iWorld
ZEE5 India improves customer engagement with Appier partnership
MUMBAI: ZEE5 India today announces that in partnership with leading artificial intelligence (AI) company Appier, it has significantly improved its customer engagement- including a 3x jump in click-through rates and video sampling- through effective use of AI to uncover critical insights about its viewers.
ZEE5 India launched in 2018 and as of December 2019, records more than 11.4 million peak daily users. As the audience grows, ZEE5 India is committed to understanding viewers at an individual level so it can hyper-personalize the most relevant content at the right time. This requires leveraging viewer data using AI to understand where people are in the customer lifecycle and how they consume content. With these insights, ZEE5 India defines and deploys a strategic mix of communication channels, content and consumption timeframes to ensure high acquisition, viewership, and retention rates.
ZEE5 India implemented AIQUA, an AI-powered proactive customer engagement solution from Appier that allows marketers to drive engagement across all devices and channels. Using AIQUA, Appier helped ZEE5 India streamline data sources to ensure relevant customer engagement.
“At ZEE5 India, we are committed to excellence when it comes to both our product and customer service, and we are always looking for partners with disruptive technology to help us achieve this,” ZEE5 India customer lifecycle management head Vani Dixit said. “To engage with and stay relevant to our customers, we need to leverage data efficiently using AI to better understand and reach them at times when they are most likely to take action. With Appier we reimagined how we make consumers’ content viewing experience hyper-personalized. As India’s largest producer of original content, it is our endeavor to make the consumer’s journey on to the ZEE5 platform intuitive and provide them with a seamless content viewing experience.”
With AIQUA, ZEE5 India has increased the number of specific customer segments by 10 times- from just a few hundred to thousands- allowing for the most highly personalized content delivery. AIQUA also allows for quick development and adjustment of campaigns to meet the immediate and specific needs of viewers. ZEE5 India has increased the number of campaigns it runs through AIQUA by 2000 per cent since March 2019, running several hundred campaigns daily
“Working with ZEE5 India has led to an excellent partnership, and we appreciate that the ZEE5 team has been so open with us about both their challenges and vision for success,” said Michelle Wong, Appier enterprise sales senior Vice President. “We look forward to continuing to support ZEE5’s growth through marketing excellence, and to helping them apply Appier’s AI solutions in the most effective ways to drive their business forward.”
Appier and ZEE5 India continue to work together, maintaining the focus on attracting and retaining customers via customized outreach, leading to long-term, meaningful relationships with viewers.
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.
