The Zoo Media Network is at marketing technology company, comprising of agencies that provide business solutions across Content, Media, Technology, and Data. It was founded in 2008 by Pratik Gupta and Suveer Bajaj, with the vision of being the preferred ‘network of choice’ for leading brands in India and the world.
Its network includes FoxyMoron: Flagship full-funnel, creative, and media-focused agency, The Rabbit Hole: Video content agency focussed on enabling ‘Culture In Motion’, Pollen: Full-service Influencer marketing agency, The Starter Labs: Full-funnel agency focused on growing direct-to-consumer brands, TCM Platform: Creating sports fandom through experiences, digital engagement and rights management, XP&D: Crafting events, activations and experiences, Phosphene: Providing new-age creative technology solutions, Metaform: Building Web3 experiences and communities and Zoo Global: Delivery centre focused on bringing Indian delivery expertise to agencies worldwide.
Its team of 600 employees is distributed across offices in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, New York City, and Dubai. It has worked with brands across industries, including Netflix, Amazon, Star Sports, ICC World Cup, Aditya Birla Group, L’Oréal, Procter and Gamble, Hindustan Unilever, Swiggy, Burger King, Cred, Dyson, Hero Motocorp, Ather, Orion Foods, GlaxoSmithKline, Revital, Colgate, Tinder, Unacademy, Duolingo, and IKEA.
Medianews4U.com caught up with Zoo Media co-founder Suveer Bajaj
1. How did the partnership between Zoo Media and DMNC come about?
At Zoo Media, one of the narratives that we champion and put efforts behind is the O2O2O narrative (online to offline to online). Zoo Media and DCMN partnered to leverage AI-driven marketing solutions, combining Zoo’s creative expertise with DCMN’s data-driven approach and proprietary technology. This includes advanced tools for measuring the impact of offline campaigns at a CPX level, media buying, campaign optimisation, and real-time reporting. This union enables enhanced campaign execution, optimised targeting, and personalised content. The partnership unlocks new possibilities for innovative storytelling, precise audience engagement, and measurable ROI, revolutionising the marketing landscape with data-infused creativity.
2. Today is an omnichannel approach imperative for brands?
Yes, an omnichannel approach is imperative for brands today, as consumers expect seamless experiences across touchpoints. The partnership between Zoo Media and DCMN enables clients to deliver cohesive, data-driven storytelling across channels, ensuring consistent messaging and personalised engagement. By integrating creative and media expertise with AI-driven insights, clients can navigate the complex customer journey and maximise brand impact.
3. There is a lot of talk about user privacy and a cookieless world. Is first party data now crucial?
Definitely, yes. Today brands advertise digitally, and have been obsessed about data about their users. Investing in customer data platforms and investing in their implementation in order to enrich this data year-on-year.
4. CMOs often complain that it is difficult to get insights from big data. How does the partnership solve this complex issue?
Typically, traditional media always solves the top of the funnel problem. For us digital folks, we see the benefit in increasing awareness resulting in a spike of search volumes. Unfortunately, very often television results are reported in one silo and digital results are reported in another silo.
With the creation of a singular view, to understand the effectiveness of media, our partnership with DCMN focuses on this problem exactly where CMOs can now the business impact that their media delivers through DCMNs tool.
5. Will the JV focus on all sectors or specialise in some? Kindly elaborate
All sectors
6. Will the mandatory online self-declaration certificate stop misleading ads? Should the uploading onus rest on the client or the agency?
The hope is that it stops misleading ads.
The onus is on clients. Because the agency can never take a guarantee for claims that the brand makes that are based on technical spec, ingredients, components, and the benefits that they may have on their consumers that are results of millions of dollars of R&D that the agency doesn’t have access to.
