Nas Daily wants to make Indian brands go viral via AI, comes to India with a marketing agency

Nuseir Yassin, Founder of 1000 Media and Nas Daily

A trending video or post is an everyday affair for Nuseir Yassin, the brains behind Nas Daily. With 68 million followers, the Palestinian-Israeli vlogger now wants to parlay his success with his marketing agency 1000 Media to Indian brands, helping them go viral with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).

Yassin announced the entry of 1000 Media to India on February 17.

"A marketing firm because now is the first time there's a big opportunity to create good content very fast using AI technologies. There's a real shift happening when it comes to content creation," he said.

Why India? He thinks this is the time for Indian brands to tell their story and get to the world stage.

"You'll see Indian brands wanting to capture the rest of the world and we want to be their partners in that. So we're betting on the growth of AI and we're betting on the growth of India at the same time," Yassin told Moneycontrol.

The marketing agency has taken on 15-20 brands so far and the plan is to ramp it up to 80-100 by the end of this year.

"We already have clients like Adani, Leverage Edu. Adani is in the works while for Leverage Edu, you can just look at their Instagram page and the content you see, that 1000 Media is making," he said.

"We want to be the partner of startups in India in helping them to be their content creation and agency partner," Yassin said, adding that they will also work with the large brands wanting to reinvent their storytelling and the founders seeking to grow their audience.

However, what will 1000 Media do for brands?

Yassin said that they want to make compelling storytelling by creating viral, emotionally engaging content that will help Indian brands and creators reach the audiences they are seeking.

The influencer may have come up with the name 1000 Media based on his journey of creating 1,000 videos in 1,000 days to become a global name. But he wants to make every story count, for which he is looking for talent locally.

"We are roughly 30 people. Most likely, it will be 60 people by the end of 2025. We're making serious investments here to make the client listing expand as well as the team size," he said.

What kind of talent he is looking for? Yassin said, "The world has two kinds of people. People that know how to go viral and people that do not. We just want the former."

AI push

India has a host of marketing agencies that brands use for their media planning but Yassin sees none of them as competition because he thinks his company mastered the art of AI-driven content creation long before it became mainstream. The company has been creating AI-generated shows on platforms like Snapchat.

"Look, 10 years ago, it used to take me 15 hours to make one piece of content. That is, a one-minute video. Shooting, editing and getting the music, scripting, research... Now, everything is cut down by 70 percent. Therefore, if it took five hours to write a video or get a video idea, with AI, you can get it within an hour. So, it has made everything much faster," he pointed out.

"Now, we're not saying that AI can do everything yet," he added. "You still need humans as part of the process. But everything has become significantly faster."

AI is also bringing down costs, the influencer said. "Digital agencies in the past would help brands make one video which would cost $10,000. The digital agencies that we're trying to build will help brands make a thousand pieces of content for $10,000."

AI is giving the opportunity to revolutionise what an agency looks like, especially if it's tech-enabled, which is a lot more efficient, he said.

Yassin individually as well as for 1000 Media uses a suite of five to seven different AI tools.

"We're not building our own AI tools. We are using state-of-the-art AI startups from around the world, whether it is HeyGen (AI video generator), ElevenLabs (text to speech and AI voice generator) or Delphi (digital cloning platform). We are just making use of the suite that exists today and making it available for the clients. Normally, clients do not even know how to get the best AI music, or the best AI scripts. We know what the best tools are. And we just make it accessible," Yassin noted.

He thinks the use of AI in content creation is "going to be insane".

"The amount of videos generated by AI, I wouldn't be surprised if 50 percent of social media in the future is AI content," he added.

Ad spend surge on social media

Yassin also thinks that in India, brands' advertising spends will shift from television and print to social media.

"This is a space we only see growing. We do not see shrinking. If any brand wants to do marketing, the best way to do it is through organic content. If a brand is spending $10 (on social media) today, tomorrow they are going to spend $15.  I think they are going to spend a lot less on TV and newspapers. And a lot of that is going to come to social media."

However, he said that the biggest problem with Indian brands right now is that they are not addressing the non-domestic audience.

"There's a massive opportunity in talking to people outside of India. In addition, I do not know if they are using enough performance marketing. I think many brands in India use brand power. However, they are not using enough performance marketing, paid ads, creative ads. Brands in India are not capitalising as much as they should on this massively untapped opportunity. In Israel, for example, people are too much into performance marketing. Everything is an ad in Israel and not enough brand."

Indian creators not making money

Brands may be willing to pay for social media content but consumers are not, and that is why there is little to no money in India's creator economy, said Yassin.

"There's no money in the creator economy in India. Most creators in India are not making any money. My assessment of India is that the consumer is not ready to pay, but the brand is ready to pay for social media content. In the next five years, maybe that will change. But for the time being, it's a brand play."

India’s influencer marketing industry is likely to be worth Rs 3,400 crore by 2026, from Rs 1,900 crore in 2023 according to a FICCI-EY report.

"The creator economy in India is quite developed. There is a significant amount of content creators and an ecosystem built up around creators. I am a big fan of the creator economy in India," Yassin said.