 We've come to the fag end of the evening. I think you've been a fabulous audience I'm going to beg your indulgence for another 20 minutes as I'm going to talk about something called Sorry, I'll just wait a second for the people to settle down, please Folks would I will just give after that very very electric session Okay, let's start. You know over the years Some of the media practices that we've been doing have become so ingrained that we sort of taken them for granted And it's become like a blind spot This year there's going to be more than one lakh crores being spent on the ad-ex So, you know, I thought it would be a good idea to maybe Review some seven or eight practices that we currently do and I'm going to give you my perspective on them I'll also add that a qualifier that these are my views and if I can be successful in provoking a debate among some of you I'll consider it mission successful So let's bash on Okay The first point I want to talk about is where has a brand gone in advertising There was an author called Naomi Klein in 1999 who wrote a book called no logo Where she was actually decrying the power of big brands and how they were exploiting people and consumers because of the power of their brands You know inadvertently I think she's getting what she wanted. She didn't want the brands to be everything I actually find that in India over the last quite a few years The role of the brand in advertising has diminished considerably Are ads are clever. They're very very funny and they have some very good ideas But they're not perpetuating the brand that they're supposed to build Bharat talked about the consistency point Sam also left this as one of the five learnings for the for the for the advertisers at the end of a session and the point out here is that you know Brands are supposed to build now Take a look at these. I've you know with due respect to the brands which have been covered out here I've taken the male apparel category. I've taken print ads from them. I've masked their brands Can you recognize which the brands are? Now isn't the point of advertising to really reinforce the values that a brand stands for Look at this one You don't need to say anything about the brand and you know exactly and all the memories evoked with this particular brand come rushing back to you Now the point out here is You need to have something that the ad something in your ad that the To that the consumers remember your brand by rather than Radh Gai Baad Gai Now this is where with more than 90% of a brand's budget going into media costs and less than 10% Or maybe six seven percent going into creation of advertising I think it's a huge potential wastage if you're not building these basic equities into your brand So first wake up call and this is more for advertisers and creative agencies Please rediscover account planning. Please start building your basic strategic and psychological equities Second point also to do with creative Why don't advertisers adapt their ad to the medium or the platform which they're using it I Remember ages back when I started my career They used to be product slates with sound music on TV Durdarshan Fabina suiting Fabina Modi and 416 and they were used to be a jingle we used to come now They stayed in our minds as a very clutter-free environment and but that was obviously not the power of TV The power of TV was emotion drama the entire audio visual piece which advertising agencies quickly caught and onto and sort of over time advertising on TV just Sort of spiraled and went up and finally about 15-20 years later overtook print And Up around same around turn of the century when FM radio started we got TV edits for radio spots The FM agency the FM stations hide great creative talent from the agencies and for the price of a media plan Started giving them ads which recognize the true power of radio as a companion medium You know while TV and radio probably sort of developed nicely in out of home We still end up getting a whole lot of print renditions for our outdoor campaigns now This is one where they say Rajini Gandha. This is what we got This is what it could have been and this was a sort of version that we gave if you look at Kotak The entire branding was sort of hidden into the entire sort of Background and it just required a small tweak to get the 811 Sort of proposition clear in an ammo You just remove the clutter and it starts they make becoming much more sort of useful for For the entire outdoor medium The point I'm making right now is that this is for these conventional mediums But it becomes a much more profound question as we move to digital in Digital we have got what search YouTube OTT Facebook Morge Share chat Twitter you got the works you got digital publishers each of them They've got a bunch of stuff on which we actually have to play our ad even like Facebook versus Instagram is completely different on this You've got a choice of video text image a sound Experiential all of this you can play on each one of these and yet. What is it that we get sometimes we still manage to get something like? You know we get ourselves print ad layouts for banners We land up running a full-length TV commercial on a social media feed We we sort of get a long text in the image of a social post We get static images in the video pre-roll or worse We get this one is to one kind of resolution on a 16 by nine screen Now this just doesn't make sense And I don't think enough time and money is being spent on how to actually adapt To the syntax of the platform that we're going to be doing if we don't start Recognizing this it's going to be as useful as putting a Hindi TV commercial on the Tamil feed So point number two that I'm leaving to advertisers again is please adapt to the syntax of your platform The next issue is a slightly deeper one How many advertisers feel that the minute you start your advertising campaign it should have a impact on sales You know performance advertising has come out with words like a course and row ass So all of this has sort of said Advertise and you will get sales and somewhere even though they say branding is different So it seems to have rubbed off on branding and the ask these days is much more. What did my branding do on sales? Because something should have moved You know fundamental to answering this question is to understand two things one of advertising works