Preetesh Chouhan has a rich experience and varied professional experience in Consumer Internet and Digital Media Business. He has led organizations to achieve synergies through quantifiable deliverables and opportunity identification. Prior to Vdopia, Preetesh Chouhan has served as National Head – Ad sales in SIFY Technologies Ltd. With his energy and enthusiasm, he has been instrumental in driving accelerated growth and monetization opportunities.  He has also been associated with brands like AOL, Indya.com and indiainfo.com and worked at varied profiles and multiple assignments. Preetesh has extensive experience in key functional areas such as Sales and Business development, Partner relationships, Product Management & Innovations, Operations Management, Strategic Business Alliances, and Content & Programming Management. 

In an exclusive interaction with India Digital Review, Preetesh talks about the India’s growing mobile advertising industry, mobile content consumption, and trends. He shares his vision for Vdopia, immediate goals and plans of company for 2013. 

You come from an online service firm Sify to Vdopia, how different is the ad sales profile from the current one? 

I was very much responsible for ad sales profile at Sify also so from that perspective my key focus continues to be the same. However, my current profile at Vdopia has magnified my area of operation and expertise. At Sify, I was responsible for revenues at a national level while at Vdopia I’m handling the entire business for the Asia Pacific region.  In my previous role, I was just handling ad sales revenues only here apart from sales I’m looking into areas like marketing, finance, HR, business development and engineering. Therefore, this is certainly a much vast profile.

As VP APAC of the company, what are your immediate priorities? 

The initial mandate that I have got, when I came onboard, was to manage the exponential growth of the company. The initial focus was to grow APAC as a region in terms of people and creating much better environment to hire and mentor new recruits. When I joined, Vdopia was about 50 people strong; we are now close to 123. We have been able to almost double our strength and we continue to grow. The second key area was to set up a robust business team and process in the South East Asia market outside India. We aggressively carried that activity and we are now well established in Singapore, Indonesia and Malaysia. The company will enter another set of four countries in coming three months. As per our target, we are looking at planting our flags in close to 12 countries by the end of this year. 

What are Vdopia’s current goals in an emerging mobile video advertising market of India? 

Our immediate goal is to grow the ecosystem because currently mobile advertising is an extremely small market within the space itself. So, until and unless the entire ecosystem grows no player will get benefit out of it. The goal is to educate the market in terms of creating a comfort level about mobile video advertising. We are trying to do it by creating favourable products, environment and engaging applications of campaigns which creates the synergy between the advertisers as well as the people. 

Where do you see mobile advertising going in 2013? 

For mobile advertising to really grow, 3G needs to take off very well which it hasn’t yet. I’m quoting multiple reports which state that only 4-6 percent of total 900 billion mobile users in India are on 3G. So, this really needs to do well for mobile advertising to pick up. Currently, Smartphone users in India are 27 million, if that number reaches to 100 million by 2015, the video consumption on mobile will witness a 60-65 percent increase for that to happen the move from 2G to 3G is crucial. New platforms will come in the picture for mobile advertising so for example Mobile TV will become big in 2013. 

Vdopia has raised $3.4 million funding in Series B round recently. How do you plan to utilize it? 

Our venture partners continue to be Nexus Venture Partners and the funding has come just in time when we were planning expansion. Most of the funds will be invested in people then we will also build new products and platforms. The third part will be used in product focused marketing where we will market Vdopia’s various products and services. We will soon be announcing partnerships with two big players. It will be a publisher-network based pact. We will be launching specific advertising solutions in regards to tablets and ipad. On a long term basis, Vdopia will roll out its services on a fourth screen the announcement for which will hopefully come soon. 

There are strong competitors in the Indian market and they are also diverging in the APAC market. How do you plan to counter them? 

I look at competition in a very advantageous way because competitors help to build the larger ecosystem. It holds true especially in the mobile advertising space. As soon as large players come in, it only helps to capture more and more spends on digital media. So, nobody is going to eat the market share as the market in itself is quite small which will only grow. 

What kind of mobile content in your opinion is popular across the country? 

There are different aspects of it. 41 percent of users access Facebook through mobile phones while 40 percent of Google search originate from mobile. If we talk about smartphones, 76 percent of these users’ access social networking websites only through mobiles and 60 percent of ecommerce transactions happen through phones. There are 30-40 users who consume news on a daily basis. There is a very diverse yet fair mix of content consumption in the country. News, Entertainment and Social as categories dominate users’ consumption on mobiles. 40 percent of smartphone users that come from top eight metros in India have watched videos on a weekly basis on their phones. This, as a trend, is very encouraging because more consumption translates into increased opportunities for us. 

Talking about nexGTv Application how has been its uptake? If you can share the download numbers.

nexGTv is our biggest and surprising success of 2012. This app is presently available free of cost on Android, Symbian. In 2012, it started from scratch by November we had 6.5 million downloads. It was all organic growth. So, it shows that if the product is good and offers something unique users will pick it up. Today, 40, 000 hours of daily TV viewing happens on nexGTv. We are also growing in terms of 40 percent in terms of users’’ m-o-m. Presently, we are showing 100 odd live channels from entertainment, regional to news channels. The biggest category on nexGTv is ‘Video-on-demand’. This gives advertisers a chance to look at this medium seriously. It is beneficial because unlike TV on mobiles ads can be made clickable and more engaging.

How are advertisers adapting to mobile video as a medium?

Well, the trend has started. Initially for every new thing there is a resistance then there is this adaption cycle. So, mobile video advertising is going through that adaption phase and it is happening swiftly. Advertisers work with us on mobile video platform very convincingly. The numbers are still very small but we are only growing this number quarter to quarter. In the beginning of 2012 we only had 29 odd clients who worked with us on the medium and we ended the year with close to 212 clients.

What are the questions that marketers ask you while you pitch for a mobile video platform?

Everybody have their own approach towards this medium and that comes from what objective they are trying to drive. So, a brand high on creative aspect of the campaign will ask us what is the cost involved in creating the mobile asset. Today one of the biggest challenge in the mobile video advertising is not many brands have mobile assets. If you run a web campaign on a website where you click on a banner you land on the website if you do a similar campaign on mobile when you click on a banner or video the landing page is a website only. So, when the user sees the website which is meant for a desktop screen the experience is really bad. The brands are very sensitive about that so they are hesitant to run a mobile campaign as they don’t have mobile assets. Vdopia has been creating such assets in a very cost effective manner which is a part of brand’s media budget.

The key to run a mobile video is the file format. So, the prevailing format in the market is mp4 or a 3GP which is heavy and non-clickable so we used some technology and created a file type which is one-third of mp4 file size and made it clickable. 

Then, marketers also ask how can they create and manage mobile assets? So, we also provide third party reports on traffic and user pattern.  Another question is also on analytics, measurements and KPI's that they can use for mobile advertising. We work with our key partners in creating brand studies which are customized as per their needs for them to measure the usage pattern and engagement level, social effectiveness.

Broadly, the questions are around creative aspects, mobile assets, measurements and analytics or simple execution and usage pattern.

What digital video trends do you foresee in this year?

Mobile TV is the dark horse it will catch up big time. Lot of content creators will start creating content for mobiles. For example I see TV channels investing in creating mobile platforms for their video content. Live streaming on digital platforms is still restricted to sports related events but going forward I think events will specially be created for digital medium.

What are your future plans in 2013?

We aim to consolidate our position in the market and make the company larger in terms of people and revenues.  We are looking at an almost 30 percent growth. Vdopia also aims to create new and unique advertising solutions.