MarTech Mumbai: By '21, 75% content intake in India will be in vernacular: Taranjeet Singh

In this digital age, marketers are competing with several conditions like time constraints, endless channels and content formation, and in such a scenario the most challenging part is to deliver contextually-relevant content in a brand-safe environment.

To discuss how a brand can break the clutter and target a specific segment at exchange4media Martech Mumbai 2019, Taranjeet Singh, Chief Revenue Officer and Business Head, ZEE5 India, shared his insights on how ZEE5 has been leveraging MarTech and helping brands hyper-personalise their offerings.

Singh started off the session by stating that ZEE5 is the fastest growing ConTech brand, an OTT platform that delivers content in 12 different languages. He further explained how ZEE5 has been building tech capabilities for brands to reach out to their audiences.

Speaking about India as a market and the opportunities for brands and advertisers to reach out to these audiences, he said, “India has a massive addressable audience. The next billion internet users across the world will be from India. The growth is huge and by 2021 it is expected to touch 900 million. As per the television rating system by BARC, the estimated reach of TV in our country is 900 million. In 2021, mobiles are going to overtake that reach of 900 million in terms of advertisers who can reach a potential audience. The OTT market, in the next five years, is estimated to be $5 billion as per the BCG report. The revenues will be across SVOD, AVOD and all forms of services.”

Singh highlighted that OTT Video On Demand has been driving this consumption as more and more people are consuming digital videos. The behaviour of consumption is not appointment viewing rather it's about time and choice. These are the things that drive human behaviour in consuming their content.

He said, 62 per cent of India's video consumption today is happening in regional languages. “If you look at regional content by 2021, almost 75 per cent of content consumption will happen in vernacular in India. There's a massive opportunity for content producers to reach out to potential new audiences or look at engaging with audiences,” mentioned Singh.

Speaking about what ZEE5 is planning and what are they doing in terms of building capabilities and technology for brands and advertisers to engage with audiences, he said:
“There are three critical things driving the digital growth - Video, Vernacular and Voice. We have a play in all three. We are one of the largest video platforms in this country with more than 1,000 hours of content and over half a billion video views a month is what we deliver to an audience.”
Singh shared that at ZEE5, data, technology, and content are the three key pillars of the company. ZEE5’s vision is to be a single entertainment hub across videos, music, podcasts, engagement and multiple other use cases. The network also has partnerships with telecoms, OEMs, connected devices, on the go partners and payment gateways.

“We're leveraging the entire ecosystem in this country. We are working and leveraging all sorts of partnerships because consumers can come from all possible ways.” In 18 months, ZEE5 has 76.4 million monthly active users, 8.9 million peak active daily users, 536 million monthly video views and 120 minutes average watch duration per user.

Speaking about the ZEE5 Ad Suite- 360-degree value delivered, the amalgamation of content and technology to reach the right audience, right messaging with the right tools that will help meet brand KPIs. Singh said, “At the end of the day, we're also a platform where advertisers come to us of services to reach out to the audience. It was important for us to build the right technology to help them. We launched a service with five key products including Infomix, Advault, Ampi5, Wishbox, and play5.”

Singh concluded his session sharing that the idea was to build unique intimate relationships with audiences and creating an intuitive individual user experience. “The whole idea is of hyper-personalization for not only as a brand but as a service to our customers and advertisers and that's the endeavours how we are building our ad tech technology.”