Ashwin Shekhar, Co-Founder, AVOW talks exclusively about the enormous potential for OEM marketing in India and the key trends that will drive its growth in 2023
CXOToday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Mr. Ashwin Shekhar, Co-Founder, AVOW
- Take us through AVOW- what it offers and how it works for various industry stakeholders
AVOW is a leading app growth marketing company which focuses on maximizing the potential of ad inventory offered by mobile Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) like Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, Realme, OnePlus, Samsung, and Vivo. We specialize in advertising within alternative app stores and other distribution channels like Dynamic Preloads via Google PAI (Play Auto Install) on mobile OEMs. We provide brands with a unique opportunity to invest their ad spend across untapped avenues for incremental user growth and engagement at scale.
- Specific to India, what market areas are you addressing? What are your key differentiators from players operating in your space in India?
At AVOW, our mission is to augment awareness around the great potential that lies for app developers in working with mobile OEMs. To achieve this mission in India as well, we will keep working towards educating mobile marketers and app developers about various advantages of mobile OEMs when integrated into their mobile marketing mix. With India as our largest inventory market, we are focusing on on-device display ads delivery, retargeting, and Dynamic Preload services as key strategic areas.
In terms of our unique value proposition for the market, our offerings include:
- Access to 1.5+ billion daily active users (DAU)
- Risk-free CPI inventory from the start
- Transparency and complete control over traffic
- Premium ad placements and advanced targeting options in alternative app stores
- 100% Fraud Free Ad Units, as confirmed by major MMPs
- Optimized real-time enhanced engagement levels
This year we introduced our offering for “Dynamic Preloads” to the Indian market, which grants our clients the exclusive possibility to be featured on thousands of smartphones right from the get-go, when new users activate their mobile devices for the first time.
- How has AVOW’s growth journey in India been so far? Any milestones which you would like to talk about?
Since entering the India market, we have provided services to leading industry players, including Amazon Prime, Unacademy, upGrad, Byju’s, My11Circle, and Navi, among many others, resulting in incremental user growth and engagement for their mobile apps.
AVOW is the only company holding official partnerships with all major Android mobile OEMs such as Xiaomi, Huawei, Samsung, Oppo, Vivo, and OnePlus, encapsulating a huge market share of 90% of India’s Android mobile market.
In order to pave the way for more localized account management in the region, we have a team of four people on the ground, including the recent onboarding of Sandeep Negi as our new Associate Director of Sales. Sandeep, a seasoned media sales veteran, will oversee our business expansion in the country with the help of three members from the Marketing & Client Strategy departments.
In more recent news, this year AVOW was lauded with four major recognitions:
- Selected as Xiaomi’s Core Agency for Xiaomi’s MiAds platform
- Won “Best Agency” in Huawei’s Editors’ Choice Awards 2022
- Recognized as Oppo Ads Strategic Agency 2022
- Received Best Agency Partner Award by VIVO
On top of that, we were also ranked twice in AppsFlyer Performance Index (in its 13th and 14th editions) in the top 10 of Indian subcontinent.
- What’s AVOW’s business roadmap in India for 2023-24?
In the Indian mobile app ecosystem, AVOW’s one-stop solution for mobile OEM aggregation is steadily expanding its presence and solidifying our position as the most viable and lucrative advertising alternative to traditional play stores.
For the upcoming years, we’d break down the market into two to three different verticals:
Apps looking at growth and wanting to decrease their dependency on Google and Facebook. We are working with brands and companies who are in the hyper-growth stage to acquire new users and enhance their reach outside tier 1 and tier 2 cities. This is done by advertising on alternative app stores offered by our mobile OEM partners.
Secondly, we are also leveraging dynamic preloads to cater to these hyper-growth companies to be the users’ first choice when they start the device for the first time. We focus on increasing the LTV and install rates of these hyper-growth apps with dedicated placements.
Lastly, AVOW will continue to help brands acquire new users who have achieved high mass appeal, particularly in e-commerce, shopping, and entertainment app categories. We will help them deploy an effective performance marketing strategy with retargeting capabilities to be able to target and retain users who have engaged with their apps in the past.
- What’s the potential for Mobile OEM marketing in India vis-a-vis the global scenario?
The potential is enormous, be it Dynamic Preloads, retargeting, or Display Ads. We want to ensure that we are tapping into quality users at every point of the funnel, not only when they navigate through the Google Play Store but also with app recommendations and suggestions at multiple touchpoints within the device.
Most advertisers are now looking at alternative distribution channels outside of the Google Play Store, which is being secured by the mobile OEM ecosystem. In addition, the recent biggest speculation around Apple allowing alternative app stores on its devices could be a potential game changer in the mobile marketing industry.
Generally, when mobile OEMs ship their devices, they also have the default app stores preinstalled, which users use for app discoverability. The app developers are also keen to test and upload multiple apps across different mobile OEM alternative app stores as, technically, no code change is required. This is highly advantageous for app developers because they can tap into every facet of users irrespective of their engagements with the Google Play Store.
With mobile OEMs, we can tap into the browser inventories. For example, when users browse, they will see, engage, and interact with ads of similar search intent, offering a huge potential for app marketers to tap into users outside the app stores.
- What are the key trends that will drive the growth of OEM marketing in 2023? What has been a major shift which you’ve observed since the onset of the pandemic?
The year 2022 witnessed the OEM ad platforms of smartphone players like Xiaomi, Samsung, and Vivo aggressively penetrating into western markets and steadily coming to the forefront in India – a trend that we expect to continue throughout 2023. We also foresee mobile OEMs continuing to challenge the duopoly of Google and Facebook in the manners shared earlier.
The evolution of ad tech platforms by mobile OEMs has come a long way, and it will certainly transform the face of mobile marketing in 2023. Mobile OEMs are successfully strengthening their targeting capabilities while being able to tap into users based on time spent on the apps. They can also penetrate deeper into the users’ interests based on app categories. This will drive a lot of app developers across growing verticals in India to discover and tap into users with incremental value.
Another key trend to watch out for would be Apple opening all doors for alternative app stores to be accessible on Apple devices such as iPhones and iPads. We have observed that advertisers have few choices once they advertise with a third-party ad network such as Google and Facebook. They keep looking for newer alternatives to advertise and promote their apps.
Additionally, we also foresee apps leveraging seasonality to scale up their reach and business to stay competitive. With many significant sports events lined up in 2023 nationally and globally, coupled with major festivals in India, we expect brands to churn out dedicated localized campaigns to leverage seasonality.
Looking at the trends, we could say mobile OEM channels will be harnessed by more and more mobile gaming apps (special placements during sports events like IPL, T20 World Cup, etc.), entertainment apps, and e-commerce apps (special placements during festive discounts and sales).
- What’s the role of technology in personalizing and optimizing on-device ads?
On-device ads can be optimized in multiple ways. One such way is to leverage appographic targeting – an app-interest-based audience targeting advertising platform to promote those apps to users interested in apps of a similar category. There’s no lookalike audience for implementing this kind of technology. Users interacting with similar apps are targeted with real-time data insights offered by most of the MMPs and mobile OEMs.
This reduces the probability of leaving redundant audiences and increases our confidence to enable mobile marketers to target users with specific interests and help them make the most out of their ROAS (return on ad spend). For example, users who love using the Spotify app can be targeted to download Amazon Prime Video using appographic targeting, as we know these users have a high intent of consuming entertainment content.
