Fri. Mar 29th, 2024

Flipkart, one of India’s largest online retailers recently forged an alliance with video streaming service Hotstar and launched an advertising platform on Friday. The platform, called Shopper Audience Network, is a new video advertising platform that will allow brands to interact with Flipkart customers through personalized advertising on Hotstar. The new platform stands to leverage data from Flipkart’s massive user base and Hotstar’s significant reach in video advertisements, in order to help brands connect with potential customers using targeted ads.

This initiative is part of a broader strategy by Flipkart to generate more revenue from the flourishing video advertising business, which aims to cement its position as the third-largest digital ads platform in India, behind Google and Facebook. The platform is estimated to reach over 150 million users across hundreds of categories, both companies announced in a joint statement.

“Understanding our customers better than anyone else has always been one of Flipkart’s core strengths, and these insights help marketers in their ad journey, on our platform. This partnership further leverages the intent-based understanding and couples it with Hotstar’s platform to create an unparalleled offering in the ads industry in India,” said Prakash Sikaria, Senior Director at Flipkart, who heads the company’s digital ads business.

Shopper Audience Network will equip brands with the right tools to measure the impact of their digital campaigns, giving insights and improved targeting, which will not only effectively reduce wastage in the marketer’s advertisement spending, but also prevent redundancy for viewers by only displaying ads relevant to them.

Commenting further on this new alliance, Prabh Singh, EVP at Hotstar said in a statement: “In Hotstar, marketers today have access to a large-scale audience that is deeply engaged and paying attention. Brands that advertise on Hotstar are seeing the power of that engagement. The partnership with Flipkart will build on this proposition and provide marketers an opportunity to connect the dots to hundreds of product categories on Flipkart.”

Currently, Hotstar is India’s leading video-streaming platform, ahead of Netflix and Amazon Prime by a huge margin. In a study conducted by Counterpoint research, it was found that Hotstar’s monthly user base was at 75 million at the end of 2017, as compared to Prime Video’s 11 million and Netflix’s 5 million. This might be because unlike Prime Video and Netflix, Hotstar operates on a ‘freemium’ model, which allows users to access their content for free, which is the preferred network type by Indians, as compared to uninterrupted, ad-free viewing pioneered by Netflix.

Hotstar’s video platform has three key components – High-quality content, innovative ad formats and a sticky and affluent audience. When partnered with Flipkart’s rich consumer insights, both companies can come together to create a highly optimized, measurable and compelling communications network between advertisers and their audience.

By Kriti

Business news author and curator at The Indian Wire.

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