We provide perfect environment for high impact advertising: Meera Chopra

Vuclip, the leading premium mobile video on demand (VOD) service for emerging markets caters to India, the Middle East, South East Asia and Africa markets.  It is highly optimistic of aggressive growth in Indian market as far as video advertising on mobile goes, with the prerequisite that it should be served in the right environment.

Adgully caught up with Meera Chopra, VP & Global Head - Ad Sales, Vuclip to understand the present market paradigm, Vuclip game plan and future growth potential. Excerpts:

Ag:How has the market evolved?How has it impacted Vuclip?
(MC):Two years back the number of brands we were working with was way lesser. We probably had a pool of 20-25 brands. Number of brands that work with us now are 150. That is the first change that has happened which indicates that people now want to go to a medium which takes advertising to ‘in the moment’ form of advertising. Consumer is in a specific environment of content and we have to make advertising non- intrusive for him/her.

Ag:And the advertising formats…..
(MC):Initial years were more about selling metrics, which says, for instance can we sell a pre- roll or a banner, you can call it hygiene advertising. Next two years, we graduated to engaging with the consumer and the brand in an environment which is extremely personalized. We currently work with 200+ odd studios, so Vuclip has content right from movies, television shows to music. We have multiple products including browser solutions,Search application and now the Prime application. From advertising perspective,we are working at solutions tomake it a play of content and capturing the consumers’ interest and more importantly how we can marry his interest in the content and his action plan.For example,Mountain Dew has been one of our esteemed advertisers. They are very happy with the response they get by advertising with us.

Ag:So you are saying matching ad content with viewer interests based on data analytics results in greater engagement and sales conversion?
(MC):Yes, of course. Vuclip has a huge reach, close to 24 odd million unique sets that you reach out to. The second part is, we do have the content, and the audience which is engaged. Now thatwe have amazing content, we have reach, we have time spent, we map all the three together. Coming back toMountain Dew example, its positioning statement is Darr Ke Aage Jeet Hai. Most of the time they associate with the kind of content where people are consuming sports, adventure. So can I create an environment which is conducive to what your brand stands for?On Vuclip we have a lot of content which is synergistic. So we created a Dew Zone on Vuclip. A zone is like creating your own TV channel,and Dew zone only has content which is around adventure, sports and sporting events.

Ag:So as an audience, I create that customized environment? Do you give me an opportunity to create a customized environment?
(MC):Each category on Vuclipis typically a channel where you host a certain kind of content. Similarly you create a zone which only pipes certain kind of content. Zones are all about marrying the content with the client’s brand attributes.
We have to place advertising in a way wherein consumers don’t feel it is an ad.Brand association has to be strong and audience interaction has to be in pull format. It is your choice to click on the brand video and start watching it.

Ag:Tell us something about the geographic and demographic targeting that you do?
(MC):Mountain Dew campaign typically was pan India. However,many advertisers are now looking at regional content play. Hindi predominantly would remain the language, but not so if you go down South. You would have lot of content in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam. So now in television, Pepsi will have to do an all India run,they can’t segregate. But with us they can. They can run probably a Mountain Dew in South andanother cola brand or Pepsi in UP depending on their market share. You cannot just be doing a pre roll or a banner and you cannot be showing your ads to everybody.

Ag:What brand categories do you see being preferred more by the consumer?
(MC):Right now, we are not applying the option of choosing which ads I want to watch. We are working towards instituting something like that. Right now it is on the drawing board stage, and might be implemented in 2016.

Ag:Tell us a little bit about the un-buffered environment which you provide to the audience?
(MC):The technology that we offer is adaptive streaming. It is very important in a country like India because connectivity is a big problem, which says that 3G is never 3G. The content that is delivered to you is mapped to your bandwidth at that point of time.

Ag:How much request do you get to push a HD video?
(MC):It is programmed on the homepage. It is not that we get more requests for HD than the others but optimization keeps happening. We will never try to choke your pipeline by saying that I would only push you an HD video. The dynamic streaming will keep working to give you as good an experience across the stream.

Ag:Tell us something more about Prime app?
(MC):As I mentioned, we have Search app and Prime app. Prime has best ratings right now. It has beaten the top apps today in the OTT space. It is a premium application with never ending content. The more you scroll the more content variety you get.

Ag:Have you opened an option of advertising there?
(MC):App launched in March this year. Obviously the first prerogative for Vuclip is to get consumers to start using the app. Get him retained there and then look into monetization. Monetization can be opened any day. It’s a plug and play. But first let the consumer get hooked and graduate to a level where he is open to watching ads. 

Ag:What would be the average size of Vuclip videos?
(MC):Music will typically be small length video. Movies will be long format. So you can watch a full movie. Majority of people are data sensitive so they download. The reason is by downloading you get the experience of watching content at your leisure,andare more ready to watch it. That option is a must for any OTT player who comes to India. He needs to enable a behavior where the user readily downloads the content.

Ag:Are you marketing your services aggressively?
(MC):Currently, a lot of it is organic. For example, look at m.vuclip.com which already has a huge base of consumers accessing our browser. We encourage those people to start using our other products. Second, is we are doing a lot of consumer touch points. We recently did a massive guest lecture at faculty of management studies to orient consumers about what OTT can offer to them. In the second leg, we are looking at other consumer activations. All our advertising and marketing efforts are going to be consumer centric rather than market centric.

Ag:Where do you acquire content from?
(MC):Acquisition of content on Vuclip is primarily driven by consumer interest.  We studyconsumer skew towards different kinds of content and acquire content based on that. Today we have a mix of popular and recent content as well as a lot of classic which is available.

Ag:How much of a customized content are you creating?
(MC):We did a huge project called Vuclip studies where we createdexclusive made for mobile content. We did an interesting series called What If. Right now we are not actively doing that project. However, we truly believe that we need to create mobile only content for the audience and we will be pursuing it aggressively.

Ag:How do you see the market shaping up?
(MC):Nobody can stop this trend. The fragmentation in the market will happen, whether it happens now or five years down the line. Indian consumer is price sensitive and very conscious of the number of applications we want to have. I would rather have one app that gives me consolidated content rather than multiple apps.

Ag:What is your take on competition from players like Hotstar?
(MC):Vuclip has been in this space for eight years. As far as Hotstar is concerned, it is like television viewing today. You have 380 channels on television. Each one has its own viewership that it rides on. You can’t compete with those marketing dollars but at the end of the day, it only has Star content. Both services like Vuclip and Hotstar will have their niche audiences because audience today is content hungry. It is important to understand the pulse of the consumer.

Ag:Which product categories are experimenting with mobile video more aggressively?
(MC) :FMCG is the largest user for us followed by Telecom. Handset manufacturers too are extremely big for us. YouTube also runs a lot of advertising campaigns on Vuclip.

Ag:Can you share the key challenges in this market?
(MC):In terms of advertising, the larger challenge is to get non-traditional guys and increase the pie. People have to realise that MVOD is where they should be putting their money. Retention and engagement of consumerstoo is a challenge for OTT players. Need is to engage the consumers to a level that they become brand loyal.

Ag:What is your TG profile?
(MC):77%, as of now, are male and core TG is 18 to 25. As per our study with Milward Brown 52% of our audience is metro. 48% is non- metro.

Your growth expectations…
Prime is going to be the key focus for us. There is a lot of sustained effort from our end to push Prime at the right spot.  Growth is going to be exponential,largely due to the growth expected of the category. Mobile video is going to be almost 70% of the data consumed. India today is at 19% internet penetration, more the people are going to access the mobile internet, more scope for growth Vuclip will have.