 I would like to call on stage the session chair, Rameeth Arora, COO and head of digital brands HD digital stream on stage. Would also like to request a panelist to please join us on stage, Anika Agarwal, senior vice president and head marketing, digital and direct sales Max Popa health insurance, Mox Chopra chief marketing officer KFC India, Ratika Bhargava sales and marketing head, Kama Ariveda, Pradeep Gayarola, business head, digital media, the Hindu group. To please join us on stage. And before we proceed and the applause my friend that just keeps on going is alright over to you Mr. Arora. How's this mic work? We're missing one person. That's Ratika. Okay so on behalf of the panel first thank you for having us here. I know this is the first panel of the day so there's the honouredest responsibility of keeping everybody engaged. Quickly jumping to the topic content and content marketing we met a little while ago and a large part of our conversation started with content is what we do every day. Consumers each one of us is consuming copious amounts of content about our lives, our friends' lives, the world and brands and you flip it over to where the brands gazing at the customer that's us and you know a large part of the brand's life is now spent in creating, managing and disseminating content that's either been created by them or created for them. And in the age of the internet the possibilities and the ways in which content can be created are just so many that there's very few excuses to either not inform or educate or entertain or engage. In that light, we'll start very quickly and I'm going to start with you Anika, is content marketing actually a thing anymore because isn't marketing content so you know we've always thought of content marketing as a discipline in marketing but that's really now passive. Sure so I think today you have a Google search bar because you have so much content to browse and when we look at content I think content is a commitment it's not really a campaign and it's a core part of any brand strategy today. We've been creating content for a lot of time but I think what's happened and what's changed in today's world is that you know content now has a history so you know if you're there out there on the net it's there forever so I think there's a little more responsibility towards the content you create. The question of discoverability of saying you know you used to create a lot of content as a brand but then you had to spend an equal amount or more money in disseminating that content but today you have options of discoverability so content becomes core. So I think what's important is that content is actually the core of brand strategy it's not a specific vertical or function so I think it's actually the largest responsibility of the CMO today because when you talk about the brand purpose and the brand voice that's actually you know signed off from you know whatever content is out there on you so that's what I think you know that's the role of content in that sense. Pradeep we've content marketing is not new all our lives we've done content marketing even when we were doing direct mail us 20 years ago and posting them to people with stamps on the envelope there's content marketing so what's changed? So see I can provide a brand solution provider's perspective right so see in 1995 was when first time I actually delved into content marketing and this was the time when National Leadership Survey which was the predecessor of Indian Leadership Survey was released and one of the newspaper brands did really well but that was not reflected in the way they attracted advertising from clients and agencies so we provided a solution or content marketing a large format full page advertising or not sorry content which basically analyzed the National Leadership Survey finding for the brand how it works and so on and so forth. A few weeks later a client called us very happy because the ROI was very high and ROI was what some people called him some his sales force was happy some agency guy said good thing and life was simple. Fast forward 2018 supplement a nutritional brand or a supplement brand wants to aim children and there's a lot of things these days about natural products right so and there's a lot of natural superfoods and all that and they want to associate and that's what there they asked us a solution. We provide a three-month you know we say that okay three-month activity 15 odd articles there is a video there is a there are various social media now this content is suddenly you see the dimension has changed it is no longer a young uni live uni dimension newspaper content kind of a format so there is a so many formats suddenly jump into it but it doesn't after that but the client is also very smart because he says that okay we tell him that see first month let's not even talk about your brand and he's perfectly fine so in first month we released a lot of article where we talk about that what is how these various foods available in the nature are so useful so on and so for one month down the line the brand is introduced right but before even all this activity started that the ROI is established in terms of that you will deliver us two million users who will minimum spend two minutes on the seeing the content 80% of them are women okay so if you see these these dimensions they are dramatically changed and the another part is storytelling so like in the in the in the 1995 world there was a you know you just communicate and now you are you are interacting even when experts write the blogs they have to answer to the people there are various stories mothers are sharing a story so there's a lot of story element which builds into it so the content market in my opinion has evolved a lot from a one uni dimensional lot of faith with saying that okay we all believe this will work let's release one full page add in a business paper and so on and so forth to now actual deliverable that measurable delivers deliverables and if you don't deliver there is a penalty or a reward so this is I think of a lot of thing has changed in the last two decades this is what my perspective I'm just going to stick with measurement for one minute and I'm going to ask a couple of you about measurement because because that's that's a large part of content right we tend to think of content as as soft as creativity but there's two other pieces to it one is the science and the other is the measurement I'm going to start with measurement