How To Boom Your Business Growth With Ads on Hotstar?

After a hefty fifteen months of development, Star India introduced an OTT or Over the top streaming service for the customers that featured a huge list of content including cricket and other sports streams in multiple languages throughout India. The CEO of Star India believed that there aren’t enough services like this who provide curated content, that too, high quality, other than Youtube. Which is why they came up with Hotstar which was mainly focused on the younger generation of India. 

Hotstar at this moment is accessible through the website, and apps made for IOS & Android. This service is operated in two ways, first in a free ad-supported service and higher tier subscription-based service. In the ad-supported services, Hotstar provides access to some star services & few selected Indian cinema movies. In the premium subscriptions, more content is provided to the customers that include services like international series and movies.

Not only that, now Hotstar has introduced their very own advertising service, that can be extremely beneficial for the business if they are looking for more reach & conversions for their products and services. Hostar has named the service, Hotstar AdServe.

Hotstar’s AdServe, where businesses can advertise withing the streams, is ready to give a strong competition to other big players in the business like Youtube and facebook. 

Let’s look at the steps for using Hotstar AdServe:

The First Step:

The first step is none other than visiting the website itself because that’s where the real magic begins. On your browser, visit https://brands.hotstar.com 

Once you’ve reached the homepage, click on the big “Advertise on Hotstar” button.

Step Two:

That should take you to the signup page, now either you can signup for a new account or sign in with a previous account you already have.

Step three:

Once you are done with either signing up or sign in with an old account, it should take you to a magical page where you’ll be asked to surrender all your money, just kidding, you’ll see another button that’ll allow you to create a new campaign for your business on Hotstar.

Step Four:

Select the category you are looking for your ad to make its debut. Let us assume for now you are going with the sports category. Pick the tournament going on at the moment. 

Fill in Campaign details

Once you have selected the category, its time to prepare yourself to give up all your Adhaar card information right there. Jokes apart, now you’ll need to enter all the details of the campaign you are trying to run.

Enter the name for your campaign, followed by the schedule you want the ad to appear. You can select the dates you want the ad to run.

Budget

Now its time for you to set up the budget that you want to put into the campaign. Be honest with yourself here, Don’t overestimate anything though, *cough* Facebook *cough*, keep the calculation in check and select the budget. Hotstar has a budget range that starts from 10 Lakhs that skyrockets up to 1 crore and more. Once you are done you can move onto the next step that’s uploading your creative for the ad. 

In case your budget is more than what Hotstar expected, you’ll need to contact their sales support.

The Video

Last but definitely not least, you’ll reach the final boss stage where you’ll be required to upload the ad video, the main ingredient of your campaign. There are formats for the video that are predefined by Hotstar:

• Up to 20 seconds of Video Length 
• Bit Rate of 50 Mbit/CBR 
• 16:9 Aspect Ratio
• 25 fps Frame Rate

Don’t forget to enter your landing page URL, where the user will be redirected to if they click on the video. Keep yourself in check with google policies for displaying the URL.

Once all these steps are done, you’ll receive a confirmation email containing all the details of your campaign and details of the payment.

Ad Formats

Before we finish off this piece, here are the ad formats that are being offered by Hotstar:

Billboard: 

Native Image:

Bumper:

Midrolls:

Carousel:

Leadgen:

Choose the format you want the ad to run from these selections based on their description of what they’ll do for you. Hotstar is one of the best platforms that provide these services online, next to facebook and youtube but being youngster focused platform it is really efficient to grab leads from Hotstar. It’s not hard to profit from this platform if you keep everything in check. Like Hotstar says just remember “Its easy to get started”.

In case you don’t want your ads to be run from Hotstar platform itself, you can always opt for platforms like The Media Ant, who are willing to take the burden of running these ads for you. They’ll be handling all the up and downs and give you regular reports of how your ads are performing.