 We move on to a very interesting Chief Digital Officer's panel who will be speaking about the state of digital marketing and identifying its valuable marketing trends. Let me invite and stage the moderator who's going to take over co-founded managing director of QQ, digital media, my friend, Mr. Sameer Pankera. Thank you, Sid. Good evening, good afternoon everyone. Always nice to be at the exchange for media conferences. Happy to be here today. We've got a really interesting set of panelists and I'm going to have them over and stage in just a couple of minutes. But I just wanted to open by setting the context. We're talking about the state of digital marketing and the trends. What we're not going to do is spoon feed you with these are the three trends that we see emerging in the digital marketing space. I think this audience is intelligent enough to glean from the conversations that we are about to have what it is likely to work out to be. But what we like to contextualize is maybe three things. First, I think we're in extremely interesting times because the way we perceive it at QQ and I think it's something that is emerging in the overall market is that the worldwide web, as we all know it, is emerging to become the worldwide video web. So internet and video, and this is my pet phrase, I apologize if you've heard me say this before at earlier conferences, but the internet and video are becoming synonymous. The second macro thing or trend that we are seeing or theme is the decentralization. And Mr. Khanna just referred to some part of it, decentralization of power of the internet. I mean blockchain is just one example, but if you actually start joining the dots there are several examples of how the power and influence has got fragmented. And you see multiple social media platforms, especially for younger people. If you really skew below 20, most people are spending a lot more time on Instagram than Facebook. And that's already happening and Facebook's aged up, already scaling, but the younger people on different platforms. So there's a decentralization of power. And along with that point, the big theme that's emerging is the rise of digital superstars. And if any of you were at the first YouTube fan fest, there was a really sort of epic moment as the first fan fest closed at Bandra Fort, where Shah Rukh Khan was on stage, and he was stalking and saying bye, and there was no punchline, and the cops had come, I was in the audience, and they had to shut it down. So the superwoman emerged from behind him, and he was stalking just as I am right now, and suddenly the crowd erupted. And it was such an epic moment because at that point in time, if you looked at the audience, they were about 80% under the age of 24. And given that instance of choosing between Shah Rukh mid-speech and cheering for superwoman, there was no booing Shah Rukh, of course. Everybody was a fan of Shah Rukh, but at that particular instance, the reflex action was to cheer superwoman. And that is a really important sort of take away where one is on digital, leveraging the power of a digital superstar in order to engage the youth is something important. Hopefully we'll see some of those trends coming out in our conversation today. So broadly, what this results in is everything on digital converging towards video. More of content marketing, and this is not rocket science, you've heard it over and over again, but I think more of the same is also what we need. And somewhat more centered around these influences, and not just doing that, but as I call on the panelists, you'll hear what the, you know, amazing things. And we spent an hour before this, so we've done a lot of homework, I'm sure you're going to enjoy this. Let me call on stage first, Ankush Manchanda from Bacardi. We have Ankush over, give him a big hand, ladies and gentlemen. Abhishek Aluwalia from Mondales, probably the most loved brand here who hasn't loved Cadbury's and Oreo and whatnot. Shyam says he likes to be called some Shuddin Jasani from Isobar, who heads up Isobar and also programmatic advertising for the den group overall. And Shonil Charles from the Times News Network. Thank you. I'm good. I'm going to stand through this. So, yeah, you know, I'm trying to deflect the conversation instead of being centered around us to so that you can talk to them and I can just be behind the scenes, so to speak. So Ankush, I actually want to open with you. I discovered something when we were chatting backstage that that kind of shocked me. And what emerged was I heard in this whole play and focus towards in reaching out to audiences directly through through content. Very few companies have actually walked that talk and I can tell you certainly the panelists here have and perhaps that's why they've been chosen. But one thing that shocked me, actually, you should narrate the shocking story. You know what I'm talking about. Millions of fans, you turned them off overnight. Tell us that story. Thanks for putting me on the block first up. But nevertheless, it's an interesting story. So as a part of one of the most fun and the cool brand or portfolio brands that we work in in this country, which is Bacardi and its portfolio brands. And as a part of the digital team, we are