Hotstar, one of India's leading OTT platforms, and Zapr Media Labs, a Bangalore based media tech company, today announced a strategic partnership to drive the next wave of mobile audience analytics in India.
The two companies will work together to create a deep understanding of mobile audiences that can be leveraged by brands to create personalised communication and offers.
While access to the Internet has been exploding in India in the last few years, especially on the mobile screen, mobile marketing has been constrained till date by the lack of availability of platforms that marry deep user engagement and audience segmentation.
Many brands have deployed significant amounts of money on mobile in the last few years, especially through banner and in stream display ads, marketers have been frustrated by the lack of brand building vehicles online that allow them to leverage deep audience analytics.
Ajit Mohan, CEO, Hotstar said, "We believe that we have a shot at creating the world's premier truly personalised advertising service, which benefits both brands and consumers."
Sandipan Mondal, Co-founder and CEO, Zapr Media Labs said, "We look forward to accelerating the pace of our research & development, growing our product portfolio and building a deeper and long lasting relationship with the larger media and advertising industry."
The strategic partnership is accompanied by a minority investment into Zapr Media Labs from Star. Zapr's proprietary technology platform analyses television viewership across 600+ channels in India providing targeted digital analytics and insight into offline consumption behaviour.
Zapr has built an analytics platform that combines this proprietary understanding with enriched data that allows advertisers to use it for sharper audience targeting and analysis.
Zapr enjoys a strong foothold in the analytics space and as part of the next stage of growth, plans to invest further in R&D and grow the team across cross platform data sciences, analytics and product management.
For Hotstar, the partnership signals a clear intent to evolve from a media startup to a full-fledged technology and analytics company that shapes the next wave of mobile usage and advertising in India. With more than 60 million users in the month of January and a sharp uptick in user growth in the last few months, the platform already boasts of some of the highest daily engagement amongst its followers.
The announcement is a big step in the direction of becoming the world's premier personalised advertising service.
