Glance rides on lock screen content in regional languages

Communicating in regional languages has become increasingly important for brands as they continue to seek to connect with consumers across regions, Vasuta Agarwal, chief business officer, consumer platform advertising, of mobile advertising giant InMobi, told ET.

“We’ve observed how brands are adapting their content to regional markets to better engage with the local consumers. According to Glance’s platform data, 60% of users are from tier-1 cities, while the remaining are from tier-2 and tier-3 cities. Most of the users consume content in vernacular languages, and this percentage is increasing every quarter,” she said.

Content consumption by vernacular mix shows close to half of all users (45%) consume content in Hindi. Kannada, Telugu and Tamil are the other top languages on the platform, 16%, 13% and 11% of users.

Several brands too are taking advantage of this phenomena and putting out more content in vernacular languages on Glance, which claims to have more than 200 million active users in India.

One such brand is Kuku FM.

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“Glance being a lock screen app, helped us to wide spread our reach amongst our target audiences. In terms of success metrics, it helped us reduce cost of acquisitions,” said Tejasvi Batria, marketing head of vernacular audio platform Kuku FM. He said Kuku FM saw its growth increase by ten times in terms of app installs and that subscriptions increased by five times in 2022 (only restricted to the installs and subscriptions InMobi was driving) when compared to downloads and subscriptions in 2021 (that InMobi was driving).

Glance’s lock screen platform enables brands to deliver hyper-localised content to users based on their location and language preferences.

By adapting their content to regional markets and using vernacular languages, brands can build better brand loyalty, local audiences, and establish a long-lasting relationship with consumers, Agarwal said.

Currently, the active user base of the lock screen platform maintains a balance of 65% male and 35% female users. Geographically, 32% of this user base come from metro cities in India and 40% from tier-2 cities.

Glance leverages data signals which include location, content interests, languages, device types, and demography to deliver personalised content.

“This allows brands to engage with their ideal customers in a more effective and efficient manner, ultimately driving higher engagement and conversion rates,” Agarwal said.