Have you ever had food cravings after watching an ad on your OTT platform or bought a dress because you fell in love with it at first sight? The response is evident and emphatic: yes! That is how advertisements affect your thoughts.
As we all know, to expand business or reach out to more individuals, you will undoubtedly require a push to attract the specific audience that you seek. For this, advertisement plays a significant part. Nevertheless, several questions arise, like which platform to use, your budget, the reach of your promotion, and so on.
However, the solution to this problem is to select a platform where you can acquire a strong audience pool, better ad prices, and, most importantly, a platform that is useful to your product or business growth. So, considering the above-mentioned statistics, Hotstar marketing is emerging as an advertising platform because of its reliability and solid audience base.
With its strategic time-outs, innings Breaks, and other areas, Hotstar allows advertisers to reach a large audience.
During the time of IPL, the viewers reach 18.6 million simultaneously, says Indian Express.
So, undoubtedly the platform proves helpful to marketers. Let's dive further to know about Hotstar marketing in detail, including some tips on advertising on the platform.
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Introduction to Digital Marketing and Traditional Marketing?
Before directly jumping on how to do Hotstar marketing, let's first understand the fundamental difference between digital marketing and traditional marketing. And to understand this, let's take an example.
My brother Rahul is a nerd and old-fashioned. So he is always in books, newspapers, magazines, or sometimes on TV. However, on the other hand, my youngest sister Shweta is addicted to social media. But both are keen on knowing the scores in cricket matches. So, they choose different methods to know it.
While Rahul watches sports TV channels, Shweta checks the score on Hotstar. The ads that my sister received on Hotstar are examples of digital marketing, whereas the ones on the sports TV channels were traditional marketing ads.
The difference is evident and apparent. However, specifically after the pandemic, the marketing scenario has changed with digital marketing becoming the ideal option. Some of them are the expansion of your business, tracking of your customers, affordability, etc.
Furthermore, according to econsultancy, "a huge 91% of marketing organizations use social media as a mix, tying with digital ads as the most commonly used channel across the sector". Thus, choosing a digital marketing platform like Hotstar advertisement can be worth competing within the marketplace. Therefore, the platform can be proved useful in reaching the maximum target audience. However, the question is, "is Hotstar still worth it"? Dive further to learn about it!
Is Hotstar Marketing worth it?
Hotstar is an exclusive entertainment platform anchoring a bouquet of regional, national as well as international content. Hotstar covers almost 100,000 hours of content on TV and provides movies that span across nine different languages, making it one of India’s largest streaming platforms. It has been constantly evolving its strategies ensuring desirable content for a heterogeneous viewership, and successfully appealing to a large audience base.
With a record-breaking viewership in the year 2021, Hotstar has amassed over 300 million monthly active viewers and 18.6 million concurrent viewers.
The soaring viewership and the augmenting content variety makes it an appealing platform for the brand’s advertising and marketing needs.
Hotstar also bears a suite of targeting options based on interest, demographics, geography, and carrier/data usage of the audience to acquire a better brand response.
Here are some stats that make Hotstar advertising a worthwhile investment:
- Hostar has an integrated young audience base ranging from 18 to 35+ years old. Thus offers a great platform for brands with young professionals as target audience
- As per the analytics, people spend 5x more time on Hotstar than on TV.
- It optimizes the user experience by personalizing content for subscribers.
- Loyal Viewers use the app at least once in every 3 days.
Furthermore, it can be said Hotstar marketing is a great bet for brands as it provides the following benefits:
- Audience Engagement
- Brand Awareness & Recognition
- Targetted promotion
- Advertising during live streams
What makes Hotstar Marketing a better bet than traditional advertising?
- Traditional TV advertising requires competitors to fight for highly sought-after time slots that correspond to popular television programs. OTT viewers can swiftly skip through advertisements, advertising only reaches people who watch a program live.
- Whoever presses the TV power button receives television advertising. On the other hand, every impression purchased using programmatic OTT advertising is targeted to specific audience groups. Rather than casting a wide net, your budget is laser-focused.
- OTT advertising allows for evaluation. Hotstar advertising invests time and money in tracking the performance of each outreach to improve and enhance future offers.
- Hotstar advertising tracks user reaction to messages, evaluates device performance, measures the efficiency of ad placement across platforms, and tracks video completion rates. The platform further uses behavioral insights and attribution monitoring data to identify what motivated the viewer to take action in order to reproduce the most popular calls-to-action and touchpoints in subsequent campaigns. This is inconceivable in traditional TV advertising.