always enticed with the with what are the new trends that we can bring on board to bring alive our brands towards the young consumer. And how can we create that engagement? Okay, so for about 18 months back, what we saw was there was this trend of digital superstars was being coming up very, very aggressively. When I, who I call a digital superstar is basically an all India Bacchot, Abhishek Kenny or Kannan Gill or a film companion. These are kind of, these are the people who have made their entire lifestyle or they made their entire content attuned to their followers, which are there on Instagram, Twitter and YouTube. And what we embarked on as a company and as a brand was a commitment that we're going to go and co create all our content in an entertaining manner, which is going to be hosted on our partners channel, which is the creator channel. So overnight, we actually decided and it was an experiment in India. Overnight we decided to shut all our brand channels, stop focusing on the branded content which was become, which was becoming repetitive and which was becoming machine led, just like Sir Amit said a while ago. And we brought in the human emotions back into our content space by providing entertaining content to our consumers with the help of these content creators. And at one point in time, we used to have like I told you earlier, at one point in time, the Bacardi India Facebook page had a million followers and a reduced YouTube channel used to have 70,000 subs, which are purely organic. You shut that all down overnight. Sorry. You shut that all down overnight. We shut them down all overnight. We experimented. We put a lot of risk on the table. It proved successful, not only in terms of ROIs in terms of delivery of content, but also in terms of brand message comprehension by our consumers, our consumers engaged with us. And we saw that massively in our social listening database where the Bacardi name and its portfolio name started popping up very, very extensively. What started as a one market example or a case study is now actually running across 13 markets in Africa, Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, and even Eastern Europe. All our brand pages are getting shut down because we don't want to focus on branded content anymore, but we want to be the most entertaining content in the community. So, you know, I might be misinformed, but from what I hear, I have never come across a brand that has had any social cloud of any significance that has turned it off overnight. I know, Shams, have you heard of this? Anybody in the panel who's actually shut down the reach that they've had suddenly overnight? No. You come across anything? Most of the brands, sorry, most of the brands in India still want to do posts on digital and keep their 5 million, 10 million likes alive on their Facebook page, which is irrelevant in today's world because you don't have organic reach. So, yeah, I've never heard of a brand which actually does that. So, Ankush, those 1 million fans just on India, and you've done this across Southeast Asia and Middle East Africa, I understand. And so, it's fair to say that the new world or the emerging markets are teaching the emerged markets the future direction of things to come? Absolutely. See, the emerging markets or the developing markets have the appetite to take a risk, which the developed markets today do not have the appetite to. So, we are actually leading the curve for the entire Bacardi world today where we are telling our counterparts in the developed world, okay, this is a trend coming up. Let's just follow this one. So, the other trend that we see coming up and more and more FMCG brands are utilizing is social listening, okay? So, on one side, while your content is being co-created with entertainers, on the other side, the analytics... I want to come back to that because that's a broader point, but I'm going to put you on this spot and if you can, you can choose to answer this. These followers that you had, were they all organic? On the Duris channel, absolutely. And on Facebook, were they acquired or organic or a mix of both? Half organic, half acquired. Got it. And so, you shut that up. Now, interestingly what's also, what you're listening over here is something, well, you could call it interesting to put it euphemistically. I'm sure you noticed that, and most of you have noticed, engagement on Facebook has fallen off the cliff. And it's been happening over a period of time, but since Jan, a lot of companies have been focused on driving traffic to their websites from Facebook. Anybody in the audience here who's using, who has been using Facebook to drive traffic to their website? Do you see a show of hands? Yeah. What's been your experience? Have you seen a massive drop-off in the last four to five months from Facebook driving traffic to your site? Yeah, exactly. So reach and engagement has been killed? Exactly. So call this wall street pressure or whatever you might, but what's clearly become evident is between the two behemoths, Facebook's attempting to be more content-oriented, but kind of schizophrenically also killing engagement of people who are trying to create content on Facebook. But wants to be much more content than just social. And