SME

Airtel enters ad tech industry with Airtel Ads; says users will receive relevant campaigns, not spam
PTI
622 words
24 February 2021
Financial Express Online
FIEXON
English
Copyright 2021. Indian Express Group
Bharti Airtel on Wednesday marked its entry into advertising business with launch of 'Airtel Ads', a move it
said will enable brands to pitch consent-based 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 in a
statement.

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 adding it has more than 320 million customers across its
businesses like mobile, DTH and homes.

"Airtel's mobile customers have the highest average monthly data consumption at 16.8 GB and the highest
monthly ARPU of Rs 166. Airtel's fast growing DTH and homes networks serve premium households across
the country," the statement added.

Nair said that Airtel Ads "breaks new ground" in the USD 10 billion Indian advertising industry, a space that is
expected to nearly double in the next 5 years. As per estimates, the digital advertising pie alone will grow to
USD 8 billion by 2025, from USD 2 billion in 2020.

"... Airtel Ads offers innovative channels for brands to reach the right audiences. What truly differentiates
Airtel Ads is its razor-sharp focus on quality over quantity and real impact versus vanity metric,” Nair said.

Page 1 of 2 © 2021 Factiva, Inc. All rights reserved.

Airtel Ads' rigorous compliance with ad-tracking standards and norms will bring transparency with advertisers
and ensure `zero Ad frauds' in the form of false impressions and clicks.

“Advertising is an adjacency to our core business of delighting our customers with great services. Therefore,
we combine the privacy that is paramount to our customers with the trust and transparency that is vital to the
brands we serve," Nair added.

Read Also: AkzoNobel appoints Mullen Lintas as its creative agency in India

Follow us on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook

Document FIEXON0020210225eh2o0000g

Page 2 of 2 © 2021 Factiva, Inc. All rights reserved.