The Zee Group’s over-thetop (OTT) platform, Zee5 has announced a strategic alliance with Optimove, a company founded in Israel in order to boost its user engagement through personalisation. Optimove will provide a suite of services, which will be backed by insight, engagement and optimisation. This alliance comes at a time when Zee5 is also ramping up its regional content and investment in originals to compete in a fairly crowded OTT space that is currently dominated by the likes of Hotstar and Netflix.

Speaking about how Zee5 will benefit from the partnership, Tarun Katial, CEO, Zee5 India said, “One of the key pillars to digital interaction and engagement is personalisation. We all create volumes of data but it then needs to get cleaned up and churned out for us to be able to use it effectively in engaging with our customers on an ongoing basis. When we started our journey last year we realised there was a need for us to be able to do this better. We have over 60 million monthly active users, almost hundreds of millions of video streams per day and month. Having churned all of that data out in terms of content, genres, geographies, languages and so on, it has become important for us to use all that data to personalise engagement with users. With a world-class partner like Optimove, not only will we be able to make sense of all this data but we will also be able to identify opportunities for consumer engagement in real time.” Katial added that in a country like India, the need to personalise and even hyperpersonalise is greater especially given the multiple languages, genres and tastes. “Our platform itself has 12 languages so our need to personalise is even greater than most other countries and geographies in the world. Within each language segment, there are different consumer segments. You will notice that some consumers may like reality shows while some may like movies. We need to continuously find these consumer segments and cohorts to be able to engage with them, to be able to take them on a journey and so much more.”

Speaking about the partnership, Pini Yakuel, Founder & CEO, Optimove said, “Zee5 have made a decision to invest in personalisation. The world of content in general is very fertile soil for personalisation. Through this partnership, our endeavour is to enable the marketing team to create a more meaningful conversation with the customers by providing them an easier understanding of consumer data and by reducing the time from ideation to execution.” He adds that the partnership will provide Zee5 with an edge in addressing the various challenges in enhancing customer engagement in India’s competitive entertainment market. “I’m certain that the partnership between Zee5 and Optimove will yield great success and will address the growing challenge of customer engagement and personalisation in the competitive entertainment market in India. Zee5 has content and data, and Optimove can leverage those to empower Zee5’s marketing team to personalize customer interactions, and offer better value to each of its customers, and increase Customer Lifetime Value.”

Besides greater focus on regional play, Katial also spoke about the company’s future investment plans saying, “We are committed to doing 72 originals this year, we are on track for that. Our investments are around big originals and technology.”