Steuart Henderson Britt – the award-triumphing Canadian historian, culture critic, filmmaker and musician as soon as famously said, “Doing enterprise without advertising is like winking at a girl within the dark. You recognize what you are doing, however nobody else does.” Such is the essentiality of advertising for commercial enterprise. However, advertising in itself is only 1/2 the task performed – it wishes the proper media platform to create the vital effect.
Launching an advert marketing campaign on random structures is again like gambling the field inside the dark; causing lack of time, effort and money. There are severa media options available within the marketplace and getting specific statistics on each of them may be a painful task, involve achieving out to every media employer personally. Fortunately, startups like The Media Ant offer a platform for marketers and advertisers to are seeking for insights on all of the media options below one roof.
Samir Chaudhary, CEO and cofounder of The Media Ant become a marketer himself and confronted comparable troubles for the duration of his stint because the marketing head at redBus. He was running on a advertising campaign with a small budget and couldn't manage to pay for an company. There are some of available media options, and sourcing statistics like price, reach, beyond examples, case studies turned into an exhaustive task, and involved calling and assembly humans from the media corporations. There was no single on line platform that might be used. The concept of The Media Ant become conceived then, a digital advertising and marketing manager for the marketing community.
The Ant That Loves Ads
Founded in July 2012 by Samir, Mayank Bidawatka and Mukesh Agrawal, The Media Ant is a discovery platform wherein media owners and advertising offerings carriers share their media and offerings information like reach, pricing and audience. This facts is then freely available to the marketers to get entry to.
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Marketers can select from the numerous media domain names like mag, newspaper, radio, cinema, out of doors, virtual and even inflight. On deciding on the proper media option and brand, a marketer can directly reach out to the respective media proprietor to region the ad. Although, it currently doesn’t provide an online payment option to ebook commercials, customers can e book ad by means of confirming it on line or via e mail. It even has a discussion platform for entrepreneurs to interact and submit questions/doubts that different marketers can answer.
Samir has over 10 years of experience in the subject of advertising and advertising and marketing. He pursued his PGDM in marketing and finance from IIM, Bangalore. He had labored with businesses like Reckitt Benckiser, Britannia and redBus.
Mayank became his colleague at redBus and Mukesh became a common friend who used to paintings with E&Y at that point. They were seeking a companion with revel in in finance, and Mukesh – who has an MBA in finance – suit the bill perfectly. He liked the concept and turned into welcomed aboard.
Samir looks after the product and standard walking of the company, while Mukesh heads the commercial enterprise and finance. Mayank isn't active within the every day activity and plays an advisory function.
Talking approximately the The Media Ant’s commercial enterprise version, Samir stated, “Right from the day one, we have been clear that we will now not price for the records or list. Democratization of records changed into middle to our perception. Finding the proper enterprise version to keep walking this free service turned into the most important undertaking we faced. We tackled that by using maintaining the value to a minimum and using era as plenty as possible to aggregate and share the statistics.
Challenges, Monetization, Traction And Competition
The Media Ant has overs 5200 media options, and has a customer base of extra than three hundred advertisers. It has been developing with the aid of 10% in sales month on month, over the past three months, its site visitors increase has been round 20%.
However, things have been no longer continually hunky-dory for the trio. Just after three months in their launch, they determined to close forestall. Aggregating media become a difficult assignment and the young startup acquired almost no traction from the advertiser’s side. For per week, all 3 of them determined to take a damage, with no telephone or internet. During this damage, they determined to provide the idea one extra month.
Fortunately, something super befell during that damage. They still don’t realize what befell during that week, but on returning back, they found their mailboxes full. There were mails both from media owners to be enlisted as well as advertisers who desired to vicinity orders. “That one week-lengthy wreck has considering the fact that been our proposal all through all difficult instances,” exclaims Samir.
The business enterprise has controlled to reach this some distance while being in a bootstrap mode – it presently has a 20-member group. They, however, gained the ET Power of Ideas competition in September 2012 and received a coins prize. “There is a rich product pipeline in vicinity. While we do now not need fund right away, we always maintain our eyes and ears open to discover the right buyers who ought to both help us with their knowledge to make the goods better or with their finances to enhance the attain of our merchandise to our customers.”
Talking about the company’s growth plans, Samir said, “Our contemporary enlargement plan entails adding more media verticals and growing depth in our present day media verticals. Once we reap this, we can launch merchandise that contact other factors of a marketer’s lifestyles.”
Although it’s a singular idea, the organisation faces competition from few players like ReleaseMyAd, BookMyAd, Advertisement India, Ads2Publish and Ads2Book.
ReleaseMyAd offers a one-prevent advertising and marketing solution enabling media making plans and shopping for, jingle manufacturing and reporting offerings, custom designed for diverse corporations with one-of-a-kind budgets. This Kolkata-based totally startup turned into based in 2009 via Sharad Lunia – ex-worker of Microsoft and a Wharton alumnus.
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It commenced off with a team of six humans, providing online reserving of newspaper commercials via their platform. It has now increased to a crew of over seventy five personnel, and allows entrepreneurs to e-book advert campaigns on radio, magazine, cinema and main web sites. It also builds and launches Google Adwords marketing campaign. It has now not raised any investment and is cash-go with the flow high-quality; it fuels its growth through inner accruals.
All the opposite players are on-line newspaper commercial booking businesses. Deccan Chronicle and The Hindu have their separate on line platforms for categorized advert bookings on their media services – Ads2DC.Com and thehinduads.Com respectively. Although, Ads2Book belongs to the network of Times Business Group – a part of The Times Group – it permits on line ad bookings on more than 50 courses, inclusive of the Hindustan Times Group.
Editor’s Note
Both media groups and marketers maintain on a mutual collaborative dating. These online advert booking structures are tapping this relationship, as they understand that the call for-deliver dynamics will constantly exist in this space, and there is lots of untapped capability right here. There are handiest a handful of gamers working in this area; they are nevertheless discovering unexplored avenues of growth. Players who recognize the want of marketers and media corporations properly , and are quick to offer innovative services will honestly have the first-mover gain that could help them make stronger their footing in this area.
