India GameChanger was joined by Amrit Sagar, the Founder and Managing Director at Ercess Live. Ercess Live is a data-drive community-powered Infuencer Marketing company.
Some of the topics Amrit covered in detail included:
- Getting his MBA in Italy and the genesis of his entrepreneurial journey
- The exploding growth and power of influencer marketing in India
- The replacement of traditional advertising with new marketing channels
- Big brands are shifting massive budgets to these new platforms and channels
- Expanding Ercess Live’s business to Asia and the Middle East
Some other titles we considered for this episode:
- The Continuing Rise of the Creator Economy
- Unlocking the Potential of the Indian Creator Economy
- Building a Profitable Startup in the Indian Market
- Is the Future of Advertising Influencer Marketing?
- AI, Data Analytics, and the Changing Marketing Landscape
Read the best-effort transcript below (This technology is still not as good as they say it is…):
Michael Waitze 0:05
Hi, this is Michael Waitze and welcome back to India GameChanger. We are joined by Amrit Sagar, the Founder and Managing Director at Ercess live. Did I say that right or assess?
Amrit Sagar 0:16
Yes, Michael, that’s Ercess. And thanks for introducing here.
Michael Waitze 0:20
It’s my pleasure. It’s awesome to have you here. Before we get to the main part of this conversation, we get some of your background for some context.
Amrit Sagar 0:28
I’m an engineer by education, but an entrepreneur by profession as of now, I started my career as a computer engineer, or with one of the large conglomerates in India, I worked with different clients over there like Pepsi or Adidas, or gain some experience went out for an MBA with SDA Bocconi on data full time MBA over there had some pretty great opportunity to work with Ferrari for one of their projects work that SAP worked in a few incubators, startups over there, basically, on the marketing side built building their products. And then during the COVID, came back to India, got stuck here, couldn’t go back and started my own gig here, which was anyway, the long, long term plan.
Michael Waitze 1:19
What was it like working with Ferrari?
Amrit Sagar 1:21
I will just in the all like, I had a project over there for almost three months, I budget Milan for them, and mostly on the marketing and the branding side. And most of the time, like, always be on your thinking on your face. Everything what are the branding packaging? How to position yourself how how the whole luxury industry that works. Prior to that, like my understanding what it’s all about, put the movie, in that in my experience I learned over there. It’s all about branding, positioning, and how you were brilliant yourself.
Michael Waitze 1:57
You were in Milan, that must have been amazing to just be living working in Milan and then doing a project with Ferrari, I am envious. You said you were educated as an engineer, but you consider yourself an entrepreneur, was this something you were always going to do? Like tell me what was it about the entrepreneurship life that made you feel like I need to be involved in this way.
Amrit Sagar 2:17
Or this was not always the plan, like regular regular and student or guide. What happens over here, everyone completes their high education enrolls in usually engineering, then they start planning their career path. That’s the way that’s the Indian Indian way. I think like till the four or five years back on that was the whole scenario where even when I started my work, entrepreneurship was not even in my mind anywhere. But when I went for my MBA, and I met teach, like fabulous entrepreneurs, founders, even in my alma mater idea, I was meeting on a weekly basis with different different executives who are building beautiful things and in every every sector, like either in ESG, in in automobile insurance, and that fascinated me, what what else I can do in my career, and I started I started small over there. I started just conversing with a lot of founders, a lot of entrepreneurs doing small projects on site. And then I found that I love that. Yeah, so that’s how I think like I got the interest and it’s an ongoing journey.
