In conversation with: Albert Almeida, COO-Non-Movies, BookMyShow

The live events industry in India has been growing rapidly and online ticketing platform, BookMyShow is working towards giving more entertainment choices to its consumers and building the entertainment ecosystem in India. In the process, the company expects revenue from its live business to increase and be equal to itsmovie business by FY 2021.     How has the scenario for live entertainment evolved in India? BookMyShow has been part of the ticketing journey for almost 11 years now. Over the years, we have seen a growing appetite for live entertainment and experiences not just on our platform but also through the various productions and concerts that we have promoted. We see this evolving with the quality of the show- in terms of the act, production and thereby the consumer experience. As per the KPMG report, the live space will continue growing by about 18% in the next couple of years. We, for ourselves, see a very healthy growth because we are getting into the world of production, promotions and we have been growing at about 40% Y-o-Y. We want to make sure that by the end of FY 2021, we can make our live business equal to our movie business in revenue terms.   How do you engage with the brands and help them increase visibility? In today’s cluttered world, brands and marketers are looking for platforms to enhance engagement. Live, being a great platform for actual engagement and interaction with consumers who are very relevant solves this purpose. On our platforms, we see a very active participation from the banking and financial services industry for our various events. We have PayPal, CitiBank and a host of others who were actively engaged with us in collaborating with large ticketing properties or ongoing stuff that we do. They see in it a valuable outreach to people sitting at the different ends of the spectrum. In their association, they see a huge value be it an acquisition, retention or reward. The telecom space is also very vibrant, given the whole mobility juggernaut in this country. We have also seen a good traction amongst the automobile players as well because that as a category is very dynamic. Apart from this, we see a lot other categories that engage with us and help us build the most strategic partnerships. It could be that we have a property and we approach the brands or the brands come to us with the intent of reaching a particular set of consumers, so we curate some content for that space. Therefore, the collaboration could be triggered on either sides and that’s really the way we engage with brands or marketers.   How is BMS able to leverage business intelligence and analytics for the brands it works with? Over the years, we have grown our community and today we have an active consumer base of over 35 million visitors on a monthly basis on our platform. Given the large base, it becomes an attractive opportunity for advertisers. We have got an exhaustive data of who the people are and through the intelligence of our devices, we have exhausted the intelligence about segments of consumers, which becomes valuable to marketer. We utilize this intelligence towards making content for a particular target group that the marketer seeks to establish his relationship with. So the ability to curate something basis a very clear marketing brief,is what we bring to the table.