Oath aims to reach 2 billion users by 2020: Gurmit Singh

In a significant development earlier this year, Yahoo and AOL integrated under Verizon to form a global brand – Oath. Oath is a digital and mobile company driving the global consumer brand space. It is a dynamic house of 50+ media and tech brands that includes HuffPost, Yahoo Sports, AOL, TechCrunch, Tumblr, Yahoo Finance, Brightroll, ONE by AOL and Gemini, to name a few. With a combined reach of over a billion people around the world, Oath combines powerful technology, trusted content and differentiated data like no other. 

Since the integration, Oath’s focus has been on bringing its assets together and investing in their brands and people. In conversation with Adgully, Gurmit Singh, VP and MD – India Business, Oath Inc., talks about how the new brand is shaping up across the globe. He also shares more about the go forward strategy for the combined AOL and Yahoo businesses, the values that drive the company and its global ambitions, Oath’s value proposition to advertisers, and much more. Excerpts: 

What is the idea behind Oath? How has the venture come to be named ‘Oath’? What necessitated the formation of Oath?
Oath is formed under the combination of two iconic brands – Yahoo + AOL – with a goal to reach a billion people around the globe, commit to brand strength and deep content experiences in content categories like: news, sports, finance, tech, entertainment/ lifestyle and strengthen the reach in key global, mobile and millennial audiences. 

Oath is a house of 50+ media and technology brands. With a house of brands as diverse as ours, we wanted a name that was values led – one that honoured our ultimate commitment of ‘Building Brands People Love’. It was very important that we had a name that brought all our people together around a single organising concept and principle much more than it was a descriptive name of assets of portfolio. 

Oath is a very simple and meaningful name that expresses our values and its emphasis in the world. It is the representation of how we operate today as an employee base and a body. 

With Yahoo now part of Oath, what has changed? And what has not changed?
The biggest change with Yahoo becoming a part of Oath is that the portfolio has now become a larger footprint. With AOL integrated within Oath, the combined brands will be reaching one billion people around the world. The portfolio now comprises dynamic media and technology brands, including HuffPost, TechCrunch, Engadget, RYOT Studios, Makers, One by AOL, Yahoo Sports, Tumblr, Yahoo Finance, Brightroll, Flurry, and Gemini, to name a few. 

What hasn’t changed is that our consumer facing brand names remain intact. Our mail service will still be called Yahoo Mail, our Cricket website and app will be called Yahoo Cricket and so on. Yahoo has been known for its assets, and with the new brand Oath as the parent company, we don’t see any change in the way those assets are named or functioned. 

Both Yahoo and AOL brands continue to live their legacy, and together our focus is going to be on building deep consumer experiences with our existing brands, launch new products and services on mobile and video and continue to grow our partnerships. 

What are the implications for the Indian market – in terms of users, advertisers, publishers?
Oath’s strategy is to build brands one billion users around the world love, and India is one of our key markets. One of our goals is to reach 2 billion users by 2020 and with over 450 million Internet users and counting, we foresee many of our new users coming from India. 

We believe that the platform shift to mobile here is a very strong opportunity for us, and we are invested in making the Oath brand more deeply engaged with the younger audience. Our focus is to get mobile-first products and deliver not just apps, but inspiring mobile experiences for our users. We recently revamped the Yahoo Cricket app for our users in India. With a refreshed design, lightning fast scores, rich content and our unique “Moments you missed” feature, the app will be the one-stop destination for cricket lovers to not just follow but enjoy the game. 

For our advertisers, we recently launched RYOT Studio, a next-generation creative studio offering a premium end-to-end content marketing solution that brings brands’ stories to life. Fueled by rich customer data, scaled distribution, premium publishing and award-winning creative expertise, RYOT Studio will work with brands and their agency partners to match them with relevant publisher voices and audiences. 

What is Oath’s strategy to build it up as a platform for Indian advertisers? What does the road ahead look like for Oath?
Oath is committed to building brands people love – yours and ours. We combine powerful technology, trusted content and differentiated data like no other – this is our differentiator from key competitors. Our solutions are driven by consumer insights and tailored to deliver on a brand’s KPIs (growth, performance or efficiency). With the help of Oath’s unique data, as well as our partners, we can prove your dollars work harder with us. 

