Aim to build entertainment pop culture marketplace at scale: V Subramaniam

'Over the next 2-3 years, the influencer marketing business alone could be around Rs 2,000-Rs 3,000 crore', said Subramaniam

How do you shape a company to leverage the most powerful elements of popular culture — people, their faces, their talent. The Collective Artists Network (or simply, Collective), which calls itself a marketplace for or collective of popular culture and talent, does just that. CEO and Co-founder Vijay Subramaniam tells Vanita Kohli-Khandekar what this means. Edited excerpts: 

How would you describe Collective and where is it placed currently?

Collective Artists Network is India’s largest creator marketplace powered by technology. The bedrock of our business is the fact that we are the largest talent management firm in India representing the cream of the country’s talent. (Collective’s roster of 300 clients includes Hrithik Roshan, Ranbir Kapoor, Deepika Padukone, Pritam and Bhuvan Bam.) We are now powering this legacy to reach out to creators all over the country using technology. There are three ways we are doing this.

One, in April last year, we launched BigBang Social, a curated creator platform. It currently has over 13,000 influencers. Advert­is­ers­/clients come to our plat­form and submit a brief on what they want. The plat­form matches creators acco­rding to the brief for client to choose, finalise and thereon negotiate. In the second phase, we will launch a digital academy for creator learning, which will be paid courses for creators across all domains for them to skill and tool themselves.

Two, there is a creator commerce play with Glance Collective, which began in July last year (a joint venture with tech firm Glance, which also owns the short video app Roposo). The JV will co-create and operate multiple brands in partnership with the Collective’s talent and creators. We have already launched a home and lifestyle brand with Ekta Kapoor called “EK” and a streetwear brand with YouTuber Beyounick.

Three, there is BigBang Music (a JV between Collect­ive artistes and Sony Music to promote new-age pop singers such as Rahi Sayed).

Our aim is to build an entertainment pop culture marketplace at scale and be the absolute destination for creators to showcase and monetise their art.

What are the big areas of focus and growth?

We have a robust motion picture pack­aging business, which is our big moat. What we do is put movie and OTT projects via the flywheel of clients from — writers, directors, actors, producers — that we represent. (Example: Break Point, a seven-part docuseries on Zee5 on the Leander Paes and Mahesh Bhupathi partnership, released in October 2021. Paes is with Collective and so is producer Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari. Collective charges a packaging fee and a share of profits, depending on the deal.) This is growing at a healthy clip. Our big focus area now is growth across tech powered by BigBang Social.

How big is the opportunity? And how big is Collective?

Over the next 2-3 years, the influencer marketing business alone could be around Rs 2,000-Rs 3,000 crore. Add the creator commerce business and we are looking at a multi-billion-dollar opportunity. Over three years we have almost doubled our revenue.

What are the challenges to scale in this business, especially in the Indian context?

What we are trying to build is a conglomerate. This has never been done in India, in our space. The first thing you need is a team. We have 250-plus employees across six cities, which is growing, and a management team with eight co-founders. A team of eight people cannot work with 300 clients and hence we need to employ an institutional approach to our business and ensure both depth and organisational capacity. The other aspect is a scalable business model, which is where BigBang Social and the other initiatives come in.

The biggest challenge is there are no benchmarks in India. So we are learning along the way and building as we grow.

Any plans to raise capital?

We will always invest in growth, and as long as we see windows of opportunities we will raise (capital) as and when needed.