Michael Waitze 3:30
Tell me about RSS live tell me what the market cap was that you were trying to fill in about, like what you saw what you understood and what you’re trying to fix? What’s the problem we’re trying to fix here
Amrit Sagar 3:40
for with access live, actually, the whole journey started where I think in late 2021, I was back in India and one thing which I could see was the super super growth and the opportunity in terms of the Creator economic what we see over here, YouTube itself, it had changed the game or it had changed the whole marketing game. And like if I analyze the whole whole marketing industry how it changes every five to seven years, if I if I remember prior to 2010 or something, it was all print media or the TV advertisement everywhere, then the age of Facebook and Google ads team and since last four five years I think the age of the Creator that’s ongoing and that’s where like the SS live came came in what we are doing over here we are trying to organize and streamline this creator economic power because because this creator whole creator ecosystem, it’s it’s not pretty much organized. It’s very much chaotic. Yeah, everyone, everyone on the Creator side, that’s not a formal setup. And that’s not always a full time full time gig for everyone. Have books do it for hobby folks do it part time. They just want to add value in terms have content and everything. And that’s where a slave is trying to streamline it, we are trying to organize the whole and end creator economy, trying to develop KPI matrices for which the whole marketing marketing initiative could be could be major could be more impactful for our brands, that what we are doing right now. And like over the period of time we do, we do have plans over here to integrate more more of the tech side, either in using the using the AI or using analytics platform, whatever fits best given the scenario, because the industry, it’s changing quite fast. I believe the Moore’s Law still holds true. Everything is changing into two and a half years, the whole whole scenario changes. I want to
Michael Waitze 5:51
dig deeper into this thing you said about YouTube, right? And I want to make an analogy. When Apple came out with the iPhone in what was it 2007. And it started to build this kind of smartphone market, it created this sort of economic umbrella over the phone market. And what does that mean? It meant that essentially, they were up here. And they left all this room underneath themselves for other people to do like oppo and all these other kinds of companies, right to make phones that kind of looked like iPhones and behave like iPhones. But obviously, we’re on Android. I want to make the case that Jimmy Donaldson also known as Mr. beast who had Do you know this 2 billion views last month? Yeah, the first time ever, has also created the same umbrella. So it wasn’t an existing company that did it. It wasn’t an existing network. It wasn’t one of the big TV channels, or one of the big news outlets that did this. It was a guy from Kansas who was born in 1998. He’s 25 years old, but he’s created this massive umbrella on YouTube. And I want to get a better understanding from your position. What that means. What the future to you, I can tell you my opinion, because I do have an opinion on this of YouTube looks like and what it means for creators.
Amrit Sagar 7:00
You do? Like when when we think that in terms of an umbrella Ecosystm One of the core thing or one of the core strengths that YouTube has is that its parent companies, Google and Google have a dominance on the search engine monopoly
Michael Waitze 7:16
on search. Yeah, fundamentally, Google? I mean, YouTube is a search engine. Yes.
Amrit Sagar 7:20
Yes, yes, actually search engine for all the digital content. And and even if you like, try to find the same same with the same keywords on the Google search as well, it will open the YouTube links for you. Yeah. So YouTube, the strength as I was saying, the core strength of YouTube, it’s Google search engine, which gives it a sort of monopoly, in my view, in terms of the content, long voice and content, whatever we are having over here, because when I analyze the market today, I have been working with a lot of content creation platforms. So just in last last couple of years, more than I think more than 1800 to 2000 different different platforms, streaming platforms, or the content platforms have have been launched, either at max Takata, in India or January, you name it, you will find a number of platforms for the creators over there. But still, they are not able to take on the YouTube or just get the creators out of the YouTube, I don’t think about from tick tock and, and even they they have been able to do that in terms of just a short video format. So YouTube, it provides us sort of like 360 degree Ecosystm for creators. I don’t see that any, any any platform is going to take on YouTube, at least in next couple of years, what I find, at least in the Indian market, that’s what I have been feeling. And even from the brands perspective, because all these platforms, they are making revenue based on the advertisement or the influence what they are getting over there. Let’s be specific
Michael Waitze 8:58
about what’s the what are the problems that you’re trying to solve for content creators? And then how do you help them make money as well as you solve those problems?
