Vernacular digital advertising may touch $1.5 billion in three years

Chennai: Vernacular digital advertising has a potential to grow several fold and touch $1.5 billion in next three years from the current level of $200 million as new platforms providing vernacular content are emerging strong.

The digital advertising market has largely remained a duopoly of Facebook and Google. Till a few years ago, Facebook and Google were the only platforms with a significant reach, and hence were able to command a large share of the digital advertising pie of $3 billion. Only 5 – 10 per cent of the market went into the kitty of vernacular advertising, finds RedSeer Consulting.

However, things are changing rapidly from the demand side. Majority of the next 200 million consumers of social media and online content will come from tier-2+ cities. These are users who prefer to consume content in vernacular languages. Online content in Indian languages were expected to be consumed by 70 per cent of the Internet users by 2021.

Realising the potential of this market, advertisers too are changing their strategies. While they feel that they can successfully target metro-audience using the Facebook and Google, they are willing to try out other platforms to reach the vernacular audiences.

Among the digital platforms providing vernacular content, Dailyhunt and Hotstar have gained strong attention recently. Both have 100 million monetizable audiences, which cannot be reached through English-dominant platforms. Dailyhunt has 80 per cent audience from tier 2-plus cities.

“These platforms are the only large-scale ones which are doing well in the key metrics of reach, quality content and monetizable audience, which makes them particularly well placed to attract advertisers. In line with these changes happening on the online consumer base and the growing willingness to advertisers to experiment with the vernacular content platforms, we see the share of digital advertising being allocated to vernacular content platforms growing rapidly in next few years,’ said Anil Kumar, founder RedSeer Consulting.

As the digital advertising market grows to $6.7 billion by CY21, vernacular advertising will have a share of 20 to 25 per cent or close to $1.5 billion in value. According to digital advertising company Dentsu Aegis, BFSI is the biggest spender on digital media with a contribution of 38 per cent of all their marketing budgets. This is followed by consumer durables at 36 per cent, e-commerce at 34 per cent and telecom at 31 per cent.