and Number two, what is a communication task for that particular campaign? So there are three or four scenarios here For new brands or brands with a new story The task of advertising is very simply to create awareness for the new proposition through building reach and frequency and through that It'll lead to trials This requires a very good creative. So a good concept executed Brilliantly is going to land up giving you that it has been established time after time Sometimes when your creative is not that strong you do need some impact to be clutter Impact could come through celebrities It could come through basically choice of impact mediums like jackets and newspaper ads Page takeovers or say impact TV kind of things that you're buying It could be through entire multimedia plans and that actually builds the entire thing So these are all ways in which you can build a new proposition and people are doing that So for this kind of environment if yes when you do a campaign It should make an impact almost immediately But the more tricky one is for mature brands in mature brands The first thing if you if you can you you got a template or expectations in terms of what it's going to do for my business The starting point is I think you should look at using analytics What is the sort of response of the category to advertising? Nacent or building categories are the ones where typically when the category advertises there is some pretty reasonable amount of growth that you can get in sales For mature brands and for example soaps or tea Category advertising will not grow the category much, but even here brand advertising becomes very important So if you're coming to a brand level whether it's a nascent category or an advertising category That is a time the role of an immature brand. It is to basically Rebring the entire psychological basically the equities strategic or execution of equities that I made alluded to a little earlier So I'm talking about the Titan jingle very memorative. I'm talking about good nights protection circle I'm talking about wixki khich khich. I'm talking Whatever you did so many brands have built all these kind of equities Now these are the ones that you should reinforce Now at that point in time at that point in time You will find that the brands with better equity take actually the market share from the ones with poor equity They are also the ones that are going to be enduring again Bharat made a reference to Impression versus impactful impression and he said I put out one ad Just maybe it was 10x these things and it sort of lingered on for a very long time Because it was playing back a whole lot of like Fevicol Kajor had to take a name It has become a metaphor to the entire bonding of India. You make one ad We did that ad campaign of theirs, which is a 60 a campaign Sharma in keys So far you didn't need too much advertising because it was playing back all the brand codes that stayed with you So this is the area where Okay, let me take you give you another example. I remember when I was in the cold soft drink business in coke They used to be a pitched battle between coke versus Pepsi share a voice blue versus red Cricket may taking one property it was used to be fight for that big share a voice game 25 years later, which are the two big brands in the soft drink business thumbs up and sprite Built around a very very strong proposition and probably that is what is resonating well with consumers So on the point on mature brands, please bring you build your psychological equities and play the long game Don't look for short-term effects That said there are times when our bland mature brand also reaches a blind spot I tried to bring this out in the panel earlier. I don't think there were too many takers to my bait You know that time you have to look at Consumers have formed a certain mental structures with the advertising that you've created So if I suddenly want to change the way people are thinking about me Just making coming out with another ad which is saying something which is not going to reposition. You've got to Get them to walk the talk and that is typically where an IMC or integrated marketing communication to my mind Actually plays a role and the bait I was giving them is we actually saw that across 10 years when Cadbury was something Which firstly was only something which was okay the very first time I was a kid I think the power of advertising got it into youth with that Which cast hair add where the girl comes into the cricket field and does that John dance that was pure advertising But this entire be beat a bit about a gift from someone you love to Which meet her ojai and therefore a moomita moment that was all done through IMC So somewhere I think even that is a has a role to play and if you have to go higher up the brand values I think is a role of sponsorship, you know in sponsorship if you go down memory lane So many brands have been built on the back of sponsorship. I'm alluding to BPL Phillips top 10 Pepsi Ongo choice Uma Pepsi as she was called in those days hero Honda roadies lack me in their fashion week you know, they were global brands like coke and and Which sort of which have been olympic sponsors since 1928 and visa since 1980 86, you know the colas telecoms the entire TV and e-commerce categories I think that cricket guys have already told us how each and every one of the unicorns has sort of really used cricket to Build the stature and actually grow them. So to that extent sponsorship. I think it's a huge weapon Which can actually be used to build a brand stature Now it is in this context, you know, I really question that what is the value that this program brought to you by Co-presented by ABC in association with PQR STU VW what that will do for a brand Somewhere with a if sponsorship has got to be the most Important weapon was a powerful weapon that you have aren't you undervaluing it by cheapening it like this? I think media owners or property owners of P passion guides were passion play properties They have the opportunity to create much more bang for the buck and I think Advertiser should be willing to pay so to answer the question for Advertisers who have the need for a Pavlovian reflects to the entire Advertising The answer is it depends first treated x anti rather than post a factor Don't do your campaign and then come back and say why didn't it work before