Brands betting on vernacular content to reach their audience, here’s why

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Move over English! There are Indian languages now that can be described as languages of the web. And guess who is leveraging the country’s linguistic diversity? Brands, for whom “regional” is the go-to word to connect with consumers since both content creation and consumption in vernacular languages is seeing an upward trend.

According to a RedSeer report, up to 30 percent of advertising spend is expected to come from Indian language ads.

The report also estimates that digital advertising spends in the regional media will reach $3 billion by 2023 from $300 million in 2018.

Among the content platforms betting big on regional languages is Momspresso, a place for mothers to express themselves. Sixty-five percent of content creation and 85 percent of the consumption on the platform is in regional languages.

“For us, Uttar Pradesh is the second largest state in terms of number of users. The top six to seven states include Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and these states give you a sense of how big regional languages are. We have good amount of scale in terms of users coming in and consuming content in regional languages,” Vishal Gupta, CEO and co-founder, Momspresso, said in an interview with Moneycontrol.

He added that the reason why brands are increasingly focussing on vernacular content is because nearly 60 percent of the audience trusts an ad in their own language.

“The audience is Bharat,” he said.

So, for Momspresso, Hindi is the largest, followed by Bangla, Marathi, Tamil and Malayalam.

“Hindi is ahead of English. In terms of creation, both Hindi and English are roughly equal but if you were to look in terms of consumption, Hindi would be one and a half times of what English is,” said Gupta.

Yet, Gupta says that brands are still catching up with the trend of leveraging regional language users and content. For example, on Momspresso, 30 percent of the revenue last year came from regional language content and users.

But even now, English contributes about 70 percent to our revenue, said Gupta, who added that creating quality content in the regional space is relatively tougher. However, regional content has witnessed growth, as can be seen from the platform’s revenue from this segment in 2018, which stood at 13 percent.

One reason for this growth could be that on a per unit basis, Momspresso prices the regional language content higher than the English content.

For the platform, the biggest category is FMCG, followed by consumer durables and retail.

Gupta is confident that the trend of brands focusing on regional language users is only going to increase.

The optimism also comes from that fact that Google has estimated language content consumers to reach 536 million by 2021. “They (language users) are growing at a CAGR of 18 percent whereas English users are growing at a CAGR of 3 percent and are projected to reach 200 million by 2021.”

But there are a few challenges that need to be addressed, one of them being finding quality resources. Adding to this, Gupta said, “There is nothing to check plagiarism in regional languages. For related content, it is easy to do that personalisation in English whereas difficult to do it in Indian language content. There is a role of the ecosystem to make that easier.”