YouTube, that is massively content, is trying to be more social. If you see the kind of features, community features and things that they're launching, they just announced at VidCon right now that they're also going to launch stories. So guess what? No points for guessing. So you'll have stories on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube now has a story feature coming up. So, you know, it's going to become so a lot of the same. And this is what I mean in doing so. The power is being decentralized from the big guys, actually in the hands of the users and the people who've become large on these platforms. So, Shams, maybe we can quickly move to you in terms of, you run programmatic. I want to actually pull the audience again. How many people are familiar with the term programmatic advertising? Raise your hands. And apart from you, sir, who would like to take a shot at explaining what programmatic is? Probably no one. So over to you. Can we demystify it? Because very few people understand it. A lot of people use the term. I'm going to use it in a very simple way. But a 30 second definition that people can digest. Basically buying audiences, not spots. Basic. I mean, I'll put it as basic as that. You use automation to buy audiences, the right kind of audiences. Now, there's an entire science behind how do you understand those audiences? What is the kind of data that you can collect on that? But in very simple terms, you will not be buying a spot on a particular home page. You'll be buying audiences. Just very simply put in terms of that. Now, coming up to what's happening on this space, technology has reached to a stage through programmatic, through data, that I can use deterministic IDs to talk to individual consumers. What's a deterministic ID? Which means that I know or say, for example, what happened on Cambridge Analytica, when this whole fiasco happened was that for each and every individual person, I know hundreds and thousands of attributes of what they like, what they dislike, what other communications they do. For example, WhatsApp knows you better than you know yourself. Because WhatsApp will be reading all. Now, that entire data is deterministic ID because it is centered around your WhatsApp ID, for example. The same thing is on Facebook, the same thing we do through CRM, through data. Now, that is something that you would use in your data pool when you're doing programmatic targeting. So I can actually do so much. The technology has already reached to a level where, you know, something like which we did earlier, which was retargeting and, you know, cookies and look-alikes. That's five years old. Today I can do one-on-one communication. But the difficult part for a brand is that do we really want to do one-to-one communication? So the technology is there. How is it that you're going to create content which is going to enable you to talk to the right consumer in the right way and still not be so expensive that I need to create. So if I'm monolace, for example, who needs to reach out to almost a billion people in India because everyone consumes chocolates, I'm not going to create like today there are 400 million users. I'm not going to create 400 million different content pieces because I want to reach out to four now. We need to start realizing who and listening to a consumer is just rather than just using programmatic as a channel to reach to them because programmatic can also give you a lot of insights. Data can give you a lot of insights. Like, for example, someone who, I think we were talking about one of the, I think we were talking about the videos. There were five-second videos versus seven-second videos, some completion rates that are there. There's so much data available that data is only used to fine-tune your media. The data is not used to fine-tune your content. And that's the power of data that we're actually not using. So we, for example, we use that because as a media and a creative agency, we combine those two. So you need to use the data that is coming out. Listen to your consumers both on your media, your social media, your search. The consumers are talking to you. Listen to them. What do they want? They are interested in watching this video. Please give more of that video. They're not interested in this content. Please stop giving this content to them or change the content that is there. Shams, where's the gap in this? Because, you know, I'm sure the audiences, you and I, we've heard this before about, listen to your customer. Even before digital came up, right? It's always been about that. Nothing has changed. But somehow, between the making that statement and you all are thought leaders in your space, making that statement and the execution of that, there is such a massive gap. Where is some of this, and it's from a spend perspective as well as this execution perspective. So let me specifically ask this, do clients actually understand the data that you're throwing at them? Is there a need to do this education in smaller groups? Are we getting into this analysis paralysis where everybody thinks that they're using data but not really actually using it? They discuss it but they don't implement the learnings. Are you seeing that? Yeah, so I'll throw