and then then we'll talk about a little more about the science and where creative and science sort of meet and you come from a category which is hard-nosed numbers like I know what those numbers look like at the end of every day and yet the brand relies more and more and more on content how do you marry measurement with the creativity of content marketing and is it even measurable of course why not because if you look at the category yes we are you know financial services as a category is very measurement and number driven but if you look at the way any brand would be built today there'll be two aspects so there's of course the storytelling aspect of it which is we've been but when you look at the science and and you look at the measurement when you define your personas and that's traditional marketing science it's nothing new right when you define your personas and you say that this is the guy I wish to speak and then you create engaging content yes we measure it and we measure it you know across the customer journey so there's a large part around attracting new customers and when you attract new customers to a category like insurance where there's so much mistrust there's a large part around measurement but there's also a large part around storytelling and when we talk about the content ecosystem we do a lot of the question is good content scaled up content how much content can you today create because you talk about personalization when we generate our leads you know you say I'm going to talk to them need differently I'm going to talk to most differently and you know maybe my content resonates because I've created the right persona but that's also expensive right so I think there is measurability because right from the journey when you say that you know I'm going to attract how do you really create content that is you know from an ROI perspective it stacks up so we've used a lot of things we've used a lot of ecosystem and partnerships and collaboration see unlike you know some of you we're not really content hubs as brands we do it as a brand so you know you collaborate with the right set of people of course you know having your right checks and balances and authenticity in mind but I think collaboration and creating an ecosystem for getting the right content for your consumers is a big driver for us when we say that we want ROI driven or acquisition led content when we look at our customers we sell a promise in insurance so when you sell a promise to customers in insurance there's a customer who's paying you for ten years and probably not getting anything back so for us across the customer journey how do you really engage with this guy for ten years and how do you ensure that you create value and a conversation and an affinity to the brand is actually the real ROI for us as well so yeah while it may seem all numbers driven in ROI and you know arch a content dollar so you know what's the cost per lead and how many leads did I get today but there's also the long tail of it which is why we invest a lot in technology as well when we talk about content and content strategy of saying you know how do you measure how do you ensure that your content is omnichannel and you're you know putting it at the right places how do you ensure you deliver content to the right mediums so you know if I'm talking to my customer through various channels what's the right one for you and what's the right one for him so we deploy all those tools when we talk about our content strategy and pieces so that we get some ROI out of it so ROI is just not cost per lead in that sense for the category okay so I have two questions coming out of there omnichannel is what I'm going to pick on but but good points on tracking customer journeys and the use of technology I think up there is the offline world there is the online world there is so much on the online world there are different audiences doing different things and in different mindsets through the day and all of them may be customers how much content can somebody create and how do you manage the the complexity of omnichannel in a world where you know Anika said the word personalization twice but everybody is expecting to get what they want the content that they want when they want it so first of all good evening everyone I hope all of you are marketers otherwise this would be a very boring session for you but so I work with a company called Kamai Urveda and in a unique position I look after sales and marketing so in fact when we were discussing before this session we said let's put in a little bit about omnichannel over here and to the question asked content is not omnichannel customer is it's the customer that is going across the channels and participating in your brand and not your content we are just tailor making the content to the channel where the customer is participating and for a company like ours which is a luxury brand we have adopted certain channels and bucketed them as per our targets or KPIs so there are two or three buckets that drive our sales and there are two or three buckets that drive our brand and our engagement so for example Facebook is used for engagement conversions Instagram is used for content storytelling brand messaging then in store is used for direct customer interaction engagement and again product sales and that's really how we have adopted the omnichannel into content and content into omnichannel strategy it's not easy and I'll give you a small example of we have products that are ayurvedic authentic and some of them appeal to people as young as like 16 17 year olds who have acne on the skin some of the products appeal to somebody who wants to maintain their skin you know maybe 35 40 years old and teaching now imagine you have that one Instagram and on top of that you have a sales target for the month on top of that you have a holy festival on top of that you have elections then you have summer weather then you have the need of the brand to start telling the story about a new product that they're going to launch and that's when a marketer suddenly figures out that I'm omnichannel I have lots of content to put out I have lots of customer audiences to talk to what do I choose in a nutshell decide which content bucket is giving you what return for which customer segment and go with that so if your stores are going to give you the sales which they are online or offline stores Taylor make the content for that if your Instagram is about story telling and about building