Zapr’s solution was driven by the need for user-level, individualized data of offline media consumption, previously nonexistent in India which is amongst the world's largest media markets. This insight led to the development of ACR technology powered by proprietary algorithms that collect offline media consumption. The intention was to solve problems faced by media companies globally such as the lack of robust large-scale data; inefficient marketing across siloed ad mediums; inability to engage with target audiences individually. Zapr combines Big Data and Ad technology to create a real cross-screen experience across Television and Digital, that is precise and effective. While ACR technology and its unique applications have existed for many years, Zapr’s novel innovation utilizes proprietary ACR for comprehensive media content detection, throughout the day, across several mediums like TV, radio, movies-in-theaters etc. Achieving 99%+ accuracy, despite low quality smartphones and poor internet connectivity for 40 Mn+ people is groundbreaking.

Zapr maps offline media consumption of 75+ million individual Android smartphone users across 650+ channels in near real-time. Zapr’s Software Development Kit (SDK) is integrated with devices through third-party partner apps, via explicit user opt-ins. Powered by Digital Signal Processing, audio fingerprints are automatically created on user devices whenever media content is detected in ambient surroundings. These fingerprints are sent back to in-house servers hosted on AWS and matched with the fingerprints of TV channels at 99%+ accuracy. Zapr churns out more than 1TB worth data everyday without accessing any personally identifiable information (PII), and engages with users across thousands of mobile apps using in-house advertising-serving technology.

Over the years, Zapr’s technology has repeatedly proved its reliability and consistency with all major media players in the market. The company is currently in the stage of increasing its user-base to over 100 million active users, emerging as the world's largest media-tech company and the leading choice digital partner for all brands. The core media-recognition technology has been expanded to include Cinema, Radio and Music etc. as well. With recent expansion in business, our technology has scaled across new geographies from India to the Middle east and now to Southeast Asia.

The long-term outcome / vision at Zapr Media Labs is to create comprehensive offline media consumption profiles for individual users and engage them with the most relevant content while aiding marketers to drive integrated and cross-platform deterministic reach across the entire advertising ecosystem. With solutions bridging the offline and online worlds, that are easily scalable across any geography. Zapr's success metrics have become the industry currencies for media engagement and have solved problems which were never solved earlier:

1) Bottom-of-funnel conversion determining promo-to-TV effectiveness for broadcasters

2) Cost savings (of over 60% of digital ad spends) through deterministic incremental reach and frequency building beyond TV ads

3) Optimizing marketing metrics based on brand lift studies of exposed TV audiences.

Our industry relevance has been cemented by growing business (40% quarter-on-quarter growth on average). Zapr is backed by 21st Century Fox, 500 Startups, Flipkart alongside multiple angel investors.

The inability to build a truly integrated cross-media plan across TV and mobile, leads to wastage and inefficiency worth billions of dollars in media ad-spends globally every year. With proprietary content recognition technology, Zapr Media Labs is the only company globally to build a massively scaled media consumption repository, having profiled over 40 million people over the past two years, across linear TV, radio, music, movies-in-theater and video-on-demand, while maintaining a gold standard on user privacy. This ocean of data is leveraged to offer big-data analytics and cross-platform mobile engagement solutions to 150+ brands, media agencies, broadcasters and research firms.

June 2012 - Developed ‘audio-fingerprinting based matching’ against a static database

November 2012 - First gamified application based on our technology, developed an ‘ad hunting game’, where users could 'check-in' to thousands of TV commercials in real-time

October 2013 - Developed ability to fingerprint live television across 100+ channels

October 2014 - Switched to an SDK instead of our own application

December 2015 - Build a Ad serving SDK and platform to allow brands to enagage with audiences across TV and digital platforms

March 2016 - Improved accuracy fingerprinting algorithms and scaled detection capabilities to over 650 TV channels

December 2017 - Improved matching capabilities across ~ 1million hours of content

January 2018 - Launched a media-matcher, that could detect all formats of media in real-time

February 2018 - Released ‘Brand Command Centre’ for real-time analytics on brand ads airing on Television and analysing competition

With several trillion dollars at stake across content creation and media buying, the global media and advertising industry is plagued by numerous issues, all centered around a massive lack of media consumption data to drive decision-making and cross-platform user engagement. In this context, Zapr Media Labs has built the world’s largest offline media consumption repository using Automatic Content Recognition enabled by our artificial intelligence driven proprietary frequency fingerprinting technology. While our technological influences include music discovery apps like Shazam, Soundhound etc., Zapr has tweaked the core fingerprinting algorithms to ensure a passive always-on setup that can detect media consumption across mediums comprehensively throughout the day. Zapr's technology could be limited by a lot of noise in ambient surroundings and poor internet. Despite being a modestly-funded tech startup, the budget allotted for technological innovation at Zapr Media Labs is several million dollars annually. Zapr complies with all local and global regulations.