Zee5 ties up with Israel’s Optimove in ‘hyper personalisation’ push

ZEE5, Zee Group’s over-the-top (OTT) platform, has announced a tie-up with Optimove, a company founded in Israel, to improve personalisation and boost its services. The video streaming platform is also ramping up its regional content and investments in originals to compete in a crowded market dominated by Hotstar, Netflix and Amazon Prime.

Tarun Katial, CEO, ZEE5 India, said: “India needs original contents for the needle to move towards watching video on demand and paying for that. So, I think when you get to a threshold level of inventory and content, people tend to see this as their first choice of video consumption.

“And, in all of that journey, building artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning models, building personalisation models — like the one we partnering with Optimove for — and some of the others come along in building a better user experience and engaging with them more.”

Personalisation is one of the key pillars of digital transactions, interactions and engagements and it is required to clean up and churn out the volumes of data created to effectively engage with customers on an ongoing basis, said Katial.

“When we started our journey last year, we realised that there was a need for us to be able to do this (personalisation) better than what we were currently doing. We have over 60 million monthly active users and almost get hundreds of millions of video streams every single day and month.

“Having churned all of that data out in terms of content, genres, geographies, languages, so on and so forth, it is important for us to be able to use all that data to personalise that engagement, to be able to understand our users, to do better recommendations,” said Katial.

He said that hyper personalisation is a reality and that in a country like India with multiple languages, genres and tastes, the need [to hyper-personalise] is more pronounced than in other countries.

“ZEE5 has content and data, and Optimove can leverage those to empower ZEE5’s marketing team to personalise customer interactions, and offer better value to each of its customers, and increase customer lifetime value,” said Pini Yakuel, Founder and CEO, Optimove.

Optimove will be working with ZEE5 to build a customer data platform.

Katial said that through this partnership, ZEE5 will be building micro segments and curating a customer life cycle journey to drive its engagement with customers.