21% of world's 1.9 bn smartphone users use ad blockers: Prashant Puri

AdLift, a leading global digital marketing firm with offices in the US and India (Gurugram), is now planning to expand its global reach and is on the verge of starting its new offices in Mumbai and the APAC. From Fortune 500 companies, including PayPal, eBay, Overstock & Barnes & Noble to companies like Savings.com, LendingTree, LegalZoom, JobVite & CreditSesame in the US and ICICI, Thomas Cook Sterling Holidays, Nykaa, Panasonic, OLX and Rediff in the APAC, AdLift has delivered most popular Web Solutions, SEM Solutions and SEO Solutions to them.

Also, AdLift has recently initiated a new venture called Yral in partnership with cricketer Yuvraj Singh’s YouWeCan Ventures.

Prashant Puri, Co-founder and CEO, AdLift, is a digital marketing expert having an extensive 13 years of industry experience. Prior to founding AdLift, Puri was Head of Global Marketing at eBay’s comparison-shopping arm - Shopping.com, where he established footprints of the company worldwide. Before that, he leadership role at Yahoo! revolved around cutting edge technologies that focused on driving synergies between search and display. In 2005, he successfully nurtured A&T Interactive into the second largest local search player by leading their foray into the digital marketing world.

In conversation with AdGully, Prashant Puri speaks at length about AdLift’s presence in India, the digital marketing ecosystem today, ad blockers and more. Excerpts:

What sets apart AdLift from other digital marketing/ search marketing firms? What’s your USP?
We were a bootstrapped digital marketing agency that’s become a multi-million dollar global digital marketing agency without any angel/ VC investment. We work specifically in North America and APAC markets, where our focus is in driving digital marketing ROI for our clients. Our USP lies in:

1. Our expert team on in-house data analyst and search marketing experts; and
2. Content marketing platform – Content Lift that’s used by 90 per cent of our clients, including Barnes & Noble, ICICI, PayPal, HDFC and many more.

How has your journey been in India so far?
We started operations primarily focusing in the North America market. In 2012, we saw APAC as a big opportunity. There’s been a significant increase in digital marketing spends in India – it’s grown from ~$0.5 billion in 2013 to an estimated $1.5 billion in 2015 – that’s a CAGR of 44 per cent. We’ve been riding this wave!

How big is the digital marketing ecosystem in India today?
As mentioned above, it’s growing rapidly. Analysts estimate this to be ~$1.5 billion in 2016 and grow to $3.6B billion by 2019.

What are the parameters for measuring digital marketing ROI?
There are a number of parameters that we measure ROI depending on the channel that we’re managing. For SEO – it is increase in traffic to the website, conversion rate/ lead generation and improvement on keyword ranking data. For SEM or PPC, it’s optimising for Cost per Acquisition, improved quality scores and lower CPCs.

How tough has it been for you to convince print and television-dependent Indian advertisers to try digital?
It used to be tough back in the days, but now marketers get it. They know if they aren’t on digital they’re missing anywhere between 5 per cent and 20 per cent of their overall revenue.

What is your biggest digital marketing challenge?
We don’t see digital marketing as a challenge but more of an opportunity that’s always going to increase. There’s always a new medium that enters the digital marketing realm every other year, which is fantastic. No other channel changes as fast as digital does. Social is getting a bigger piece of the pie – Facebook is leading the charter here, but you’ve got new entrants and options with Instagram (acquired by Facebook) and Snapchat that’s growing in popularity.

How big a threat are ad-blockers for digital marketers?
Adblocking is a major concern in APAC (not so much in North America). There’s been close to 100 per cent increase in ad blockers being used today and this is a major concern with 21 per cent of the world’s 1.9 billion smartphone users using ad blockers. Digital marketers need to think hard and act fast – they need to come up with non-intrusive smart advertising. We as an industry have allowed intrusive ads to run across the board – this needs to stop.

Where do you see the strongest growth coming from in India?
Within digital marketing – I see the strongest growth to come from content marketing and social media influencer marketing.

What has been your year-on-year growth? What revenues are you targeting this fiscal?
We don’t dispose revenue numbers but our YoY growth has been in the lower three digit percentage range.

Please tell us about your new venture - Yral. How is it helping marketers?
Yral (pronounced ‘viral’) was founded in January 2016. Yral is a joint venture between AdLift and YouWeCan Ventures, a Yuvraj Singh initiative. Yral seamlessly connects advertisers with celebrities by leveraging their social media network. Yral’s goal is to deliver the right audience and scalable reach to its advertisers by leveraging modern social media platforms.

Today, brands need to jump through hoops to reach the right celebrity/ influencer. Moreover, celebrities have unprecedented reach and a strong connect with their followers/ fans on social, which remains underutilised. Yral makes it easier to leverage a celebrity (real influencer) to endorse their brand online.

What does the crystal ball say for digital marketing in India?
Growth. Growth. Growth!