DAN India’s Data Sciences Division launches ‘Dentsu Marketing Cloud Video+’

The Data Sciences Division of the Dentsu Aegis Network (DAN) India, has announced the launch of ‘DMC Video+ [Dentsu Marketing Cloud Video+]’, a tool that provides an agnostic approach towards planning and buying on over-the-top TV (OTT) platforms.

In a population of 1.3 Billion, with a tele-density of close to 89% households, nearly 565 million internet subscribers and roughly 450 million smartphone users, Indian telcos and OTT providers have become the primary platform for consumption and distribution of content. In an economy where the “cut the cord” movement was already picking up steam, COVID-19 induced lockdowns have been a fillip to OTT consumption in India. While reports from the industry boast of a 25-30% spike in viewership across the OTT platforms, the industry remains fragmented in the absence of a unified platform to understand OTT audiences and activate them for advertising.

Commenting on the launch, Shamsuddin Jasani, Group MD, Isobar- South Asia says, “The Indian OTT ecosystem is hyper competitive and has attracted varying types of players, each of whom offer varied value propositions to consumers. This has created a somewhat fragmented ecosystem with no accurate measure of how brands should engage and activate these audiences. With rapid increase in consumption of online content – primarily fueled by OTT Video, Audio and Gaming, the ecosystem suffers from the absence of a single source of truth when it comes to buying inventory from these platforms. The Dentsu Marketing Cloud Video+ presents a unique solution to this problem by creating a single ecosystem to understand and buy these audiences in a seamless manner, limiting the rise of another walled garden ecosystem.”

“In an environment that is now heavily focused on reducing wastage, brands know they need to move budgets from linear TV and traditional advertising towards digital advertising driven by OTT. They however, tend to play it conservatively when they aren’t sure exactly how much of shift will achieve the best ROI. In the absence of transparency, unified insights and audience buying system for OTT consumers, there exist several inefficiencies within the ecosystem. The promise of the Dentsu Marketing Cloud Video+ product is to plug this gap, thereby guiding brands on their journey of capitalizing on audiences who are increasingly mobile and engaged in consuming high quality production content on OTT rather than traditional video consumption of user generated content,” adds Gautam Mehra, CEO, DAN Programmatic & Chief Data Officer, DAN - South Asia.

The tool has been launched under the umbrella of DMC Explore, the proprietary Audience Intelligence tool of the Data Sciences Division under its suite of products – the Dentsu Marketing Cloud (the overarching platform that houses DAN Data Labs). Through DMC Explore, clients are not only enabled to gain deep insights into the content consumption of audiences in the OTT ecosystem, they can also activate selected segments for their campaigns.

Dentsu Marketing Cloud Video+ remains the first holistic product catering to planning and buying OTT audiences within the ecosystem.