that up to the clients here as well. So let me just add to that, we try to be the ones who make sense out of it. Now it depends upon the maturity level of the client, how mature the client is and then how much we want to talk to them, what level of conversation that we want to talk to them. But really, yes, you need to make sense out of the data. There's too much data. As a digital practitioner who's been in this industry for 18 years. So there's a need to simplify. There is a lot of data around. We need to pick and choose what data we really need to use and what is the KPI. Everything comes down to KPI and the most important... But does everything come down to KPI? If you juxtapose that to what Mr. Khanna was saying, that have we killed the real use of digital by making everything two numbers based? Correct, but what I mean by KPI is, and that's what the main thing is, digital today is too much driven by digital marketing KPI. So when I'm saying KPI's, I'm not saying, it's too much driven by likes, impressions, video views, time spent, engagement. Now those are a very small set of KPI's. A bigger KPI with the brand managers and the companies that are looking at is, what's my sales? Is it really making a difference to my brand? Are we sure you want to jump into this? Just make it as simple as that. That's what I mean by KPI's. No, absolutely. How much it is influenced by what is Dhanda Kitna Bada? Because you hear a lot of that and a lot of good stuff gets flushed down the toilet because of that. So how do you see it at Mondaliz? Okay, I will... And this essentially KPI of revenue is something which, you know, e-commerce, the business unit I represent, we are governed by that. When I say that, at the end of the day, e-commerce is as much as revenue as well as equity, right? So bottom line is, for us, is that if you're investing $100, the KPI in terms of revenue, that is one. And then there is, you know, is it helping me drive equity of the brand? Does it get picked up in the tracks? You know, our consumers talking about it in social media. And we've done some executions in India, in China and other markets, which has proven that, you know, e-commerce can do both. So I think KPI is definitely... It depends on how you want to classify KPI. For us, it is both revenue as well as, you know... Yeah, I think... Sorry, I'm just cutting it out there. Too many... That's why digital marketing is still not big, is because the power of digital marketing is not really, you know, taken. Right now we're talking about just small KPI's of Impressions Clicks. We're not really talking about how businesses are being impacted by digital. There are huge businesses, legacy businesses, which are being challenged because people are using the power of digital to create brands and sell and content. And we have lots of examples of that. That's something that brands are not understanding. When you say digital marketing is not big, I do want to contextualize. It's 12,000 crores, but spent where? 12,000 crores. I mean, just think about that for a second. How many people who are actually creating content are seeing that? Or is that all going to media? And we'll come back to that. But I want to come back to you. I wish I could just... You know, I don't know how many of you saw... There was a very interesting campaign that Cadbury's did. How many Shirley Setia and Arman Malik fans in the audience? No Shirley Setia or Arman Malik fans? Okay, so very few people watching you. How many people watch YouTube? It seems like a... Okay. And you did that. And how many people know Arman Malik? Let me put a point. How many people have consumed Cadbury? Everybody. Like... How many have used Cadbury as a brand to express their love on Valentine's? A lot more girls. I thought it would be the other way around. So yeah. So the fact is that what we did in Valentine's and just to build on the point that it is about creating a differentiated proposition, integrating on what's happening above the line and bringing that thought in in terms of a proposition to the consumer. So we created something called a gift box which consumers, a gifta can buy, give it to the gifty. And the gifty essentially opens, you know, the, you know, blips open, opens the box, gets an augmented reality application and essentially the content comes to life. So when I say content, it's the personalization of messaging, you know, which, you know, expression of love, you know, and how the person feels. So now things like this essentially is what digital can do, right? And the idea behind that was creating an experience that was the core thought. This was the application of that thought of creating that experience. That's right. That's right. And then you had Arman and Shirley create a jingle that kind of dovetail with this. And then there was integration even in social media of this particular. And I shouldn't call it a jingle because it wasn't. It was a great song. Yeah. Far better than just a jingle in that sense. Right, it was a song. Actual content. Yes. It was a content. And then content was deployed not only in TV, in social, but also in e-commerce initiative. We were running almost like a 360. Right. And which essentially drove revenue. Right? So it was, yes, it