We will keep improving our already world class Omni-channel Demand Side Platform (DSP) that will consist of the best of both technologies. In 2018, we will roll out our new platform globally as well as for the Indian advertisers, differentiated through mobile-first investments and first-party data activation. 

What are your major offerings for advertisers and publishers?
After the integration of Yahoo and AOL, we now have industry’s most comprehensive ad technology stack for advertisers and publishers that spans across mobile, video, search, native and programmatic. 

We have brands that tell real stories (HuffPost, Yahoo News, Yahoo Cricket) to brands that deliver them (BrightRoll, RYOT Studio). Our recent revamp of Yahoo India homepage, along with updates to Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Cricket and Yahoo Lifestyle for India market, was our way of offering a refreshed and unified experience. Through these updates, our brands offer personalisation across our core properties, offering a better way to consume, engage and discover the quality of content that people come to expect. 

We have a history of delivering great consumer experiences across all digital formats while balancing relevant advertising for marketers. The ultimate aim is to build brands people love – and we make brand love through scaled audiences, trusted content, premium distribution, and differentiated data for thousands of the world’s leading advertisers. 

What are the opportunities that you seek in the video space?
The explosive growth of digital video is no surprise as the medium spreads seamlessly across screens and devices, but what has come as a shock is how quickly mobile has challenged desktop as the primary choice for video viewing. No one could have predicted how soon consumers would be watching 360 degree videos on their smartphones every week. As per a global research study, consumers are making digital video a habit – 92 per cent watch videos online every day and 88 per cent watch more video now than they did a year ago. 

With our brands like RYOT, we are building deep consumer experiences in this space – for instance, RYOT offers editorial partnerships that tap into the world of immersive video to keep people informed, and have even landed major award nominations while doing so. 

Currently, our focus is on building our existing foundation of video delivery like Gemini Video, which allows advertisers to exploit video advertising on native - and, improving reliability and performance and launching new products to deliver high quality, personalised video experiences online. And we will continue to tap into this space. 

Programmatic and Affiliate Marketing have already made enough inroads in the Indian market. How will Oath compete with that?
Oath is a digital and mobile company driving the global consumer brand space. When it comes to competing in the Indian market, I believe we had always been there through Yahoo’s Brightroll DSP and AOL’s One by AOL platforms. In fact, when combined together, both platforms serve over one trillion ad requests each month. 

Programmatic and affiliate marketing are still at a nascent stage in India, but definitely seeing growth in terms of adoption. And as mentioned above, our comprehensive ad technology stacks allow us to continue leading in this space. 

Which publishers have you tied up with so far and are in discussions with?
We are looking at strategic partnerships in order to allow the publishers to distribute selected content via Yahoo’s sites. In the beginning of this year, we partnered with premium UK media brands like The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent, The Evening Standard and Hearest UK across five countries – UK, US, Canada, India and Singapore. 

As for India, we have tied up with Bloomberg Quint, India Today, Firstpost, BGR, News18, India.com, Overdrive, Bollywoodlife.com, CricketCountry, Sportskeeda, Spotboy-E and PinkVilla among others. Additionally, we also allow HuffPost’s content on Yahoo India. 

We can’t, as of now, reveal the publishers we are in discussions with.  

What is the platform’s strategy for content acquisition?
Our strategy is to put our amazing brands on every screen in the world. To get there, we’ll build deep consumer experiences with our existing brands, launch new products and services on mobile & video, and continue to grow our partnerships in ways that consumers see and feel. 

Going forward, what is your growth strategy for Oath? What are your revenue targets and what are your focus areas/ markets to drive growth for Oath in India?
As mentioned above, our strategy is to put our amazing brands on every screen in the world. And to get there, we’ll build deep consumer experiences, keep launching new products and services, and continue to grow our partnerships in ways that consumers see and feel. 

In India, the platform shift to mobile is a very strong opportunity for us, and we are invested in making the Oath brand more deeply engaged with the millennials. Our house of brands touch almost every major community and every major vertical. We want to continue our growth of users across our products like Yahoo Mail, Huffpost, Yahoo Cricket, Search and Yahoo News and launch new products which consumers love. We will continue to give interesting updates and refreshing our products based on the changing consumer needs. 

And as we launch new experiences and products on mobile, we’re also reinventing the ad experiences with a mobile-first ethos. We are innovating new ad formats in video and believe that ads, when done well, are as creative as the content and can actually be additive to the user experience. 

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