2023 is going to be the era of hyper-personalization, connected journeys, and a shift in how marketers approach and target multiple touchpoints.

CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Mr. Vipul Kedia, Chief Data & Platform Officer, Affle

1.        Provide an overview of the digital advertising landscape in India / evolution of Affle 2.0

The digital advertising landscape in India has been quite fragmented and we are entering a time when the global technology sector is undergoing a paradigm shift due to constantly evolving consumer trends accelerated towards mobile-first behaviors. As early enablers for these conversations, we are starting to see a shift towards even more technological engagements. At the same time, the classic value drivers of scale, efficiency and expansion are being severely tested by the rapid development of intelligent technologies and connected solutions for the enterprises worldwide.

With emerging scenarios and global tech megatrends as a core to our future-backed innovation, we unveiled Affle2.0 Consumer Tech Platform Stack in 2021-22 powered by Affle2.0 strategy. We are redefining the connected landscape by leveraging our big data and machine learning capabilities to target relevant potential customers, while simultaneously reducing ad fraud through our end-to-end mobile technology platform.

2.         How is Affle positioned to address digital marketing space? With users consuming content across various devices, how do you plan to leverage this opportunity?

Affle powers unique and integrated consumer journeys for marketers to drive high ROI, measurable outcome-led advertising across global connected devices. We stand out by consistently scaling up our technological capabilities, orchestrating digital priorities of the advertisers globally through innovative use cases and delivering constant consumer engagements over the course of their lifetime. Our proprietary consumer intelligence platform delivers consumer recommendations and conversions through relevant Mobile Advertising across the omnichannel connected ecosystem through our platforms – Appnext, Jampp, MAAS, mediasmart, RevX, Vizury – to address the needs of the advertisers and consumers across various steps of the consumer journey and devices.

Be it the full-funnel user acquisition and in-app user conversions, on-device app discovery that blends into the users’ mobile journey, high-impact measurable Connected TV (CTV) advertising, or integrating online to offline shopping experiences, our advanced technology stack empowers brands to engage with relevant consumers at scale across the connected devices through multiple use cases integrated and drive results with real-time insights.

3.          How can brands benefit from Affle’s solutions? Please give some examples of how brands have benefited from Affle’s solutions.

Affle unifies and simplifies the fragmented advertising and marketing tech ecosystem by providing an end- to-end integrated mobile marketing platform. We do this through our deep learning algorithms that transform ads into consumer recommendations to deliver enhanced engagements, conversions, and ROI for brands globally. Our platforms have powered award-winning campaigns for brands like Swiggy,

Discovery+, Lotus Herbals, Fossil, which have been recognized at prestigious industry forums such as Maddies, MMA Smarties, and Mobexx.

While the industry is largely dominated by companies operating on clicks, views and impressions, Affle is well differentiated as it drives CPCU based conversions for advertisers across the industry verticals. Key differentiator for Affle is our end-to-end automated mobile advertising consumer platform that improves conversions across the funnel through our unique tech that integrates strong DMP (data management platform), mFaaS (fraud detection) and effective user prediction algorithm, along with product offerings that eliminate the guess work from channel optimization and help to integrate online and offline customers.

4.        How do you plan to tap the consumer base in Tier-2 and -3 cities?

In FY 2020-21 we unveiled the Affle2.0 Consumer Tech Platform Stack powered by the Affle2.0 strategy that is anchored on the 2Vs – (Vernacular & Verticalization) and 2Os – (OEMs and Operator) level partnerships to drive deeper verticalization for our advertisers across industry verticals.

Vernacular and Video form important parts of Affle’s growth strategy and we power scalable opportunities for our advertisers to reach out to their target audience in local languages. Our Consumer Platform aims to be present across all consumer touchpoints, also focusing on gaining significant reach among audiences for whom English is not the language of choice. We have seen an increasing share of advertisers deploy local language creatives in their campaigns and this trend continues to grow. We have worked with some of the largest apps to drive their local language campaigns and acquire users who were hard to engage without such customizations

5.        What important trends do you expect to play out in 2023?

2023 is going to be the era of hyper-personalization, connected journeys, and a shift in how marketers approach and target multiple touchpoints. The last two years, many businesses either went mobile-first or doubled down on their digital channels to reach newer audiences. In 2023, we are going to see a further strengthening of how marketers understand and respond to unifying their messages across mediums, languages, and demographics. So, mediums like Connected TV, WhatsApp Commerce, OEMs are going to play a significant role in connecting these user journeys.

The pandemic added a new layer of mobile users who took to mobile apps for the first time and are now active users. So, the next 100 million shoppers in India are expected to come from these audiences who have a vernacular affinity. Marketers must invest in more localized, contextualized opportunities to drive recommendations and conversions.

In this context, to cater to local context and product preferences, data-driven segmentation is going to be key. While data insights are crucial for marketers to target and reach their users, it is also important to segment the right set of users. Our mDMP platform uses the deep learning and Machine Learning technology to go beyond just demographic-based segmentation and target according to language, interest, personas, in a privacy-first approach. These will help marketers to customize their creatives and communication accordingly.