 that I would like to call upon our keynote speaker for the evening who will be talking to us about delivering the quantum leap for digital advertising. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Mr. Amar Abraul, managing director and chief executive officer AirAsia India Limited. Very good afternoon to all of you. A very big thank you to the organizers for inviting me. A little bit of a background for myself and then setting the context for why I am here. I am a chartered accountant by profession. I have largely worked in sales and business development and potentially do not understand the A of advertising. Forget about digital advertising and that is why I have my colleague, my marketing head here with me, to talk a little bit more about that. Having said that, the opening of the slide is here. That is not me. We at AirAsia believe ourselves to be a digital company, an airline second and a digital company first. Just again, last year when I joined AirAsia, that was about I think April 2016, we started our digital journey here. Anupama joined us as well and we certainly decided that the way to go in the future is a digital future. We came up with one or two campaigns which were reasonably successful. We will start with that and then I will set the context of what digital means to me and hopefully what we are doing at AirAsia will mean to you as an agency and as marketeers. Acha, if you go to Delhi, you must have the Matka Peer Biriyani. You probably will. I double. Dumb is Andhra Biriyani, ugly. But the important thing is that wherever you go, you must always try these baggage, seats, everything, full Anyways, for all destinations, there's one destination to go to, AirAsia.com For all destinations, there's one destination to go to, AirAsia.com So these two campaigns went off very well. They were released only on YouTube and Facebook and that was our start last year into getting into digital from AirAsia. Anybody having? Okay, so from just to give you a little bit of a context as to what AirAsia is, since we don't have too much of a presence in Mumbai, I'll just give you a little bit of a context of who we are across the group and then certainly in India. The airline was started about 15, 17 years ago. Tony Fernandez bought it for, one bring it from the government. And in 15 years time, we are now one of the largest airlines, low cost airlines in Asia, certainly if not the world. 217 planes, a bus, a three twenties, we fly 233 destinations. We are nine airlines, nine joint ventures across this thing, which makes us again one of the largest joint venture airline in Asia, if not the world. AOCs is basically airline operating centers. We operate in certainly India, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, now in China, in Japan, and opening soon Vietnam and so on and so forth, right? As I said, 123 destinations, 24 countries, and we've got 16,000 people working for us, who we refer to as all stars across all of these countries. And nine times winner of the Stryfax world's best low cost airline. This is our sort of a very high level snapshot of what our digital journey as a group is. To be honest, AirAsia invented internet shopping. We don't take enough credit for it. 17 years ago, we were the first one who disrupted the travel industry by going direct to consumer through the web. When the big clunky computers were there, IBM, green screens were there. We basically went direct to the consumer to teach them how to buy airline tickets, how to purchase meals, and so on and so forth online. As the airline grew, we launched Big Duty Free, which is our loyalty program and it's digital only, only available on mobile. We have recently launched Big Pay, which is our currency, our digital currency, big loyalty. All the planes are getting wired. Every plane, 215 planes are gradually getting wired to provide free Wi-Fi to consumers on the plane. We launched our first ever hackathon across Asia in Malaysia in a headquarters Red Cube. We've launched our first in-flight entertainment channel. We believe that we are going to be the Amazon in the sky. We transport about 45-50 million consumers on an annual basis on our network, 45-50 million consumers captive in the plane. We are going to launch the largest ever shopping catalog in the sky. We have our own innovation lab and if you think about it, the plane is the biggest internet of things and the plane is the biggest digital instrument out there. Everything is wired from an engineering perspective, from flight ops perspective, from crew perspective and so on and so forth. In India and across the nation, across Asia, we've launched self-service kiosk and I'll talk a little bit about that why is that important from a digital perspective. We've launched roving agents in a number of airports and last but not the least, about a week ago, we announced a deeper integration partnership with Uber, where Uber can be ordered through our app from anywhere in the cities and the 124 odd cities that we operate. We firmly believe that going forward, Air Asia certainly is going to be a completely digital airline. What's my agenda and what does digital mean to me as I run the company here in India? I look at it