Vineet Kanabar

I was early to ride the wave of change in our media landscape. As we moved from 200 mn TV households to 1 bn smartphones, what has remained constant is the power of storytelling to drive business outcomes.

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 My career spans zero to one journeys (growing TVF), one to 10 roadmaps (growing Spotify & streaming as a category), and 10 to 100 leaps (India's digital media ecosystem). This gives me a unique view of what brands must do to grow in each stage.

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At Z47, our levers are content and community, creating value for the ecosystem through our marketing resources.

The big takeaway is: to have outsized ROAS, brands must orient themselves with culture, instead of trying to manufacture it. 

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This holds true across all categories and customer segments. Brands today must think of themselves as cultural programmers, rather than creators of marketing messaging. Brand Programming is the new content strategy.

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This was how we built Spotify as a content brand in India, with our approach replicated in many other markets. When brands orient themselves with culture, ROAS goes through the roof. 

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Immersing in customers' lives and seeing them as cultural participants, not mere buyers, is the first step towards building a brand programming approach.

At Z47, we support founders in getting their early marketing strategy right through three key ways: offering expertise and consultation on marketing strategy, providing networks to find the right partners, and sharing our perspective on team-building and early marketing hires.

There is a lot of unorganized tribal cultural knowledge about Indian stories - in entertainment, business, startups, sports and more. Over 150 episodes, I spoke to actors, writers, directors, musicians, founders, CEOs, and tech folks who are building the next generation of great Indian entertainment. These conversations and lessons now inform Zero to Infinity, Z47's own content brand.

The scale differs by several orders of magnitude. For a consumer brand, the TAM is 200 mn. For a VC firm, the target audience is a few hundred thousand. 

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Both present unique marketing challenges and have strategic use cases for content and community. Both have fandoms, in their own way.

At Z47, we bring our community together to create mutual value and amplify it through content creation. We aim to engage, educate, and entertain with a purpose - developed nation building.

"Powerhouse," the story of CAA - how one company revolutionized the global entertainment business. It's particularly relevant as CAA Founder Michael Ovitz sits on the board of a16z.