Amrit Sagar 9:07
Yeah, we are trying, we are trying to solve this problem basic difficult to problem for the content creators. First is the discovery of creators by the right set of brands, like who fall in the TGW, who understand the creators content, what their likes are, what their audience likes. So first is mapping of creators. The second part we are helping creators monetize their content, because if they work with themselves, they are not much discoverable using our platforms and using our network. What we are able to do right now we are we are able to get each of our creators around eight to 10 gigs a month with different brands. Most of the collaborations are long term collaborations where we try to get we try to make these creators the face of the brand, at least for six months to nine months, we are so that we are so that they can have a continuity in their content, whatever they are creating, the experience they are generating through those. And even the brands to have great, great stories to tell about it. What are the creators
Michael Waitze 10:17
get paid to they get paid for each content that they have? Do they get paid like an affiliate? So if they actually get click throughs to the products like how does that work?
Amrit Sagar 10:24
They are paid directly through brands, they do have direct brand contracts for eight to nine months, affiliates are one way to go. But we don’t work on the affiliates, because we haven’t seen great returns for even our creators or brands in that part, right. But they get a contract for six to nine months. And they keep on working for different set of stories for brands.
Michael Waitze 10:48
So talk to me again, about this discoverability on the platform. Like let’s just take a big brand like Coca Cola, I’m just making it up. I don’t even know if they’re on your platform. Let’s say Coca Cola wants someone to do some type of work for them some type of influencer work or some type of content creation work for them. What do they do they come to the platform use it like a search engine? What’s the How did the content creators get rated? How do we know if they’re good, bad or indifferent? Does anybody ever get kicked off the platform just walk me through like what that experience is like,
Amrit Sagar 11:18
they get a whole set of process over here. So let me take you through the journey from the brand perspective how it happened. So once Coca Cola gets onboarding on our platform, the first thing with our brand strategist to finalize what type of campaigns or what type of storylines to have in mind. Right. So once that party is finalized, we do have some we do find some synergy over there. And then we start looking for the creators, there is one thing, which is very important in the creators economy, that any data which is not current, that’s pretty irrelevant, even for brands. Like, I’ll give you an example over here. So I’m a creator. And today I am creating content on lifestyle or education. And my six months later, while my journal might change, I might be creating content on fitness. So the current data current set of data for the creators, that that’s always the key. So what happened from the brand perspective, when they had been the to have everything finalized, in terms of the brief in terms of the campaigns to reach, then we start looking for the creators, we bring them to our platforms, our platform do have updated data up to like two weeks, every two weeks, we update our full database. And we try to find the right fit of creators over here based on the budget of the brand, like what they are willing to pay, Coca Cola is willing to pay around $2 million for five content over there. We try to we help them try to find the creators in that budget range, we reach out to those creators on behalf of brand, align them with brand, get the content created, get the content quality verified from the brands. And then the story goes live. After that the platform platform analytics tools to measure all the engagement to where they are from the Creator side how how the content is performing on different platforms, whether it’s on Instagram, or YouTube or any other any other social media platform. And then over the period of time, the whole campaign ROI, or the whole campaign metrics is measured, that defines the success of the campaign. Like what we got over there, how many what engagement was over here?
Michael Waitze 13:39
Can you talk about the specific data points that you look at that are the most important? Right? In other words, if these five data points are showing some kind of traction, what would they be? And then how do you sell that to the brands?
Amrit Sagar 13:53
One of the key data point which we work upon is the CTV, that’s the cost per view, whether you are a creator with 5 million followers or 10 million followers, that doesn’t mean anything until and unless your content is getting views. So even if you do have on the other hand as well, like if you just do have 10,000 followers, but your view is getting views going in millions, that means something so one of the one of the key data points is the CPV. That’s the first and foremost Okay, the second part is always the engagements from your viewers. If if viewers are not engaging with you, that age they are commenting or they are liking your content, they are sharing reposting then the content, okay, it will have views but it doesn’t influence you viewers or they don’t like the content so much that they save it or they reshare it one of the major point for like these data points in that because in this greater economy or in this whole platform, there’s a whole lot of bot profiles actual like we do have very much fake huge The whole bot army over there are more will sell you to will sell engagements over there. So we, we as platform, we need to make sure that like we take care of these things, we are able to weed out the sort of creators or the sort of views, which doesn’t add any value to the brands. And at the end of the day, in our opinion, personally what I believe influencer marketing or the creator economy, it’s not all about sales, it’s mostly about branding are telling us to be influencing it’s a long term game. It’s not just that sort of affiliate that I, I measure everything in terms of the fields. But the ROI over here, they are intangible. They are brand building storage, how we recall things and how we are engaging over there.
