 Moving right into our next session, which is a fireside chat with Mr. Georgie George, co-founder GoNuts, he's going to be talking about building a brand in the experience economy. Now, Georgie George is a seasoned business leader with over 20 years of experience in media, broadcasting, sports, brand management, entertainment, digital and live events globally. He has worked in leadership roles with leading companies like MTV Asia, Astro, Yahoo, Percept Sports and Entertainment, Sony Music and UBM. His last role was as vice president, general manager, country head at World Wrestling Entertainment, for the Indian subcontinent. Currently, he's the co-founder at GoNuts Asia. GoNuts Asia's largest and most influential platform for human connection, communication and commerce using celebrities to make lives richer. And having a conversation with him in this fireside chat is Mr. Rohail Amin, senior editor exchange for media group. I welcome you gentlemen on the room and Rohail, I'll leave this conversation forward. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, always great. Welcome, Mr. George. Once again, a second conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. And I'll state my get into the first question. I mean, first of all, tell me you have created a platform that is so unique. I was going through it in the day. I mean, I haven't seen kind of such platforms. Tell me the idea behind GoNuts. What do you do exactly so that our audience also benefits from it? Yeah. Thank you for having me here. So let me just quickly tell you what we are about and what we intend to do. We saw the biggest, with fandom that exists in our country, we saw the biggest divide was the ability of fans, especially in secondary and tertiary towns, to be able to connect with celebrities that are fundamentally very metro centric. And as you probably know, even the communication from celebrities to their fans is very one sided through their social media. We saw there was an incredible opportunity to disrupt the space and through disruption, what we meant was an opportunity for me this to become an immersive experiential opportunity as opposed to a one way communication. As you know, many agencies pay a lot of money to many celebrities to post a tweet or post is a Facebook on Facebook or Insta. Here was an opportunity for the larger Indian diaspora to connect with these celebrities to be able to use them in a way that is immersive and relatable. And last but not the least, go to a trusted pike or a trusted source that can actually deliver those experiences for them. You know, be it weddings, be it brand promotions, be it creation of content, be it shout outs. So we started with shout outs as a fundamental as a fundamentally as a platform to be able to actually create human connection between people. Imagine a person sitting in Varanasi or Harpur or any smaller town in India being able to gift his daughter on her wedding, an invitation from Kailash Kheer or Shankar Mahadevan, where he sings also a line or two of the song that she really, really loves. What an incredible memory and our business is that creating powerful memories in the minds of our customers and making their lives richer. Right. And when it comes to using celebrities for doing it, is it limited to only the film industry, the music industry or are you also looking beyond it? So we, you know, this is a very interesting question, Rohail, because initially we had, you know, people who are in the investment community and venture capitalists and all of them saying, and the names just centered around these people. As you can see today with adoption of video content, which is almost 50% more than the predecessors in the millennial generation, it's multi-screen, multi-channel, all of the above, we have thrown a plethora of people who until some time back were not even known. These are on our OTT platforms. These are across radio. These are chefs. These are sportsmen. I mean, earlier it was all about cricket, right? And it was all about Bollywood. Today, we're talking about an actor from Mirzapur, Vita Harshita Gaur. Or we are talking about Pankaj Sripati. Or we are talking about Udham Singh, who was a VJ on Channel V and an iconic one at that. And I'd love to show you a little promo. Our objective is to really connect with the heartland and for them to really resonate with people whom they relate to and not just the people that are up there in the stratosphere. I think we've got a lot more realistic in our life now, especially I hope with the pandemic, where we believe, where we know that a lot of things which we'll make believe and we lived in those immersive experiences in film today are about reality experiences. And that's what it is. So, you know, the breadth, the scale, the multilingual part that we bring to the table, the multi-price point, the multi-genre is what makes Go Nuts exciting for brands and makes Go Nuts exciting for customers. So, it's only the end customer, like somebody who is a fan, who can, you know, kind of go nuts. But are you looking at also because brands also use celebrities in a very big way and they have to shell out really big monies to do it. Are you looking at those brand problems as well as you move along? So, I was managing director at UBM, which is Informer Markets. And one of the things, when I inherited the business, I found that it was probably one of the most boring businesses in the whole world. As you know, exhibition businesses are cake, you know, it almost goes back to pre-historic dinosaur days and nothing's really changed. The same people come into those exhibition halls, go down the walkways and then go back, you know, after interacting. Yes, it's a multi-billion dollar industry worldwide, but nothing's really changed or progressed. I saw the incredible opportunity of using my experience from media and entertainment to really bring together, bring a B2C face to a very boring B2B business. That was the first time I