- OTT marketing is significantly more focused on the consumer than traditional marketing. People who view a movie on their favorite streaming service do so on purpose. They are more likely to consider an advertisement before the main event because they have chosen to watch the video and be amused at that time.
Strategies to consider while advertising
When you understand the challenges, you should also understand the best practices for OTT advertising. Here are some best practices to follow for Hotstar Advertising:
✔️ Keep them short
Many consumers skip ads when the "skip ad" button appears on OTT. As a result, keep your advertising to a minimum. They should be at most 30 seconds long.
✔️ Formatting
A lot of consideration must be given to the formatting; for instance, your advertisement might look fantastic on a large screen, but how will it look on a smartphone? A range of platforms, such as televisions, laptops, tablets, and smartphones, should all be able to view your advertisement.
✔️ Create relevant ads
Your target audience should be served with updated and pertinent online advertising. Spend some time acquiring knowledge of your target audience before you start so you can create a customized experience that will build trust and turn visitors into customers.
Different Types of an ad formats on Hotstar Marketing
Hotstar has announced its advertising service, which has a huge impact on the business in case they look out for more reachability and conversions related to their products and services. This service of Hotstar is known as Hotstar AdServe.
Using Hotstar AdServe, any business would be able to advertise using the streams. It is ready for big players competition who are in the same domain as Facebook and YouTube. As a brand marketer, first step is to visit hotstar’s website https://brands.hotstar.com and register your brand for Hotstar Adserve. The platform has a well made UI that enables users to create campaigns with ease. Campaigns can be custom-made for displaying ads on popular Sports Streaming or on their entertainment content
Brand Marketers can advertise on Hotstar using many types of ad formats. Below are a few popular types of ad formats that you can be used while promoting on Hotstar.
Billboard: To advertise on Hotstar, the Billboard ad format is used when it is required to drive a faster reach for brand. Also, to drive more video views or traffic to your website or app.
Native Image: Ads shown in-app on hotstar app. Native ads are used for:
- When you require to drive more installs for your app.
- When you require more people to visit your website or app and act on it
Bumper Ads: Ads shown just before the selected categories video is played. Bumper ads are used for:
- When you require to increase your brand awareness
- When you wish to deliver a short message to be actioned in a few seconds.
Carousel Ads: Ads shown in the form of carousel (slides) below the video just like the above screenshot. Carousel ads are used for displaying multiple products or projecting many details about one product
Midroll Ads: Promotion on Hotstar using midroll advertising refers to a video ad that gets displayed in the middle of the content instead of before or after the video content of the published Midrolls ad formats can be used when it requires to increases awareness through an appealing story of about 20 seconds.
Lead Generation Ads: An effective way to collect user while running a compelling mid-roll campaign. This gives an opt-in to the brands to utilize user data Leadgen ad format is used when you require to capture leads that come through your midroll ads
How to Begin Hotstar Marketing? Follow the steps
Follow these easy steps to get started with Hotstar Marketing.
Step 1: Sign up for the Hotstar Advertising Platform:
Step 2: Launching the campaign
A campaign name, brand name, and brand logo have to be added at this stage. After then, choose an objective. For example, If you're launching a new product or service, brand awareness can help. Traffic Target assists you in attracting a large number of visitors to your website.
Step 3: Choose an Ad Format
- Rolling Before
- Roll in the Middle
- Streaming Display
- Ad for Native Frames
- Ad for Spotlight Stubs
Step 4: Selecting an Ad Set for Your Hotstar Advertising Campaign. Display advertisements:
- The Billboard
- Video Ads with Native Images
- Bumper
- Mid Rolls
- Carousel
- Lead Generation
Step 5: Determine Demographics and Location
Step 6: Establishing budgets and pricing models for the campaign
How much does a Hotstar advertisement cost?
There are various price structures for Hotstar and Budget video and display advertisements.
1. Cost Per Completed Views (CPV)
2. Cost Per Impression (CPM) (CPCV).
The cost is set for a 10-second commercial and rises as the video duration does.
The CPM: The cost per 1000 Impressions metric specifies that the impression will begin to be recorded as soon as the app or browser ad starts to play.
The CPV: No matter how long the advertisement is, the view will only be recorded once it has finished playing, according to the metric known as CPV.
Wrapping up
Disney+ Hotstar is unquestionably emerging as one of the most popular OTT platforms with millions of users. It has driven a lot of consumer and user attention with a wide choice of kid-friendly shows, its well-organized content library, and its smooth user experience.
One of the major factors that have influenced the growth of Hotstar is its differentiation amongst sports, local and international entertainment aligning popular shows, and India's love for Bollywood. Hotstar dominates India's on-demand video streaming services through this winning combination.
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