Outbrain, the world’s leading premium content discovery platform, announced today the appointment of Neeraj Singhal as Director of Amplify Sales, to lead the company’s efforts in providing strategic content marketing support to brands and advertisers in India. His appointment comes at critical juncture, as India prepares for robust infrastructure and digital capabilities development under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Digital India initiative, which is likely to further fuel
the Content Marketing revolution in the country.
Singhal brings to Outbrain nearly 12 years of experience cross the media and adtech space, having previously worked at Komli Media, Religare Technologies, the Times of India Group, and Lime Labs. Prior to joining Outbrain, Singhal was with Viacom18, where he was responsible for digital media adverting sales revenues across the organisation’s five networks – Nickelodeon, Vh1, Comedy Central and MTV.
Content Marketing is identified as the next big thing to hit the Indian advertising industry, driven largely by the burgeoning eCommerce market in India, valued by Deloitte at USD16-billion for 2015 – a staggering 300% increase from 2010. This identifies a clear opportunity – and need – for brands and advertisers to lead the conversation and develop best practice for more strategic solutions that enable them to stay relevant to their customers and target audience.
On Singhal’s appointment, Anthony Hearne, Regional Director for Southeast Asia, India & New Markets at Outbrain, commented: “Outbrain is at the forefront of helping brands get smarter with their content marketing and customer engagement needs. Content Marketing has developed from a simple ‘build content – get clicks’ model to one that can now deliver across the full funnel of digital marketing requirements. We are delighted to welcome Neeraj to the Outbrain team to help us deliver more value to our brand customers. His experience across the digital marketing and publishing space is just what we need to help us drive our business in India.”
Outbrain, founded in 2006, started operations in India in 2014 With an impressive client portfolio that includes giants such as Hindustan Unilever, Visa, McDonald’s, the company has invested in capacity building and talent development to help support Content Marketing needs in the country, developing at an incredible pace. The appointment of Singhal underlines Outbrain’s continued desire to support and invest in the prolific growth of content marketing and discovery that is seen in this region.
On joining Outbrain, Neeraj Singhal, Director of Amplify Sales, India at Outbrain said:“Outbrain has built an impressive global network of premium publishers and as content marketing has begun to gain significant momentum with one of the world’s most populous nations, some of its recent and most impressive growth has come from Indian brands and publishers. I am therefore extremely excited to join the Outbrain team. On top of this, Outbrain is building and innovating with some really smart tech tools that enable brands to subtract more business value out of their content than ever before.“
Outbrain recently extended its offering with a new product feature called Custom Audiences, allowing marketers to retarget visitors with content rather than traditional display advertising. According to Singhal, the new product will help brands in India better engage audiences, especially on mobile:“I think a lot of marketers understand that content is an integral part of the mix – especially to engage mobile audiences. According to our recent data*, in India, we see over 40% of our audience consuming content on mobile devices, which indicates that there is a real need to engage these audiences through means other than display advertising.”