Michael Waitze 15:49
Is there a bunch of questions here? But the sources live actually train some of the influencers? Or give them advice? Or? Or give them a plan for how to market the content they’re creating? Or do you leave that all up to them? Do you know what I mean? Like it’s part of your business to create this section inside of Ursula that says, if you want to be a creator, we’ll teach you how to do that as well. And then we’ll connect you to the brands are you just going after existing people that are already creating great content,
Amrit Sagar 16:13
we are not training on making anyone creators. But what we are doing differently over here, like we do have one more vertical in our service. That is for the artist management vertical creators who want to transition to a full time creator game, right? We want to be influences we are we to have dedicated contracts with them, where we try to manage their content manage, we don’t tell them what to create or something, but the quality of the content in terms of like what their audience wants to listen, or what’s trending, even in terms of the aesthetic quality, we help them with that. Apart from that we try to help them build their long time branding as well. Because as a creator, if you don’t work on your story, right? You are going to be lost. It’s a very big economy. So through our artists management vertical, we do have dedicated set of creators who work through us only and all of their content, all of their the business part on contracts, everything that goes through us. But yeah, we are not training anyone from scratch to become a creator influencer. But I personally believe the creative economy or the influencing part, that that should be organic. Until and unless it comes from within you or you don’t have a story to tell. And everyone has a unique style of telling story. If it’s trainable, then then it’s pretty much scripted.
Michael Waitze 17:43
Yeah, I mean, that’s the thing I was gonna ask you next, right? Do you see a situation where just like movie studios get scripts train people how to act. They’re acting in schools, you know, in, in India, they’re acting schools in New York, they’re acting schools in LA, do you see a place where people can actually train people to be influences and then manage them almost like a manager movie studio?
Amrit Sagar 18:02
I highly suspect that one key reason for that, which I believe is age, the audience is pretty smart. Today, we are consuming content. Like anything, we do have cheap access to data, we do have cheap access to content and audiences audiences becoming more and more what we can say intelligent in terms of understanding like, what is organic, what is scripted? What is reacting, I don’t think in terms of scale, it is going to be pretty viable to train someone to act or to create some type of content, which is very much scripted and get attraction. Okay. Compared to the organic ones.
Michael Waitze 18:42
Again, I think it’s a moving target. I’m not really sure what’s going to happen. But I do think that the audiences are getting really smart, do you feel like this is really going to replace, like mainstream advertising? Right, because I feel like people less and less watch commercials. And I put that in quotes, and are more influenced by the people that are creating content online and saying, I’m going to buy that thing. And I’m never going to watch that commercial. Do you think over time that like ad agencies and stuff like that are just going to get smaller and smaller? They’re never gonna go away? Right, but they’re just gonna get smaller? No.
Amrit Sagar 19:16
Certainly, we did a survey a couple of months back trying to understand like how the influencer marketing or the organic content that’s impacting the budget of the TV advertisement or the print advertisement. And what we found like we we did a survey with almost 80 of our brands like who were in our who were on our platform at that point of time. And what we found that just in last three to four quarters, the advertisement budget is shifting most from the TV advertisement and others to the content marketing. They may not be influencer marketing, but more on the content side whether it’s a textual content animated, influencer organic, or anything which is more engaging compared to any TV commercial. shells. And even from my experience and water is seen my home like no one watches ads any more, even if it’s if it comes between India Pakistan cricket match did had that day before. And whenever there was a commercial coming my mind if you were just changing the channels to see something else. So yeah, I think the mainstream commercials that ah that is on decline. I can’t say that but that is on decline with a few people are engaging over there.