drove equity. We, you know, we owned Valentine's in that time. Anything you can share with the audience? What was the lift in brand? I could say we were stocked out. It was? We were stocked out. You were running out of inventory. We were stocked out on this particular SKU. We, you know, it was the, again, I can't share numbers, but it was, you know, much ahead of what we had planned. You know, the demand was much ahead. And that essentially shows that if your proposition is right, it's well integrated. Right. And there is enough noise around this. You get a multiplier effect. Got it. I'm going to come to you in a second. But while we're on the topic of the impact, Ankush, just quick 15, 30 seconds. The stuff that you did with the influencers and on the influencers channels, not a Bakari channel because you shut that down. And I think incredible thought there. What, what was the lift in actual, what can you share in brand recall in business, what actually went up? So see the drastic shift when we did from branded content to entertaining content was that. And branded content means stuff that you commissioned. Branded content means. Giving creators this broad brief and letting them be a lot more independent in what they were putting out. Absolutely. Branded content means something that my own company or my own digital agency will produce it for us. We'll put it on a brand channel and then put $100 to push that to the relevant audiences. Okay. Whereas a creator content will mean we'll just brief the creator. We'll give them a guidance. They will make the content basis the nativeness of their own channel and their own followers. And the brand message will be seeded into that particular messaging. Okay. So when we made this shift between branded content to create content, we did a campaign with all India Bakchot called the Bakardi House Party Sessions campaign. It was a three month long campaign with Tanmay and with Nuclear hosting it. We not only got extremely high numbers of user generated content, which are ranging in about three to 4,000 music pieces that we could work with. And the brand lift was up to about 4X. So 4X brand lift versus what you've done as branded content. Absolutely. So 4X was the gap between when you do branded content whereas once you do creator led content is what our brand got on digital only on the back of three months of production. Fantastic. What was your expectation when you went to market with this? Did you expect it to be double? Do you expect it to be 4X? Do you expect it to be 30% better? Honestly, we were also shocked about it because we never imagined it was an experiment. You commissioned this basis some thought. What was that thought? How much better? Or was it a risk that you took? So we basically looked at a trend line in the year prior to that where we had experimented with influencer led content and for the first time what we had done was we put the same content on an influencer page and same content on a brand channel page. The influencer page got us nine times more engagement. Wow. Who is your media agency and your creative agency? I would not like to say that. Isn't it public knowledge? It's BBTO and OMD. Okay, awesome. And they were obviously supportive of this. That's how you pulled it off. Not really. More to Shawnee Lynn. Okay. Not really actually because we actually decided to go and work directly with the content creators because it's best when you sit with them face to face and you interact with them on a very, very personal level because you have to understand quite a few things. One, the content creator needs to understand that he's embodying a brand. It's a relationship that you're building with the person. It could last one year, two years, three years, but it's a long-term proposition. It is not an association where you call him, ask him to do three tweets and the brand manager tells him, okay, what to host. And that's the point about the sprint versus the marathon. This is about a marathon, not a sprint. We come back to that, but Shawnee, very interesting time. So you, as the Times News Network and you're talking about a serious thing and we all know that news in India has become a lot of, is dramatic to say the least and we know that one man can be credited with that, but everybody's followed. Correct. And you guys created that trend, I guess. That's right. Knowingly or unknowingly. But the point is, do you feel with all that's going on in digital and you're responsible of making that shift for an incumbent into this new space? And obviously the Times Group does a lot of cool stuff on digital, but in news, are you threatened by what's going on and how you're going to crack it and tell us something about what do you think is going to be path-breaking for you to achieve this? So, you know, we currently have this challenging task of taking a massive existing news brand and that too, like Sameer rightly said, you know, is in its position, has a way of delivering news, which is Times Now, online. And we've been at it for the last year or so and we realize that, you know, it's diametrically separate. The TV guys can't do online. So we've, in the past one year or so, we've gone about and set up a team of about 200 people who write, there's an