from three perspectives. One is certainly from a consumer perspective. Second is from an employees or an all-star perspective and third is from the digital marketing perspective. As I mentioned, Anupama will come on stage and talk about that and why do I choose consumers and employees because that will give you an insight and that will tell you on how we are transforming two things. One will give you an insight on what's happening in a company such as ours and what's happening with the consumer. It's a perfect sort of a test case of 1,500, 1,600 employees across the nation and also how are the consumers reacting and what kind of consumers do we have and how do you mold yourself if you were to work with us? In India, this year we are transporting 4 million guests, 2018 that will go up to 8 million guests and pretty much every year thereafter we are adding 3 to 4 million guests every year. 26 percent of our guests are first-time flyers ever. So we are absolutely living up to a motto of now everyone can fly. Our network is largely tier two and tier three cities and 26 percent, one fourth of every plane is filled with people who have never flown before. A chance to absolutely influence behavior on how do they purchase, how do they check in and how do they go through the entire journey from a digital experience perspective. 49 percent of the flyers experience AirAsia for the first time ever, every time they fly. 50 percent of them have never flown with AirAsia and they get to experience our product for the first time. Again a huge opportunity on telling them about the brand and what we stand for and what we offer. 50 percent of our guests are between the ages of 16 to 35. I was having a meeting with early on with one of the reporters from a publication. I said again you know literally catch them young and watch them grow. So whatever we teach them, whatever we tell them right now is how they are going to interact with our product going forward. And our app is doing fantastic, a four and a half star rating for VAP certainly on the Apple Play Store. And again to promote mobile, all of our fares, whether it's fares, whether it's cancellation charges, fees, etc, etc, everything is 10 percent lower. As I said, we are basically wiring our planes. We are launching Big Pay which is eliminating cash from the planes. We tied up with Uber and that on the corner there is the self-checking kiosks which we have launched in Bangalore Airport and in Delhi Airport. From a customer perspective right, so we've invested again very heavily in technology. In the last one year we've completely integrated and bought every bit of the customer interaction into Salesforce. So earlier if a consumer was calling for a refund or for a change of meal, change of destination, there were different teams and there were different people across the globe interacting with them. Now with Salesforce everything is in one place. The entire consumer experience is in one place. As we go through this journey, we will learn the consumer, learn the habits of the consumer a lot more and we'll be able to offer customer personalization as this journey of digitalization begins. We get about 25 million telephone calls which are now recorded in one place. 25 million telephone calls across a network across all of the countries that are now all getting recorded in Salesforce. We get about 7 million emails which are of customer complaints, of customer compliment, of service requests and so on and so forth. Again teaching us a lot as it's getting captured into one place and as we move into artificial intelligence to understand what personalization do we need to offer to the consumer. I'll move swiftly on to employees. As we said, we refer to our employees and our team as all stars right. In India right now we have 1600 people going up to 2,600 people by next year and increasing to about 5,000 all stars by 2020. So very, very rapid expansion and 81% of the team that works for us is in the age group of 18 to 34%. And probably the most interesting statistics is only 26% of our staff has actually computers. Everybody is doing their work or 75% of my workforce is working on mobile. We don't even issue laptops anymore and we are phasing out email. We're completely phasing out email and the two tools that we work on are provided by Facebook that is workplace and work chat. The entire interaction is through photos, is through tweets, is through work chat groups and so on and so forth. So we are digitizing as the demand to be honest is of the generation. Nobody is carrying laptops nowadays, at least vast majority of the youth population. Nobody is interested in writing lengthy emails and we are moving with the times in the company. We're partnering with Facebook and we provided the work chat and workplace for this thing. All our expenses, again the teams are perpetually traveling, they're perpetually in the plane. All our expenses which is really huge thing is managed on Concord. We are investing very heavily in e-games. Again there's a huge, huge investment going on in e-games because that's the future as well. Especially with the generation that's working with us. Our entire interaction from hiring to managing the work day, payroll processing, all of that boring stuff is also moving on to work day. Complete digitization, everything will be available on mobile. Your leave, how much leave do you have, how much bonus are you earning, how much sales incentive are you going to earn and so on and so forth. Everything is going to be available on mobile, no more emails, no more clunky computers. That's where we are moving as a company. And here is another reason why we are changing and why we are becoming digital in every way. I don't think a lot of people who don't work for an airline realize just in the cockpit itself we carry on every flight anywhere between 25 to 30 kgs of paper. If you enter a cockpit it is absolutely soon with paper when the plane is flying. 