the brand experience go with that to your last question then you don't expect an ROI on that right then you just expect customer engagement and maybe at some point in time you might have a conversion but that doesn't become the key so I guess in today's world I'll just sum it up omnichannel is something we all talk about but we all are on we ourselves are customers we are on the channel ourselves so just Taylor make your content to your customer audience and where they are participating I'm going to take a track back from what you said everything's not about return on investment in terms of cash mox is there a is there is there a bunch of metrics that you evolved that measures engagement cash ROI depending on where you are or who you're talking to have you been able to evolve metric for content marketing I would actually echo Ratika on that I think see I think that three streams of content that we create as a brand I would say a the first stream of content is the brand as a publisher that's one whole stream of content that comes out the second stream would be the experts as publishers of content so experts would be bloggers critics reviewers and they are themselves creating content for the brand the third stream I would say would be consumers as publishers and content creators so for from our perspective there are three brackets of content that come out from a brand perspective and I feel from a learning curve each of them work for different kind of objectives and each of them have a different measurement metric let me start with say a brand as a publisher right so the most expected thing from us is to share information about the new products we've launched and you offers that have come out and we advertise it I wouldn't call that as content that doesn't count as brand as publisher I think basically to me content is where consumers are actively seeking you out engaging with you more actively and that really qualifies as content marketing so if I leave advertising out what kind of content does a brand like us come up with so I'll give you an example sometime ago we launched a product called you know it's a it's a mailbox that we launched the pre-launch component of the mailbox was basically an omni channel multiplayer game that we created and it was kind of launched five days before the launch the game itself and we got like lacks of consumers to come on and try and crack the code to unlock this thing called the mystery box so when we had these five days of engagement with consumers I would consider that to be an example of content marketing where people came on the on the website they interacted with the game tried to crack a code win something and interestingly when they won they got a VIP access to come to the restaurant and access that box one day before its launch and our measure for that kind of content was how many people actually turned up and we found that almost you know I mean I can't exactly share that number but about four percent of our sales revenue got met on that one single day before the launch because what we were doing is rather than having a pre-launch teaser campaign or having a coming soon campaign or just an advertisement we created this game where people had to unlock the mystery box and that gave us revenue that could actually measure even before the product got launched so in this example we actually could define sales itself to measure how this content marketing has has worked but there would be other streams of content right everything isn't about launching new products or offers so there are often disruptive things we do like so for example you know last year we launched something called a KFO which is a Kentucky flying object it basically means we got people were delivered a box at home that kind of we could be reassembled into a drone and it also of course had food in it when the box got delivered now in this kind of content I think what happens is the news itself is highly disruptive or a product like cheats are for example the news is highly disruptive we don't really have to create content there what we do is we give out the information the key you know selling points or the key attributes of the concept that are interesting and then it has to be handed over and let loose to the native content creators the platform the scoop loops of the world you know other other examples that we had used last time so I would say like when we when we use content marketing and let it out to platforms to create even bloggers for example we have to let go in terms of the style of content that is created all we have to tell them is hey guys something really wacky and interesting coming from a brand perspective are you interested and what we find is our metric there that reflects whether something has actually become successful or not is actually earn media and we're able to actually track earn media and determine we find that when things are actually fundamentally interesting for the consumer beyond advertising earn media kind of flies through the roof we don't really have to spend much money on it everyone's interested people are sharing it and we really find ROI actually there becomes it's going to be exponential so the measurement of ROI is irrelevant actually so that's the other interesting thing what we also can do on the second series of initiatives is that we find that when we do some of these disruptive initiatives like a kfo or a cheats are launched and earned impressions go up we also see that for that particular quarter you find an increase in for example metrics like top of mind and we also have found a correlation between top of mind revenue top of mind and sales revenue itself so it's an derived metric but you can actually draw correlations very comfortably from any of the content marketing streams we do which are big enough to have an impact on earn media and you can see whether it's made a mark or not even consumers actually recall some of these initiatives back to you on a post brand track but you must measure that because everything must either drive perception or behavior if it doesn't drive either of the two then it's actually a failed initiative so some one of the two has to be tracked for everything the third one that I'll talk about is consumers as publishers you know for example you know that's really great fun because you give consumers something to work with you give them a template like we recently told consumers hey how many different ways can you say finger licking good and