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You are an FMCG brand wanting recall from prior customers, or a travel app that wants existing dormant users to try a new feature. What if you could reach out to this audience across leading content destinations in India and re-engage them to achieve your objectives?

Presenting Custom Profiles, our latest product that enables marketers to re-engage with their own audience by matching them with over 125 million customers on the Colombia Audience Network (CAN), India’s largest and most premium content network.

With Custom Profiles, marketers can leverage content, native and video advertising to re-engage their existing customers on leading Indian media properties across news, lifestyle, business, sports, music, video and more. CAN’s exclusive reach powered by Colombia’s rich data, best-in-class ad technology, superior optimization and intelligence on campaigns ensures that you can drive high ROI and impact.

A few early pilots with our clients for Custom Profiles have yielded promising results. Some clients have been able to re-engage 30% of their customers on our network, while seeing an increase in transactions of up to 300%. While they do so, Custom Profiles is helping them drive better results in a brand safe trusted environment.

Custom Profiles matches its audience with CAN, which is the exclusive vehicle for targeted advertising across leading destinations such as The Times of India, The Economic Times, Cricbuzz, Gaana, Indiatimes and more. Using CAN, advertisers can reach over 250 million users every month, while leveraging the Colombia ad-tech stack for precise measurement, targeting, and optimization, to deliver the highest ROI.

>> To know more about Custom Profiles, you can write to us at : colombia@timesinternet.in

The last few years in India have belonged to digital. People bought a lot more smartphones than ever before, more people got connected and more recently, many of them of discovered digital payments like never before.

We could have hardly imagined such a fast changing digital landscape for India. Almost everyone who is online in India today, is plugged into some or the other social network, to the extent that they are today turning to social media first to reach out to the brands they love or otherwise.

This digital deluge has changed the consumer engagement game for marketers too. With the digital wave, they could reach out to their consumers anytime, anywhere and engage them with digital advertising. However, along the way, their consumers on digital have rapidly evolved too.

With the spontaneous rise of 4G in the country, falling data costs and inexpensive hardware, consumers’ content consumption habits are changing. They are reading less and watching more videos than before. They are streaming music than downloading it. With platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram Stories, they are living in the moment with instant real-time videos.

Traditional ways of digital advertising are not enough. Given a rising trend of ad blockers among consumers, marketers need to look at advertising that is not intrusive and enhances the consumer’s content experience.

Content Marketing is the way ahead

Content is what the consumer looks for online today and content is what will help marketers get their message out to consumers. As marketers you can no more go to consumers with advertising that is in your face. You need to engage consumers with marketing that is beyond mere product pitches.

Native advertising is what it is all about now. Blend in your branded content with the content that consumers are looking for and take it wherever they are. Their interests is what moves them from one digital channel to another, so you will need a platform that helps you:

• Personalize your branded content and take it to the right audience.
• Engage them in the most relevant way, be it Native, Video or display advertising.
• Follow consumers wherever their interests take them and engage them with advertising that is relevant and contextual.

Many brands are already exploring content marketing and it is already bearing fruit for them. There are several examples out there which tell us that more brands are focusing on consumer engagement through content marketing. In fact, estimates from our recent study ‘The State of Indian Digital Marketing: A CMO Perspective’ suggest that content marketing and distribution’s share in digital marketing budget averages close to 15% but is expected to reach the global average estimated at 35% in the next two years.

However, in India, marketers currently are spending almost 80% on content creation and just 20% on its promotion. What good is quality content if there’s no platform, such as the one described above, to take it to the relevant audience? Ensuring that your brand content gets placed and promoted on relevant channels is what will really get content marketing going for you.

Colombia Audience Network welcomed Network 18, one of India’s three biggest publishers, to its premium publisher community this month. With over 60 publisher partners the Colombia network now occupies 55% page views across Top 10 publishers along with reaching over a quarter of a billion users per month worldwide.

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Colombia, our smart marketing platform that allows marketers to connect at scale with digital consumers with complete ease and with absolute control was covered by leading tech portal DynamicCIO. Looking at the growing trend of native ads Colombia is a perfect fit for marketers looking to target specific audience.

Below is the article where our IT Head, Mr. Sumit Malhotra talks in length about the inception of Colombia, the technology and how it has evolved to become one of the largest publisher-owned ad network platforms in APAC.

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We at Colombia hit a pretty big milestone last month – we served more than 6 billion native recommendations last month making us, we believe the largest native platform in India and definitely the largest home grown one. For that we would like to thank our publisher partners who have recently joined us in the last few months. (For a sample list of our publisher partners please see View More .)

That translates into millions of hours of engaged time spent by nearly 200MM consumers on both publishers’ own and branded content in 11 languages across India. Reaching nearly 200MM consumers across the world.

