The Data Sciences division of the Dentsu Aegis Network (DAN) India, has launched DMC Video+ (Dentsu Marketing Cloud Video+), a tool that provides an agnostic approach towards planning and buying on over-the-top (OTT) platforms.
DMC Video+ is the first holistic product catering to planning and buying OTT audiences within the ecosystem.
Speaking about the launch, Isobar South Asia Group MD Shamsuddin Jasani said, “The Indian OTT ecosystem is hyper-competitive and has attracted varying types of players, each of whom offers 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 a 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 (DMC) 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.”
With nearly 565 million internet subscribers and roughly 450 million smartphone users, OTT players have become the go-to platforms for consumption and distribution of content. Moreover, VOD (Video-on-Demand) consumption has been fuelled by COVID imposed lockdowns in India.
With various reports showing around 25 to 30 per cent spike in viewership across the OTT platforms during this period, there’s an absence of a unified platform to understand OTT audiences and activate them for advertising. And here’s where DMC Video+ comes in.
“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 a 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 (DMC) Video+ product is to plug this gap, thereby guiding brands on their journey of capitalising 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,” added DAN Programmatic CEO and DAN South Asia chief data officer Gautam Mehra.
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, but they can also activate selected segments for their campaigns.