Cleartrip is a leading online travel company operating in India and the Gulf regions. Subramanya Sharma, CMO at Cleartrip, talks about how cutting edge technology at Zapr Media Labs disrupts the media and advertising industry.

"We use Zapr data to make sure that every dollar that we spend on ATL (above-the-line) is being spent the right way." - Subramanya Sharma, CMO at Cleartrip

Q: In your words, what is Zapr?

A: I think Zapr is a great tech platform for enabling performance advertisers to understand offline media. So as performance advertisers, we’ve always been uncomfortable with using of anything which is  broad-based, above-the-line kind of media and I think Zapr kind of bridges the gap for performance advertisers like us.

So I would say it’s a tech platform for helping understand ATL better.

Q: How is technology disrupting the media & advertising industry?

A: In the last five years, I think we’ve seen huge strides in technology primarily both on the consumption side as well as on the supply side. As companies, we tend to use data hugely pretty much for decision making. So data has become a big differentiator for our moves and other couple of things like targeting.

Right now, to get your ROI, you need to do better targeting and hence a lot of focus in terms of how you can make use of tools to help you enable better targeting and the last one is in terms of performance advertising itself has kind of come to the forefront now irrespective of which industry you are in and for us, Cleartrip has always been a major believer in performance advertising and hence whether you are using offline media or online media, performance seems to be the name of the game when it comes to media itself.

On the consumption side, I think patterns have also changed: people are viewing multiple modes of content, like be it on their mobile phone or on their laptops. So, I think the consumption patterns have also changed due to technology. And there are more start-ups which are using some of these to help consumers consume data differently. So these are the broad trends that we see which have dramatically changed in the last three, four years, I would say.

"...they [Zapr] have built out a good platform on the technology side which is very useful. On the other side, from the people’s standpoint, I think they are extremely hungry for making sure your client gets the best..."

Q: What role does Zapr play in the media & advertising industry?

A: There are couple of use-cases. One, I think, more on the consumer side to understand what is the viewership patterns of our kind of broad target audience: like are they watching more of GEC or are they watching more of Hindi movies. So I can watch the overlaps, so just trying to understand viewership behaviour because TV is extremely helpful in this age as well.

Second use case, we’ve also used is using some of the data to optimize our spends. So we use Zapr data to make sure that every dollar that we spend on ATL is being spent the right way. So these are broadly the two cases that we’ve used Zapr effectively.

Q: How have you used / intend to use Zapr? Any case studies?

A: I think Zapr is one of probably the good technology place to bridge your offline performance right, because these don’t go as together as you would see in online advertising. So I think these guys play a good role in bridging the gap that exists there.   

Q: Would you recommend Zapr to your colleagues in the industry?

A: I think Zapr has two things going for them: One, I think they’ve built out a good platform on the technology side which is very useful. On the other side, from the people’s standpoint, I think they are extremely hungry for making sure your client gets the best so I think, the combination of these two make this - at least for Cleartrip, we still run like a startup, and hence that kind of startup culture is useful for us to work specifically on the offline media itself.  

Zapr is a great tech platform for enabling performance advertisers to understand offline media. We use Zapr data to make sure that every dollar that we spend on ATL (above-the-line media) is being spent the right way.

Subramanya Sharma,

CMO, Cleartrip