started, so we had jewelry shows and renewable energy and all these kind of verticals, which are fundamentally B2B verticals. And for the first time, I started using celebrities. I started using Miss India's in the jewelry show, inviting people to come to the show, all of that. Now unconsciously all of this worked at the back of my mind in order for us to be also now disrupting these old spaces, which were our cake and really needed newer ways to connect and engage with customers, newer ways to get their brand messaging strongly into the minds and hearts of customers and stakeholders. And I think the opportunity for brands, the opportunity for smaller MSMEs and SMEs, which are about 800 million in our country. And even if they were to spend a lakh each, you're talking about a serious, you know, an 80 billion dollar business. And therefore, we have already seen, you know, brands connect with us to do these brand promotions. And again, all done over the phone. So no big math fancy budgets, no 18 camera shoots, no, you know, couple of days in a studio. And it's working because it's used through on social media. People are loving it and people are consuming it. As someone said in a panel, just not a panel, Kavita said some time back on her thing. I mean, you are bordered with over, you know, a couple of tens of 100 brands in a day. How many do you really need for? And therefore, it's really important to have the frequency, the connection and the ability to come back with newer stories. Right, right. And I think when we saw this pandemic going on and the color tunes, they had to rope in Mr. Bachchan to make people register it. I think that's a very live example of the influence they exert. So my next question is, you know, you are in a category that is in a larger sense. So tell me, what does it take to build a brand in this category? What it takes to build a brand in this category, I would think is a lot of what I call as passion marketing. You know, Ken Roberts said something and he wrote a book which is all about called Love Bites, if you remember. And it was all about what brands are like Love Bites. They need to be visible. They have to have passion. And last but not the least, they need to be of high recall value. You know, and that's what it's about. Our objective with creating gonads has been exactly that in two different ways. One is what we do in terms of our brand messaging and what people consider the brand value identity of our brand. Second is how do we communicate our brand purpose? So contrary to what people may think, oh, wait a minute, this is a celebrity shout out platform. It's all about shout outs, a whole bunch of celebrities there, celebrity commerce, etc, etc. But we have a larger purpose. And our larger purpose is to make people's lives richer through the memories that they have through through the through these videos that we create. Therefore, the creation of those videos, the trans, you know, the ability to communicate the heart of that message. It's not about a birthday message. It's about how that content that we co create with that particular artist makes such a big difference. Let me show you one little video of an artist who had brought back to gonads. And you will understand how this resonates with the heart of what we try to do. Just give me a second and just tell me if this is kind of you're getting this on your screen. So what also has happened in the last few, I mean, months we've seen the rise of virtual, of course, but in the over the last few years, social media has taken up such a huge mind share that everything is for social media. You shoot a video, you shoot a picture, you eat your food, this social media first, right? So you want, how do you tell me how has social media impacted this entire experience marketing space and creating experience over the last few years? I think people are a lot more vocal and a lot more expressive about their feelings now, simply because they have found a medium for expression and social media is nothing but a footprint for expression. It could be a dish that you like that you filmed and or taken a photograph and placed it on an Instagram. It could be a video you created and you upload it on Facebook. It is about expressing vanity. Let me put it this way. And vanity will never go out of fashion as long as we walk this earth. What our videos do and won't go nuts is trying to do is fundamentally connect with that vanity. When I gift something to somebody, say I give it to Ruhail, Ruhail is going to show that off to his community that he is a recipient of this. And guess what? Ex-person, be it an artist Javed Ali or Shankar Mahadevan or Kailash Kher has actually called his name out, sang him two lines of what he loved and expressed what somebody else was trying to tell Ruhail in a way that connected with him and will stay a memory in his life forever. That's what this is about. And as long as people want memories, as long as people want to thrive on vanity, this is going to be a business that's going to be fairly, fairly important for connecting people. So Mr. George, give me a sense of the drivers of the influencer content. What is the audience profile like? Is it the urban centers, the tier two? Give me a sense of that. It's early days yet Ruhail in that sense because the business has just been about six to eight months old. We're still kind of using data that we are getting from user behavior, people who come onto the site, people who are transacting, people who are recipients and really trying to understand what really works. So a lot of the data that we collect is actually for user data as opposed to having some research agency research this and give it to us secondhand. So in that sense of the word, we're almost like an OTT platform. We are therefore deep diving into what people like, what kind of age groups, who's actually buying. But just to give you and to answer your question, the demographics currently point out to predominantly male