25 to 30 kgs, the amount of fuel that is consumed just to carry paper to fly a plane is unbelievable. So there is no choice as we are low cost. We are moving to e-bag. Everything is moving on to an Apple platform and basically all of the electronic bags, the huge bags that the captain carried will disappear. Our cabin crew, on a daily basis there is about 300 cabin crew that works for us right now. 850 pieces of paper are filled by them on a daily basis. This is the sales that is done, the security report that is filled and everything in that nature. Everything right now is on paper and that's all going to be moved as we convert to Rocky as we move to Wi-Fi and as we introduce Epos. To get to 4000, to get to, we're going to get to about 21 planes and then to about 40 planes by next year, we need to hire about 2,000 people. Hiring 2,000 people means at least a minimum of 10,000 interviews to be conducted for cabin crew. We are very picky on who we choose who flies with us. So 10,000 interviews to be conducted, paper forms to be filled out, assessments to be filled out, all of that is going. So every part of the company, not only digital advertising, every part of the company is being digitized as we move forward. We're investing very, very heavily in technology and every bit on how interaction is going to happen with the consumer, how interaction is going to happen with the cockpit, how interaction is going to happen with the cabin crew is all transforming into digital. So that's a little bit of a snapshot, a few snippets of where A-Rasia is moving and I like to call Anupama now on stage probably for the more interesting stuff which you're here for and then certainly we'll be able to take questions as appropriate. Thank you. Thank you. So just quickly taking over from there. So I think what we'll discuss today is the agenda is more about where the digital advertising is moving and where the digital advertising spends. But I think what Amar brought alive is what goes behind that company. It's not only about marketing and advertising spends, but the entire ecosystem has to transform. Now just quickly, if you see, this has been the marketing story of A-Rasia in 2017. I joined here in 2016. It's almost one and a half years and we truly believe that we have as a company taken in the aviation space a quantum leap when it comes to digital. Our spends has grown from 17 crore to 21.8 which is and this growth is larger than the category. Digital as a part of overall spends in 2017 stands at 30% which is also more than what the category is. Overall user growth on our website and app has been phenomenal. Now it's grown in 17 it grew by 140% and we are targeting the youth. So 18 to 34 age group, it jumped phenomenal like from 4 million to 9.2 million which is more than double. Our users and social have doubled and the Facebook page of A-Rasia is one of the most engaged mediums platforms in India and as Amar showed those two TVCs I think that we did on digital so this has been one of our biggest campaigns in 2017 and the lead medium was digital. We only supported with few outdoors and stuff through offline but we completely ran the campaigns on YouTube, Facebook, Hotstar and supplemented by display and in fact in this entire journey our app base for specifically for A-Rasia India stands at 1.4 million which is in fact larger than few of our biggest competitors because they have more capacity share than what we have and this entire thing has led us a led A-Rasia India to grow to 4.3% market share when it comes to aviation market currently in India. Just quickly I think Anurag already talked about in that one slide itself how digital is transforming our world but I think in terms of what digital India is doing we are second in the world with 34% internet penetration when it comes to mobile 80% of the traffic has just gone very swiftly to mobile. We are spending almost so many hours a week on mobile. We have already beaten US in terms of app downloads and by 2021 we'll consume 32,000 video minutes every second which is phenomenal. And who are these users? So these are two types of users I think for every market here this is the point to it kind of make a note. So one is the evolved user which is majorly from a metro who is more educated speaks or converses mostly in English and has 3G and 4G connection and easy for a marketer to target but I think the focus is also to how to from a communication and media channel perspective how