Evolving Marketing Trends in OTT, the Use of Customer Data and AI to Predict and Personalise Engagements

Key highlights

What this conversation covers

You were part of many organisations across multiple industries over the past two decades, and now you are a marketing leader in the media and entertainment space. What are the key trends you have observed over the past decade across various industries?

I started my journey as a marketing executive in retail, and from retail I moved to broadcast media, then to music, to telecom, and finally now to the digital space.

The trends that I observed in retail were quite a few; however, the most interesting was being called the Barista generation, because the key trend then was the start of the coffee culture and socialising over a cup of coffee in a chic ambiance. Another trend that I started at Barista was creating merchandising and space selling categories that were later adapted by many coffee chains. Moving on, when I shifted to broadcast, I observed that the broadcasters then could create mindset changes via content, and there are multiple examples like Balika Vadhu with a social message, Indian Idol, Bigg Boss and Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa, which gave rise to the reality show viewing culture. At Tata Docomo, we created the trend of pay per second, while the industry trend was pay per minute, therefore exceeding the subscriber count by 3x of what was expected. Six months later, TRAI made it mandatory for every telecom player to introduce the pay per second plan. The music industry introduced the trend of electronic dance music, and LeEco started the trend of creating a 360 degree ecosystem comprising content, apps, and peripherals.

Across the media and entertainment industry, I would say the latest trend is going digital all the way. From a time when only 7% of marketing budgets were allocated to digital, it has come a long way now that digital gets at least 70% of the same budgets. It is a considerable change in how marketers across industries depend on digital, AI, and personalisation for consumer engagements rather than using ambivalent media or TV.

I am sure that this shift comes with its own set of inherent challenges, because you also need to have content concerning consumer trends. How are you leveraging technology to meet consumer demand in terms of personalisation of content? Is ALTBalaji using AI in any form to manage content personalisation at scale?

Yes, there are challenges, and that is where the analytics behaviour comes into play. We at ALTBalaji not only look at segmentation across basic demographics, that is age, location, and social attributes, but also place emphasis on something called mindset marketing. Here is an example of mindset marketing.

Last year we launched season two of a show called Broken But Beautiful, meant specifically for urban women and men. However, after a certain point in time, as our regular exercise, we tried to identify the behaviour of the viewers who were churning out, to find out what they had been doing on the app, time spent, other shows watched, and which top five shows were on their priority list. The results were quite an eye-opener for us. The first show that they onboarded with was Broken But Beautiful, but the next show a certain segment of that audience watched was from a completely different genre. This shows that there is a tendency among viewers to change genres at the flick of a button, and busts the myth that women do not watch sensual shows. We also identified that not just young women, but even those above 45 or from small towns, watch sensual shows. So, there is multiple interesting behaviour analytics that can be found through data science. Using AI, we reached out to these women viewers and sent them personalised messages that they anticipate. This means that a certain segment of the viewer community is more open to various content genres, and there is a possibility of engaging more with these sets with multiple pieces of content at once. These are the kinds of discoveries and actions we are leveraging out of analytics and trying to personalise the communication and improve engagement and subsequent action.

Are there any other AI use cases that you would specifically like to mention that are helping ALTBalaji achieve business growth?

We use personalisation in our messaging across business WhatsApp, emails, SMS, and push notifications to reach out to various consumer segments daily to control churn. We also use A/B testing across our viewer base with offers while onboarding, by serving segment-specific content using AI-led personalisation and hyper-personalisation. We subsequently track the response, which lets us understand how each consumer is reacting to what type of personalisation. However, we must realise that AI, for us at this point, is still at a very nascent stage and can only improve with the data wisdom we acquire.

Another case is that we are now going to use AI to measure and predict user engagement based on their behaviour for specific shows daily. This will help us create a predictive user journey and a model that allows us to map a show's performance well ahead of it being launched. So, to sum it up, we are using personalisation, predictive analytics, and measurement using AI to interact, engage, and serve our viewers with their content and communication preferences in mind.

Very recently, ALTBalaji and Vijay Sales formed a first of its kind strategic alliance for in-store branding for a web series, creating visibility to a captive high net worth audience, maximising brand recall and business ROI. What other vital initiatives have you been executing as a marketer in the OTT space?

OTT is typically divided into a few kinds of business models for apps, and one of them is the subscription video on demand model. Examples of some SVOD apps are ALTBalaji, Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, which are strictly subscription-driven platforms. We have no ad-based video on demand content available. With us, at ALTBalaji, most of the first episodes of a series are free, and the rest is entirely behind a paywall for which viewers must subscribe. Network-backed apps like Hotstar, ZEE5 and Voot are a combination of AVOD and SVOD. They have their broadcast channels' catch-up content on an AVOD platform; however, original content or movies are always part of their SVOD offerings. Typically, AVOD platforms are supported by advertiser revenue, whereas the SVOD platforms will have opportunities available so as not to disturb the consumer's ad-free viewing experience.

We allow brands to participate in advertising only on the first free episodes, we do co-marketing on already shot content, and then we have content integration opportunities for advertisers. However, we are very particular about how the integration happens so that the consumer has a seamless viewing experience.

We have executed a 10 minute virtual reality experience around Ragini MMS 2 that no other OTT platform in India has done; we have done the Breast Buffer campaign that got us nominated in Cannes as well, and many such initiatives.

Content production is almost at a standstill for all production houses due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, there has been a spike in subscribers for ALTBalaji in Q4 2019-20 plus most of April. How do you manage the creation of new content and the distribution of existing content to keep the user stickiness intact?

As India grows more digitally savvy and adds almost 10 million active internet users per month, as per a Google report, we can still target new viewers, as for them our library is new. We have the most extensive Hindi originals library compared to all digital platforms, with more than 60 original series. So for us, the tracks are parallel: library push, and the launch of new shows. We have already launched three shows during COVID-19 and are planning to launch our fourth, and we have several shows in the pipeline to be edited and launched over time.

As a marketer, in the post-COVID-19 situation, what kind of trends do you foresee across industries? It can be specific to OTT if you want to share that, or it could be just across the board for a marketer.

During COVID-19, as I said, our work has not gone down as an OTT platform. We are continually working and delivering to the consumer to keep them entertained during this tough phase. Our goal of content discovery during this phase has not changed, and it is the mediums through which we reach out to the consumer that have changed. In the current phase, we are not using out-of-home, print, or radio as an advertising channel. Instead, we are focusing on digital mediums, other OTT platforms, and television news channels.

The second trend we will see is the small-town focus. We are focusing more on acquiring smaller town web viewers using a web light version, a PWA app, for our library of content. So, from an AVOD perspective, things may not look good at the moment; however, things have moved up from a subscription perspective. Also, the advertising revenue for the broadcast industry will change in the equation, as the post-COVID situation will see a lifestyle remodelling, and ultimately new normals will emerge for marketers to connect with consumers.

The third trend that I see emerging is virtual reality, digital engagement like gamification, digital payments and delivery, and digital healthcare and digital education, that will be on the surge.