Back from a hectic day at her son’s annual day at school, Anishka was just back home surfing casually through her favorite national television channels and wait a minute she could not believe what she had just seen. Jumping back to the channel, she was dumb-founded to see the proceedings of the annual day celebrations at her son’s school being shown on her favorite national television channel. Wow! Her son’s school had become so famous, she thought happily. She was quick to alert all her friends and of course her parents who lived in a far away town in UP. While her friends in town thanked her profusely as they got the glimpses of the mega-show that their tiny tots had just put up, her parents were equally confused. What they were watching was anything but a school. Was their daughter day-dreaming somehow as they kept calling her to check if the channel they had tuned was indeed the same?

What Anishka didn’t know was that a Bangalore based company Surewaves was enabling national TV channels to air localized content at select towns at chosen day-parts to deliver local content to their viewers which they cared the most about. Needless to say Anishka and her friends were quick to patronize the channel and the viewership ratings of the channel zoomed enabling it to garner better revenues from local, regional and national advertisers. Founded by four technocrats, who have a deep thrust in technology and the media world, the company is successfully solving the impending need of the media convergence that would allow advertisers to target specific consumers in different corners of the world.

More than three years down the line, after establishing Surewaves in 2006, the Founder Rajendra Khare, ex Managing Director of Broadcom India and the Founder Chairman of Indian Semiconductor Association (ISA) today can count prominent companies among its clients. “We facilitate an advertiser or brand owner to better target consumers, ensuring that advertising using this visual medium is not only more effective in attracting the attention of the right people at the right time, but is also more cost-effective. This is possible through our SureWaves Media Grid platform that connects smartly with specific SureWaves Edge Devices, through which media owners can regionalize their content and at the same time advertisers can target the specific set of viewers through multiple forms of medium such as television, digital out of home screens or mobile phones,” says Khare.

The trick lies in the ease with which SureWaves Media Grid platform helps media enterprises to manage and control the distribution of regionalized content and for advertisers to not only pick and choose the right mix of media properties to reach out their messages to target audiences but also plan and monitor the actual ad impressions played out. The ease with which an enterprise can create a customized communication channel of its own through digital screens has helped Surewaves to get the confidence of GroupM and Big Cinema, companies who are quite selective of their partners. As in the case of GroupM where their HR team has successfully leveraged the SureWaves solution to create an Intra-TV platform that runs across more than 10 offices in different cities and showcases employee targeted minisodes and programmes, internal case studies, newsletters from employees along with employee engagement content like Slam Book, Birthday updates. This symbolizes active engagement for its employees and these displays enable collective learning, knowledge sharing and growth for employees – an effort that has helped GroupM team to win the prestigious International HR Congress Award for innovative use of media.

It is the unique mishmash of their technology knack, with in-depth media knowledge from associations with top notch media groups like GroupM and Times Group allowed the four founders, Khare, Ravi Bhatt, Anant Kansal and Tapan Datta to bring the best in breed software solutions with the media tactics well placed. The 35 people employee base of Surewaves may seem to be a minute number; however, the company has ensured the unique blend of technology and media at every level to construct a strong base. Today, the company is in the building mode and are mulling on investments from different sources. With the right customers in place and the USP of their products further strengthened, Khare is hopeful of moving beyond Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi, to take its technology solutions to rural hinterlands in India for delivery of education, health and entertainment and scale up globally in time to come.