Inmobi’s Rajesh Pantina on seeing the unseen in the whirlwind of content

A whole new world for the advertising and marketing industry has been opened by the digital medium. It is a pathbreaking medium and no longer just a new-age media platform to complement the traditional platforms like print, television and radio. The Ad-Tech and Mar-Tech worlds are leveraging emerging aspects of Digital to sharpen their strategies. Though the adoption of Digital began more than a decade back, newer elements are emerging frequently, which makes this medium so dynamic and also difficult to master.

The inaugural edition of Adgully’s DATAMATIXX 2022 Summit & Awards, held in Mumbai on August 25, put the spotlight on data analytics, programmatic, AI/ AR/ ML, connected TV, cookie-less future and more.

Delivering his keynote address on ‘Seeing the Unseen in the Whirlwind of Content’, Rajesh Pantina, Director - Marketing, APAC, InMobi, said, “The Internet has given us different occasions to really be inspired and engage with each other. Fifteen years ago, 2007 was the year when Inmobi was founded and we ended up thinking that mobile is going to change the world and we wanted to look into the idea of personalised mobile in-app advertising. It was a time when Apple’s iPhone was not launched, and today, we are continuing to be the most profitable Unicorn in India.”

He further said, “One of the big pieces or problem statements that we were trying to solve at a certain point of time was thinking about how consumers today are really stuck to their smartphones, spending so much time on it with a yearning to see content – smaller pieces or longer pieces – to really discover the right of content, the right kind of inspiration at every micro moment. But the question is how do we see the unseen in a whirlwind of digital content. The first big thing is that there are 12,000 hours of video content being put out there, every day on the Internet, and when you basically try to discover these content, it is not that easy, it is all in the walled gardens. The consumer goes to 3-4 selected apps such as YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, etc., and keeps repeating that cycle. Even after spending 4.8 hours a day on the Internet, the consumer has yearning to stay informed, entertained and get inspirational ideas with each micro moment spent on his/her smartphone. The journey to discover content is not short, so we came up with the problem statement that – Can this journey be simpler for each one of us? And, can we reimagine a world of seamless, frictionless content discovery?”

Pantina pointed out that this requires reinvention. He elaborated, “It started with looking at the place one visits most often everyday, which is the lock screen, and we thought what more could we do with the lock screen? We thought of creating something which is not actually an app, but a one-click journey for consumers when it comes to content discovery, where the content comes to you. So, we partnered with the OEMs, including Samsung, Vivo, and others so that these phones have Glance. We have Google and Jio invest in us and take it forward globally. We have 200 million-plus people in India, engaging 25 minutes a day with the lock screen, consuming content. At the Glance Live Fest, actor Rajkummar Rao was live on Glance and accepting challenges, where people were interacting and engaging with him. We had 690k people interacting with him live. We also had the Roposo Jam Room, where people were engaging with their favourite singers. We had female, male gamers go live – around 2.7 million gamers participated in one Live gaming tournament on Glance. IPL was live on Glance as well. The question is how one as a content creator can drive this experience, getting into the lock screen marketing and consumer behaviour.”

These are edited excerpts. For the complete address, watch below:

https://www.linkedin.com/video/live/urn:li:ugcPost:6968510276174295040/