Here is how WNNR is helping brands gain control over their data

After spending lakhs on digital ads to drive traffic, many brands face a familiar frustration: customers land on their website, browse a few products, and disappear. The numbers show up on the dashboard as churn—cold, silent, and unexplained. Why did they come? Why didn’t they buy? Why didn’t they return? For most marketers, the data offers little more than guesswork.

Back in 2017, entrepreneur Trigam Mukherjee faced the same problem with his fantasy gaming startup, Starpick. Despite strong user interest, high acquisition costs, poor retention, and low revenue per user eventually sank the business. That experience exposed a larger, industry-wide gap: the absence of actionable data deep enough to explain why users behave the way they do.

“There’s always data,” Mukherjee says, “but rarely the kind that tells you what’s really happening. It just sits there—and over time, it quietly eats away at your business.”

Determined to fix that, Mukherjee teamed up with his childhood friend Trilokjit Sengupta to build WNNR — a gamified data intelligence platform that turns everyday user interactions into rich, actionable insights. With over two decades of experience in the creative industry, Sengupta knew what brands need and how they think. Coupled with Mukherjee’s gaming background, they set out to solve the core problem: limited access to actionable, high-quality data for brands. 

Launched in January 2025, the Bangalore-based company promises to help brands move beyond passive engagement metrics and truly understand their audiences through its cognitive science-backed platform. It allows brands to turn any audience touchpoint into a consent-based data and engagement opportunity.

“It enables marketers to own every level of interaction with their captive audience. By gamifying these interactions, it delivers far deeper consumer intelligence than traditional platforms,” says Sengupta.

As a technology stack, WNNR can layer over any e-commerce or digital interface to gamify specific user interactions—whether it’s driving engagement for a hotel’s loyalty program or identifying potential customers in key markets. 

“WNNR redefines what engagement means today. Through gamification, it transforms passive attention into active participation—turning every digital touchpoint into a measurable, valuable exchange between brands and users,” explains Mukherjee.

By gamifying engagement and enabling brands to own their data, WNNR eliminates guesswork and helps marketers extract far more value from their existing budgets.

WNNR currently has three core products. The first is WNNR for Publishers, which rewards readers for their actions on a news platform, turning passive consumption into active engagement. It gamifies the experience and gives publishers access to rich first-party data.

News stories rack up millions of views, but publishers often have no idea who is reading or sharing their content. Traditional metrics only capture consumption, leaving advertisers with broad, impersonal numbers and little insight into their actual audience.

WNNR aims to change that. By gamifying interactions on news platforms, it collects consented, actionable data, giving publishers detailed insights into reader behaviour.

Over time, this intelligence allows for highly targeted campaigns that engage users meaningfully while providing advertisers real value.

“The approach is still new, and adoption will take time. But much like digital advertising emerged as a separate channel from TV and radio, gamified audience intelligence is poised to become a transformative tool, helping publishers reclaim their data from big tech and turn engagement into tangible business results,” says Sengupta.

Mukherjee explains this with the example of the New York Times. The publication has transformed reader engagement by making games a core part of its digital strategy. Its suite of popular puzzles and word games now serves as a major driver of subscriptions and daily user activity, turning gameplay into a key entry point for new audiences.

“Subscribers engage with stories because they enjoy the gamified experience, turning gaming into a genuine revenue channel. WNNR aims to replicate this model for other publishers, creating engaging, data-rich experiences,” he says.

The second, WNNR Ad+, is a suite of gamified ad units that flips the traditional advertising funnel. Normally, a user clicks an ad and visits a landing page, and only then can the advertiser capture their data. WNNR Ad+ reverses that sequence — collecting first-party data at the point of the interaction itself through gamified, reward-based experiences. This allows advertisers and publishers to gain richer insights right from the first click.

For example, a user may encounter a mini-quiz on a travel website that asks questions that may help the brand know the consumer better. In return, the consumer may win free travel or hotel vouchers. 

The third product, WNNR G-SaaS, is a white-label gamification module that seamlessly embeds within a brand’s native platform. Fully customisable, it adapts the brand’s look and feel, like a chameleon, while enabling brands to gamify any consumer interaction within their own ecosystem.

Together, these three products create a unified system that helps brands, publishers, and advertisers derive actionable data from every user engagement.

WNNR, which claims to be the first in the world to provide this service, is category-agnostic, as any business, whether consumer-focused or B2B, has interactions that can be gamified. 

For consumer-facing companies, engagement with users is key, and that’s where the gamification modules fit in. For B2B enterprises, the focus shifts to employees, vendors, or service delivery.

“Our platform is highly bespoke. From the start, we designed it to adapt like a jigsaw puzzle—fitting any business scenario, no matter how unique. Whether it’s consumer engagement, employee motivation, or vendor performance, WNNR can be applied almost anywhere,” says Sengupta.