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Tag: Azhar Iqubal

  • Co-Founder Azhar Iqubal becomes Chairman; Deepit Purkayastha new CEO

    Inshorts rejigs leadership

    Inshorts has announced a transition in its executive leadership. Azhar Iqubal, who co-founded the company and has served as CEO since its inception, will be transitioning to the role of Chairman. Co-founder Deepit Purkayastha, will assume the position of the CEO of the company.

    Said Iqubal: “After leading the company for 11 years as CEO, I have decided to step into the role of Chairman of the company. My co-founder, Deepit, who has been an instrumental part of our journey from the beginning, will take charge as the CEO of the company and I am excited to see him lead our company to even greater heights. I remain committed to our vision and mission of building a large and profitable internet company in India.”

    Added Deepit Purkayastha, Co-founder & CEO, Inshorts: “Azhar has led from the front through ups and downs. I thank Azhar on behalf of the company and I feel honoured to take on the role of CEO to lead the company through the next phase of growth.”

  • The ad targets urban news consumers in the age group of 18-35, who value brevity and time

    Inshorts unveils inaugural brand campaign

    By A Correspondent

     

    In order to boost awareness about its short form content value proposition, news app Inshorts has launched a video commercial of its first ever brand campaign on YouTube. Executed by Cheil India, the ad targets urban news consumers in the age group of 18-35, who value brevity and time.

     

    Carrying the tagline – “Short mein jaano”, the campaign captures real life situations where the protagonists get frustrated from people around them who waste time in beating around the bush instead of communicating to the point.

     

    This being the central theme, the video commercial revolves around a bomb squad commando stuck in a situation of urgency, awaiting instructions from his senior, to take the necessary action. It is only after a series of unimportant information that the commando is guided about the course of action he was looking for all along.

     

    Inshorts, through its 60-word shorts, provides users a unique content discovery experience that allows them to read a lot of news items in short, in very little time. With just a few swipes, at a time and place of their convenience, consumers can keep abreast with all the important news of the day.

     

    Commenting on the launch of the campaign, Azhar Iqubal, CEO & Co-Founder, Inshorts said, “Being an internet company, we are launching our campaign online first and intend to go all out with ATL and BTL campaigns later. Through this TVC, we hope to highlight the Inshorts value proposition of keeping its users updated with simple, factual and to-the-point content which can be consumed in minimum time.”

     

    The commercial has been directed by Gajraj Rao, produced by Code Red Films and conceptualized by Cheil India. The four-week long campaign will go live on digital and social platforms like Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

     

    On the launch of the campaign, Aneesh Jaisinghani, Executive Creative Director, Cheil India said – “When you have a great product like the Inshorts app, a veteran director like Gajaraj Rao, super talented actors like Rajesh Sharma, Nikhil Ratnaparkhi and Sumit Gulati, a few things are guaranteed, a ball of a shoot and a couple of awesome TV commercials. Hope the viewers enjoy watching them as much as we enjoyed making them”

     

  • Aims to become distribution platform for publishers and brands

    Inshorts partners with multiple content publishers

    By A Correspondent

     

    Popular news app – Inshorts, has partnered with more than 30 content publishers and 5 leading e-commerce players to position itself as India’s fastest growing content distribution platform. The list of partners include Zomato, Bookmyshow, Tripigator, CarDekho and BikeDekho, Sportskeeda, Catch News, MotorScribes, Indian Express Group, India Today Group, The Guardian, Outlook, Reuters, PTI, ANI, The Next Web, Trak.in, Bloomberg, Inc42, The News Minute, TechCrunch, Engadget, Social Cops, 91mobiles, The Better India, ScoopWhoop, Finimize, Milaap, SME Times, VakilSearch, Factly, India Infoline, North-east today, Autoblog, CillyPoint and Product Hunt.

     

    Inshorts CEO and Co-founder Azhar Iqubal said, “Inshorts was built on the premise of keeping its users informed by providing them with a simple, easy and built-for-mobile user interface. As we scale in terms of content and user base, we are opening up the Inshorts platform for Content Publishers across the board to help them take advantage of our growth.”

     

    On the company’s decision to onboard e-commerce players to share branded content, Iqubal adds - “Our monetisation roadmap is going to be based on combining brand centric content with the power of personalisation. In effect, we hope to solve the problem brands face in reaching the right customers. Brand partnerships like these are the first steps in that direction and the response from our users has also been very encouraging.”

     

    “In the next 6 months, we hope to scale our user base beyond 10 million users and launch a slew of personalisation features wherein we are able to serve the most relevant content to users based on their content consumption behaviour, age, gender and location. We have already rolled out an intuitive personalised news feed for all the users which is serving them content selection powered by an AI technology based recommendation engine.

     

    With over 3 million downloads and a rating of 4.6 on Android playstore, Inshorts serves about a billion page views every month. The app also generates about a million clicks for detailed stories which help to generate traffic to the mobile websites of its partners.