Advertising is the largest revenue driver for HT Media, as it is for most Indian news companies.

An increasing focus of the advertising industry (especially for digital formats like display) is performance or bottom-funnel advertising, but HT had typically provided only top-of-the-funnel options for its advertising sales team, as we learned during INMA’s recent study tour and conference in Mumbai

The publisher has now built an AI-driven full-funnel advertising platform for clients — and found that the system is also proving useful for its in-house marketing team. 

The system, called Echo, uses their in-house ad server, is integrated with a marketing suite that offers more than 20 native inventories, and marries it with an underlying data layer, letting HT showcase personalised ads at scale, Puneet Jain, CEO of HT Digital, explained during the recent INMA study tour and conference in Mumbai.

“At any given point of time, we have used AI to be able to identify the right ad, at the right inventory, at the right article, for the right brand — so that it delivers better engagement for advertisers and better outcomes.”

HT also offers features such as A/B testing, brand lift studies, and fatigue management.

“We are able to add impressions on the fly … . We’ve been able to significantly improve our ad inventory without necessarily looking to get more traffic or more users,” Jain said.

CTRs are three or four times higher than typical CTRs in news publishing. Readers are finding ads less intrusive, which shows up in a 35% increase in engagement. And ads “have entered the performance stage where we are delivering outcomes or conversions.” HT is now delivering more than two billion monthly impressions and a million conversions. 

“In fact, because this is both advertising as well as a marketing suite, we are not only limiting ourselves to improving our ad offerings but also to improving our customer lifecycle goals,” Jain said. “For example, we now know which user to target for app downloads of our news products and which user to target to source subscriptions for our news products. So the same set of ad tech is also helping us improve our reader engagement goals.”

What’s next? Jain wants to own the transactions business as well. 

“We will look to drive actual online transactions completely — originating from our systems, from our sites, and finishing on our sites using the same tech.”

Also on the road map: a WhatsApp commerce engine built around the advertising and marketing suite. 

“This is a completely conversational interface where because we already know our users — they are logged-in users, we know their interests, we know which ads they interacted with — we reach out to them with a similar product and we offer them conversational capabilities to be able to convert to a lead or, in some cases, completely to a transaction, including payments, while being in WhatsApp,” Jain said.

“Conversational commerce is already big in China. I think that is about to happen in India as well.”

Also coming up: the ability to add inventories from the open Web.

If you’d like to subscribe to my bi-weekly newsletter, INMA members can do so here.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .