Fork Media makes Middle East foray

Armed with a native advertising product and an image monetisation offering for digital publishers, Fork Media, a part of the Mumbaiheadquartered Antfarm group of companies, has set up shop in Dubai to handle clients in the Middle East. It has started operations with publishers including Khaleej

Times and Motivate, and is in talks with several more to offer its services, said Samar Verma, CEO, Fork Media.

Fork Media was formed around 18 months ago and has forayed into some South East Asian markets besides India. It takes up content spaces (native ad spaces) on the publishers’ sites, and creates and serves native content on those spaces, in a revenue share with publishers. This native ad offering is called ‘Brand Press’. “The model is one where we work only with reputed premium publishers and don’t go down the long tail,” explained Verma. In India, the company works with several media companies including HT Media and NDTV on their online offerings. The image monetisation product ‘ Impulse’ enables publishers to monetise their image galleries. It uses image recognition software and contextual mapping to identify suitable creative options, superimposing a semi-transparent layer on published images.

“So an automobile manufacturer, for example, who wants to take on a competitor whose image has been published on a site, can now do that by taking up the ad in that same space. Pop-ups and banners have been attempted till date. This, I believe, is an offering that does not exist anywhere else, except in the US. And the technology is proprietary,” added Verma.

The company has roped in Alex Pugnet as director for the GCC region, said Upen Rai, MD and cofounder. Joining him in Dubai will be Vineeta Gogia, sales director, who moves from Fork Media’s Mumbai office. Fork Media has offices in New Delhi, Malaysia and Indonesia.