iWorld
IBROAD7 restructures under umbrella entity Reach India
Mumbai: iBroad7 (www.ibroad7.com), the country’s largest agency in the audio market with proven capabilities across multiple media including print, outdoor, and television, is now expanding and scaling up rapidly with a focus on the new economy, along with a sharp focus on localisation of campaigns and content.
The company is expanding, both vertically and horizontally, under a new umbrella entity— Reach India (www.reach4india.com)—in a sharply engaged hub-and-spoke model, with widened national and international operations and new lines of businesses.
This restructuring has been done keeping in mind the emerging landscape in the media, brand communication, and content space. This includes programmatic audio, branded podcasts, digital media, and tech-enabled real-time media buying and planning.
“Over the last few years, we have seen many brands and organisations, some of which we have had the privilege to serve and many which we would love to serve, grow manifold. We would like to be a part of this journey, chronicling their march, telling their stories, and amplifying and localising their conversations through audio, digital, content, and other formats in any language, anywhere in India,” said Reach India MD Rohit Upadhyay.
Upadhyay founded iBroad7 in 2010 and since shepherded it into India’s biggest in the audio space. It has created and serviced over 1800 brands, across geographies, industries, sectors, products, and services through more than two million campaigns and four million creatives.
iBroad7 will remain the anchor entity for steering the group’s flagship radio operations. It currently serves several marque brands across a wide range of industries and segments including start-ups, e-commerce, real estate, government, automobile, food, spirits and beverages, hospitality, travel and tourism, electronics, pharmaceuticals, ed-tech, and BFSI among others.
The brand portfolio includes Honda Motorcycles and Scooters India (HMSI), Zomato, Spicejet, Cars24, SBI, L&T Realty, Godrej group, Goodyear, HDFC Ergo, Foodpanda, Cure.Fit, MI, Zoomcar, Dunzo, Patanjali, and Eazydiner among a host of other storied MNC and Indian brands.
iBroad7 is expanding internationally as well. It has recently set up its office in Dubai to service the Middle-east and North Africa Region (MENA). “There are plans to expand to Singapore, soon,” Mr Upadhyay said.
The new businesses include Audiostream (www.audiostream.in), to serve as a single-roof solution for programmatically buying digital audio at scale. Audiostream allows brands to reach across multiple music streaming and podcast publishers to optimally reach their target audience at the click of a button. It enables non-skippable audio spots with a very high listen-through ratio (LTR) of 90-95 per cent, complete transparency in KPI measurement. Brands can reach out to listeners via: age, gender, location, language, genre. Audiostream enables video advertisement on Spotify, Wynk, Hungama and Saavn.
A new business—The Buying Hub (www.thebuyinghub.in)–has also been set up as a one-stop shop for real-time media buying and planning on a single platform that enables brands to localise their campaigns. Brands will be able to log on to the specially created platform that contains all information about inventories and rates across media—from radio, print, television, OOH, OTTs, and much more.
Another arm, Digisutra (www.thedigisutra.com), is a future-ready digital marketing, social media, and branding & communications solutions agency. Digisutra’s range of offering includes digital media, digital media buying & PPC, influencer marketing, integrated creative development, content creation, website development and management, social media strategy and development, SEO, CRO &SEM strategy & implementation, OTT & connected TVs, and much more.
It has also branched into the creator economy with Earshot Audio (www.earshotaudio.in), India’s only PaaS (Podcast as a Service) company, offering a complete suite of services that includes production, publishing and promotion of branded podcast IPs for brands and organisations.
iWorld
WhatsApp may soon let users to pick who sees their status updates
The messaging giant is borrowing a page from Instagram’s playbook as it pushes to give users finer control over their social circles.
CALIFORNIA: WhatsApp is quietly working on a feature that could make its Status function considerably smarter and considerably more private.
According to reports from beta tracking platforms, the app is testing a tool called Status lists, which would allow users to create named groups such as close friends, family and colleagues, and control precisely which group sees each update. It is a meaningful step up from the platform’s current blunt instruments, which offer only three options: share with all contacts, exclude specific people, or manually select individuals each time.
The new feature draws an obvious comparison with Instagram’s Close Friends function, and the resemblance is unlikely to be accidental. Both platforms sit within Meta’s family, and the company has been nudging them toward a common logic of audience segmentation for some time.
The move also fits neatly into WhatsApp’s broader privacy push. The platform has been rolling out enhanced chat protections and is exploring the introduction of usernames, which would allow users to connect without exchanging phone numbers. Status lists extend that philosophy from messaging into broadcasting.
Meanwhile, Status itself has been evolving well beyond its origins as a simple photo-and-text slideshow. The feature now supports music stickers, collages, longer videos and interactive elements, pushing it closer to the social-media-style story format pioneered by Snapchat and refined by Instagram. In that context, finer audience controls are not merely a privacy feature. They are a precondition for people sharing more.
The feature remains in development and has not been confirmed for release. WhatsApp routinely tests tools that are later modified or quietly shelved. But the direction of travel is clear: the app wants Status to be a destination, not an afterthought. Letting users decide exactly who is in the audience is how it gets there.
