Naveen Tewari say GenAI is absolutely transforming its advertising business. Most of this work is still in a pilot phase, but Naveen says the results so far have been dramatic.
Naveen’s InMobi is India’s first unicorn, with a valuation of $1 billion at the time Soft Sofa invested $200 million in the company in 2011. InMobi has had its ups and downs, but in the 17 years since its founding, it has built two powerful businesses. This is the original adtech platform that allows advertisers to connect with content publishers through an ad exchange. There are about fifteen global adtech companies, the largest of which are companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon. For InMobi, this is now a $300+ million business, 65% of which comes from the US, and Naveen says it is very profitable.
The other is the lockscreen company Glancelaunched in 2019. On Android phones, if you see internet content on your lock screen, it is provided by Glance. Today it has more than 400 million users around the world.
Naveen says it’s this combination of a consumer play (via Glance) and an adtech play that has really made Google, Facebook and Amazon successful, and this he believes puts InMobi at a growth inflection point. “Our place in the world is very secure,” he says.
Generate ads
But more than that, he’s now excited about what GenAI can do for both the adtech and Glance businesses. The way the adtech business has worked until now is that the advertiser sends a creative or brand message to InMobi’s advertising platform, and the platform then places the ad within a publisher’s or developer’s content based on some basic information about the content user. . Often it is a banner ad that the user hates. But with GenAI, Naveen says, the platform will move from serving ads to generating ads.
“Suppose you read an article about a certain technology, and suppose there is an advertiser with a certain product that is technologically oriented. Our platform will figure out a way to integrate that into your content. It will adopt the tone of the article’s content and, with your permission, write as if it were a continuation of the article. It will indicate that this part of the article was sponsored,” he says.
The same can also happen with audio and video content. Naveen says the platform can insert a promotional piece in the middle of a podcast, in the moderator’s voice. “The moderator would never have said this sentence, but in the moderator’s voice he could say that this discussion is sponsored by such and such a company, or whatever you want. And then it says: ₹Now we come back to our conversation…’ and the conversation starts again.’
Pilots have shown that users interact three to five times more with such creatives, which are generated on the spot, than with banner ads. Naveen says this should also translate into a comparable revenue increase for the advertiser and InMobi.
In 2015, InMobi had tried to offer a similar content-rich advertising experience through an agent called Miip inside apps. That initiative was quickly abandoned. “Unlike the technology we have today, it just couldn’t scale,” says Naveen.
On the lock screen
A similar GenAI initiative is active in the Glance business. A GenAI software installed on the phone is used to train the system about you by uploading about 10 photos of you. From this it learns, for example, your gender, your estimated age, height and likely nationality. And combined with your browsing habits, it instantly generates the content you might like most. Depending on your preferences, it can provide excerpts of articles, or entire articles, or audio versions of them.
Naveen has uploaded pictures of himself and he shows us how it helps him when he visits a clothing brand’s online store. The system generates images of him along the way in the clothes in the store that he might like best. And if he likes something, he can immediately click and buy.
“GenAI is all about generating internet and generating commerce,” he says.
