Shemaroo is likely to invest Rs 75 crore in its broadcast and OTT business, media networks have reported.

The money will be utilised for ShemarooMe, CEO Hiren Gada was quoted as saying.

In FY24, the company wants to expand its TV and OTT businesses along with introducing new offerings, reports said.

The company has registered an annual growth of 23.3 % in digital media and 66.5 % in traditional media in the financial year ended 31st March 2023 compared to the previous fiscal.

ShemarooMe, the OTT Platform, released 14 titles in the fourth quarter.

Meta has carried out its last phase of lay-offs, according to media reports.

The company announced in March that it will start letting go off employees. Over 20,000 employees have been already given the pink slips.

The staffers affected are in departments like marketing, site security, enterprise engineering, content strategy and corporate communications.

Meta has said that these steps are aimed at improving efficiency.

Affle through its subsidiaries (“Affle”), today announced the signing of a definitive agreement to acquire 100% ownership of YouAppi, a global gaming focused programmatic mobile app marketing platform. YouAppi Inc. was incorporated in the USA in 2011 and they have a strong ground presence with teams based out of USA, Israel and Japan.

Affle is a global technology company with a proprietary consumer intelligence platform that delivers consumer recommendations and conversions through relevant Mobile Advertising. Affle powers unique and integrated consumer journeys for marketers to drive high ROI, measurable outcome-led advertising through its Affle2.0 Consumer Platforms Stack which includes Appnext, Jampp, MAAS, mediasmart, RevX and now YouAppi.

YouAppi delivers a comprehensive range of programmatic mobile app marketing solutions with real-time results optimization for the fast-growing gaming industry globally. YouAppi's programmatic mobile app marketing platform deploys AI & ML-powered proprietary technology with sophisticated algorithms and granular audience segmentation for many of the leading global companies.

Commenting on this development, Anuj Khanna Sohum, MD and CEO of Affle said “We are excited to announce this acquisition and welcome the YouAppi team on-board in the growing Affle family. We see a lot of synergies to strengthen YouAppi as a Consumer Platform business in the fast-growing & resilient gaming vertical. YouAppi is well aligned to our CPCU business model on both iOS and Android platforms to unlock greater consumer conversions for leading game developers globally. We appreciate YouAppi’s entrepreneurial culture and strong execution focus on tech innovations, profitable growth and financial fundamentals.”

“Becoming a part of Affle allows us to accelerate the YouAppi vision and strategically align our complementary technology capabilities and combined business models, delivering greater value for our customers globally," said Moshe Vaknin, Co-Founder and CEO of YouAppi. “YouAppi is ranked amongst the top 10 platforms for North America in the Appsflyer Remarketing Index and is amongst the fastest-growing companies in the 2023 Inc. 5000 Regionals: Pacific list. This is the result of the dedication, trust and hard work of our team, and the loyalty of our customers. We look forward to driving fast-paced innovation and greater profitability together with Affle.”

Real Sports from the house of JetSynthesys has signed Indian cricketer Veda Krishnamurthy. The agreement aims to further strengthen Veda’s brand as a cricketer and an entrepreneur globally. Headquartered out of Pune, JetSynthesys is a new-age digital entertainment and technology company with a global foray into gaming and esports, digital entertainment, wellness, and livelihoods.

Veda Krishnamurthy is a household name in the Indian cricketing circuit, having represented the country in over 50 One Day Internationals (ODIs) and 76 Twenty20 Internationals (T20Is). Her flamboyant style of play and fearless attitude have won her a legion of fans, making her one of the most popular players in the Indian cricket team.

Talking about the association, Rajan Navani, CEO and Founder, JetSynthesys said, ‘’We are honoured to welcome Veda to our Real Sports family. Veda has been an inspiration for many, and we are excited to work together to further enhance and stimulate her vision globally. We at Real Sports have always cared about our clients and brands alike and aim to bring strong partnerships to life. We hope to accomplish the same with Veda and look forward to some great work together.’’

Excited about the new development, Tarish Bhatt, Chief Business Officer, Real Sports said, “We are delighted to have Veda Krishnamurthy onboard. She embodies the spirit of cricket, and her performance on the field has inspired a generation of young cricketers. We are confident that her association with Real Sports will help create the right brand presence for Veda and reach out to the desired audience.”

