Prashant Puri, Co-founder & CEO, AdLift & Yral
Prashant Puri is the co-founder & CEO of AdLift, a Digital Marketing Solutions company headquartered in SF Bay Area with offices in Gurgaon, India. An alumnus from Columbia University, Prashant is a digital marketing expert having an extensive 13 years of industry experience. With his ability of turning websites into multi-million dollar enterprises, he played an instrumental role in setting up the company and taking it on a high growth trajectory.
Recently, Prashant has also founded a new venture, Yral (pronounced ‘Viral’) which is a JV between cricketer Yuvraj Singh’s YouWeCan and AdLift. Yral is a platform that connects advertisers with celebrities by leveraging their social media network. In conversation with Dominic Rebello, he reveals Yral’s plan to become the only social celebrity endorsement platform
How does Yral connect Brands with Celebrities?
Yral seamlessly connects advertisers with celebrities by leveraging their social media network. Yral’s goal is to deliver the right audience and scalable reach to its advertisers by leveraging modern social media platforms.
Today, brands need to jump through hoops to reach the right celebrity/influencer. Moreover, celebrities have unprecedented reach and a strong connect with their followers/fans on social which remains underutilized. Yral makes it easier to leverage a celebrity (real influencer) to endorse their brand online.
How big is the potential for a business like yours? Any major customers that you now cater to?
Digital marketing spends are estimated to reach $2B by 2019, and if celebrities lead only 5% we estimate the market size to be $100M. We currently work with over 100+ celebrities - Actors, Actresses, Musicians, and Cricketers. In the next couple of months, we plan to expand this across other sports verticals. We’ve done a couple of successful campaigns in the BFSI (HDFC) and consumer goods segment (Nestle). We have some more exciting campaigns in the pipeline that would launch by Q3 2016 for Diwali !
How do you plan to scale up?
We’re growing our current 10 people team to about 50 by Q4 of 2017 (Jan - March 2017). We’re actively hiring across business development & social media experts. We also have a SaaS platform in the pipeline that will streamline the process of launching a campaign with celebrities making them more accessible.
Who would primarily be your consumer audience?
Our consumer audience is business that’s looking to build a brand, is a brand or promote a product.
Where do you see yourself five years down the road?
The social media space is heating up very fast. Most of the spends are on Facebook – we plan to take a percent share of these spends and become the only social celebrity endorsement platform in India first and then the rest of the world.