 Ladies and gentlemen, with that, we're moving on to our special address on humanizing your brand through sports marketing in the age of social media and artificial intelligence. A sports marketer and business strategist, Michelle has spent her entire career in sports. She oversees a portfolio of 14 sponsorships that span across 12 cities and four continents. After joining TCS, Michelle served as director of sponsorships for New York Roadrunners and was a sports specialist at the ESPN Wide World of Sports at Walt Disney World in Orlando. Michelle has a master's degree in sports management from the University of Massachusetts, is a passionate fitness enthusiast and is based in New York and we are delighted to have her here in TechMunch Thursday. Please, everybody, put your hands together, even the virtual one, while I welcome our speaker, Ms. Michelle Doty-Taylor, Head Sports Sponsorship at Tata Consultancy Services. A very warm welcome to you, Michelle. Thank you so much. I am so excited to be joining everybody today and to be part of this conversation around the next normal of digital. So I am thrilled to be part of the conversation again today and I appreciate you having me and for everybody tuning in. Thank you, Michelle. Shall I get started and share my screen? Absolutely. There we go. All right. Well, again, thank you for that warm introduction and really I want to talk about humanizing your brand. I mean a lot of people looking for services where I'm working right now overseeing their global sports sponsorship portfolio needs really no introduction to this audience. So I just wanted to acknowledge that as a tech company, we are always looking for ways to transform companies and communities where we work and live and obviously serving as part of the larger Tata group. But really here today to talk about the challenge, right? What is this challenge and how do we humanize our brands in this increasingly digital world that we're in? And it's a big challenge to compete with everything that's going on, all the noise around us and I will say a particular challenge even for a company as large as Tata Consultancy Services is as a business to business company, right? And a company that doesn't necessarily have a tangible product or services company. So how do you humanize your brand? And this has been a huge challenge for us as it is with many of you out there in your company. So how do we do this, right? How are we going to climb this mountain and be this goal? Well, we start with what we know, right? And what we know is that people connect on a very personal level, right? And what's been working out there across the digital marketing landscape are, you know, some of those more personal touches, right? We've seen so much success and I think we've read about a lot of success with the happy birthday emails, right? That companies have started sending out again, based on data gathering data of what you know about people and just recognizing a special moment in time for folks and using that as leverage to perhaps promote a product or introduce something new. And those birthday emails that when companies are engaging in that type of connection are hugely successful. We see them with higher transaction rates, higher revenue rates, and higher click through rates. So we know we need to get on a personal level. But where to start, right? Where do we start? Well, we start thinking about what people care about, right? What drives passion with people? And I can think of very few things beyond sports that create that emotion, right? And the love and whether you're a fan or spectator, sport is incredibly engaging, right? It gives people a sense of team, a sense of purpose and belonging. So really, when you start to align your brand with sports sponsorship, you're able to build off that equity of all that emotion and passion that comes around sport. So this is a great space to start looking at, right? In terms of humanizing your brand and trying to, again, create that connection. But there's so many different sports. There's so much out there. How do you start to narrow down on what's right, right? And you start by finding something that's part of who you are as a company and part of what you believe in as a company, right? Certainly, you want to bring data and analytics into the mix too, right? In terms of looking at what sports align with my key demographics, right? And do all your due diligence on that front. But to really make it authentic connection, you want to find what is going to really align with your core values. And what do you believe in as a company? And how do you bring that to life through sports? But other components of services, they came to us through the running platform, right? And it all starts with a story, right? As any good human element does. It's all about that story and the storytelling. And for Tata, again, it started with a journey of one of our executives, right? Who needed was was directed to get healthier and fitter by his position. And that executive went home and immediately started a walking routine and that walking route of running. And as as as he saw the benefits that this physical activity brought to his life in terms of the health benefits, the mental clarity, right? My goodness, if this is doing so much good for me, imagine what it can do for the rest of our employees, right? And this was at the time that this is our chairman, right? So this is significant. And TCS created an internal program called fit for life to really gamify movement and give employees incentive and in challenge to start adding movement to their lives. Again, as a tech company and most other companies, most of you out there as well, we spend a lot of time each day in front of our computers. So encouraging movement is critical. So again, there was a lot of success with the fit for life program in the first year alone, 40,000 people engaged, and now we're up to over 200,000 people that engage in this program every year. But that wasn't enough because as TCS looked at it, he started saying, well, it's doing tremendous things, encouraging movement and healthy activities, doing tremendous things for employees. But what about our clients? What about our communities where we work and live? And that's again, how we found this very true connection to running and sponsoring marathons. But because it really gave us