Tookitaki (www.tookitaki.com) is a social audience discovery and retargeting platform that has recently launched its beta version at iAccellerator’s (( iAccelerator is an initiative of CIIE (Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship), set up at Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA) to foster innovation-driven entrepreneurship in India. )) Demo Day in Ahmedabad, India.
With incubation funding recently secured from Bangalore tech start-up incubator Srijan Capital as well as other angel investors (( Reported Tookitaki angel investors are Aakrit Vaish, director of Flurry Inc.; Miten Sampat, VP Product Strategy at Neustar; Anuj Pulstya, member of the Indian Angel Network; Maneesh Bhandari, investor director at Framebench; Anand Ladsariya, owner of Everest Flavours, and Nitin Agarwal, owner of NM Fashions. )), Tookitaki is looking forward to demonstrate just what its platform can do for advertisers conscious of media budgets waste.
Tookitaki At A Glance
In their own words, “It all began from a simple idea to go social and capitalize on the problem – too much data, not enough time to squeeze the best. Tookitaki built on this idea to help enterprises explore and engage with relevant people across the social web.”
“We help marketers discover their audiences via analyzing social graph data. Simply put, a marketer can define criteria to describe an audience and our machine learning algorithm based on contextual search can “locate” a potential audience. We then provide RTB-based platform to reach out to the discovered audience.“, says Abhishek Chatterjee, Founder & CEO, Tookitaki.
Tookitaki scans social media platforms – Facebook and LinkedIn at the moment, with Twitter to be added soon – to identify products and brands that people talk about. Tookitaki’s audience discovery engine will then help advertisers identify and connect with the very people who are interested in their products.
By targeting the right audience with the right ads at the right time, followed by retargeting campaigns across both Facebook and the general web, Tookitaki promises to address three shortcomings of most online advertising campaigns:
– low engagement: at an average 6.2% (( Source: comScore)) engagement rate, plenty of brands fail to make the most out of their targeted audience
– low CTR: 0.1% ((Source: Wordstream)) appears to be an average click-through rate across banner ads in the United States, while we’ve all experienced CTRs even significantly lower than this in recent years;
– high bounce rate: at a whopping 40% ((Source: Wordstream)) average bounce rate, many ad budgets are wasted towards the final stages of their attempt to engage the desired audience.
The tools employed by Tookitaki in the quest of bridging the general web and the social media while creating targetable audiences include:
– Facebook Custom Audiences, helping brands to serve ads exclusively to their targeted audience;
– Intelligent Programmatic Advertising, assisting media buyers in fine-tuning their targeting.
Tookitaki will be facing tough competitions from more established and well-known players such as AddThis, RadiumOne, Lotame, Hearsay Social, as well as from smaller, newer companies like Perfect Audience or Velocity. Its founders remain confident that Tookitaki will be able to find its place on the market and prove value to its advertisers.
The Tookitaki Team
Tookitaki is the brainchild of Abhishek Chatterjee and Jeeta Bandopadhay.
Abhishek has a passion for real-time problem solving and loves to do different. After completing his BE in Computer Engineering from University of Pune, he pursued a MS in Computational Biology (Applied Mathematics) from University of Southern California. He brings in a wealth of experience to Tookitaki, having worked with DoubleClick (Google) and JP Morgan New York as an algorithmic engineer for 5 years.
He is the founder and CEO of Tookitaki, keeping an eye on overall strategy. Additionally, he works very closely with the product team to make sure brands and companies are well-connected to their preferred events and relevant people.
You can reach him at abhishek@tookitaki.com
Jeeta is the life and breath of Tookitaki. She completed her MA in English, then moved on to pursue a degree in Integrated Marketing and Communications from St. Xavier’s College in Kolkata. She is very lively and has the unique talent of talking in a convincing tone on subjects she has no clue (hey, these are her own words!). She gels quick and easy with anybody and enjoys networking. Her previous employer is the media conglomerate The Times Group, where she worked on some of their business journals.
She is the chief marketing officer at Tookitaki and she is currently busy building rapports with clients. In the free time, she keeps thinking of innovative marketing strategies and talks about Tookitaki to anyone she meets.
You can reach her at jeeta@tookitaki.com.
Other members of the vivacious and fun Tookitaki team include lead designer Sudipta Mallick, along with algorithmic engineers Nishant Kumar (previously with Microsoft) and Niraj Kumar (ISM Dhanbad).
You can try out the Tookitaki platform at http://beta.tookitaki.com/ or take a demo tour at http://tookitaki.com/demo/index.html.
