‘The next evolution of advertising will be shaped by what consumers choose to tell brands’

As advertising becomes increasingly data-driven, brands have access to more signals about consumers than ever before. They know what people search, browse, watch and buy, and use those signals to predict what they might want next. But prediction, however sophisticated, does not always capture what consumers actually choose.

That is the space Truecaller is looking to address with Truecaller Pulse, a platform that brings consumer participation, consumer intelligence and real-time audience activation into a single loop. The idea is to give consumers a more direct say in what they want and, in turn, help brands turn those declared preferences into more relevant experiences and marketing decisions.

With more than 500 million active users and over 5 billion ad impressions served every day, Truecaller sees its everyday communication environment as a particularly high-attention setting for this approach. In this interaction, Hemant Arora, VP & Global Head, Truecaller Ads Business, explains the concept behind Truecaller Pulse and why he believes the next evolution of advertising will be shaped not just by what consumers do, but by what they actively choose to tell brands.

What was the thinking behind building Truecaller Pulse? What gap in the advertising and consumer insights space were you looking to address?

The idea behind Truecaller Pulse starts with a simple belief: great marketing begins with understanding consumers.

Advertising has become increasingly sophisticated at understanding behaviour. We know what consumers search, browse, click, watch and buy, and technology has become very good at using those signals to predict what a consumer may want.

We saw an opportunity to add something equally powerful to that picture: consumer choice itself.

What happens when you give consumers a simple way to tell brands what they want, what they prefer or what they are considering, and then turn that participation into intelligence and action in real time?

That is what Truecaller Pulse brings together: consumer participation, consumer intelligence and real-time audience activation in one continuous loop.

Research can help brands understand consumers. Media can help brands reach them. Truecaller Pulse brings those two worlds closer, allowing consumer understanding to translate into action while it is still relevant.

For me, every campaign should create two assets: customer growth and consumer understanding. That is the larger opportunity we are building Truecaller Pulse around.

With more than 500 million active users and a high-frequency utility use case, how does Truecaller’s scale contribute to the effectiveness of Truecaller Pulse?

Scale is important, but the quality of that scale is even more important.

Truecaller has more than 500 million active users and serves more than 5 billion ad impressions every day. But the opportunity with Truecaller Pulse is not simply to ask questions of a large audience. It is to create meaningful consumer participation at scale.

Truecaller sits within everyday communication. People come to the platform with a specific purpose and make decisions in those moments: whether to answer, whether to engage, whether to trust and what to do next. That creates a very different quality of attention from a conventional content environment.

This gives Truecaller Pulse a strong foundation: massive reach, high frequency, trusted identity and high attention. We can bring consumer choice into that environment and turn participation into consumer intelligence across audiences and markets at scale.

Scale gives us reach. Trust gives us participation. Context gives that participation meaning.

That combination is what makes Truecaller a particularly powerful platform for building Truecaller Pulse.

What makes Truecaller’s users and the way they use the app different from audiences on other digital platforms? How does this benefit advertisers?

The biggest difference is the context and quality of attention.

Truecaller is part of everyday communication. People come to the platform with a specific purpose. They are making decisions in the moment: whether to answer, whether to engage, whether to trust and what to do next.

You rarely make a call without intent, and a call almost always leads to some form of decision or action. There is therefore a natural journey between intent, communication and action, and Truecaller is present within that journey. That gives us a uniquely high-involvement moment across billions of interactions every day.

This creates a very different environment from a conventional content feed, where the primary objective is often to consume or scroll.

Truecaller also brings significant frequency, with users engaging with the platform billions of times every day. For advertisers, that creates an opportunity to build relevance across repeated, high-attention moments rather than relying on a single exposure.

Our proposition is therefore simple: massive scale, high frequency, trusted identity and high attention. That becomes particularly powerful when you bring consumer participation into the environment through Truecaller Pulse.

The opportunity isn’t simply to create more impressions. It is to create more valuable moments.

Truecaller Pulse allows brands to ask consumers questions directly. What does this tell brands that they may not be able to understand from regular advertising data?

Advertising data tells you a great deal about what consumers do. Truecaller Pulse adds something equally valuable: what consumers choose to tell you.

Take something very simple. I am a vegetarian, yet I can still be served a chicken soup advertisement because, based on every other signal available, I may look like the right demographic or behavioural fit. The system can make a sophisticated prediction and still get the consumer wrong.