to target the new users which is more of a India too. This is from study run from YouTube we have picked up okay and this audience is very different from the India one users because India one were both desktop and mobile exposed but if you look at the India two they are they have experience internet through mobile itself okay and maybe they are still with living with 2G sort of services and their mix of urban and rural and as the as you see the digital spends is growing more than what the overall spend is growing and it is already formed 15% of the overall pie in India it stands close to 12%. Yeah and I think one very interesting point to note is what's what's new in digital marketing actually changes every day okay. So if we quickly look at globally digital spending has crossed TV for the first time in 2017. Nearly two thirds of display ads have moved to programmatic though there's a lot of discussion around programmatic how to do whether it's write the stuff and from a marketer or point of view. Big data is changing the entire thing in terms of customer experience and personalization. In fact in air ratio also we have started like our home page we have started a lot of personalization exercise in which people will see the relevant stuff that they have searched last okay and then in terms of app this is very interesting that we download eight for close to eight apps per month but the interesting point for a marketer is that 25% of them are never used and 26% are abandoned after the first use. So from an app strategy perspective we need to really target the right user who will kind of be hooked on to my app and there'll be a you know longer stickiness rather than just having it you know deleted from the mobile. I'll skip this one okay quickly so after this in my as a marketer I believe there are two things one is okay increasing the spends and digital is eventually happening and we'll see that as Anurag also spoke by 2021 we will see the spy increasing maybe 30-35% we don't know what exactly it will land up to but two things will really help so one is the moment marketing and later on I'll speak about keep it real okay. So moment marketing can be two things like a person for a personal perspective when when in the day that person is the most engaged so I think the best example for it could be a job email coming early in the morning so if that person is looking for a job that's the right time to target him or her and another is more timing perspective so if there is something happening in the ecosystem how how is a brand I can increase my chance to engage in that conversation be a part of this conversation and create more content around it okay. So this is where I think the recent burger emoji debate which happened where Google had another emoji where they placed the cheese down and Apple put the cheese up and there were a lot of conversation and then we had the biggest influencer Sundar itself talking about this that will get it corrected I think the beauty the content got amplified when actually KFC and McDonald's came into the conversation where they put up their video and taking it there as a brand taking a take on this so McDonald's came that you guys keep on debating but we make the best burgers whether it's the cheese is up and down doesn't matter and KFC took completely different angle that we don't have once we have complete chicken burger so why don't you come to I think this this is one example where it created a lot of conversations just a simple tweet from some person made so much engagement on the social platform and Amul as we all know it's one of the veteran moment marketing they do in print and now they have carried all their stuff in they have launched their app which carries all these ads which we are seeing since our childhood and in our small way in Aresha we did this in Valentine's campaign where we told that love is where we try to say that love is in the air so no matter if we are like our competition competitors are big than us so indigo is the biggest competition then spice chat and then jet airways but when we are flying in the air we are friends okay so friendly rivalries they've done in good taste can be a great thing I think I had a video but it's somehow it's not playing so I'll skip this so we ended saying that love is always in the air and the fun is in the flying and with zero spend we could reach those numbers that you see in that red box and we could have all our competition engaging with this campaign in a very positive manner and the second thing which I really believe is you can buy likes but not love so in mark as a market here we need to keep it real because the moment marketing reached the web the audience has become omnipotent keeping it real never has been more important than what it is today because as a marketer we need to tell a story but it has to be a rightful story because with the advent of digital what has happened the power of consumer replying back reaching out to brand has happened which was not there when it was just an offline way of advertising so brands have to be more real they need to sound that they're actually they need they no need to sound they have to actually solve the consumer