Amazon’s share of advertiser wallet is accelerating, said Amazon MX Player's Karan Bedi

Streaming

The ad dollars are shifting from traditional to digital and Amazon’s share of advertiser wallets is rising fast, said Karan Bedi, head of Amazon MX Player.

"Amazon's ecosystem, whether it is MX, whether it is e-commerce, whether it's Prime Video ads which were introduced in the early part of this year, the share of wallet that is moving towards Amazon is accelerating more and more," he told Moneycontrol.

The transition from TV to streaming has occurred and Advertising Video On-Demand (AVOD) has taken a big chunk in that market.

Streaming ad pie

The overall digital ad market is around Rs 60,000 crore and AVOD accounts for 35-40% at Rs 25,000 odd crore, according to analyst estimates. YouTube captures 2/3rd of the total AVOD market and the rest is split among streaming players. The top streaming player makes around Rs 6,000 crore while YouTube takes away around Rs 14,000 crore and the remaining Rs 5,000 crore is spread across other players.

The demand for content on digital is limitless, advertisers have realized this and moved their spends to digital as streaming is more targetable, Bedi said.

Girish Prabhu, Head, Amazon Ads India pointed to 450 to 500 brands that are active on the platform at any point of time. "This number is growing because we are also seeing a lot of interest from non-product brands like services brands."

The platform is seeing a mix of in-between content advertisements and in-show advertisements.

"There's a lot of interest for product-based ads from FMCG brands and other categories especially towards product launches like for the launch of a new phone or a new moisturizer. On the app, when a viewer is watching a show and sees an ad, the product detail page shows up. This is not only turning out to be good for brands but viewers as well, Prabhu said.

Bedi noted that in this shopping from viewing and viewing from shopping experience they are seeing second screen (Connected TV) experiences scaling up.

Prabhu pointed out that when customers come to the Amazon e-commerce app, they end up watching content for two hours after placing orders. "The content extends engagement. It gives us an opportunity to have the customer spend more time, which they would otherwise have simply gone because they're done with what they wanted to do. So, it helps us extend the engagement and an opportunity to discover things. For large shows that we launch, people come to the shopping app and watch it for two hours," Prabhu added.

Scaling up content

The merged platform has doubled its watch time both on mobile and Connected TV.

"We see our minutes per customer on TV has gone up from 40 minutes on an average to about 80 minutes. On mobile, which is a much larger base for us, we've gone from 20-25 minutes to closer to 50 minutes," Prabhu noted.

This increase is on the back of many show/title launches.

Just after the merger, Bedi said that they launched a bunch of big shows. "We had the returning season of Aashram, which was one of the largest scripted shows this entire year. We had Rise & Fall. We have done a lot with videsi (foreign) products, which includes Korean, Turkish, content. This is a very big category and  we are doubling down on this. We have also launched anime in this category."

Expanding the content slate, the platform which has over 250 million monthly active users in India, is tapping into the short form content ---micro dramas. MX Fatafat has had a soft launch to test the audiences' content taste.

"We expect MX Fatafat to roll out massively, not just from a scale point of view in terms of distribution, but we also see there's a huge amount of content that is coming up. There is content that we have acquired from other places. There is original content that we are creating based on customer feedback. By the end of this year, you will see a very large number of original shows," Prabhu said.