Naveen Tewari said GenAI it really changed the business of advertising. Much of this work is still in the pilot stage, but Naveen says the results so far have been dramatic.
Naveen’s InMobi is India’s first unicorn, has reached $1 billion in value at the time SoftBank invested $200 million in the company in 2011. InMobi has had ups and downs, but in the 17 years since its establishment, it has built two powerful businesses. adtech a platform that allows advertisers to connect to content publishers through an ad exchange. There are only about 15 global adtech companies, the biggest of which are Google, Facebook and Amazon. For InMobi, it’s now a more than $300 million business, with 65% of it from the US, and Naveen says it’s profitable.
Another is its lockscreen effort A glancelaunched in 2019. On Android phones, if you see internet content on the lock screen, it is sent by Glance. Today, it has more than 400 million users worldwide.
Naveen said it is the combination of consumer play (via Mirit) and adtech play that has made Google, Facebook and Amazon really successful, and this is what he believes puts InMobi at the inflexion point of growth. “Our place in the world is very safe,” he said.
Generate ads
But more than that, he is now excited about what GenAI can do for his adtech and Glance businesses. Until now, the way the adtech business has worked is for advertisers to send their creative or brand messages to InMobi’s advertising platform, and for the platform to then place those ads in the publisher’s or developer’s content based on some basic intelligence about the content’s users. . Often, these are banner ads that users hate. But with GenAI, Naveen said, the platform will move from serving ads to generating ads.
“Let’s read an article about some technology, and say there is an advertiser with a certain technology-oriented product. Our platform will determine how to mix in your content. It will take the tone of the content of the article, and with your permission, will write as if it were a continuation the article. This will indicate that this section of the article is sponsored,” he said.
The same thing can happen with audio and video content. Naveen said in the middle of the podcast, the platform can, in the voice of the moderator, insert a promotional piece. “The moderator will never say this line, but in the moderator’s voice, they can say this discussion is sponsored by the company, or whatever they want. Then they will say, ₹Now back to our conversation…’ and the conversation starts again.
In pilot projects, users have been found to interact with these creatives, creating them quickly, three to five times more than with banner ads. Naveen said that it should also translate to the same increase in revenue for advertisers, and InMobi.
In 2015, InMobi has tried to deliver the same content-like advertising experience through an agent called Miip inside apps. The initiative was later abandoned. “It’s not like the technology that’s out there right now, it’s just not scalable,” Naveen said.
On the lock screen
In the Glance business, the same GenAI initiative is active. The GenAI software installed on the phone is used to train the system about you by uploading about 10 photos of you. From it learn, for example, your gender, approximate age, height, possible nationality. And, combined with your browsing behavior, it will produce the content you like the most. Depending on the determination of your choice, it is possible to send a piece of the article, or the entire article, or the audio version.
Naveen has uploaded a photo of himself, and he shows how it helps him when he enters the online store of an apparel brand – quickly, the system creates a picture of him in the clothes of his favorite store. And if they like it, they can immediately click and buy it.
“With GenAI, it’s all about generating the internet, generating commerce,” he said.
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