About OLA
Ola Cabs (stylized as OLΛ) is an Indian ridesharing company offering services that include vehicle for hire and food delivery. The company is based in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India and was developed by ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd. As of October 2019, Ola was valued at about US$ 6.5 billion A variety of venture capitalists including Softbank have large stakes in the company.
Ola Cabs was founded on 3 December 2010 as an online cab aggregator in Mumbai, and is now based in Bengaluru. As of 2019, the company has expanded to a network of more than 1.5 million drivers across 250 cities. In November 2014, Ola diversified to incorporate auto rickshaws on a trial basis in Bengaluru. After the trial phase, Ola Auto expanded to other cities like Delhi, Pune, Chennai and Hyderabad starting in December 2014.
In January 2018, Ola extended into its first overseas market, Australia, and in New Zealand in September 2018. In March 2019, Ola began its UK operations introducing auto rickshaws in UK. More than 10,000 drivers have applied both in online and offline mode ahead of its launch in London. In February 2020, Ola launched its taxi-hailing services with over 25,000 drivers registered.
Summary
As part of their launch into European countries and in particular London – OLA had a requirement to create thousands of assets for deployment across wide reaching, multi-channel campaigns designed to win over the hearts and minds of drivers and consumers alike.
A tool to bring order to chaos
With extremely tight deadlines it was clear that they need a tool to help accelerate the creation of over 1,000 assets – spanning production, approval and distribution over a period of five days. With stakeholders in both London and India it was important to find a tool that could bring everybody onto the same playing field with full transparency, control and input into the creative process.
Communicating efficiently as the campaign scaled
IQ allowed teams to begin pre-production whilst at the same time production crews were deployed to various locations around the United Kingdom to begin production of campaign assets. Centralised information within IQ allowed all teams to see and work from the same documents in real time – ensuring everyone was aligned to the final output required.
Accelerating the creative process
In addition to handling pre-production, IQ also allowed multiple projects to be created, each pre-populated with hundreds of assets varying in type from 16:9 video to 1:1 Instagram ad-units. iQ’s streamlined workflow removed the need for spreadsheets and confusing video links – instead providing a fast, effective way for teams to see where they were in the creative process.
Approvals, Insights & AI’s role
Approving digital content has long been a complicated process. OLA wanted to remove the reliance on email, spreadsheets and thousands of Vimeo links. iQ was set-up to provide guide rails allowing everybody know where they we’re in the production process, what needed to be approved, what was approved and what was ready for download / distribution. Centralised feedback where OLA team members could annotate with precise feedback as soon as assets were uploaded to the platform enabled editing teams to quickly make changes.
Rather than just settling there, IQ took things a step further than just standard approvals – using artificial intelligence to analyse every pixel of the content for performance optimisation and brand safety checks.
This allowed OLA to check for brand safety issues such as explicit / illegal content In addition to highlighting performance enhancements and ways to make assets perform better for their pre-selected distribution channel. This also allowed for automatic meta tagging of assets for advanced search in the future where teams might need to search for quick access to old footage for re-use.
Strengthening teamwork and collaboration
Keeping teams communicating especially when they’re on the road and never in the same place is a key benefit of using cloud-based tools. With inbuilt chat functionality and preproduction documents visible to everybody – Teams could collaborate quickly and effectively together.
Creating content faster for less
Its cliché – but time is money. Production needed to be faster and more efficient. By enabling pre-production and account teams to collaborate on the same playing field -magic things began to happen. Open lines of communication meant teams could work faster with more information and more alignment to achieve their end goals and objectives.
IQ enabled vast simplification of bureaucracy in a high-speed production environment with critical deadlines. With everyone aligned around a single workspace, OLA achieved project success in a fraction of the time it would have traditionally taken.
