Airtel enters ad tech industry

NEW DELHI: Bharti Airtel on Wednesday marked its entry into advertising business with launch of ‘Airtel Ads’, a move it said will enable brands to pitch consentbased and privacy-safe campaigns to over 320 million customers across its various businesses like mobile, DTH and homes.

Airtel Ads—that underlines the company’s efforts to get a foothold in the booming Indian advertising industry—leverages the company’s data science capabilities, and would enable brands to create deep engagement and high-impact campaigns for most relevant customer cohorts.

Airtel asserted that its customers would receive only the most-relevant brand offerings, and not unwanted spam.

“We are not in the quantity mode, we only want to bring it to customers who care. Therefore, volumes may be less but quality will be high,” Adarsh Nair, chief product officer at Bharti Airtel said.

While the company would look to make connections between customer preference and brand relevance, it would not “hit customers with ads that do not make sense” nor “profile” its user, Nair emphasised.

To start with, the video and display placement will be through apps such as Wynk, Airtel Xstream, and Thanks app, going on to DTH TV ads.

“We have millions of customers walking into our mass retail and store fronts... can we actually, even there, for consumers who are not digitally-savvy press-in the idea of, say, a health coverage or video subscription... Those tests are also running right now. I believe even in our mass retail these ads units can appear, to help our customers,” Nair said.

Large brands like PepsiCo, Zomato, CRED, Tata AIG, Apollo 247, Lenskart, Cars24, Gameskraft, Harley-Davidson and others have run campaigns during the beta phase, and Airtel has touched almost Rs 100 crore in annualised revenue run rate in this space. The company said as many as 180 million unique users were touched during the beta phase, itself.

“During the beta phase, Airtel Ads delivered successful campaigns for over 100 brands across multiple categories – FMCG, BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance), Digital Startups...,” Airtel said.

Airtel Ads would enable brands of all sizes to curate consent-based and privacy-safe campaigns to one of the biggest pool of quality customers in India, Airtel said.