problem and keep the story very real and not like I'm doing so and so at a very you need to spend very less but what you'll get is very good but the product has to actually deliver that okay so we believe that two of these brands there are many others okay but they have done a really good job of keeping it real so one was the entire story campaign that Bajaj did with INS Vikrant and then in fact the brand solute took it further forward by saluting various invincible Indians through this campaign and we all know what Tata T did with Jaggery okay so they took this functional benefit and created a movement out of it which is still phenomenal still you kind of we look forward for what is happening in this space and has been done by Tata and in our small way again at Aresha I think when it started 16 years back we said that as a tagline we want to say now everyone can fly this is what the vision of Tony Fernandez who has group CEO is it was a tagline but it needed to be reinforced within the system until a brand was born and we believe that today in India it is the right time to say that now everyone can fly because the kind of route choice fares that enable and the kind of we we are more like a low-cost pay for what you use and not kind of no bundle it everything okay so we are yet to fly to Mumbai but I think we are slowly making our headway to the entire country yesterday only we launched Chennai and Bangalore Chennai and Chennai Bhubaneshwar and our focus is more and more connecting Metro to the tier one tier the tier two and tier three sort of places and as Amar spoke about it and the entire data of that 26 percent of our audience is people who have not flown I think this is really big achievement as a brand or as a organization that we have kind of created in India I have worked in telecom and e-learning and education and the aggregator cab space but I never knew that aviation could be so exciting and we the entire 365 days of last year has been just thoroughly going as in it's it's like every moment is just very happening moment in this company so with this I think I'll end what Amar and we wanted to share this is one of the just the Kabali campaigns that we did that really created a good recall in it was more it was more southern centric but I think the PR noise that it was it created was across India thank you thank you so much for talking to us about the Aresha digital story Amar I'd like I'd request you kindly join me once again we'd like to present you with a memento a token of our gratitude I'd like to show yes I think we can do we have a couple of minutes okay we do happy to answer any questions that you may have if any no brilliant it's not very easy oh yes all right I'd like to invite on stage Mr. Ashish Pasi sir if you could please join us chairman and CEO densu ages network to kindly present a token of our gratitude to Amar and we do have a question though so we probably take that up right now sale of air India on the digital conference we are from news channels so you know we'll ask such why don't we talk about that offline I don't think anybody else will be interested in sale of air India from a digital perspective no but they said ask question they did not say ask question on digital so so what's the question yeah the sale of air Asia so do you think that any of the player current existing player in India and like a ratio indigo spies they're all doing very well do you think any of them would be looking at the piece of fire I think I can only speak for myself I can't speak for the other are the airlines to be honest right but they've already made public statements with regards to the intent and they've said what they have to say from our perspective again without boring the vast majority of the people here we are very focused on building our brand we have 15 planes right now going on to 21 planes and we will we will never say no to an opportunity but at this point of time very very focused on growing business in India pretty much on the formula that kind of strategy that we have which does not include a purchase of a state owned airline and one question for the crowd sex so when this the digital boarding pass would be available in India I think it's coming soon so Bangalore airport is very progressive we are working with Bangalore airport right now for a complete digital journey through facial recognition it is the the beta test is about going to start about in about a month's time and the ministry of civil aviation aviation has also stepped in to make sure that there's a uniform standard so whenever any airport rolls it out we will follow the same standard right so it is I think digitalization is big on everybody's mind certainly on the airport's airport's mind there is no space for more counters there is no space the sector is growing it's up 20-25 percent year on year right therefore digitalization is the way to go whether it's kiosk self-check and mobile what I view it is it is happening and it's going to happen even at a faster click that's enough do we have any other questions okay yes yes mr vassim you can do the honors now ladies and gentlemen let's have a round of applause for mr brawl and Anupama thank you very much once again