<div><em>Information platforms to crawl the web to pick relevant content for marketers to make their campaigns become more personal. <strong>Vishal Krishna</strong> reports</em></div><div> </div><div> </div><div>The name of the digital game today is “engaging” the consumer. The consumers, so far, discover content by themselves and are very often in a fix about the pertinence of the content consumed. But how does a marketing company discover the right content and continue a lasting engagement over a campaign or even try to engage the consumer personally. The answer lies with engineers. Startups such as AirLoyal, DrumUp and IceCream Labs are helping companies to take information and re-market them to consumers. These technology companies are self-funded companies and have now achieved reasonable scale to raise funds. They are betting on their intellectual property, the data engineering and analytics engines, to make their pitch stronger, which is to tell marketers that they need these platforms to make campaigns effective to keep a customer loyal to the brand. </div><div> </div><div>Big Brands are spending at least, Rs 100 crore, each year in trying to increase engagement over the web and soon this number is only going to go up significantly. GroupM, the media buying agency, says that the total market for digital spends hit only Rs 3,400 crore in 2014, expected to double by 2018, which is less than 7 per cent of the total marketing spends in the country. However, in the net, it is very important to find early influencers and marketers for engaging the digital citizens. Today a campaign drives up traffic on a website or an app and then the traffic dies because of lack of continuous engagement. IceCream Labs worked with Lifestyle, the Rs 4000-crore retailer, to make the retailer’s private label brand “Code” to reach the relevant target audience on the web. Every time a person made a search for the word “Farhan Akthar” and entered a website, images of Farhan Akthar wearing Lifestyle’s collection appeared as a banner. “The algorithms are powerful because they recognise images and bring it as part of content during campaigns,” says Madhu Konety, founder of Icecream Labs. This is also a new form of ad-technology where content is preferred over plain banners. Icecream Labs has raised two rounds of angel funding, sources say the amount raised is close to $250,000 or Rs1.50 crore. </div><div> </div><div>Similarly, DrumUp helps marketers crawl the web and get content which is relevant to their brands. “Discovery of content has to become an engagement. Today content is what ad-technology companies are after,” says Vishal Dutta, founder of DrumUp. This startup is building a Business-to-Business (B2B) and a consumer strategy. “Today organisations are willing to pay to get relevant content,” says Dutta. The consumer can use our app to get content for free, which will be the data on which DrumUp will engage businesses. They are currently in talks to close a $1 million (Rs 6 crore) round. They are in many ways similar to HootSuite, based in the USA and started in 2008, which raised $285 million to help companies their social media platforms.</div><div> </div><div>“Today TV is still important for engagement, but with the growth of marketing smartphones will use this channel increasingly because of it can be customised,” says Hemanth Rupani, VP Sales for Britannia India.</div><div> </div><div>The ideas do not stop there. AirLoyal, a Chennai based startup, has signed up over 20 companies and are signing a vendor agreement with a large FMCG company to make their campaigns powerful. Their app “Ladoo” is doing two things, first, it makes consumers take simple questions on the app, on behalf of brands, for which they receive free vouchers that can be redeemed on different brands. Second, it provides brands a platform to ask questions and get responses on trending topics. This campaign ignition platform can also be white labelled for marketers. It provides dashboards based on various variables fed in to the software based on the kind of the questions the marketing team chooses to input on to the platform. “This is a far better way of engaging consumers, than throwing in banner ads across apps,” says Raja Hussain, co-founder of AirLoyal. The company competes with the likes of mCent, which has a similar business model.</div><div> </div><div>In India the per customer acquisition cost is larger than what they spend on a product. Today for 36 million customers, net savvy or smart phone savvy, advertisers spend Rs 1100 per person. The ad spends are made on acquisition of the customer rather than engaging them. At least these startups are going to play a prominent part in making marketing meaningful. </div><div> </div><div> </div><div> </div>
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