you go inside the campaign say what is my marketing task? What is it that I want media to do? Is it a reminder? Is it building up awareness? Is it changing my entire brand values on so-and-so forth? Fundamental I think it's marketing is a science and an art is just that we don't ask these questions enough And next point Sorry, this is I wanted to end this point on this this this aspect which is The reality today is that media is obviously now more than just a delivery pipe for advertising We can it allows us to do associative marketing clutter-breaking impact building higher-order brand values through sponsorship legitimizing what the brand stands for why use of content building endorsement through sharing building Experiences and actually being a retail marketplace all of these things media can do now if you have the discussion before your campaign What is it that you want to do? Solutions will come if you just come out with one vanilla plan only sometimes reach and frequency works Sometimes you need something else and that's I think a discussion better had before the plan It's a marketing call not just a media call that you have to take at that time Related to this entire thing is Is advertising only about Salience brand logo registration in and out or is it actually about communication? Look, I'm a true believer of brevity and non extravagant ACDs average commercial durations I've also said the job of advertising is to reinforce brand values But it baffles my mind to see When brands take premium properties like IPL and paid top dollar, why do they only expose that 10-second edit on that? Even when the 30s or 20 seconds of main TV commercial hasn't had established play for the love of me. I can't understand that Relatedly this comes with the idea of Repeated spotting leading to potential irritation Let's take IPL from which a lot has been spoken in the last one hour now Typically what they are the guys with the sponsors and all they'll be coming with five or six spots into 73 matches So it's it happens like that so we did evaluation for one such client We found that they delivered some 1100 odd grp's on IPL they delivered a 44 percent reach at one plus so at least 44 percent of their target audience or at once and 24 or 25 percent of it so it ten times or more Nowhere else even you do a media plan will you get a 10 plus reach equal to more than 50 percent of your one-plus reach This is because obviously IPL people coming back and now when people are coming back You've got say 80 seconds and you take eight ten-second spots rather than taking Four 20-second spots. Why you don't have to do share of voice per game You have to look have the whole season to actually do your entire campaign and this to my mind is a mind bender Because people are doing this time and again on India's most expensive property Sorry, so see again and again and again and you expect it to do actually better The next point is really about why do we plan digital and TV in so as I lose? I think you would have got enough drift from the sessions that have been earlier to done today that That it's not or digital or TV. It's obviously digital and TV The reality is as far as consumers are concerned. I am watching it I'm watching one screen or the other screen sometimes when I'm watching connected TV I don't even know whether I'm watching TV or I'm watching a digital platform But still when it comes to us as in the advertising domain Advertisers have a meet a media manager separately for digital separately for traditional in our own agency. Sometimes we have Mostly we have digital teams and TV teams Now the TV planners have typically learned to build their plans spot at a time Which leads a certain TV are those spots are chosen by genre by channel by day part by weekday weekend And that in turn goes up to give some grp's which gives in turns gives reach Frequency effective frequency at that share a voice at a certain CPR P. Fine. That's what we've got now We come to the digital planners. They give you reach in impressions or millions and then they give you impressions and then they'll give you average OTS and You come back to them and say hey, okay How many grp's did your plan deliver and they'll scratch their sort of chin now, that's ridiculous, right? Why are we treating it as completely different when like to like they can be total comparability? So if you have to look at reach at one plus on a common base You take the IRS base not just TV base or digital place equated to the lowest common denominator Which is IRS and said this is the kind of one plus reach you're getting on TV This is a kind of one plus feature getting on digital. So that's equated So if you are fond of TV ours Okay, there's one fundamental difference between TV buying TV And and and digital in TV you buy a spot. So you're chasing content and you're accruing audiences as Anil was also talking earlier in digital. You're buying audiences completely agnostic of content In general, I'm not talking about IPL. I'm talking about in general in digital but that said If you want to actually do comparability, you can still find reach at one plus There is a the TV are equivalent and digital is called concurrency. How many people were watching it at any one time? If I'm looking at effective frequency, that is where right now digital is failing YouTube gives it to us hotstar gives it to us But a large number of other platforms don't and as a result You can't you actually find it difficult to build reach at high frequencies on a large digital platform But my point in this limited point in this one is it is so simple to actually plan TV and digital as one similar Video plan, but we are still not doing it. Why I don't know why With this coming towards the end of it. I Think there is a game where we should review our media TG Currently there are three TGs and marketing guys work on The smallest one is the creative TG. So that is what the creative agency comes and Typically you'll find a large number of categories have a youth bias So they like to show youthful a youth at the center of it because that's an aspirational imagery But that doesn't mean that's your business TG necessarily They also have a media TG which is supposed to approximate to your business TG but for example, and that's the The classic example that used to be given fairness creams had a female as a media TG But 40 percent