Real Sports has a roster of eminent sporting personalities and works with some of the leading athletes across India, Europe, Oceania, and Asia-Pacific. Recently the company onboarded ace badminton champion, Saina Nehwal. The partnership between Real Sports and Veda Krishnamurthy is a perfect match, bringing together a brand that has been at the forefront of the sports marketing industry for decades with a cricketing icon who has captured the hearts of millions. With this association, Real Sports aims to strengthen its position as a leading sports marketing brand in India and globally.

Sharing her thoughts on the partnership, All Rounder Veda Krishnamurthy said, ‘’I am thrilled to be associated with Real Sports, a brand that has been synonymous with quality sports marketing and am optimistic about this venture with them. I genuinely believe that Real Sports shares my goals and ideals for the brand perception that I am envisioning. I look forward to leverage their industry knowledge and expertise for projects and collaborations in the future.’’

At the 10^th edition of Google Marketing Live, held on May 23, the technology behemoth announced the launch of several new generative AI advancements and tools for Google Ads, Performance Max, Product Studio, and Search Generative Experience (SGE) in Search Labs. The company hopes to encourage advertisers and vendors to easily create customized product imagery, improve ad relevance, scale campaigns, and better manage creative assets.

In one of the blog posts announcing the release of the tools, the company noted “In e-commerce, eye-catching images are a business’s digital window displays — and merchants with the right mix of imagery online can get better results. In fact, while many product offers on Google have just one image, we see an increase in both impressions (+76%) and clicks (+32%) for product offers that include more than one image (as per Google Data, Global, April 6th, 2023).”

It continued, “Our new Product Studio, designed with Google’s AI Principles top of mind, brings the benefits of generative AI to businesses of all sizes, helping them easily create unique and tailored product imagery for free and get more value from the images they already have.” These features include adding custom product scenes; removing a distracting product background; quickly increasing resolution.

Meanwhile, Performance Max is meant to be one of the best examples of how AI-powered campaigns can drive growth for business. “Advertisers who use Performance Max achieve on average over 18% more conversions at a similar cost per action, which is up from 13% roughly a year later. We’re bringing generative AI to Performance Max to make it even easier for you to create custom assets and scale them in a few clicks. Just provide your website and Google AI will start learning about your brand to populate your campaign with text and other relevant assets. We’ll even suggest new images generated just for you, helping you stand out to customers across a wider range of inventory and formats. This capability will also be available through the new conversational experience in Google Ads. Global testing will begin later this year.”

Regarding the announcements made at Google I/O around new generative AI capabilities coming to Search, the statement noted, “These new experiences will make Search smarter and simpler, and Search will continue to be a jumping-off point to the best of the web, including your business. As the future of Search evolves, the future of advertising will evolve too — bringing more opportunities to grow your business and showcase your brand. This new Search Generative Experience (SGE) can be found in Search Labs, a place to access Google Search experiments. At I/O, we showed how ads will appear above and below this new experience. Now, over the coming months, we’ll experiment with Search and Shopping ads that are directly integrated within the AI-powered snapshot and conversational mode. We’ll also experiment with new formats native to SGE that use generative AI to create relevant, high-quality ads that are customized to every step of the search journey.”

Google also announced advances to its Merchant Center, dubbed Merchant Center, while noting the number of businesses using Merchant Center has doubled in the past two years. According to the release, “Merchant Center Next is a simplified version of the platform, built to make it easier for smaller merchants to get started, find customers online and grow their businesses. And while we’re simplifying, the features that larger retailers rely on aren’t going anywhere. One way we’re doing that is simplifying how to set up a product feed. In the past, merchants setting themselves up on Google for the first time had to manually add their products, prices, images, descriptions and other details. In Merchant Center Next, we’ll automatically populate a merchant’s product feed with the information we can detect from their website (merchants can always edit what gets pulled in, or turn this off) — making it easier to quickly show their products across Google.”

As the month of May winds down, and updates from Twitter continue to blip on the news radar, industry watchers are waiting for Elon Musk’s promise of a pay-per-article feature to debut on Twitter. Since his acquisition of the social media and microblogging platform last October, Musk has brought about a flurry of product and organizational changes. The Twitter-verified blue tick was rolled out as a paid service apart from other updates, ranging from allowing monetization of content by creators on Twitter as well as the introduction of long-form video streaming and more.