a platform for talking about who we are, but connecting to our core values. So when you find what it is that speaks to your company and connects in a meaningful way, it's not about just signing a sponsorship deal and putting your logo on a stadium or massive signs. You really want to make it meaningful. You need to be able to leverage the different components of the sponsorship to tell your story and to share what it is that connects your company to this sport or event or program. So how do you start to make it meaningful? Lots of different ways. And again, finding those personal connections is how you start to bring this stuff to life. As an example, in the running platform, TCS concentrates on a few different areas. Obviously, we use running sponsorships as a way to drive our brand engagement. And in those instances, putting a logo on a sign is certainly a good start to building more brand awareness. But we also use these as opportunities to engage our clients and employees. And there's very few things as personal as going through a journey and experience with someone together. And when our clients are able to engage with us in the training of a marathon, and for anyone who's ever participated in a marathon or any endurance event, training is part, it's like a nine months journey of getting out there every day. And it really opens up this incredibly personal and very human conversation between our clients and employees around how's your training going, right? And it gives them another level of conversation in addition to whatever business dialogue may be happening. And for anyone out there that is a runner, you'll know this firsthand. And if anybody lives with a runner or is friends with any runners, you know that runners love to talk about their training, right? They love to talk about their latest run and how they're feeling and, you know, any kind of little issues. So again, this is such a great source of in terms of leveraging the passion people have around this activity to create conversations and build relationships. The other things we do with our sponsorships are really try to improve the event experience through technology, right? So how are we going to make this authentic? How are we going to really enhance the experience in some meaningful way for the participants, for the spectators? And for TCS, obviously, for us, technology is our mechanism for communicating who we are, right? In the same way that we transform organizations and the clients that we work with through technology, we're transforming the sporting experience and the marathon experience. And I'll share a few examples of that just to help bring that to life. And then lastly, CSR and community engagement is a huge piece of these sponsorships as well, giving back to the communities and doing it again in a way that really has a very meaningful and purposeful manner to it. And I can't tell you how many stories we have of the times where we bring our employees out to events to volunteer, whether it's handing out water or some other support along the way. And they themselves get so inspired that they start training and running. And again, this conversation starts around the water coolers of everybody talking about their training journey. So it's pretty amazing stuff. So in terms of bringing this sponsorship to life, and again, I just share these as examples of ways that TCS has integrated technology into the sponsorships, creating these very human elements and moments. And one of my favorite moments of any marathon, and for anyone who's ever watched a marathon, it is full of emotion. The runners themselves and everything that they need to do just to even get to the starting line, let alone start running. And then as they're running by, everybody's watching saying, this is amazing. It's like a sea of humanity running by. And every runner has their own story to tell. So it's hard to even be around this space without being inspired. But one of our hero activations has been creating the mobile app to support many of our biggest race sponsorships. And what that really does in a very authentic and genuine way is showcase how technology is able to enhance the experience and solve problems for people. And again, it's leveraging data, which is really the key here, a lot of what we're talking about, right, in terms of the next normal digital. It's using this data in a way that adds value. So one of the classic challenges of the marathon experience is that you've got a course that's 26.2 miles long. And you've got spectators lining that course. And if you're trying to cheer on your loved one, if you want to give them that support to help get them across the finish line, you're generally standing somewhere along that course waiting for that one moment they're going to pass you by, right? And in the past, it's been very likely that you're going to stand there for quite a bit of time and ultimately potentially miss your runner, right? Because it's hard to figure out where they are. You don't know if perhaps they're having a good day, they might be running a little faster than you expected or perhaps something happened and they're running a little slower than expected. And what our app was able to do was connect up to the timing system of the races and basically allow spectators to track their runners, right? Through various different technologies that we used in these races. And it allows the spectators to know basically every few blocks where their runner is so they know where to stand, when to be there, and how to find their runner. And what it's enabled is hundreds and hundreds of these incredibly wonderful, I call them sweaty hug moments, right? The moment where the spectators standing looking for their runner, they're looking at the app, trying to figure out where they are looking up to find their runner. They see them, they scream, the runner screams, there's this amazing hug, right? The sweaty hug moment. And it's our technology that's made that happen, right? And so when we can tell that story through video or however else we capture those moments, it really helps humanize our brand. It's one of the most powerful examples of this. We've also done other things in terms of, again, leveraging data that we have to really give people an offer that is of value to them, right? So for folks that may not know, for some of these big races that