editorial newsroom which writes about 5,700 stories a day. There's a digital video team that does, you know, made for digital video. But what we felt was that we do video for a living. You know, we've been doing broadcasts for the last 10, 15 years and we should ideally be the winners in this game. But video has got extremely democratized. There's a lot of people out there who are making content which is as good if not better. Luckily for us, we have an edge up that we have facilities, equipment, you know, talent. But again, they're all programmed towards broadcast. So the challenge this year is to shift everyone's mindset to think broadcast plus digital as well as, you know, incubate this digital first video. But it's not easy. There's a complicated audience in this country. You know, it's difficult to create content which appeals to different age groups. So we are struggling with the younger lot. And, you know, one of my examples, one of the things which we decided to do on the get-go with regards to transitioning to video was we had to kind of understand that we're not programming for ourselves anymore. You know, most of our channels are stuff that we would like to watch easy to manage, easy to hire talent and get that going. But what the large masters of this country, especially the younger lot are watching now and not necessarily what the traditional broadcasters are putting out. So I usually give this example that, you know, if you go to YouTube trending on any given day, folks like you or a lot of people in this room will not consume 80% of the content which actually India is consuming. So we're having that, you know, challenge right now to figure out how to bridge that gap. Like I said, there's hundreds of producers and, you know, talent out there producing video. And then the big guys are also trying to come in like us, trying to play the game. But it's a, you know, a fair open field and everyone's competing with each other right now. You seem to have had a lot of success, at least with Mira now, which is scaled massively. You know, obviously, Fede Suza at the helm of that has done a fantastic job in terms of bringing that to digital. And we see, is that something that's emerging dynamically or is that a planned approach because you certainly got a big win on that one. So you know, I would say that Mira is in a unique position. It's a new product for us also, just been around for about a year and a half. We have a fantastic anchor leading that, who's being able to, who's one of the few anchors who's being able to bridge from broadcast to television, which is Fede Suza, as most of you would know. And what my feeling is, and I've been, you know, speaking to Fede about this as well as management, is that I think a lot more people, and I'm sure in this room as well, have, are familiar with Fede, but have consumed the content on a social platform or online or on your mobile device, rather than see her on TV. So that's an interesting play out. It wasn't designed, and we didn't do it the thing, but we're going to build on it. And, you know, we're looking at additional anchors who can, you know, bridge the gap from broadcast to television, broadcast to digital. Another digital index, sort of knowledge index for the audience. How many of you have caught up with a guy called Dhruv Rathi online? Hands, anybody seen Dhruv Rathi? Okay, one or two people. I mean, these are some sensations in new space. I mean, he calls himself an independent news agency of sorts. Correct. And if you actually measure analytics of Dhruv Rathi versus Republic online solely, because Dhruv Rathi is not available offline or on analog, it is off the charts. And it's, well, since I saw that, but I remember it being like three X or four X in terms of engagement and almost near similar scale. And this is with zero money versus one would assume that there is a lot of money backing a giant like Republic. So again, coming back to the point of the decentralization of power where somebody as an individual just by dint of content and sort of their own take on stuff. And the beauty, I think, is on digital. The markets have become so fragmented. There's nothing. You have to find your niche and then blow it up because there's a market for everyone. If there's a market for Dhinchak Pooja, I'm sure. Have you heard of Dhinchak Pooja at least? Okay, awesome. So people have heard of Dhinchak Pooja, not Dhruv Rathi. But, yeah, so, you know, there is a market for everything and I know it's cringe pop, but so be it. So, you know, just joining some of the dots, you know, Champs, we talked a little bit about this backstage, but if you can elaborate, everybody approaches this and the whole, the sprint versus a marathon analogy and says, okay, now I had to check box digital, so I did digital. Oh, now the new thing is content marketing with influencers. So check that off, right? But between you and Ankush, maybe if you could talk about very quickly how it cannot be, how that influencer marketing thing is not the end goal, it's actually the start point. And then how did you connect the dots? So talk about it macro and then maybe Ankush could quickly fill in on their specific example. Yeah, so I think when we were talking about earlier, first