Privacy-first marketing and AI investments: InMobi's focus for 2024

A report from Statista says that the number of smartphone users in India is estimated to reach over a billion in 2023. Brands are increasingly choosing mobile platforms as a means for marketing and advertising. Additionally, the majority of mobile apps have become a crucial channel for businesses to engage with their customers.

Vasuta Agarwal, CBO - consumer advertising platform, InMobi, an Indian mobile marketing platform, defined 2023 as an interesting year for her company. Why? The reasons are two-pronged.

Firstly, in terms of InMobi’s journey, it completed 16 years of its existence during which it scaled about two billion users globally while working with almost 25,000 advertising partners.

Secondly, when it comes to Glance - a smart lock screen platform introduced by the InMobi group in 2019, crossed 200 million users in India and Southeast Asia, covering almost 80% of the Android smartphone users in India alone. It also began monetisation and advertising on the platform.

According to Agarwal, the major focus areas for InMobi in 2024 are privacy-first marketing and continuing to double down on AI investments. “We will continue to invest a lot in privacy to see how we stay ahead of the curve when it comes to advertising in a privacy-first era. Concerning AI investments, there are large use cases at InMobi when it comes to creatives and then the targeting, bidding, and pricing algorithms as they are at the core of the advertising stack. So, we will continue to focus and invest heavily on these two aspects,” she notes.

She also observed that streaming and videos will continue to play a big role with future developments in OTT platforms, and short video apps. “Video is here to stay in all different shapes and formats and our investments, especially on Glance, geared a lot on videos with live gaming, shoppertainment, and short-form video feed,” she comments.

The Indian gaming ecosystem witnessed a substantial evolution throughout 2023. According to Statista, the mobile games market in India was projected to reach a revenue of USD 139.20 million in 2023. With Glance introducing gaming in January 2019, Agarwal comments that gaming on the platform has become more interesting to advertisers because its audience base has expanded.

“It is a misconception that the gaming audience is only young adults because we have seen a very healthy skew across demographics now. A phenomenon that changed during COVID-19 was that a lot of people started spending time on gaming as a form of online entertainment which is why we see that when brands look at gaming audiences, they see it across the board.”

Trends in the AdTech and MarTech fraternity

With the proliferation of online activities and the widespread sharing of data, individuals and organisations alike have become increasingly mindful of the potential risks associated with data breaches and unauthorised access. Google is set to disable third-party cookies for 1% of the users from January 4, 2024. It will ramp up to all its users from Q3 2024.

Agarwal says that in 2023, the world moved to a privacy-first kind of advertising era. “We saw this with the iOS ecosystem in the US and Europe especially because Apple introduced its privacy for advertising lens which does not use user identifiers for any kind of advertising or measuring advertising. Therefore, I do expect it to continue in 2024 as well,” she notes.

Also, Agarwal, speaking about the effects of this shift in the Android ecosystem with the Google Play IDs, states that the privacy-first push will continue and it will become front and centre even in India. 

A Google Play ID is the unique identifier of an Android application and is of two parts separated by a period. It is used for identification to prevent fraud and abuse.

“India has launched its version of the data protection bill ( December 2019). So, I think user privacy is going to be at the core of many things on the advertising side and that is a shift we will have to prepare for in the Indian ecosystem as well.”

A growing trend emerging out of the grassroots is the Ad Net Zero initiative. It represents the advertising industry's initiative to minimise the carbon footprint associated with the creation, production, and execution of advertisements, aiming to achieve genuine net zero impact.

Agarwal explains that it is an initiative that InMobi invested in 2022 with a few partners globally. “It may be a phenomenon which comes into India soon because it’s all part of the responsible media buying framework which a lot of global players are pushing for,” she adds.