MAM
Pocket Aces elevates Vinay Pillai to head of strategy
MUMBAI: Homegrown digital entertainment company, Pocket Aces, has elevated Vinay Pillai to the dual position of head of strategy and head of clout. Vinay joined Pocket Aces in 2020 to scale Clout, its influencer management business, and has played a crucial role in getting it to a leadership position.
In this enhanced role, Vinay will work on establishing key strategic partnerships that will not only aid in scaling the current revenue and profitability but also cement Pocket Aces’ leadership position in the sector long-term. Prior to Pocket Aces, Vinay was the co-founder of dekkho, India’s first content streaming OTT platform. Post dekkho, he headed the OTT platform at The Viral Fever, called TVF Play.
Vinay is a computer science engineer and an MS from Columbia University, New York. He spent most of his career in product and strategy consulting with companies like DramaFever, DocPlace, and Booz in the US before returning to India.
Commenting on his new position, Vinay Pillai shared, “I am extremely excited to take up this crucial additional responsibility to shape our strategic direction along with Aditi. Leading Clout over the last few years has been an absolute pleasure, and I have thoroughly enjoyed building it from scratch to a market leader today with an amazing team. Additionally, I look forward to now working with Pocket Aces’ finest leaders across other business units to help them scale our company to even greater heights. We have prided ourselves on always doing things in a data-backed way with a huge impetus on innovation. I feel honoured to now get to contribute in a Pocket Aces wide central capacity with our stellar young team and would like to thank Aditi for the opportunity.”
Pocket Aces co-founder & CEO Aditi Shrivastava said, “For the head of strategy role, I wanted someone who would work alongside me to add to our vision of taking our cutting-edge media business to the next level. Vinay is a non-linear thinker. He has founder blood, as well as a blend of consulting and operational experience. These give him a unique vantage point on how to take on incumbents while also giving him the hard operational expertise of scaling businesses on the ground with growing teams. Vinay has done an excellent job of scaling Clout, and I’m excited to see him in this enhanced role. Vinay will be working closely with the rest of our management team, who will take the lead in putting our strategic direction into action.”
MAM
The Merit of Madness: How AI is Changing the Game in Advertising
By Ritz Malik, founder, Ritz Media World.
MUMBAI: When it comes to growth in a competitive landscape, a businessman always has to be a firm believer in Darwinism. You either need to bring a better product, or a better price, or both to the table to get customers and scale. Without this value proposition, you remain unnoticed, and staying unnoticed is not something that a brand wants to do.
You have to do all this and also make sure that you stay cashflow positive at the same time. Otherwise, you’re at a real risk of becoming a large hollow balloon that your competitors are just waiting for to explode or implode under its own weight.
As we’ve entered the era of AI, the notion of a product’s efficacy, cost efficiency, marketability, workflow management, and logistics reliability has become increasingly relevant and prevalently impactful. None of this is background noise anymore. It is the difference between bleeding money on traditional media and actually engineering a profitable campaign.
For example, META’s AI Algorithm has finally given us the ability to measure the ‘CREATIVE’ for a business’s promotions. The best part is that we can do so organically. Content that is actually relevant to the target audience gets more views through reach. This tells us exactly how the audience is reacting before we even scale the budget. This is how we have been gifted the ability to provide merit to the madness of the creative process.
So, our process is as follows:
A set of creatives is built for social media
Their performance is closely monitored for reach and engagement.
Based on the best organic performance, we choose the creative.
Make micro adjustments to add a sales proposition and CTA (but keep it subtle)
Publish the modified creative as an ad.
There’s a lot that goes on in between, but this is the basic method for getting it right. And this is just the AI that’s being used by platforms across the world.
AI utilisation is something that has greatly made the creative process a lot easier. As an agency that thrives on coming up with ideas that are out of this world, we have made the most of leveraging AI to bring ideas to life without spending a fortune.
So, this way, the ability to create high-impact brand stories is no longer under the tyrannical gatekeeping of large budget organisations. It is now that merit solely falls on the storyteller.
Now, AI-powered content production and the AI algorithm on Social Media platforms are asking the question: Is your content compelling?. If yes, the audience will watch your content, share it, and engage with it.
And when it comes to keeping budgets down, we can surely say that it holds the capability to execute million-dollar shoots at a fraction of the cost.
For example, we recently came across a creative challenge by a major Real Estate Developer from Gurugram. They had signed a celebrity couple for their brand ambassadorship a few months ago. They were now about to launch their new project, but for some reason, they could not get their shoot done.
What we came up with was to use the likeness of this celebrity couple and place them throughout the project’s feature video. With the help of AI generation, we were able to rebuild a completely new feature video with their brand ambassadors in 2 days, and no additional physical shots were required.
Imagine being able to save 50-60 lakhs in production costs, 15-20 days in production time, and comfortably be ahead of schedule to launch the project.
This has changed the game entirely. With AI, you can now just acquire the likeness rights of celebrities, and you can just build environments and scenarios with them. The balance between creative and artificial intelligence isn’t a battle for control; it is simply the ultimate tool for survival and scale in a landscape that rewards the fastest and the smartest.
