Marketers are increasingly avoiding shameless plugin, says Angad Bhatia of Indiatimes Lifestyle Network

Over the years, marketers have evolved to understand that a shameless plugin of their brand in the content could backfire. And hence, very few marketers now insist on putting their brands in the face, feels Angad Bhatia, COO of Indiatimes Lifestyle Network (ILN), which operates Indiatimes, MensXP, iDiva and WhatsHot.

“They understand that their attributions are different for performance marketing and brand building. With that, they understand today that if they ask for a shameless plugin, they will be called out and trolled. And they are doubly wary of that today. Marketers who insist on putting their brands in the face of content are not even 50%,” he said.

In an interview with BuzzInContent.com, Bhatia said there was no need to shy about placing product and services in content. “The fact is we use products and services in our daily lives. We do not need to be shy about it. We just need to make that an integral part of the script,” he said.

ILN’s revenue model is built around content marketing. The network earns 60-65% of its revenues from branded text and videos and is growing at 100% YOY. But is it a smooth sailing in such a cluttered space with the challenges around measurement of ROI and day-to-day hassle between editorial and clients?

Bhatia believes that cultural relevance and genuine reach are the answers to most of the challenges.

Excerpts:

In which ways does Indiatimes Lifestyle Network help brands in their content marketing efforts?

ILN has four brands in its stable — Indiatimes, MensXP, iDiva and WhatsHot. ILN is at the heart of branded solutions in two strong verticals. First is the branded text. We were the first organised player doing branded text in the country with a proper rate card, deliveries, analytics and mechanisms for the industry to track, which started almost four years back. It is a huge business for us. While for more social-led publishers it is a dying business, for us it is a 100% plus YOY growing business. We have a dedicated editorial team that works directly with over 400 to 600 clients every year for a range of branded stories.

Our second leg of brand solutions is branded video. Our core around branded video is short-form content. Popular IPs from our stack include South Delhi Girls, Honest Reviews, Happy Teacher and Love on the rocks.

We did about two dozen long-format web series last year. In fact, we were a strategic partner with Facebook last year and they directly commissioned over a dozen of web shows hosted on Facebook Watch. Some of the popular ones include Love on the rocks, Toughest Indian men, Toughest Indian women and Groom barabar groom.

The largest brand in your stable is MensXP. How much does content marketing/branded content contribute to its revenues?

60-65% of our revenues are non-display or non-programmatic, which is branded content. If you talk about MensXP, it will be slightly higher on branded content but even display is very strong. iDiva is strongest in branded content and slightly lower with display. Indiatimes’ display is very strong.

Which categories are mainly using MensXP for their content marketing initiatives? What strategies do you have to expand your offerings to other categories?

We are the largest youth lifestyle network in the country. Overall, ILN does 50mn unique users on site. 99% brands who work with us are all lifestyle clients, who want to tap into millennial audiences. OTT platforms, fashion and beauty, FMCG and mobile categories are big for us. The BFSI space is there with us but not in a big way.

In an era when engagements are bought, measurement of ROI, especially sales lead generation, has always been a challenge for the brands. They say they have to go by the numbers what publishers share. How is ILN tackling this challenge?

Attention can be bought, not engagement. We have invested huge in figuring out the right analytics and right metrics. Beginning with branded text, typically the industry works on a page view commitment. Whereas we go to the extent of giving scroll depth, page depth, social engagement (organic and paid separately). Not only this, all our advertisers are able to validate all the information we share with them with the trackers provided to them.

In a world where transparency is the centre stage for most of the evolved advertisers, we understand that ROI calculation is at the heart of their strategy.

Every savvy digital marketer understands and has very strong attribution funnels that they can track at their ends. While the role of conversion and attribution could be the same, the expectation is different from different mediums. The marketer may run a cost per installation campaign or cost per sale campaign on search or social platforms. But from a publisher, the expectation is not to convert this into leads or sales. ROI, cost per click, cost per download and cost per retention are some of the standard metrics that most evolved advertisers use today. Most of the advertisers understand that in their attribution funnel, there is a role for the top-of-mind recall. And this is at the heart of ILN.

Pitching for a content initiative is highly important in the cluttered space. How do you make sure that you are on the top of the game at pitching?

We care deeply about the values that each of our publishing brands embodies. We ensure that ethos is represented across every single piece of content. There is a value system that all of our brands have and that is what makes us relevant. Because we stand for something, we create content around what we stand for. We have a voice. Our business is not built on Facebook and Google traffic with any sort of content that would work. There is a lot of editorial integrity.

What’s your learning over the years about clients’ preference for a platform?

Cultural relevance and genuine reach are the two things that client want.

Brands are usually obsessed to bring name brand in the face. Sometimes they go very far to insist on their brand’s mention in headline or subheading. How should a publisher deal with such a situation?

We have been in this business for the last four years and we have seen a dramatic shift in the mindset of top advertisers during this period. They understand that their attribution funnels are different for their top-of-the-funnel and bottom-of-the-funnel campaigns. They understand that their attributions are different for performance marketing and brand building. With that, they understand today that if they ask for a shameless plugin then they will be called out and they will be trolled. And they are doubly wary of that today. Marketers who insist on putting their brands in the face of the content are not even 50%.

We have done training with our teams, we have built case studies, we go and explain what works and what does not work. Between the four platforms, we do close to 800-1000 branded stories every month and 35-40 branded videos every month. We have an over 100-strong brand solutions team. ILN is sitting at a different scale of branded solutions today. We have now forayed into vernacular and we are going to repeat the same success there. In the last two months, starting from MensXP to Indiatimes to iDiva, all the platforms have gone live in Hindi.

How frequently you face editorial and brand conflict on several counts, including the intensity of brand integration?

This is a continuous thing. We learned and developed processes internally as to where we draw the line. Our entire ambition is to create branded content that people genuinely love. I have built an editorial business so I will always have a softer corner for the editorial universe. But to be fair, what most people forget is that advertising is still information and it is important to people who want to know what brands have to say. We do not believe in giving subliminal messages that are extremely hidden. We feel that if brands are not important in the narrative that we are building out with branded content, we are doing disservice to both audience and the brand.

Our video with Spiderman is a clear promotion for Marvel. In Kusha and Dolly video with Lakme, we have not shied away from saying that we are in the Lakme salon. That itself is a changing trend in branded content. There used to be a subtle product placement earlier but even as it is subtle, if you are trying to be sneaky, your audience will call you out for it. Your brand has to disappear from the content in a way that it is a very much organic part of the script. The fact is that we use products and services in our daily lives. We do not need to be shy about it. We just need to make that an integral part of the script.

MensXP claims to have more engagement than BuzzFeed. Is it same when it comes to Indian players like ScoopWhoop, TVF, POPXO, Catch Up (erstwhile WittyFeed), etc.?

We are strongest in every metric. Our concentrated reach is above 50mn unique. If you add social reach, that becomes 185-190mn. ILN is much bigger than several networks. Globally in terms of social interactions, ILN is right after BuzzFeed. MensXP on standalone basis is far bigger than ScoopWhoop and BuzzFeed in India in terms of social interactions and reach.

Does MensXP also rely heavily on influencer network to attract traffic similar to its peers, including BuzzFeed, ScoopWhoop, TVF?

We do not think of our social channels as traffic attribution tools. Those are engagement platforms for us. And we have a very healthy business running on those platforms. Our Instagram page has a business model and that has nothing to do with bringing people back from Instagram to our sites. We build content for a platform for the audience of that platform and not to drive traffic from there.