OML-funded ‘Hypothesis' to organise creator economy and streamline influencer marketing

OML has funded a tech platform, Hypothesis, which aims to bring together creators, brands, and agencies under one umbrella to make planning, executing, and analysing influencer marketing campaigns seamless.

India’s creator ecosystem is thriving and the team behind Hypothesis has had a front-row seat mapping the evolution, challenges, and opportunities in this space.

Hypothesis is a data-driven platform that connects brands with their customers through the right influencer and manages the entire campaign pipeline. At the same time, it empowers creators to engage with their audience and build meaningful relationships with brands. This social prediction engine not just enables brands, agencies, and influencers to make proactive decisions, but also serves as a central platform of information, insights and tools for a robust influencer marketing stack.

Today, a growing number of brands consider working with creators an essential part of their brand and marketing strategy. But it remains a largely unorganised space - with discovery of the right talent to work with and measuring success depending on how each individual brand structures their efforts.

That’s where ‘Hypothesis’ steps in - allowing agencies and brands to discover the right creator with detailed filters, conduct outreach, set up the campaign, and track performance on one platform.

On the supply side of the ecosystem, ‘Hypothesis’ empowers creators and influencers to reach their full potential using social media intelligence to understand their content performance, audience affinity, and form connections with brands and agencies.

‘Hypothesis’ provides the following services for brands and agencies:

- It streamlines influencer marketing processes by bringing influencer discovery, outreach and analytics under one umbrella. This enables brands and agencies to take proactive and smarter decisions using data-rich social prediction engines that provide actionable insights into their campaign performance, audience and creator persona.

- The campaign performance forecast eliminates guesswork, allowing accurate estimation of metrics, recommending a budget range to plan campaigns with a clear understanding of expected results and optimisation based on campaign objectives.

- Hypothesis’ intelligent campaign designer utilises pattern recognition, giving them automated creator and content recommendations.

- Its interactive analysis module allows granular tracking of each content type and tagged format, allowing them to optimise their campaign ROI most efficiently. 

‘Hypothesis’ for creators:

- Streamlines the creator journey by auto-consolidating their content performance under one dashboard, eliminating the stress of monitoring across multiple social media platforms. This helps them focus on gaining valuable insights and creating impactful content for their audience.

- Hypothesis’ AI-powered insights on the market trends and branded collaborations help creators tap into the minds of their audiences to understand their interests, sentiments, brand and creator affinities.

- It helps save research time and efforts by auto-tracking the performance of their fellow creators and learning which platforms and creatives work best in the industry.

- The social media intelligence that auto-matches brands with creators based on their performances and previous brand collaborations enables creators to reach their full potential.

- The access management tool facilitates easy, hassle-free sharing of social media metrics without loss of data privacy.

Gunjan Arya, CEO and Board Member – OML Entertainment, said, “The ‘Hypothesis’ team comes from a unique cross-section of brands, agencies, and influencers, allowing them to gain first-hand experience and deep knowledge of this ecosystem. Leveraging this expertise, we funded the social prediction engine and have been using it for the last few years across diverse markets and platforms. In fact, it has been one of the critical reasons that our brand solutions vertical has been experiencing rapid growth. And now, by bringing the platform to the ecosystem at large, we aim to add value to their influencer marketing efforts and pave the way for global standards in this space.”

Himani Agrawal, Senior Vice-President - Product and Analytics - Hypothesis, added, “Audiences are moving online and brands recognise that, hence influencer marketing has gained prominence in recent times as it allows brands to get closer to their audience at the moment they are the most engaged; while watching their favourite content. We have also noticed a seismic shift in consumer behaviour and buying patterns, with people becoming more picky about their choices, a conventional 30-second ad is not sufficient anymore to give them all the information they need to make purchase decisions. Influencer marketing fills this gap, by scaling your efforts, maintaining a benchmark for performance while creating quality content that talks to the brand’s philosophy. However, this space lacked a leading-edge tool that cuts through the unorganised nature of this industry to support brands, agencies, and creators to simplify their influencer marketing processes. Hypothesis’ raison d’etre is to fill this void and provide win-win solutions to all in the long run.”

The platform aims to provide end-to-end solutions for various pain points in the influencer marketing realm and bring about a paradigm shift in branded content creation and the overall creator landscape.