ZAPR’s proprietary technology profiles the offline media consumption behavior of millions of people, enabling content owners and brands, for the very first time, to identify their offline audiences and re-engage with them on digital and mobile.
BW Disrupt got into an exclusive conversation with Mr. Sandipan Mondal, CEO, ZAPR to understand more about the platform and its offerings. Q- Please elaborate more on ZAPR?A- Bangalore based media-tech startup, ZAPR, with its proprietary technology platform, profiles the offline media consumption behavior of millions of people, enabling content owners and brands, for the very first time, to identify their offline audiences and re-engage with them on digital and mobile. ZAPR has been working with leading media agencies, brands and broadcasters to help them better understand the media consumption preferences of millions of Indians, and to engage with their audiences seamlessly across TV as well as the mobile and social universe.
ZAPR blends together expertise in digital signal processing and data analytics to identify, analyze and derive insights from the media consumption habits of millions of people across the country. ZAPR is one of India’s most advanced digital signal processing and media data analytics labs. One of ZAPR’s primary research areas is content recognition and the team of engineers and statisticians, has built some of the most sophisticated algorithms in the field, to power ZAPR’s product portfolio. ZAPR’s research focus is also demonstrated through our strong collaborations with academia.
Q- How is ZAPR helping brands in optimizing their ad spends and audience engagement?A- ZAPR builds anonymized profiles for millions of individuals based on their offline media consumption patterns, and allow brands and media companies to engage with them. ZAPR is at a unique position to help brands bridge their offline advertising strategy with their mobile strategies and enhance their audience buying plans/ ad spends. Users who are consuming offline content are usually and simultaneously engaged elsewhere, leading them to ignore TV commercials. ZAPR’s technology allows brands to identify specific target audiences, create audience segments based on their TV viewership habits and engage with them on the mobile platform in a relevant, personalized and contextual manner. Ad campaigns can now be directed across platforms, to ensure that a brand's wasted TV impressions are reinforced across screens. ZAPR blurs the line between the silos of mobile and TV, allowing brands to reach the same audience across both screens.
Media budgets are allocated based on the insights and strategy of experienced planners. They are well equipped to analyze and internalize multiple data sets and act according to the picture that emerges from the data. Previously, they were forced to take decisions based on an incomplete picture. Platforms like ZAPR are attempting to fill in the gaps, and help the planners get a more comprehensive view of the consumption patterns in the industry.
Some examples of audience engagement:
• A leading GEC recently worked with ZAPR to understand the performance of the promos of its new TV show. Using the Data Platform, ZAPR was able to identify the conversion of audiences from the promo to the actual show, and built a correlation model to measure effectiveness.
• ZAPR also worked with a broadcaster worked with ZAPR to create dashboards highlighting viewership trends of their channels, and other players in the genre, across the entire country. Through these rich dashboards, the analytics team at the broadcaster can compare the performance of their channel and shows, across granular geographic areas across the country.
• Finally, a regional broadcaster had a new prime-time show launching, and used the ZAPR audience platform to target viewers of competing shows, by pushing the show promos to them to build show awareness, on Facebook and other mobile apps.
ZAPR connects the TV screen with the mobile screen, i.e., it allows the industry to engage with TV viewers on their mobile devices.
Q- Who are your stakeholders and what is your value proposition for them?A- Operating at the intersection of media, mobile, tech and data analytics, ZAPR is India’s largest media consumption repository and audience platform. Through its deep expertise in digital signal processing and advanced analytics, ZAPR is building comprehensive media-consumption profiles for millions of Indians, and ushering in greater transparency and efficiencies in media analytics, planning and engagement. ZAPR’s proprietary data platform and audience engagement platform can be leveraged to drive media targeted brand engagement campaigns and to derive data-backed audience and consumer insights.
As a B2B company, ZAPR works with leading brands, media agencies, broadcasters, research agencies and others, through a suite of product offerings, across data and audience.
ZAPR is at a unique position to help brands bridge their offline advertising strategy with their mobile strategies and enhance their audience buying plans. Users who are consuming offline content are usually and simultaneously engaged elsewhere, leading them to ignore TV commercials. Ad campaigns can now be directed across platforms, to ensure that a brand's wasted TV impressions are reinforced across screens. ZAPR blurs the line between the silos of mobile and TV, allowing brands to reach the same audience across both screens. ZAPR’s technology allows broadcasters as well to identify specific target audiences, create audience segments based on their TV viewership habits and engage with them on the mobile platform in a relevant, personalized and contextual manner.
