 Thank you very much everyone. With this we move on to the next keynote address. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Mr. Asim Sood, CEO Impact Measurement. Could you please turn on Mr. Sood's mic? Hi, good afternoon everyone. Can you hear me? Excellent. Thank you so much. Thank you for taking out time to join my session. Can I request you to switch on my slides please? Alright, great. Okay, so we all heard the word artificial intelligence many times since morning. GPT, generative and transformative technologies. But today I'm here to talk about fundamentals and the importance of fundamentals. My name is Asim Sood. I lead a company called Impact Research and Measurement, which is in the field of media analytics. I'm also the chair of the Association for Measurement and Evaluation of Communication, an international organization wherein people from all over the world get together to work on education and to promote the business of communication measurement. At our firm Impact Research and Measurement we offer integrated measurement solutions to our clients. And for that we use a lot of technology. We use the terms that you've already heard in the morning. We use machine learning. We use artificial intelligence. We also have a lot of other technologies that are available in our portfolio. But I'm not here to talk about that today. In fact, if you want to talk about those, one of my colleagues is here. His name is Shekhar Govindarajan. He's sitting in the audience. He's our chief software architect. In case you want to talk about technology, he's the guy to go to. But today what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk about something very, very fundamental. And the case that I'm going to try and make is It's great to adopt new technologies, but please don't forget the Fundamentals that we have. And to do that, I'm going to take an example, Which is something called Barcelona Principles. How many of you have heard of Barcelona Principles? Not many. Great. So I'll get a chance to tell you about Barcelona Principles. So it was in 2010 that about 165 professionals from all over the world were representing public relations firms, measurement companies like ours, consulting firms. We got together and we said, if you look at chartered accountants, you look at cost and work accountants, you look at management consultants, everybody has certain principles that the industry abides by. So why is it that the communications measurement world we don't have any principles? So it was in 2010 in the city of Barcelona. Barcelona looks like this, by the way, if you take a picture from the airplane. So in the city of Barcelona, we got together and we said, okay, let's sit down. And over a period of three days, we identified certain principles and said, if you want to operate in the measurement world, you must comply with these principles as a supplier. So we are providing services or as a consumer on the corporate side. If you're doing measurement work, you must comply with these principles. So I'm going to take this example and I'll tell you our experience of having worked with so many clients in India. We've been working with clients in the measurement space for now 17 plus years. So I'll try and connect the dots and show you why it is so important. If you look at Barcelona Principles, there are seven principles. I'm not going to go through all the principles with you. You can go back and read them later. But the idea is that there are seven principles. And in the communications measurement world, we believe that if your campaign complies with these seven principles, the probability of your program succeeding is much, much higher compared to if you are not complying with these principles. And there are seven principles and these are so important for us that we drafted them in 2010. And after that, we've had two revisions to these principles. This is all the feedback that we have received from all over the world. I'm going to only talk about the first principle to make the case that I want to make to you. The first principle is about setting measurable goals and the importance of setting measurable goals. You know, especially in India, one of the criticisms that we have to Barcelona Principles is that people read the principles and say they are so basic. Like if you read this principle, it says setting measurable goals is an absolute prerequisite to communication planning measurement and evaluation. And all of you will say, it's so simple. This is exactly what it needs to be. But you will be surprised when you enter the real world and realize that this is one principle which has caused failure of maximum number of campaigns. I know it's surprising and I'm going to tell you our experience of working with clients. So if you look at measurement, communication measurement, what are we doing? We first monitor content. So as impact research in measurement, we offer measurement services. And then we offer, which is something called toolkit for measurement. So we work with a lot of clients and not every client wants to spend a lot of money. So they say, dear impact, you offer us monitoring services. And you give us those glossy technology tools and stuff so that we can do measurement on our own. These are the same tools that our experts also use to offer successful campaigns to our clients. But they say, no, no, we don't want your help on measurement side. Just do this basic monitoring for us and give us the toolkit. We'll do it ourselves. A lot of these clients came back later and said, somehow our campaigns are not successful. As successful or they're not giving us the results that we wanted. And we started going back to these clients to understand what was happening. We realized, and I'll give you an example of what happened. So we would enter the room and we will sit with the team and we will ask them, take a small piece of paper, each one of you. If they're like five members in the team, we'll give them five slips of paper. And we'll say, now write down the objective of the campaign that you're working on currently. And everyone writes it down. And then we say, now exchange the slips with each other. And tell us if all of you have the same objective written on that piece of paper. Surprisingly, yes, this number is very surprising. 