Michael Waitze 20:33
This is my big question for you, right? Because I think that there’s a massive opportunity to hear in 2022 Procter and Gamble, one of the biggest like consumer goods advertising companies in the world spent just in the United States alone, over $5 billion on advertising, that money is not going to go away. But I do feel like it’s going to have to move. Do you feel like that the opportunity that you’re building into is that big? Are you trying to take some of this money away?
Amrit Sagar 21:01
Totally, totally over there, or just an NDA, I’ll tell you the numbers. I haven’t seen the global numbers too much. But in like I do analyze trends and market and I see are just in the last two years third creator economy that has grown by more than 170 to one 80%. I have seen personally in my clients projects, like when they started with us, they started with around 10,000 huge budget with us on a monthly basis. And now they are spending around 40 to 50,000 Euro, whether that’s an increase of just 400 to 500%, just over a period of two to three quarters. And I seeing this not just for the New Age startup brands like their most of the b2c who are getting ferns, we’re trying to expand further, but from the traditional business houses as well, like we do have Tata Group as our clients, and they are spending around more than 10 or 10 or 15 millions per month in terms of the influencer or the creator marketing budget. And that is increasing that is ever increasing.
Michael Waitze 22:05
Yeah. So I mean, I agree with you, I think those numbers are just gonna keep getting are just gonna keep getting higher and higher. Do you do any vetting of the creators that sit on your platform? If you know what I mean? Or can anybody just sign up and then it’s up to the platform to kind of rate them and spit them out?
Amrit Sagar 22:20
Yeah, anyone can sign up on our platform. That’s true. But to get reflected on the platform, they need to get vetted. They need to get vetted on their content, what type of content if they have ever, like shared explicit or abusive content or anything, which is not in line with the community? Guidelines Sure, which to follow. We don’t onboard them. They’re on onboard he rejected but he or anyone can apply the our internal team, that’s that’s their content. That’s their engagement. As I told earlier, that the age or the age and minutes of the creators likely to have bought followers bought engagement, we do need to beat them out to keep quality creators to our client. Yeah. So
Michael Waitze 23:04
do you have your own studios? Do you create your own content as well? And if not, why not?
Amrit Sagar 23:10
yet? Not yet. We do have that in plan. We do have our partner studio where some of the contents are created. But we are we are planning to do that in next couple of quarters. But right now on.
Michael Waitze 23:23
Okay, if you need some help with that, let me know I can definitely help you on the studio side and the content creation side. What is your business plan? Are you just taking a commission from all this stuff that gets paid on the platform? And like, do you handle the payments as well? So your creators get paid directly or through your platform? Like how does that work as well?
Amrit Sagar 23:42
creators get paid through us or like, because we do have to make money over there. And I just commission and commission from the both side that that is our bloodline. All the payments goes through us. Whether from the client side, whether from the Creator side, we try to be as transparent as possible in that and complying to the old old taxes, but yet, they have no direct transactions, right?
Michael Waitze 24:08
Here’s one of the reasons why I asked this, in my mind, like every company like yours is building a platform. And I’m wondering if you thought about this, right? If you’ve got big brands on one side, right? How many brands do you say you have on the platform?
Amrit Sagar 24:19
I do have 80 plus brands right now?
Michael Waitze 24:21
Yeah, that’s a lot of brands. Right. So and then on the other side, how many creators do you have?
Amrit Sagar 24:26
Oh, more than 200k
Michael Waitze 24:28
within 200,000 creators? Yes. Okay. So just think about the audience that you have. And I just mean, the people that are on the platform, right? Do you ever consider the fact that RSS live is also kind of masquerading as a fintech? Because you’re handling all these payments your hand you’re paying people every month, right and potentially 200,000 people a month. They’re trusting you with their money. You’re already acting kind of like a FinTech, not like a bank per se, right. Do you ever can siddur adding other services to those creators so that then they can get insurance through you and do other things through you so that it’s this one contained platform.
