When Wall Street bankers tell tales for millennials

Ashwin Suresh’s career was on a trajectory many Indian families aspire to—an MS in engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign followed by an investment banking job with Citi in New York. “I was living the Wall Street life and the markets were doing really well—in the beginning,” recalls Suresh. Then came the crash of 2008.

Unlike many others, he kept his job. But there wasn’t much work and he started attending evening classes to rekindle a side project from his college days: film study. He earned a diploma in film-making from the New York Film Academy. “In the process, I discovered that to me it was much more exciting as a career than finance.”

The emerging media and entertainment industry in India interested him in particular. He took the plunge in 2011, moving to Mumbai to join Reliance Entertainment. Then he set up Junglee Pictures, the movie studio arm of The Times Group.

It was exciting for a young man turning 30, but the cracks started to show, says Suresh, now 37. “I wanted to move much faster than I was able to under the umbrella of a large organization.”

FINDING PARTNERS

Towards the end of 2013, he shared this frustration with Anirudh Pandita, his college mate and an investment banker. As roommates at university, they had attended film classes together. They decided to launch a new generation digital entertainment venture: Pocket Aces, whose popular video content channels on social media today include Dice Media, FilterCopy and Gobble.

The third co-founder is Aditi Shrivastava, who grew up in Kuwait, with Pandita, attending the same school. She went to Princeton University for engineering and earned her spurs on Wall Street like her co-founders, before setting up an impact investment network for Aavishkar in India. She had, in the meantime, started dating Suresh and married him.

Suresh, who also grew up in the Middle East, admits there’s an NRI feel to Pocket Aces content, especially the series Little Things that Dice Media co-produced with Netflix. Its writer Dhruv Sehgal, who doubles as the lead character Dhruv Vats in the story about a millennial couple in Mumbai, was also an NRI. This might, in fact, have contributed to its success.

“What tends to happen with content targeting a large, diverse audience is that specialist audiences aren’t addressed,” says Suresh. “Young, urban India was turning to the West for content. So, when you put an Indian context to that, it really connected.”

Given their finance background, the founders thought about distribution and monetization strategy from the outset of content creation. Thus, they began with short videos suited to smartphone users, rather than Web series, which required a bigger commitment.

“It ensured we had the distribution and data on which to base our longer form content,” says Pandita. For example, the Operation MBBS series currently running on YouTube began after two short videos targeting the medical community went viral. It was the same with Little Things whose initial avatar was a short video. “The data showed people liked the chemistry between the actors in this relationship comedy,” says Pandita. “So we aren’t taking wild bets on content.”

Season One of Little Things was distributed via YouTube before Netflix came on board for Season Two. Pocket Aces is now in talks with other OTT channels such as Amazon as well as platforms like TikTok to reduce its dependence on YouTube and Facebook. Before this, the startup made its money from branded content on its YouTube channels, instead of being happy with a pittance as its share of ad revenue.

“We service clients directly with our branded content products. We don’t have to share that with Google or Facebook,” points out Pandita. For example, Operation MBBS is branded by edtech company Unacademy.

LANGUAGE OF SCALE

It took time for the upstart media venture to get buy-in from brands and advertisers. “The hardest part was getting your foot in the door,” recalls Shrivastava, who leads the revenue side of Pocket Aces. “But once people saw that our content thesis was working, we could get meetings with agencies and brands. Then it was easy to connect with them because they saw we understood the language of RoI, data, positioning and the solutions they needed.”

With a peak of 709 million monthly views in August last year, Pocket Aces has broken away from the digital video entertainment pack which includes the likes of The Viral Fever and Culture Machine. Distribution strategy across multiple platforms contributed to this, and so did its content strategy which spans FilterCopy for short videos, Dice Media for longer form series, Gobble for food videos, its new Jambo channel for animated content on Instagram, and Nutshell for infotainment. While these go out on social media and OTT platforms, its new gaming app Loco is direct to consumers.

Each of these properties fits in with Pocket Aces data on what consumers want. Jambo arose from a view that animated content appeals to adults, not just kids. Nutshell responds to research showing that many viewers are looking for easy-to-consume explainer videos. But Loco is the biggest new bet. “Our mission is to solve boredom and we observed that gaming is becoming a large part of the consumer experience,” says Pandita.

“What got you here won’t get you there” is a popular saying among startups. Pocket Aces is figuring out its take on this as it deals with the challenge of scaling up its content while staying true to its core values. “We use that phrase a lot these days to justify the transformation we’re undergoing,” says Suresh with a laugh.

Pocket Aces started out with the founders taking all the business decisions, while a bunch of “hungry, inexperienced” creators came in for the content. The idea behind getting fresh content creators was to avoid the baggage of experienced ones—with definite ideas of good and bad—who may not be nimble enough to adapt to data, “because they’re not used to a consumer-centric approach to content,” explains Suresh.

“We realised last year that we’re becoming a large organisation producing content at scale. Now we’ve gone back to hiring people with experience of management and processes because we’ve already got a culture of creating content in a creative and efficient manner. If 150 people are creating things a certain way, the 151st person doesn’t disrupt that culture, he or she adapts to it.”

The startup raised a $14.5 million Series B round last year. It had revenue of $4.6 million in FY 2019, as the former Wall Street bankers keep an eye on the profitability of established content even as they foray into new shows and types of content.

Sumit Chakraberty is a consulting editor with Mint. Write to him at chakraberty@gmail.com