we sponsor, it is difficult to get a race entry. Oftentimes these races are oversubscribed and it takes quite a bit of luck sometimes to just score an entry. So particularly for the TCS New York City marathon, thousands and tens of thousands of people enter a lottery and only about less than 50% get in. So TCS saw this as an opportunity, right? We wanted to connect who we are and what we believe in in terms of technology and what we believe in what we're doing in the community with STEM education with our running platform. And so we leveraged the data that was available and we saw that there is many teachers, right? The kind of the champions in our community who are STEM educators, right? Who applied for the marathon but didn't get in. And we were able to send them a personal message saying, hey, we know you applied. We want to support you on your journey and not just in running but in the classroom too. So we're going to offer 50 teachers access to the TCS New York City marathon. And these teachers were so thankful to be able to get their entry, right? And they were so inspired and we continued this relationship by providing them STEM resources and tools for their classrooms. We created lesson plans around running that they were able to use with their students. But some of the most magical moments were when we went into some of these schools and did surprise announcements to the teachers to let them know that they were in, that they got in a race entry. And again, leveraging this data of knowing that they wanted to run but they didn't get in and us knowing that and wanting to tap into this particular audience of people where we have this alignment on the importance of education really helped create these amazing moments. And we would go into school assemblies, right? And we would go up and basically make an announcement and say, hey, is Mr. So-and-So here in the auditorium, we've got something special for you. We're here to welcome you to the class of 2022 TCS New York City Marathon. And the teacher would start screaming and the students would start screaming. And it was just this incredibly emotional moment. So we're really excited to continue with that program, but also to share how, again, finding the right data and tapping into that with the right offer for the right person is incredibly magical. One other thing I'll call out again, just using technology and I know that David had mentioned this earlier, the power of augmented reality and virtual reality to create different experiences. We created a really cool experience a few years ago with the runner's bib. It's something that every runner got. And when you scan the bib with the app that we had created, professional athlete would essentially, through augmented reality, pop out of the bib and give the runner a special message. And that was really fun. So we do all kinds of different activations to really help, again, bring technology, show people the power of technology, sorry, and what's possible through these sponsored things. Want to share quickly a little bit more about how we're adapting to this new digital world, right? And I don't think there was a better catalyst for this than 2020. And for as much challenge as 2020 gave us, it also created some opportunity, right? In terms of when live events weren't possible, TCS was able to work quickly with our sponsored races and race partners around the world to say, how do we still create meaningful, right? And a time where people need more than ever to keep moving, to keep being active for your own physical and mental health, right? At a time where people still need to feel connected when we weren't able to leave our houses and some of us still can't, right? How can we still keep people motivated and connected? So we worked with our partners to really to create these virtual marathon experiences, bringing the fights and sounds of these global massive races to runners in their own homes, right? In their own home towns and recreating the experience to the best we could, right? So we leveraged augmented reality. So when these virtual runners completed their run, they still were able to get a medal around their neck and take that winning photo, right? We created online communities for runners to talk because again, runners want to talk about this. This is something that they're incredibly passionate about. So they wanted these online communities to talk and inspire each other. We still engaged with our teachers because we knew that teachers were being challenged in new and different ways last year and they still needed support from us as well. So we created newsletters again to just try to keep this community connected in this time where people were feeling a little bit more isolated. One of the biggest successes was turning the London marathon, the Virgin Money London marathon completely virtual for the first time ever. We had over 37,000 participants in that race, which is really excited for one day race, right? And people from all over the world. I think the other thing that virtual racing has created is this environment that is more inclusive than ever, right? In the past, if you wanted to participate in any of these big races, you had to get an entry, obviously, but then travel, right? And that has some significant costs to it at times. But in this world of virtual racing that we were able to help our partners create, you can do it from anywhere. So suddenly the barriers to entry were lower and the inclusiveness was greater than ever. And that was really, really exciting to see. And that really concludes, sorry, most of what I wanted to share here with everybody today. I just would want to finish by saying one of the best ways to humanize your brand is to really start by figuring out what you believe in and then build on that belief. I'd like to conclude with a short video and then can take any questions. I can try playing the video from here and see if that works, but I'm not sure. Thank you, Michelle. That was a wonderful session. I think we all would agree that when it is a personal story that you put forward in any endeavor, I think it becomes a great achievement like this has become for TCS. And thank you once again for sharing this case study with us, sharing your insights and stories with us. Thank you so much for your time, Michelle. You're welcome. Thank you for having me. Thank you.