in the age group of 25 to 50 and fundamentally heterocentric at this point and understandably so. As this gains traction and you're slowly starting to use social media and communication and marketing to get into secondary towns and tier two and tier three cities, you will find the adoption and user pattern change very drastically. And in fact, we've had some incredible case studies from smaller towns, people who wanted a poem by one of our artists, people who wanted to have a wedding card done for his particular for his daughter from a small village. And these were in fact, these presented case studies to us without us and us moving into that direction. Yes, we knew that there was an opportunity in the wedding industry. But now we know that there is a big opportunity of actually disrupting the wedding cards business by using digital and these kinds of things are coming as insights from customers themselves. And it's really interesting. So the market will teach us just as it has taught radio, it has taught television, it has taught the OTB business, it will teach us in terms of what consumers really want if we keep our ears to the ground. Oh, you mean like Shah Rukh Khan would be inviting somebody for a wedding? He probably will invite him sometime. Amazing. Tell me one thing, you are like, you know, the brand has been built, it is visible. I mean, I saw there's a lot of demand for it. But tell me what have been some of the learnings of during this journey of building this brand? I think the learnings have been the, I mean, these are cliche words, but the fact is customer is king because the customer dictates how your product is defined. And if you can create that product with him, the user experience as what now everyone talks about beat the pathway to commerce on site or the experiences offline, there needs to be cohesiveness from a brand point of view. You can't have some like for example, if I were to say, let's say Milkhaji who's on board, a Milkhaji who's extremely respected and is a legend and an icon in our country. And who's also on go nuts, by the way, is off site and on site presence and aura and communication should not be dissonant, where it actually affects his own personal brand. So these are things that we are very careful about. And a lot of it comes from my deeper understanding of talent and having worked with in the music, in the television and in the film side of the business and to be able to really not treat talent as commodities, but treat them as talent that is going to be creating unbelievable and memorable content for customers. Right. My final question is where do you see go nuts in two years from now? And second, what is the scope of influencer marketing and what kind of trends will define it? I've asked three questions in one, so yes. Yeah. So let me answer the influencer marketing first. We will always look, I mean, this is historic, right? Even in the era of offline businesses or brick and mortar stores, we've always gone and got a recommendation from the salesman who's selling us from saris to washing machines to anything. Somebody very recently, there was a panel I happened to listen to and they said that what would they prefer and how would people actually navigate to in retail? They said that almost 85% they would prefer that they would go to the store. Now that trend is slowly changing abroad and you have instances of Burberry that actually use their offline presence more in terms of people coming and feeling the product but buying online. They're actually moving their customers online. I see that influencer marketing in the way people understand it today, which is basically using people to manipulate, if I may use that word, or influence buying behavior is going to change very well because customers will expect brands to be more authentic. People to be more trustworthy, brand trust as we call it is essential. So therefore, even when we work with brands, we're careful not to have our talent pool work on brands that are actually misrepresenting themselves. It's very important and we make sure that we have all the legal documentation in place because you don't want a situation which comes back to haunt you. So, authenticity is important, trust is very, very important and at the end of the day, we've got to know for a fact that these artists also for them are brands in their own right and their own brand longevity is determined by the kind of products and services that they are going to influence. So, I'm always a very skeptical about somebody posting on Facebook or sending a tweet and getting a couple of lax because you have not really kind of, you've just got the money, you don't care and you've just put it out. But I think and in many cases we've seen that blow up in people's faces. I think now it's time where customers also understand that. Just as very recently we heard the story about one of the musicians actually buying Facebook likes and followers to be a commander higher price on influencer marketing. It doesn't that tell you something about how far this influence can be bought. Therefore, it's very important for brands to be authentic and create that level of trust because consumers are not stupid. But I think it's still in the growing phase and a lot of new things will come up. Of course, I mean there will be greater credibility in demand. I mean the more focus on that as we move along from the platforms as well as from the celebrity side. But thank you Mr George for sharing these thoughts. We have a lot of questions but we are out of time hopefully very soon in the next conversation. Thank you so much. It's always a pleasure being on the show. Sorry about the technical glitch. I've got to figure out this part. But thank you anyways. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you Mr Amin for doing this wonderful conversation here on the screen for all of us. We've all taken some notes here. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Thank you.