In addition, we now are proud to announce that we have hundreds of marketers using the Colombia platform in India including a significant number of the Top 500 brands of the country.

We call Colombia the smart marketing platform because of the personalization that we bring in to the platform to both organic and branded content, the transparent monetization model as well as the consumer relevant branded content from some of the top brands in the country.

Colombia’s transparent monetization and increased consumer relevant advertising will not only help publishers earn more revenue but also help elevate their publication brand value for top marketers of the country. Colombia, with its deep analytics will go to the extent of providing key audience information, such as what audiences are responding to your content and this makes it the most preferred network of marketers.

Some of the key publishers working with Colombia include Times of India, Economic Times, Navbharat Times, Times Local Partners, Maharashtra Times, Indiatimes, Gizmodo, Amar Ujala and several others.

Why publishers choose Colombia?

• Smart Optimization/Recommendation Engine: Relevant organic and branded content to targeted viewers ensures better engagement, monetization and seamless revenue creation.
• Data Management Platform: Presence of a warehouse where all information is stored and is divided in a way that’s useful for its publishers.
• Order/billing automation layer: With an automated billing platform, keep a check on your revenues with all information available in a consolidated fashion.
• Audience Extension Service: Enables publishers to make more revenue from their site’s traffic by allowing advertisers to reach out to their site visitors throughout the web and not just limited to their website.
• Demand mediation engine: Helps publishers to make their inventory available across multiple demand sources in order to increase and maximize revenue.
• Assistance in re-engaging with their audience in a more interesting way!

Gulshan Verma (Chief Revenue Officer - Times Internet Ltd. ) and Swapnil Shrivastav (VP, AdTech - Times Internet Limited)

Over the last 20 years, the world of marketing has changed leaps and bounds. In 2000 there were 5MM internet users in India, now more than 350 MM users are connected online and by 2018 - we expect there to be over 500MM internet users in India. The majority on mobile phones. That's a staggering number for marketers!

With this growth and the lightning pace of the ever evolving digital sphere, Marketers want a platform that allows them to choose and control all their marketing and that lets them find, connect and engage with consumers based upon their interests and passions.

Since the beginning of our journey in 1999, The Times Internet team have pioneered the digital revolution in India. From creating sites that capture the interest and passion points of Indians, to taking our flagship news and business papers online through the Times of India, Gaana, iDiva, Dineout, Indiatimes and many more.

We have constantly been innovating to give marketers more and more control and a bigger say in how and where they would like their content to go. In 2015 we extended our advertising platforms to include native and content advertising reach over and above the display advertising format with the launch of the Colombia Marketing Network.

The Colombia Marketing is a platform that allows marketers could connect at scale with digital consumers with complete ease and with absolute control! And we can proudly say with the launch of the newly created platform - www.colombiaonline.com

Your experience of running your campaign begins from the moment you register/log in.

As you can see from the screenshot above, it's this easy for you to create and manage your content. In creating an all new campaign, we give you insights and data analysis through cutting edge tools and personalization for audience reach. You can choose where and how your product is advertised in the online network. Not only is that a choice you have but you can demographically target your audience.

Our tools help you monitor every rupee invested and what impact it has. You can see the ROI - a value for each penny that you spend with just the click of a button.

Why should you choose Colombia?

• Deep Personalization: Colombia is a platform that lets you personalize your ads and content extensively.
• Premium Audience: With the robust publisher network you can be assured of reaching premium audience from all of our top news and content sites.
• Wide Reach: Reach over 150MM consumers in India on the most premium news and content network from publishers such as the Times of India, Punjab Kesri, Business Insider, Storypedia, Sandesh and many more
• Smart Ad platform: Leverage the power of our technology to understand consumer's interests and target them based upon their passions using Native, Display, Video and rich media advertising tools.
• Multiple Marketing Actions to generate ROI : From creating brand awareness to distribute your content (and only pay when users are interested in your content) - the Colombia platform allows marketers to use multiple marketing tactics.

Welcome to the all new Colombia. And we would like to simply say "Happy Marketing"!

Gulshan Verma (Chief Revenue Officer - Times Internet Ltd. ) and Swapnil Shrivastav (VP, AdTech - Times Internet Limited)

Wendy Hogan, ExchangeWire, APAC contributing editor, profiles the digital ambitions of India's largest media and entertainment group, Times of India Group, and how programmatic advertising is playing a crucial role with its digital venture Times Internet (TIL).

One of the most significant of these, according to Swapnil Shrivastav, VP Ad Technology, was "managing yield for each impression on different sections of the website and apps".

Times AdCenter will help advertisers buy inventory on the group's digital properties which together bring in about 50 million monthly unique visitors.

Times Internet launched a unique ad technology platform yesterday. The new technology has been so far used in the West and is likely to usher in a new era is digital advertising solutions.