ZAPR can provide marketers and researchers with crowd sourced data that can be used to enhance their marketing strategies based on media consumption patterns of target audiences. It permits marketers to re-engage with viewers exposed to brand’s TVC across screens and augment their frequency. This also permits them to deliver content to a viewer’s handheld device based on his or her language preferences.
With in-depth understanding of media consumption habits, ZAPR bridges the gap between TV and mobile for a more rich and screen-agnostic media viewing experience. ZAPR replaces irrelevant advertising with engaging and personalized content thereby improving the content consumption experience of the end-user.
Q- How does ZAPR help with rich content delivery for consumers?A- The ZAPR Audience Platform can be leveraged to identify relevant audience segments based on their media consumption habits and to engage with them across the mobile ecosystem, thereby enabling brands and content creators to bridge their TV and mobile strategies.
For example, a movie studio with a new upcoming Hollywood action movie, can identify millions of people who enjoy watching similar movies and push the trailer to them. Or a sports brand can identify millions of people watching specific sports matches and engage with them. Or an FMCG brand looking to reach out to prime-time GEC viewers can engage with them specifically. Hence consumers receive customized content based on their media consumption patterns.
Q- What is your growth strategy? After TV and mobile audience engagement, what’s next?A- While ZAPR’s current focus is on television, which is still the largest media format in India, our technology platform is format-agnostic. Our goal is really to build a comprehensive profile for all forms of media consumption. Having solved for TV consumption data, our research is now focused on non-linear formats, keeping future consumption trends in mind. ZAPR plans to expand across radio, movies in theater and most importantly, video-on-demand in the coming months.
Our intent is to be a single-source repository to analyze and understand comprehensive cross-format media consumption. Over the next few months, we will also be launching innovative mobile product offerings to help brands re-engage with their audiences in a contextual and relevant fashion and extract much better ROI. This will also help our mobile app partners drive better engagement with their users and get more value for their ad inventory. Our technology is also geography agnostic, and we will soon be considering expanding to other countries. For the near future, however, we are focused on India, expanding our product portfolio and working and collaborating with stakeholders across the industry.
Q- What are your thoughts on the media consumption habits and patterns of the Indian audience?A- Indians love humor and are beginning to take to sports in a big way. Non cricket sports – Kabaddi, Football etc. are growing rapidly in popularity. Additionally, we watch a lot of regional content.
Q- What opportunities does the media-tech landscape hold for ZAPR?A- A lot of practices and methodologies in the media and advertising industry were decades old. It’s been just a few years since ZAPR started and we’re seeing the industry moving away from those today and adopting new age technology, with disruption in content formats, distribution platforms, consumption patterns and advertising strategies.
The multi-billion dollar media and advertising industry had very limited access to massive data-sets on content consumption and preferences of people. ZAPR’s data now acts as a bridge, connecting TV and mobile, enabling content creators to identify, understand and engage with their audiences. Imagine if a sports brand could identify viewers of football matches, or a youth-centric brand could identify viewers of a reality show, and engage with them, in a contextual and personalized fashion on mobile. ZAPR is bridging the gap between the 40 inch screen and the 4 inch screen. Companies have always been very particular on taking data-driven decisions. While this is not a new phenomenon in any way, their analytics teams were always constrained by the limited data available, so is the case with the media and advertising industry as well. Today, as technology evolves and makes massive data sets available to the industry, data analytics is evolving to be able to work with and analyze such large data repositories. Today data analytics is becoming a part of all functions in media and advertising - everything from decisions on content strategy, brand strategy, media strategy etc.
Q- If you were to share 3 USP’s of ZAPR, what will they be?A-
• ZAPR is India’s largest media consumption repository and audience targeting platform
• ZAPR is one of India’s most advanced digital signal processing and media data analytics labs
• For the very first time, ZAPR enables content creators to better understand the media consumption trends of millions of their viewers, and to engage with them in a personalized and contextual manner