Amrit Sagar 25:10
Honestly speaking, like before, you just mentioned it, I never thought in that perspective, that yeah, we do have processes of FinTech, like we are we are doing a lot of payment processing through us. But haven’t really thought in that me. Maybe in future, we might give it a thought. But one of one of the core thing in the FinTech is that it is pretty much very regulated. It’s a very rehabilitate industry in India. Yeah. So might be in future, that could be a good idea to expand. I’m
Michael Waitze 25:43
sorry, sorry, here’s a suggestion, Emery, you work with a regulated insurer, right? Yeah, create a product that does this. If the Creator pays a little bit of money in premium, if their contract gets cancelled with one of their brands, for some reason, it could be COVID, it could be anything, right? It could be, you know, a natural disaster, they still get paid. Because the insurance company pays out. It’s a really simple product. But it could create real great traction on on your platform. And you don’t you’re not the regulated entity, to the insurance company to the regulated entity, right. So you just co create these products with them. And my guess is that the more you interact with your creators, and there will be more of them. Like we said, this whole thing is going to take over the advertising agency advertising business, I’m convinced of it, I do the same thing. And I’m pretty convinced that my target is to take ad revenue away from ad agencies, because I don’t think they’re relevant anymore. But if you have all these creators on the platform, you can offer them all these products as well. And that’s a cool distribution platform that you’re building. Just an idea. And
Amrit Sagar 26:46
this is actually pretty interesting, because in terms of the insurance like the to be, to be very frank and honest, even Indian insurance industry that’s pretty much fragmented, like its potential has not even been utilized up to, I think, five, or 10 posts. So this is, this is a great idea. We’ll try to implement it, even with the pilot, and I’ll update you like how it goes
Michael Waitze 27:10
up. But it’s another again, it’s another way for your firm to become this one gigantic ecosystem of content, advertising, influence, and fintech all in the same place, and your creators, or your clients for multiple products. And if they trust you to get them brand deals, they should also trust you to get them find some financial services that go along inside that ecosystem of the brand deal. Anyway, just just my opinion. Can you talk to me a little bit about the challenges of being an entrepreneur in India, like what you’ve actually learned during this journey about building a business from scratch?
Amrit Sagar 27:47
Entrepreneurship, I believe it’s never simple. Whether you are in India, whether you are in Germany, whether you are in Italy, it takes I believe, like takes sweat and blood. When I talk from the India post, say, the entrepreneurship, it’s sort of what I can see a booming trend right now in India, a lot of entrepreneurs are coming, a lot of my colleagues and my juniors whom I know, they are leaving their full time jobs and coming to build something of their own, whether it’s their unique idea, your some problem they see they’re trying to solve over here. The challenge is what I see in India, a few of first stage in terms of regulations, a lot of verticals, a lot of industries are pretty much regulated in India, which needs to be opened a bit for entrepreneurs to at least test drive, launch and get initial traction or at least validate their POC in terms of the product. But they that is not very easy in India, right. One of the example I can give you that energy in terms of agri tech and India has been traditionally agricultural dominant country, right. I believe like it becomes logical and natural that most of the startups or a big section of the startup should be in the agri tech take a lot of huge opportunity. But there are so many bureaucratic hurdles, there are so many policy hurdles over here that we see just a very few few numbers of entrepreneurs working in the agricultural sector, compared to what we see more in the different segments. So yeah, it’s a bit tough right now. But thanks. So opening, government policies are changing gradually. But still still a lot, a lot of distance to cover here.
Michael Waitze 29:35
And how does the funding landscape look like to you this year, as we head into the end of 2023.
