Flipkart and Hotstar Come Together to Announce a New Ad Platform

In a first of its kind partnership in the industry, Flipkart, the e-commerce platform, and Hotstar, India’s streaming platform, announced the launch of Shopper Audience Network, Flipkart’s new ads platform that allows brands to connect with customers through personalised TrueIntent video ads on Hotstar.

Developed by Flipkart, Shopper Audience Network uses deterministic audience-based insights to help brands connect with users by leveraging Flipkart’s understanding of users’ purchase journey and the massive scale of TrueIntent video ads. It will help serve personalised advertising to over 150 million users across hundreds of categories.

In addition to providing brands a holistic view of their consumers, the platform will also provide them the right tools to better attribute and measure the impact of their digital ad spends. This partnership ties in with Flipkart’s ambition to be a leading digital ads platform in India and the partnership leverages Hotstar’s huge momentum in the video ads market.

Speaking about this partnership, Prakash Sikaria, Senior Director, Flipkart, “Understanding our customers better than anyone else has always been one of Flipkart’s core strengths, and these insights help marketers in their ad journey, on our platform. This partnership further leverages the intent-based understanding and couples it with Hotstar’s platform to create an unparalleled offering in the ads industry in India.”

Commenting on the development, Prabh Singh, EVP, Hotstar, said “In Hotstar, marketers today have access to a large scale audience that is deeply engaged and paying attention. Brands that advertise on Hotstar are seeing the power of that engagement. The partnership with Flipkart will build on this proposition and provide marketers an opportunity to connect the dots to hundreds of product categories on Flipkart.”

The Hotstar video platform’s three key components - a canvas of high-quality content, innovative ad formats and a sticky and affluent audience - when powered via Flipkart’s customer insights come together to create a compelling platform for any brand to talk to its consumers. This platform provides a highly optimised and measurable, brand-safe environment for all advertisers - addressing a big gap that marketers have been seeking to fill for some time.