Gamification & VR - the next big consumer engagement drivers on OTT: Divya Dixit

Adgully is back with a new edition of its annual feature – TRENDING NOW – where we present the strategies and views of a cross-section of industry leaders as they go about reclaiming lost time and market opportunities and build for a stronger future, armed with the lessons of the pandemic period.

Over the last few weeks, Trending Now has been bringing insights from industry leaders on how their organisations are geared up to seize the opportunities in 2022, break through the Covid disruptions and find growth and remain resilient.

In conversation with Adgully, Divya Dixit, SVP, Marketing & Revenue, ALTBalaji, speaks about the major developments in the OTT industry in the last one year, the strategic focus on youth-centric content and associations, growing the subscriber base, the growing importance of gamification and virtual reality for OTT, and more.

What are the trends that you expect to dominate in your sector in 2022?

The year 2021 has been great, especially for the OTT segment, as we have all put out some stellar content. According to the OTT Insights report, ‘Now Streaming: The Indian Youth OTT Story’, released by Dentsu Marketing Cloud (DMC), binge-watching as a culture is on the rise as a result of boredom and isolation that set in during the pandemic. Due to the lockdown, OTT accelerated to become mainstream entertainment for viewing global content, including movies, originals, news, sports, and music. As a result, we witnessed a rise in the number of Indian viewers as people spent an increasing amount of time watching classic favourites and exploring new genres. A recent joint report by industry bodies CII and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) pointed out that the Indian OTT industry is experiencing an expansion phase, with immense subscriber growth and high quality and original content investment. The report said that the sector will be poised for growth and be worth $1.3-15 billion by 2030.

ALTBalaji focused on introducing content that appealed to mass audiences to address the subscriber churn. Currently catering to an MAU base of 10+ million, we have sold 3.48 million direct-to-platform subscriptions in nine months itself in this highly competitive Over-The-Top business. The platform also sees an audience engagement metric of 83 minutes per day, with different genres catering to varied audiences. At ALTBalaji, we constantly seek content, technology and marketing innovation. The cost of a subscription to an OTT platform is also a crucial aspect. Pricing strategies and offer packages need to be worked on to suit requirements and affordability. Being creative is always a benefit with differentiated programming strategies that add to a player’s superiority, especially when they offer similar content. Certain players try to capitalise on their strategy while the rest of the streaming catalogues resemble one another.

What are the challenges and new opportunities that you see emerging in the year ahead?

The focus for 2022 will be a digital strategy covering all the bases for youth-friendly platforms. We will partner with multiple digital payment gateways to ensure the audience has the smoothest experience possible for our various youth-centric shows. In addition, strengthening our robust analytics platform, which has a live dashboard that provides us information on views and engagement along with socio-economic and demographics of our viewers to generate behavioural consumption patterns, will sharpen our retention strategy.

Creating constant breakthroughs by presenting relevant stories, content and steadily innovating will be at the core of operations. Evolving and adapting to new market trends such as VR, AI, Gamification, Consumer-centric WhatsApp messages, Quirky PNs, Moment under the sun for consumers, Recommendation engines, voice search, quicker and easier payment options (onsite and offsite) along with cashbacks will help serve audiences better and engage deeper. Constant modernisations to keep up with lightning-fast digital evolution are the only way to ensure brand relatability. Keeping sharp tabs on everything, right from marketing to pricing to tech innovations to content, is and always will be the way forward.

How is this year’s turnout expected to be in this sector as compared to the last two years? What are the changes that have taken place in this sector in the last two years? How strong will this sector’s growth and recovery be compared to the last two years as well as the pre-Covid period?

OTT has become a mainstream entertainment platform. The trend that changed the dynamics of the sector is the shift from buying tickets to purchasing subscriptions for an enormous variety of global content, along with the films that were not released in theatres debuted with huge openings on OTT platforms.

Viewership numbers from smaller towns, especially in Tier 2 and 3 cities, rose rapidly. Since ALTBalaji is a platform that produces shows majorly in Hindi, it became accessible to the mass population of India. Across Industry, UI and UX became simpler to encourage local adaptation, subscriptions more competitively priced, connected devices sales grew as families adopted OTT as a mainstream content platform and short format apps gave birth to vast amounts of UGC. Although the Indian online streaming industry would have grown steadily in forthcoming years, the pandemic accelerated growth multifold in this segment.

ALTBalaji will aggressively focus on developing new concepts and stories for evolving youths on the content front. With marketing consideration, this year the focus will be more on strategic partnerships with various popular youth-centric brands, influencers, innovations in digital marketing, social media, PR and various other aspects involved in a 360-degree marketing campaign to promote our upcoming shows and campaigns. We have always believed in the power of brand partnerships to help a platform grow. We are also looking forward to various partnerships with youth-centric brands and payment gateways to ensure the audience has the smoothest experience possible.

ALTBalaji is also working around a 2.0 version of homegrown solutions, wherein we will have our optimised recommendation engine. When it comes to the backend, we have invested in developing systems that track and analyse user data and generate behavioral patterns for us, with a growing impetus towards the why and not the what, regarding the viewer and their content consumption patterns, we have redesigned the ALTBalaji app based on user behavioral models. Our platform will be trained on user data and behavioral patterns. This system will help upgrade and enhance the consumer experience to the next level.

At ALTBalaji, we are also launching Gamification and Virtual Reality, which will be the following big consumer engagement drivers on OTT. We will keep expanding our reach beyond the borders of the Indian subcontinent into previously untapped demographics.