Amrit Sagar 29:42
Since last quarter, I see things looking up just because because we are a bootstrap startup. We haven’t. We haven’t reached fund or it hasn’t fall in our plan even even now. But in just in terms of the funding landscape. I think 20 made up 2022 made of 2023. That was a funding mentor. Even in India, investors are pretty skeptical fund houses are not giving easy money, how it was raised earlier. But yeah, now since last quarter, I’m seeing things opening up. A lot of these are in market even. I have been investing a little bit myself and in different startups. And I see that viable business models just not in terms of the Blitzscaling, or a viable, viable and profitable business models are emerging. And the funding is opening. I hope, like, at least in the next quarter, it will it will come back to 2019 2020 numbers, I believe that I think
Michael Waitze 30:46
the funding is going to return. But I do agree with you, in the sense that I think the funding is going to look for companies that are that have a real path to profitability. I don’t think they’re looking for people to blitzscale anymore. I don’t think it makes sense because I think it’s just an easy way to lose money and not a great way to make money. If you’re in business, you should be in business to make a profit. I presume you’re profitable. Yes.
Amrit Sagar 31:06
Yes, we are. We are we are profitable.
Michael Waitze 31:09
You’d have to be with with all that activity?
Amrit Sagar 31:11
Yeah, we are we are profitable, our business model is pretty much we have, it’s pretty much straightforward. We are not the we are not dependent on the Blitzscaling or just the customer records over there. We do have recurring revenue from our existing brands, and most of our profit comes just from the retention,
Michael Waitze 31:32
do you have a data science team as well, as your company continues to grow, the amount of data that you’re going to going to be able to analyze is just going to grow exponentially? Right? So do you think about building a data science team in the future? Do you have one now? And do you still do you already do some of your own data analytics at scale.
Amrit Sagar 31:50
Um, we don’t have a data science team right now. But me and my founder, we are both from the computer engineering background. So like we have a bit of understanding of the data analytics we have used to in our previous work life or when we we are engineers, and we are able to analyze a bit of data on ourselves using a model most of the tools. But yeah, our data is going to be crucial. I personally believe we are we are losing a bit by not consuming all these data, analyzing and driving mode, more value from that. But right now, we don’t have in our plan for any data science team, at least for this financial year, maybe next, we might start building some data models and onboarding data engineers over there to organize and crunch more of our data. Yeah, I
Michael Waitze 32:41
mean, at some point, you’re just gonna have to do that. Yes. Before I let you go. Are there any other sort of Mar tech trends that you see or that you envision happening that we haven’t discussed already?
Amrit Sagar 32:53
At least not just in the marketing, but in the technology itself? I see that even the marketing industry it’s it’s changing very fast. When we were talking about like, we were talking about influencer marketing, a couple of years back, that is the thing today we are talking about the Creator economy or the creator marketing. It’s not just the influencer marketing, but more of the Creator marketing. I believe, like with the advent of the AI, or the EU, or the creation of creation, or the use of more of the conversational or generative AI, new new types of marketing, marketing tools, or the marketing segments are going to crop up. Whether that might be creating virtual virtual avatars, or who can create content on their own can have their own persona on the one managing it from themselves. Using just the power of conversational AI or the generative AI.
Michael Waitze 33:46
Do you look at expansion outside of India? Or are you sitting there thinking for now at least the Indian market is just so large that I don’t need to expand yet. But I mean, if you look at United States, right, North America, Southeast Asia, there’s a massive content creation economy already getting built there as well. Do you think about expanding outside to?
Amrit Sagar 34:04
Oh, we do have a bit of pretension Middle East right now. And but apart from that, we don’t have much presence somewhere else. But yeah, we do have plans to expand starting with Asia, not too keen on Europe or us right now. Because that that I like from our analysis, what I we have found that that market is already very much saturated, and India is a growing economy. A lot of companies are spending a lot of money over here, right? We were lucky that if we capture a big pie over here, compared to just venturing outside and trying our luck over there.
Michael Waitze 34:41
Got it. Okay, I’m gonna let you go. This was awesome. I really learned a lot. I’d love to have you come back on the show. As you continue to grow and as the sort of trends that you’re seeing change. I’m in this market. So I’m super curious about what’s happening. Amrit Sagar, the Founder and Managing Director of Ercess Live. Thank you so much for doing this today I really appreciate it
Amrit Sagar 35:03
thanks Michael really appreciate it.
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