 You might recall that in March this year, homegrown e-commerce giant Flipkart acquired a Bengaluru based mobile advertisement company Adequity, this for an undisclosed amount but only last week the fruits of this strategic acquisition have become apparent. Because Flipkart has announced that by February 2016, they're going to start displaying native and video ads on their mobile app, a new potentially key business with its Flipkart brand stories ad format. The company is encouraging its advertising clients now to shift their marketing efforts from the desktop to the mobile. And will this latest move by Flipkart be a real game changer in the larger e-commerce ecosystem? That's what we're asking after all, considering the Chinese e-commerce behemoth Alibaba generates more than 55% of its sales from ads, the question is will others follow suit as well? We speak to brands and mobile tech companies and find out what the future holds for e-commerce in-app advertising, could it become the next big thing we find out in this our top story. Search engine Google and social networking site Facebook dominate the online and mobile advertising space globally as well as in India. But e-commerce companies like Flipkart that have garnered large consumer traffic and data over the past couple of years are also now considering targeting shoppers across their platform, prompted by their growing seller base and higher adoption of smartphones. Valued at over $11 billion, Flipkart first started dabbling with advertising a year ago with a few banner ads. But recently it's put its weight behind the ad sales vertical in the last six months. If successful, Flipkart's move into in-app advertising can provide a much needed boost to margins and create an additional large revenue stream. So with a view to gaining the first mover advantage here, Flipkart is launching its brand ads platform which will connect advertisers with the right audience at the right time through a brand story format. M-commerce has taken over e-commerce by fairly stents and in fact Flipkart leads that game and we have close to about 300 mobile slash internet connected users and that number is growing. What this means is yet there's only 2% of current advertising spend is around mobile advertising and there's a unchartered, unexploited space or opportunity for advertisers to be connected with consumers. So we are defining that whole space and that overlaid with our construct called commerce advertising is completely a unique solution. Not only does an app provide a more accessible platform to users, for brands it could really be a game changer as it allows them to catch the very consumers they're targeting at a crucial juncture. See the person who goes into e-commerce portal is clearly going with a shopping intent. So capturing an audience when he's focused on his shopping intent is one of the most important aspect any brand would like to aspire for and dream of from an audience reach perspective. So that makes an e-commerce value proposition from an advertising perspective extremely effective and efficient. Second part is in terms of saying that you know the whole audience journey from being aware of a particular brand to being discovering a particular brand in a particular format of an e-commerce environment is extremely useful from a client's perspective. So I think these two points make the in-app advertising on an e-commerce portal extremely important and crucial. Well ad market in India is booming with studies showing that India represents 7.4% of the world's mobile app ad clicks which translates to a 164.3% increase in one year. This is also partly because in-app advertising offers a number of variations in terms of formats for brands looking to advertise here. So what format works best and can give a brand the maximum in terms of visibility and engagement. So with various conversations we are having with marketplace platforms the format which is sticking really well is native ads because look at it this way that consumers are looking for various items there and right now native seems to be the right format which can blend in a commerce platform. While the boom and end commerce and mobile app advertising is a good thing for brands there is also a flip side especially for consumers. I think the cons are that I think the advertising formats that one can actually get from a brand communication point of view are slightly lesser than what in-app advertising would be and sometimes what happens is it may irritate the users if the ad sort of interrupts what you are doing because the way search and other advertising formats on the internet were built they really interrupted the user while in-app advertising especially for free apps can be irritating at times. Adspends in India are expected to touch Rs. 49,000 crores next year and a sizeable chunk of this could go into mobile rather than online. This is a huge opportunity for apps to get a clutch of brands on board as advertisers but how are brands themselves viewing this space? So the in-app advertising piece has evolved significantly over the last year or so and Yes Bank has been a fairly early adopter in this space and so in fact if I give you an example we target NRIs all the time and the conventional digital mediums were fairly saturated and that's where we tried and sampled the in-app space and we met with some phenomenal results. So the traffic on mobile for Yes Bank increased by 600 percent, our CPCs are down to one-seventh of what it used to be and the cost per leads are down by a half. So I think all in all from a brand perspective it just works very well if more platforms with high traffic such as Flipkart and various other e-com players open up their apps for brands like us to be present. Marketplaces like Snapdeal, like Flipkart have the largest customer databases so it obviously amplifies brands reach which is a very difficult task on Google, difficult and costly task on Google and Facebook. It is very impactful because it allows you certain behavioural targeting, there's a customer profiling that these companies do so on that basis targeting becomes a lot more impactful and of course there's the fact of full transparency which basically means that re-targeting and data mining and the rich data gives you a lot of those options for the future as well. So it's basically all across the value chain we think that it's a complete win-win solution. You know ultimately brands are going to go where their customers are going and it's clear that Indian shoppers are very quickly taking on shopping through apps. Also with the deep data insight on consumers e-commerce is clearly in a sweet spot to make the most of this shift but whether this same formula that works for e-commerce websites holds true for apps as well that remains to be seen. For the moment we'll take a quick break after that we'll be talking to Manish Goyal the CEO at DenSnapdeal TV shop we'll find out what's cooking over there to join us.