of the business used to come from males. So But on TV that was fine because if you were planning on a female TG you deliver on male TG less But you would deliver reasonably well Now in digital this becomes obviously exclusive if you're doing females you'll only get females. You won't get males They won't get them like for example So many i'm feeling very left out in all of this because So many brands have got They stop advertising to people above 50 and i'm way way above 50 So all the exciting brands that the young people in this audience see i can never get to see on digital because So now somewhere around the line my limited point on this one is Again when you're coming on digital have your TG planning TG when it comes to TV But when you're coming to digital, please relax your TG definitions to make it closer to your business TG the other one is India is a subcontinent It's a very heterogeneous subcontinent It's also very expensive to just about reach everybody in this entire market We have the opportunity and and The entire landscape has given us an opportunity to carve out this entire market of ours in four very fascinating ways You've got about 167. Okay, Anil has now dramatically brought this down to 108 million I haven't seen the last 108 million i'd seen it until 167 and then maybe 133, but that number is not validated So i was staying staying with this but they pay TV. How households are this? There are about 43 million guys who are free to wear and these are reasonably isolated universes So this is like in the old days dur darshan terrestrial homes and c&s So dur darshan was available in c&s homes, but nobody would watch dur darshan Similarly not too many people in pay tv homes are watching fta. So these are reasonably Mutual exclusive tgs Then you've got 20 million connected tvs again, not completely mutually exclusive But the cord cutters are mutually exclusive and the cord shavers are right now watching both A large part of the 167 million are also watching content on mobiles But there are about 47 million of them who are watching this is the erstwhile media dark guys who never had any access to tv Now these are the ones who are having the geo phones with a youtube pre-burnt on it and watching it there The point i'm making out here is that you have this available available to you But still you're going into all homes and targeting your brands. Why? Wouldn't it make more sense if you had limited funds to go after the one Sort of audience or universe which is more suited to your source of growth and actually just max out or at least give deliver optimal levels there similarly We there is this thing tired thing of tv planning where we come back and say let's plan on hsm and regions So you have hsm which has got these 11 12 states plus you've got of course the four southern states and all the rest of it I think that requires a rethink What you've got on this table out here is all the hsm states So 61 reach overall hsm of tv within which at the hsm level 53 of them are reached by hindi content reached If you have to look at the bottom four maharashra goa assam or it's an resping all You'll actually find that In some states 65 to 75 percent of tv reach is all you can reach through hindi Forget this is just about reach The same thing if you look at what percent of the total viewing is made up by hindi look at the same four channels Four sorry states in west pingol Quarter of the entire viewing is on hindi's 75 percent of it is probably bingoli or whatever the local ones are Even the four ones are there even if we look at panjabharyana where Where as reach was concerned almost everybody was watching some amount of hindi But in terms of the total amount of tv with your view 40 percent of it is still coming from panjabi Now in this kind of environment We are still going and planning on hsm We take out that hsm cut and then do our plans and then try to see how to sort of build Reach on some of the others and how to manage the imbalances between states But if you actually did statewide planning Our chances are that you'd probably come out with different plans Just suppose that with my point with the with the earlier unique universes You'll find that the 43 million fta homes are all in the hindi speaking hsm So that gives you a further opportunity to carve it up These are some of the things that I don't think we've been thinking of And this is really what I wanted to bring to the fore So really what I've said today is three things One I think is this entire point about that Sorry, just give me a second One clearly is that media without the right creative is meaningless I've made a plea to focus on building your basic equity elements that make your brand And to focus more on adapting the medium or the platform on which your ad is being played And to judiciously manage the acd Yeah, I don't have a high ad length copy, but don't also meaninglessly put 10 seconders on especially premium properties like ipl The second point I made was Make a media plan with an understanding of what the media task is and how media how advertising works There may be times when reach and continuity is the best thing to do other times impact or multimedia And yet on the time when associated marketing or sponsorship But the important point is it's a strategic discussion. So this is the discussion we should be having before the campaign goes I really think both At the Advertiser end and at the agency end we need to introspect It's a marketing meeting and not just a how to reach people meeting And I think if you do that you'll have much less of people coming back later and saying why didn't this campaign Not work Relatedly TV and digital needs to be viewed exactly by the same lens I think the science we built on tv planning is being brilliant over the last 35 years We should use those same kind of metrics of building reach See and through that building brands and apply them to digital and you'll find that both digital and tv both work And lastly what we said is that in today's media landscape? Choose markets with more granularity and in a digital media choose your mark your tg with less granularity I hope I've been able to raise some points that make you look at some of the media practices that you do with a new lens And if it's helped provoke some Some thought or discussion. I'll consider it mission accomplished. Thank you very much