7. What are the recent account wins by Zoo Media Network?
The Rabbit Hole has won Kota Factory – Netflix, WPL season 2 – BCCI, IP – Chit chat and chicken dinner – BGMI, Murder In Mahim – JioCinema, Namacool – MiniTv, Heeramandi – Netflix, Pad Pro and SE Launch – RedMi Xiaomi, Video on scale – Trip Reels Project – Make My trip, Product Launch films – Irth Bags, Be Boathead – Air buds campaign – Boat
The Starter Labs has bagged Avighna, Royal Canin, MobiKwik, Edelweiss Mutual Fund and Mogu Mogu
FoxyMoron has secured CMF by Nothing, Nothing, Irth and Bajaj Electricals
New Accounts won by Pollen includes Vaseline (one off campaign) and Tata soulful
New campaigns from existing accounts include Lakmé – lumi litt, lumi smooth, glycolic acid, cc tinted serum, Ponds – Peony campaign, Love beauty and planet – Monthly sustenance campaign and Goldmedal – Worked on two quarterly campaigns.
8. There has been a greater focus on performance media by Zoo Media Network. How is this paying off?
Typically, Zoo has always been an agency that focusses on reporting business results to its clients. As a first-generation native digital agency that is run by entrepreneurs, the culture has always been to drive measurable impact to clients. As a result, we have focused on acquiring and building brands across sectors such as BFSI, E-commerce, Pharma, HealthTech, Fintech, Gaming, Entertainment and others whose businesses have begun to depend on and benefit from digital in a good way. This strategy has helped us stay true to our narrative.
9. Edtech that Zoo Media has relied on has struggled badly after the bubble of 2020-2022. How important is it for an agency to be nimble and quick-footed to adapt to changing situations?
Agencies take months if not years to understand and master categories. Once an agency cracks a category, creating a specialisation in that category is a surest way to dominate. Over the last 16 years, FoxyMoron has demonstrated this by consolidating large businesses in the personal care sector (L’Oreal, HUL, PnG), entertainment (Star, Viacom, Sony, Zee, Netflix, Amazon Prime), packaged foods (Pepsi, HUL, ITC foods, Orion Foods etc.) and Edtech (Byju’s, Unacademy, Scaler, Lido Learing, Upgrad, Embibe)
During the pandemic, the EdTech sector provided a massive opportunity for agencies to support their client partners in their growth phase. During the period, FoxyMoron was a service provider across content, media, data and technology solutions to the aforementioned advertisers. However, the crash of the sector left a gaping hole in several agencies’ pockets. From a behaviour perspective, the entrepreneurial nature of our organisation had the foresight to see these coming miles away, having said that we were agile to repurpose the skills and resources that we had amassed working with the ed-tech sector in India to quickly re-deploy them to working with allied categories from around the world. The agility the agency needs to own is a combination of market awareness and business insights and the nimbleness to remodel its resources towards other lucrative opportunities.
10. Zoo Media did India’s first Gen AI campaign for Wrangler Jeans. What were the learnings from this?
Here are the key learnings:
- Depth of conversation was equal to 16.
- Users who engage are 8x more likely to act upon a CTA – example 50% coupon code, the uptick in that was 8x higher than people who didn’t have a conversation
- Users were not bothered that the responder was a bot so long as the responses were relevant.
- Robots can touch human lives (The bot made was a break-up bot. Take from case study)
11. What role is AI going to play going forward for Zoo Media and the creative industry? Will it greatly shorten the time needed to create and execute campaigns?
AI will revolutionise Zoo Media by augmenting our creative delivery and campaign execution. AI-generated content tools will assist our Copy & art teams, while AI-driven analytics will optimise our campaign targeting and ad spend. Additionally, AI-powered project management tools will streamline our workflows, enabling us to focus on high-level strategy and creative direction, resulting in more effective and efficient campaigns.
12. Apart from India, what are the expansion plans in the US and other markets?
We want to expand across North America and Canada, and offer our global delivery capabilities to both agencies and direct clients.
Other markets we actively want to expand into are the Middle East and South East Asia. Via this partnership, we now have an entry point in Berlin, and will also expand into other European countries eventually.