Musk, who had previously stated his aim to transport a million human colonists to Mars by 2050, at the end of April said that come May the social media platform will allow media publishers to charge users on a per article per click basis. Musk tweeted that the feature would allow users to not "sign up for a monthly subscription to pay a higher per article price for when they want to read an occasional article.”

While that feature is still awaited, exchange4media spoke to industry veterans on how this would impact news media publishers around the world, and its level of impact in a price-sensitive market like India.

Dr Kushal Sanghvi, Head - India and SEA, CitrusAd, says, “Headlines, breaking news, entertainment buzz, are all streaming continuously and for free across your social and media and FYPs. While paid subscriptions to news publishers are becoming increasingly common in mature markets in the West, it will require a huge shift in the thought process of Indian consumers for the same to take place here.”

Nakul Dutt, Strategy Director at Foxymoron (Zoo Media), agrees, noting that at present there are more than 500 million Indians who consume news online, out of which only a fraction subscribe to one or more online news platforms. “Making consumers pay for subscriptions is not an easy task primarily because of three reasons. In the physical world, one used to pay for the newspaper to consume news; in the online world almost all of the content is free.”

“Second is the consumption behaviour, with so many publishers, consumption of news is getting fragmented. While some mature consumers are publisher-first, others tend to either follow content-first-specific publishers for specific genres or content discovery approach, relying on aggregators or information platforms like Twitter for their daily dose of news,” he adds.

“Another important point is the general nature of the online ecosystem. Digital is about instant gratification. The intent is towards fulfilment and not a commitment - the destination. Because of this lack of brand loyalty in the digital world, publishers need to first champion discovery and retention before acquisition – subscribers.”

On the other hand, Mitesh Kothari, Co-founder and Chief Creative Officer, White Rivers Media, says the recently announced pay-per-article feature has been accompanied by a significant level of appreciation.” It’s similar to people on OTT platforms who do not want to buy yearly subscriptions and are given the option to pay on a monthly basis. When it comes to articles, the monthly subscription fee drives away a substantial number of readers who were probably looking for one article in particular, or who just do not want to get into a monthly commitment.”

Kothari says readers who want to take the monthly subscriptions can go ahead as usual. “However, the feasibility of paying per article will certainly attract the category of people who are somewhere in the middle. How this whole thing pans out in the long run is something that we will be able to tell only with time.”

Sanghvi also believes that it’s a question of wait-and-see, stating that in any case, Twitter needs to find consumers who are ready to pay. “And that this can be done only when consumers are getting content that is relevant to them and access to information that affects them. This holds equally true for the publishers’ side as they want to reach consumers who’ll be interested in their news products.”

It is important to note that all these changes come even as many advertisers have paused or moved entirely out of advertising on the platform, taking a cue from liberal individuals and organizations who decried Musk’s seeming pandering to the right, including allowing political advertising and reinstating the accounts of ‘alt-right’ icons Donald Trump and the rapper known formerly as Kanye West.

That’s why, in what was clearly meant to be a soporific for advertisers, it was announced last week that Linda Yaccarino, the former head of advertising at NBC Universal, is taking over as CEO of Twitter in little more than a month. Musk will remain involved as executive chairman and chief technology officer, even as he reinstated his commitment to transforming Twitter into X, “the everything app”.

Stay tuned for a breakdown of that this week.

Faizan Ahmad, National Sales Head - Digital, The Hindu has quit. He has now joined  India TV Digital as Business Head, Web Business.

Ahmad was associated with The Hindu Group for over seven years. He has been a sales professional for over 12 years and has a  rich multi-functional experience of handling a wide spectrum of Digital Media, Content Marketing, Alliances, Programmatic and PRIGITAL Sales. 

Prior to joining The Hindu, Ahmad was associated with India.Com as Senior Manager Sales. He has also served stint at Business Standard as Group Officer, Digital Ad Sales. Ahmad holds Post Graduate Diploma in Business Management from IMS, Ghaziabad.

He has also  authored multiple research papers in the field of service quality and consumer behavior and has been featured in the list of "Top 50 Content Marketers" in India by LinkedIn and Paul writer and in TOP 50 Content Professional list of World Marketing Congress.