digital agencies are very good at also doing that. So I'm sure if your digital agency is not doing that, I'm there, so we'll do that. So more than happy to work with influencers, not a problem. So what's happening in India is that a lot of brands are using influencers as a sprint, as you said. I have a campaign, I have a massive campaign and I need to create noise around it. For this particular campaign, for the next 45 days, let me try to get influencers to talk about it for the next 45 days. I'll pay them and then switch it off. That's the normal trend of how we do it out here in India, regionally and globally, by region I mean Asia Pacific and globally. The trend is to have an association which is a longer term association with your main influencers. And I don't mean celebrities, I mean influencers. So there's a difference, you have celebrities and then you have influencers. You use your celebrities, like for example, you've got Virat Kohli who is now pretty much on every brand has got Virat Kohli on it. But there are a lot of influencers out there who are influencing a particular community or a particular target that is there. Use them as a part of your longer term strategy. Use them for a year, a year and a half, two years, three years on a sustained effort to build your brand, to build communication with your audience and to build a two-way channel. It's not just a one-way channel, it's not just the influencer talking about it and no one listening. Could you say it's almost like making multiple influencers into brand ambassadors? Absolutely. So rather than one Virat Kohli, you could have 20 influencers who actually do the role of a brand ambassador because they're doing it for one year now. Absolutely, it could be a thousand. I'll give you an example of how now brands and businesses are getting created using a channel like this. So I was in Cannes last week and there's a brand called Glossier which is a makeup brand which is created just using digital and which is challenging the legacy makeup brands that are there and that's increasingly happening because traditional brands are really using digital just as an add-on. So it's a brand that's born on digital? Completely. It actually started off as a blog. It was a blogger who started this off and she then went on and created a brand which is now getting sold because they are co-creating the brand and the product with their consumers who then become influencers for them. So for example they came up with this so there is a makeup cleanser that they spoke about and how they actually and I'm not going to talk about the entire case study you can go and look at it online but how they used social to first understand what the consumers want. They reached out to thousands of consumers. So your point about listening to the consumers was done socially. No money really spent. No money. They have a technology behind it. They have data behind it but I'm saying understand what the consumers are talking to you not just use data to communicate to them understand what they are talking to you create a channel where you can actually speak to them and get their feedback create, co-create brands with them so there were a thousand people who created this product with them those thousand people then went and spoke to two hundred, five hundred thousand people in their network saying that I created this brand and that brand has got a ten thousand waiting list now they want to stock and this is a digital only brand sold only digitally created only digitally using content and people only digitally and they are challenging and there are so many examples there is Michelle Fan is another great example I mean New York she's all over hoardings etc half a billion dollar valuation of a business beauty facts subscription stuff like that and I think there's some happening in India also I think there's a few digital only brands for food for men's grooming by the way is a big segment we're seeing it's not I'm not saying that digital here digital do only digital brands but use the power of this medium the way it is supposed to be meant and not just something that I think for digital as you rightly pointed out we used to earlier say a full amount of money is left so let's do digital that was used to be ten years back now it's saying that okay let's do some influencer marketing because there's some money let's see how I can do some influencer marketing here and there and that really is not doing the job that it is supposed to content is not really doing the job that it's supposed to Sameer I'll answer your question in two ways with two points one is the importance and the investment levels that the digital medium gets in the FMCG companies today now at my organization I can give you an example because I've been with Bacardi for about six years now it took us about three to five years to make our organization a digital first communication organization okay today our budget investments on a media split are 90% on digital and only 10% go on above the line mediums okay the 10% with a clear objective of ensuring reach and recall and the 90% with a clear objective of that you have to deliver engagement with the young audience because it's been scientifically proven that the higher