There was a time when OTT was growing and now that is somewhat saturated. Casual gaming is becoming increasingly popular. In India, there are around 400 million users, ranging from 350 to 400 million and they’re all playing casual games. We dig deeper into the gaming scenario in India in an exclusive chat with Storyboard18, Otohiko Kozutsumi – Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer AnyMind Group. And Rubeena Singh, Country Manager, India and MENA who also talk about Anymind’s business mdoel, gaming, acquisitions, expansion, influencer marketing, AI and more.
What has AnyMind been up to?
Oto: We have two types of businesses. The first one is brand growth and commerce, and the second one is publisher partnerships. In the first one, we collaborate with brands to provide end-to-end solutions from marketing to e-commerce. Brands aim to drive conversions online and offer them everything from brand awareness to conversion and online company sales.
Another component is partner development. Here we collaborate with creators, as well as online publishers and media outlets. We also have app developers, which falls under our POKKT mobile business where we help mobile game brands expand their business. It is not just for branding purposes but also to increase the app’s user base. They also seek to generate advertising revenue from the brand side. The brand side comes first, followed by the application side, and we assist them throughout the entire process.
What are the expansion plans for India?
Oto: In March 2020, we acquired POKKT in India, so this March marks the fourth anniversary of the POKKT acquisition. We had plans to enter the Indian market as this market is massive and then there’s rapid growth. In the digital economy or industry, this industry segment is rapidly expanding. We wanted to tap the Indian market and then we met Rohit, the founder of POKKT.
We believed in his leadership and amazing insights into the mobile gaming and advertising industries and thus we entered India via POKKT.
POKKT already has a very strong business base in India and thanks to it we are now able to bring that to our influencer marketing platforms.
We also have grown and built our e-commerce management platform and introduced the publisher’s growth business to India. We now aim to grow the influencer and e-commerce businesses and launch a partner growth business. We have now on board Rubeena as India’s Country Manager and we are currently driving the influencer marketing and e-commerce business under excellent leadership.
Rubeena: As Oto mentioned, our business has two sides: brand growth and partner growth. We started the brand growth solution with mobile marketing. With Anymind’s experience and global product, we launched influencer marketing and direct-to-consumer (D2C) in India. Now we have a complete ecosystem that helps us enable our clients and partners grow
I believe this can give us tremendous scale. We have the ability to not only serve a very large enterprise clientele , but also the SMB segment. We are currently working on how to go beyond the top cities to serve mid-market, mid-segment clients and how to penetrate deeper. With our technology, we can easily service the scale that comes with this segment.
How are you leveraging AI?
Oto:Before generative AI was demonstrated and booming, we had already included AI functions such as machine learning and computer vision into AnyTag our influencer marketing platform or as a partner growth business. So, AI is already widely used in the automotive business. and right now, generative AI is thriving.
Recently, we introduced AI influencer capabilities to businesses. The AI influencer is divided into two halves – one, a typical AI influencer who can publish something fascinating on Instagram or other social media networks and the second portion, which is quite interesting is the AI influencer live commerce function.
If we collaborate with AI influencers to undertake live streaming or live commerce, we can do it 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So, if humans need to do it, we can do it, right? So they are really interesting features for AnyMind. that we’ve recently begun this type of new project.
Can you share some details on Anymind’s faming vertical?
Rubeena:The gaming vertical is our largest business in India . We have offerings from brand to performance. The value lies in the technology stack that we built about a decade ago which has an understanding of the consumers who use those games. Marketers can then utilize that stack to target specific audiences.
Any consumer trends that Anymind has been leveraging in India and globally about influencer marketing?
Oto:Firstly, consumers are moving really fast. Let’s say in Southeast Asia, previously, Instagram was quite active, then TikTok entered the Southeast Asian market and became one of the fastest-growing social media platforms right now in India Thus, consumers are adapting to technology and are moving quite fast which I believe exceeds corporate and company expectations. This means that we must also adjust to a more localized approach. So, for influencer marketing what just supports best is Instagram Facebook and TikTok. There’s also YouTube which works well.
However, we have also began to adapt and support X (ex Twitter). So, X remains popular in Japan, the United States, and Saudi Arabia. Interestingly, in India, there are numerous other platforms like Moj and Josh, so, in the future, we’ll need to adapt, or localize, our platform to serve such platforms too.