they come up with wacky cool content in terms of how they can say it and we give them a template to work out of and what we find is engagement rates is a good metric to work on these kind of campaigns so we find engagement rates to north of 20 to 25 percent happening on these kind of campaign whereas you just take a typical post or an offer it'll be one or two percent so here you would certainly check for aspect like engagement rate and that itself is a good check of ROI because there's no nothing you're really selling all you're doing is getting the consumer not to buy your brand but buy into your brand and if you can check that with engagement rate that kind of works beautifully on ROI one more thing you know like which I feel is the if you can make a really interesting content so one of the examples which I love is this blend tech right very boring industrial category you go to his YouTube page 9 lakh followers so when the first iPad comes here one simple line can it blend it and then he puts that entire iPad into his blender and just converts into a dust and generates 18 million views on one video now if you look at a ROI on this kind of a thing let's say that a person was buying one video view on YouTube at 1 rupee so till for a 160,000 rupees worth of iPad his return is 18 million rupees already happened just on this and the sales are all additional so an interesting content can actually create a way more ROI but emotion is something where it starts and rational gets delivered so this this link between emotion and you know rational thing is something which is a very large challenge a marketer needs to solve so we don't always create our own content there is earned media but you know there are so many successful case studies of user-generated content is earned media lego's created a whole franchise out of people who create out of Lego and our own YouTube but that can go wrong as well and I know there's a lot of misinformation in your category and people create all kinds of content and there is the flip side to earn media which is the wrong type of media what's the strategy to fight that content or misinformation is content the antidote to bad content so yes you know in actually in all categories today as he said the consumer is the publisher so you will have it across and one comment one content piece can actually wipe off the entire earned media that the brand has so I think a couple of things one tracking it real time as much as you can across assets responding real time to them in our category specifically I mean we cannot use technology to do that we use people to do that and you know because word of mouth is such a big deal you also have a lot of advocates around but in category like ours it's they're difficult to find so somewhere we also nurture those and actually get user content and a micro influencer content out so that helps we've got five minutes so we are going to go into closing comments why don't you start and why don't we go backwards closing comments what is it that you would like to leave everybody here with the one one thing you'd like to you'd like to take out of your stable and give back to the community on content marketing I think I would just say that we've talked a lot about you know what we do as brands to manage content just one thing that you know if we all talk about purpose led marketing and you know as marketers that's in our brand strategy all the time content gives you a large play around that and if everything is linked to that one purpose and everything ties back together then you know that's the real sort of impact on top of your funnel otherwise it's just engagement it's just cost per lead so I think that becomes very important and on a lighter note I think brands as publishers over the years will only go down so I read somewhere you know a quote from one of the guys at Marriott who manages content marketing who said that you know content marketing is like a first date if you talk too much about yourself there's never a second date so I guess we should also let you know just let it be sometimes and just just be on the sidelines and and manage so yeah okay very quickly just one word credentialing whatever content we put out there and you'll put out there just make sure that it goes back to the brand's authenticity and whatever the content is if it comes back to the brand's authenticity and the brand umbrella you've credentialed your brand and your content will speak a thousand words and content is longevity now so it stays for yeah we'll create longevity long after we are gone I think whatever we are seeing in content marketing is just the starting point unlike newspaper television radio internet was never created as a mass medium it was a one to one medium and while Cambridge Analytica influencing 87 million you voters in US might be a wrong way of using the power of this one to one communication but that's the future the future is that it's going to change dramatically whatever we are saying today is not going to remain so we all need to prepare for it and ultimate power of the medium will be that one unique company the unique communication for each of the user that is what a medium is capable today so I think my view is that you know advertising and content both have roles consumers want information from brands as well they just don't want to be entertained by brands in fact they've got enough other folks trying to entertain them who perhaps are a bit better than what brands can do in terms of content entertainment so you know the thing is to be realistic about what your role is and in the space of content and do it to again Ratika's point do it in a relevant way don't if you don't have to go out there have an opinion on everything under the sun because it's really not required it talks back to your brand story so essentially I would say content stream should be of two types either it talks about what you do as a brand and talks or it's done in a way which reflects how you say it which is your brand story or brand personality if both of those come alive through content it's great to do if it's not working out for that just let it go so that's the way I would summarize be authentic be relevant invest in technology don't be afraid to measure and personalize those are the five things that I picked up from you guys I'm just sort of summarizing and our time's over so thank you very much that was a very efficient discussion and lots of fantastic stuff thank you thank you very much