65% of the time we found that people had written different objectives on that single piece of paper. And I can promise you, go back and do this exercise with your team and you'll have surprising results. So what happens is that we don't have a culture of writing down these goals the way they should be. Here are examples of what we heard back from clients when we asked them, what are you trying to achieve next year? And people said, we want to drive media coverage and that's where they left it. And imagine if you're working in a PR firm, you have a director and there are so many people in that team reporting into that director. And if this is the objective that you start with, imagine what is it that the new person who's joined the team is going to think about what we're going to achieve for the client. And there's something about bad goals and good goals. And it's not about whether the goal is bad or not, but whether it's defined in the right way or not. So we believe if you want to have a measurable objective, what you need to do is you need to have four elements in every goal. Who are you trying to target with the campaign that you have? What are you trying to change in this behavior or knowledge? By how much do you want to change it and by when do you want to achieve it? If these four elements are there in the way you're articulating the goals of your campaign, there is a higher probability that this campaign will be successful. Let's go back and look at one of the examples from the bad goals that I shared earlier. The client said create card envy among affluent consumers in the Pune market and that's all that they said. But when we told them that there are these four elements that you need to have, when you're defining goals, then they went back and came back with a new one. They said we want to increase awareness from 57% to 60% for the credit card brand among the affluent target, people who are earning more than 50 lakh rupees in Pune within the campaign timeframe of May to December 2012. I hope you're able to see for yourself how much of a difference the way you've defined the objective on the left-hand side and on the right-hand side makes. Clearly the way you define your goal makes it much, much more measurable. It may sound very simple. I've said who are you targeting? What are you trying to change in the behavior by how much and by when? It may sound very simple, but still a lot of our clients face a challenge in defining the objectives very well. As a part of amic, I get a chance to travel a lot and I meet companies from all over the world. On one of my visits, I met a lady called Deb Camden. She leads a company called Communication Dividend. What she's done is she's created a tool, this website address that you see at the top. If you go to this website address, it has a tool which will ask you very simple questions and it will help you define a measurable goal. It has steps. Every step will ask you basic questions. Who is your target audience? What is the desired behavior change? What is the realistic target that you have in mind? You answer these simple questions and the end of it will give you a measurable objective which you can start working with. I will consider my talk successful if all of you go back and try and read about Barcelona principles and also try and check if the communication program that you're running is compliant to Barcelona principles. And I can promise you that as soon as you reach that stage, the probability of that campaign succeeding is going to be far, far higher. You've seen this many, many, many of our members and clients of our members all over the world that whenever they start taking Barcelona principles seriously, they make a lot of progress. I started my talk by sharing that in India a lot of criticism that we have is people say Barcelona principles sound very basic and do we really need to follow them? And even then, you will find that most of the campaigns fail to comply with Barcelona principles. So if they are so simple, why is it so difficult to comply with these Barcelona principles? If you would like to know more about communication measurement, at AMIC, we run an education program. We have courses available and we also have a summit coming up which is in Miami later this month starting on the 15th of May. It's a physical event but also has a lot of virtual participation possible. So in case you're interested, please check it out. And here are some resources that you may want to look at if you want to learn more about measurement of communication. And if you still have any questions, I'll be around during the day. And if you want to reach out to me on Twitter, that's my Twitter handle. This is all that I want to talk about. I've left some space for questions if you have any. Thank you. Thank you so very much. I now invite Ms. Astha Mishra from Exchange for Media Group to kindly present a small token of appreciation to Mr. Soob.