Sandeep Goyal forms mobile ads JV with Zeotap

Former chairman of Japanese advertising major Dentsu in India, Sandeep Goyal has formed a joint venture (JV) with German startup Zeotap to create a programmatic advertising platform for targeted advertising on smartphones in India.

Goyal's privately held firm Mogae Media Pvt Ltd has signed an agreement with Zeotap to form a 50:50 JV, the company said during the weekend. The JV will be live by next month and a larger roll-out is planned over the next 6-19 months.

Programmatic buying involves a major shift in the approach to digital advertising from the entire ecosystem, according to Goyal.

"Programmatic is an ideal technique to move marketing from a fragmented campaign-by-campaign paradigm to an always-on paradigm covering the entire customer life-cycle. With zeotap, we wish to do just that," he said.

Zeotap was founded in November 2014 by Daniel Heer and Projjol Banerjea. Prior to launching Zeotap, Heer spent five years at Vodafone before joining AppLift as director of strategic partnerships. Banerjea was previously chief product officer at moboqo (acquired by Applovin) and prior to that vice president for marketing & business development at Fyber (acquired by RNTS Media for $190 million).

In 2014, it launched its data platform which connects mobile network operators (MNOs) with the app and advertising ecosystem. The solution anonymises data extracted from MNOs' systems and employs a variety of signals to generate user and request­-specific scores that augment advertising transactions.

Zeotap recently raised $6.4 million from Capnamic Ventures, Iris Capital (backed by advertising conglomerate Publicis and telecoms giant Orange) and a group of angels including former executives at Nokia and Yahoo in its Series A funding round. Its existing investors include the HitFox group and former executives at Deutsche Telekom, McKinsey, GfK and AOL.

"The new investment will be employed towards zeotap's international expansion as well as to substantially grow our global technology centre in Bangalore," said Heer, CEO of Zeotap.

Goyal launched Mogae Media in 2012 along with his wife after selling his minority stake in Dentsu India to its foreign partner.

Dentsu took over its India joint ventures Dentsu Communications Pvt Ltd, Dentsu Marcom Pvt Ltd and Dentsu Creative Impact Pvt Ltd by buying the 26 per cent stake held by Goyal through Mogae Consultants Pvt Ltd in early 2011. Goyal is a former Group CEO of Zee Telefilms and ex-president of ad agency Rediffusion DY&R.

The Goyals are also shareholders in FoodFood TV with celebrity chef Sanjeev Kapoor.