The moment I am given the opportunity to say, “This is not relevant to me,” or choose what I would actually like to see, I have contributed something that no amount of inference can fully replace: my declared choice.

Now imagine that happening at scale. Those choices can make the next set of impressions more intelligent, precise and relevant, while simultaneously creating a continuous understanding of what consumers actually want.

That was the idea behind Truecaller Pulse: to bring that power to brands while bringing the power of choice back to consumers.

The consumer becomes an active participant in the intelligence loop. Brands get better understanding, consumers get more relevant experiences, and every interaction can make the next decision smarter.

How is Truecaller Pulse different from traditional market research or audience targeting on social and digital platforms?

I see Truecaller Pulse at the intersection of consumer understanding, audience intelligence and media activation.

Traditional market research can provide a deep understanding of consumers. Digital platforms are exceptionally good at finding and reaching audiences. Truecaller Pulse brings another dimension to that equation: giving consumers the opportunity to directly express what they want and turning that participation into actionable consumer intelligence.

A brand can ask a question, understand the response, turn that declared choice into an audience or insight, and then use it to inform what happens next in the campaign. That creates a much closer connection between consumer understanding and media action.

What makes Truecaller particularly powerful is the environment in which this happens. We bring together trusted identity, everyday communication, high attention, massive scale and real-time activation.

So the differentiation isn’t simply that Truecaller Pulse can ask a consumer a question. It is that we can take consumer choice from participation to intelligence to activation at scale.

That is the closed loop we are building with Truecaller Pulse.

What kinds of brand or business questions is Truecaller Pulse best suited to answer?

I would start with a simple answer: any brand that wants to understand its consumers better.

It could be a brand that wants to build stronger consumer loyalty by being genuinely curious about what its consumers want, or one that wants to understand people beyond simply treating them as data points or placing them into a cohort based on a demographic variable.

Think about the power of giving consumers a choice and then turning that choice into action. A consumer can tell a brand what they want, the brand can respond with a more relevant experience, and that interaction can create new understanding for the next decision.

It could be a product launch, a campaign, a category, a new proposition, a creative idea, a purchase decision or simply a brand wanting to understand what its consumers are thinking today. The possibilities are broad.

The real opportunity is to make every impression more intelligent and precise, while making every campaign a source of consumer understanding.

That is why I see Truecaller Pulse as something that can become relevant to every brand, product and campaign. Truecaller Pulse brings consumer participation, consumer intelligence and activation together, and makes that possible at a meaningful scale.

Once a brand gets responses through Truecaller Pulse, how can it use those insights in its campaigns? Can these insights influence targeting, messaging or optimisation?

Absolutely. In fact, activation is a fundamental part of how we have designed Truecaller Pulse.

The consumer response doesn’t simply sit in a dashboard as an insight. It can become part of the next marketing decision.

If consumers express an interest in a particular product, preference or category, that understanding can help a brand create more relevant audiences, messaging, creative or offers. It can also help marketers decide where to place the next impression and how to optimise the campaign.

The really interesting part is what happens over time. A consumer makes a choice, the brand learns from it, the campaign responds, and that response creates another opportunity to learn.

So the loop becomes simple: Ask. Understand. Activate. Learn.

That is what makes Truecaller Pulse different from a traditional insight exercise. The intelligence is designed to move back into the campaign and make the next interaction smarter.

Ultimately, the opportunity is to make every impression work harder: not just to drive an outcome, but to create a better understanding of the consumer that informs what happens next.

What is the larger opportunity you see for Truecaller Pulse?

The larger opportunity is to change the role consumer understanding plays in advertising.

Marketing has become exceptionally good at reaching consumers, measuring behaviour and optimising for outcomes. The opportunity now is to make every interaction create deeper understanding of the consumer as well.

Every campaign should create two assets: customer growth and consumer understanding.

Truecaller Pulse brings those two worlds together by giving consumers an opportunity to actively participate, turning that participation into consumer intelligence and bringing that intelligence back into the campaign through real-time activation.

What makes this particularly powerful is the platform we are building it on. Truecaller brings together trusted identity, everyday communication, high attention, massive scale and the ability to activate in real time.

Truecaller Pulse makes consumer choice a continuous part of marketing: something brands can understand, act on and learn from at scale.

That is the larger opportunity: moving from campaigns that simply reach consumers to marketing that continuously learns from them and builds stronger relationships over time.