Airtel enters advertising business

New Delhi: Bharti Airtel on Wednesday marked its entry into advertising business with the launch of 'Airtel Ads', a move it said will enable brands to pitch consent-based and privacy-safe campaigns to over 320 million customers across its various businesses like mobile, DTH and homes.

Airtel Ads, which underlines the company's efforts to get a foothold in the booming Indian advertising industry, leverages the company's data science capabilities, and would enable brands to create deep engagement and high-impact campaigns for most relevant customer cohorts. Airtel asserted that its customers would receive only the most-relevant brand offerings and not unwanted spam.

While the company would look to make connections between customer preference and brand relevance, it would not "hit customers with ads that do not make sense" nor 'profile' its user, Adarsh Nair, Chief Product Officer at Bharti Airtel, said.

To start with, the video and display placement will be through apps such as Wynk, Airtel Xstream, and Thanks app, going on to DTH TV ads. Large brands like PepsiCo, Zomato, CRED, Tata AIG, Apollo 247, Lenskart, Cars24, Gameskraft, Harley Davidson and others have run campaigns during the beta phase, and Airtel has touched almost Rs 100 crore in annualised revenue run rate in this space. Nair said that Airtel Ads 'breaks new ground' in the $10 billion Indian advertising industry, a space that is expected to nearly double in the next 5 years.

As per estimates, the digital advertising pie alone will grow to $8 billion by 2025, from $2 billion in 2020. "Advertising is an adjacency to our core business of delighting our customers with great services. Therefore, we combine the privacy that is paramount to our customers with the trust and transparency that is vital to the brands we serve," Nair added.