Brands and marketers can target audiences on the VI platform, not only within their owned and operated media but also onto the third-party, said Nishant S Gupta, Head of Revenue, TorcAI, at the Pitch CMO Summit in Mumbai on Friday.

He was delivering the spotlight session on ‘Many Industry Firsts with VI Ads’. According to Gupta, brands can also transfer their first-party data in the most secure manner on VI Ads’ platform.

Talking about VI audiences on third-party media, Gupta said, “Till date, within the telco ecosystem, advertisers could target the audiences within their owned and operated media. But with VI Ads, the landscape has completely changed. Now brands and marketers can target audiences on VI platform not within their own and operated media but also onto the third party.”

Vodafone Idea Limited (Vi) provides access to more than 243 million subscribers in India and has signed a multi-year partnership with Infomo's subsidiary TorcAI to launch a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) enabled AdTech and data distribution platform known as VI Ads.

Vi Ads has been conceptualised, developed and handled by TorcAI. It was launched in 2022.

“It allows the brand and marketers to not only target the digital part but they can also target via traditional media like SMS and OBD,” Gupta said.

Accompanying him was Madhu Sudan, Executive Director, New Business, TorcAI, who said it is the first time that media and data are being stapled together bringing telco data into digital advertising.

Sudan added, “When we say the platform is inventory agnostic what we really mean is that we have telco data, which tells you who the user is and on top of that when we staple it with media we also know where he is.”

He said that brands usually spend a significantly large amount of time, effort and money experimenting with various media to try and find out which media works best for them and this usually involves very little efficacy and large budgets.

Explaining through a case study, Sudan said, “We ran a campaign recently. It was a large music service that we all know of. They were relaunching in a huge way and they wanted to spend significantly large amounts across media categories. So, we arrived at music affinity audiences and we ran it in excess of 20 different platforms.”

“The service would have had to run individual campaigns across each of these media categories to understand which works for them and which don't; whereas with VI ads, capability and ML (machine learning) capabilities, we were able to identify music affinity audiences and target them across various number of third-party media and yielded fantastic results,” Sudan said.

Explaining the concept of media and data stapled together, Sudan said, this is the first time it's being done and TorcAI has brought in the telco data into digital advertising, which is the most deterministic form of data available in the market.

“Once we know who the user is, we staple media to that ID and we also know where the user is. We are concatenating multiple campaigns into one capability by stapling media and data together,” he said.

Adding to this, Gupta highlighted that the platform not only allows the brands to target predefined cohorts like gender and socio-economic class but it also allows the brand to create its own custom cohorts and segments.

“It offers the marketers the benefit of unique audience segmentation and interest groups and targeting parameters,” he said.