be held in New Delhi on the 27th and 28th of April 2011.

We wanted to create a catalyst that would drive more brand dollars since India as a market will grow over the next 4-5 yrs exponentially through brand dollars. Keeping that in mind we either had to create a kick ass product that would be a differentiator in the brand space for which we needed tons of money or go through the grind on our core capabilities, which is sales and business development. That is the sole reason we got into a space where we could shine from day one and touch wood it has. We were the first to go to market with an open proposition and not just being a blind ad-network, created a new format called ‘hybrid ad-network’ and testimony to that is not only the market welcomed us but we also ensured that the competitors in the space followed us, which to me is the biggest testimony in any business.

This industry has shown tremendous promise but the realization of the same has not been as significant, therefore I would still maintain that we are coming of age but still not yet there. But my belief is we will be an industry size of around 2000 cr in display advertising in the next 3 yrs time, and everyone in the business will actually be taken by surprise catering to the sudden surge that will happen on the demand side. We are just getting ready for that opportunity.

For us, we are a small company with huge ambition and hunger. Every level we have to cross hurdles and therefore every hurdle crossed is a milestone achieved so I wouldn’t put one or two specific ones. Though the sweet memory will always be LinkedIn, simply because they believed in us and awarded us the business when we were just 5months old as an organization. And then off-course the day when Makemytrip went public at Nasdaq, as partners we were very proud since this was a company that backed us like LinkedIn in our early stages. And now ad:tech simply because we are clearly on our path that will get the ecosystem to the next level. All of these efforts helped clients meet their end objective through brand advertising and that to us is testimony of our vision as well.

We were the first ones to see the opportunity in the DTH space and created a niche for ourselves there too. With Airtel and Big as partners and those are milestones where now advertisers are able to get the TV platform through a brand new format - whether it is static or in motion thus by clearly breaking the barrier on price and clutter.

And off-course we have a bunch of other business including 60 other websites and our mobile business, that is still very new but again those are milestones we have achieved over the last 24 months of our existence.

Did you know that India is the largest growing market for the DTH industry world-wide? It is! We are currently sitting at a number close to 20 odd million households that have DTH connection and it is estimated that India will have a 100 M homes in the next 2yrs. Look the opportunity, for most players who run this business their core business is telephony and that is a clear indication as to why they are in the business of DTH. Answer is simple, convergence of mobile, TV and internet. Today there is no path back facility available but it is just a matter of time before this aspect is either cracked through a mobile connection or directly through a remote and then imagine all the interaction that is possible with a consumer, its mind blowing. For advertising, when the delivery capability matures you will see that targeting right at the house number level in an area will be possible and that will be the day TV would have actually broken all possible barriers in terms of precision targeting.

So for me it is a huge potential for players who are in that space.

See, it’s pretty simple. Adoption rate of commerce has increased multi-folds and more and more people are using the internet and mobile to shop today. Shopping could be anything from buying movie tickets, gadgets to airline tickets or whatever is convenient for a consumer. Brands are setting their own shops so that they are accessible to their consumers when the consumers want them. It’s just mind share they are creating and not many companies are building it to create a new revenue model though that is what will happen in the days to come but since their core capabilities are not selling online they will be happy to actually have their site and also have it distributed through various other multi-brand ecommerce stores.

NetworkPlay will be a large digital media player upwards of 100 crs in revenues five years down the line.

Future of digital is convergence and commerce and one can already see a lot of action in that space. Look at what Airtel is doing in terms of convergence through its mobile phone and DTH platforms, look at how mobile transactions are happening, I haven’t gone to pay my bill in over 2 yrs now, I just use Mchek. So there is going to be a lot of action through convergence and looking the arrival of 3G and faster data services that Reliance Industries have planned, I see a lot of action in the commerce space.

I can’t comment on specific sites but the truth is that scalability of these businesses into the remote parts of India will be an issue till such time you also become a stockiest. And unless you have a solution to ensure customer satisfaction and are making it available to consumers across India in a decent time period you cannot grow in a manner you would want to keep in mind the potential of these businesses, Vis – A – Vis India’s population Vis – A – Vis Internet penetration. And above that if it is going to be just a metro phenomenon where you have daily deals happening then I guess we are really missing out on a large opportunity. I am sure all these players are working to find a solution that will enable them to solve this problem.

There will be consolidation in this space. We firmly believe that companies with tremendous tech capabilities on side and great sales capabilities on the other, are the ones that will survive and it will be an ‘either or’ scenario in India. We chose to be the latter and will continue to drive our efforts in human capital and education.

In terms of competition, I guess to each his own, we don’t believe in playing in a market, we believe in creating new markets and if you look at all our offerings, they were all markets we created for our offerings.

See video is just a delivery format on the web and it will continue to be there and I am sure will grow as well. However what I think will work will be the ones who own original content and news channels who have live streaming happening. However the opportunity to just do pre and post rolls is a hindrance, which is why original content will be the driver for companies who are in the space.

There are a lot of companies whose product delivery is supreme, they will grow exponentially simply because the deployment of delivery of video on the net is not the core competence of the content owner, therefore those will do well anyway.

And off-course it is a great way to communicate with your end consumer so it will only move northwards.

Mobile hasn’t taken off because of multiple reasons however there is a large market in the VAS space that is doing extremely well, when ARPUs of operators are falling down it has to be through the VAS initiatives, however what hasn’t grown is the advertising space through the WAP medium.

I believe that all these days the issue was with screen size, GPRS usage and adoption of internet on the mobile. All the three are slowly but steadily going away, we are seeing tremendous push by the mobile manufacturers, whether local or multi-national promoting, all kind of services and offerings through their handsets. That will be a major push in terms of usage of internet and applications through the mobile. It will be a slow process, but it is happening and it will be just a matter of time before we see that a first-hand experience of internet for a lot of the Indian youth might be through a mobile phone.

But make no mistake, there will be storm in this space when it takes off and the innovative ones who own either products or services that are path breaking will be the ones who will survive. We have seen baby steps being taken that direction as well where recently Ford Endeavor and Figo used bar codes that were printed in their print advts, which consumers loved to engage with to see a video of the same on their smart phones. I guess that technology has been developed by Telibrahma and is called ‘Augmented Reality’, so there is a bunch of efforts happening in this space by various companies, which are operator independent as well.

So rest assured the space is promising and will get bigger in real time in the next 3-4 yrs.

That is a tricky question, independent agencies will be bought out by the larger ones and we have had a lot of successful home grown independent creative shops and media shops. So it has its advantages and disadvantages, I guess kick ass creative shops will survive in the long run but media houses that are independent- wont!