your engagement the more is your increase in the purchase of intent okay that's been proven as a this you did not because your surrogate advertising on TV didn't work but because you saw the results of digital because one would argue as a liquor company you can't do much but you could do surrogate but you didn't think this delivers that much more results absolutely I mean we still release a TV commercial every year on television and on sports channels but that's to a very specific different set of audience which is above 30 but we also have to acknowledge the fact that we are living in a country which has the largest under 30 population today they don't believe in one way they don't want to be advertising anymore and power to these guys they want to have a two-way communication with the each and every brand that they are engaging with and they want to be emotionally involved with those brands and hence comes the engagement part of each and every campaign that you are driving forces okay the second point that I will answer is we as brand marketers have taken a buzz words have taken a buzz words so for example first is digital which when Google then it meant video today it is influencer okay nobody connects the dots from 1 to 4 together and they don't think of the brand and the center of it or the objective that why is the consumer on digital today okay just to give you an example yes my fellow colleagues in the digital space also do that because they have a checklist or a checkbox to be signed off with whereas there is another approach that you can take with influencer marketing for example when we launched the campaign called Bacardi house party sessions with AIB and nuclear we not only announced the fourth time you plugged them this is amazing they are really awesome partners we are really proud of the work that they have done I am sure they are awesome yeah so it was not about working with AIB that's the first one fifth okay and counting it was about the messaging that the brand wanted to create and the brand wanted to create a platform which is connect music and give it back to the music community and you wanted the biggest distribution partner with you which fortunately unfortunately AIB has it the fifth time okay but power to those guys it started with a call out video it came to an entries it came to selection of the artist it came to giving the artist a platform where they could perform and it finally came down to giving the music videos and then performing at NH7 music festival it was a full-blown 360 campaign the centerpiece was the influencer and the freedom to the influencer 100% freedom to the influencer with a brand guideline that this is what the brand stands for this is the challenge this is the objective please do what you are best at we've got six minutes I want to do one last round for each one of you one of the biggest things that we are seeing is you know we talked about this number this about 12,000 crores give or take 2,000 crores depending which research report we have spent on digital you've heard each one of these gentlemen speak of you know the forward-thinking approach to what is the right way to deal with this industry and one would assume that thought leaders and anybody who's been on the panel today would I think echo similar stuff however oddly enough less than 250 crores is going towards exactly what we are talking about and at any such medium if you talk to the thought leaders they would say this you're leading an agency we have CDOs here CMOs here what is you're making your dent in your organization but speak on behalf of the other folks and maybe we can start with from one of this perspective you have this view the video market just do 250% last year no company has increased their budgets by more than 25-30% there's this massive gap that's now getting created because the market's growing 300% inventory is growing and budgets are going up by 20-30% and we know this we know the future is there and this strategy exists why can't we see people saying I spent 20 crores I'm going to make it 50 crores why is that not happening I just want to add to that it's just not an issue about only 250 crores we're actually seeing a depletion in the ticket sizes what marketers were willing to pay since we're in the content creation business as well and we do a lot of branded content for partners where people were willing to pay say 50-60 lakhs for a piece of high quality content now the demands are coming at we need to do it in 15 so we're seeing that trend but the overall ad-ex is growing there isn't any decline in that and this is probably the fault of the content creation community and speaking on their behalf I think it's very typical in India that we fight over things that are emerging and so people are maybe competing and dropping their prices versus coalescing and sort of helping lift that entire piece for a 15-second video in China by the way an influencer with more than 1 million fans on this platform called DOE he can make 30 lakhs for a 15-second video and 1 million fans there are many people in India who have more than 1 million fans on social media now that is the reality but I would say that there is probably less than 5% who would be able to talk beyond double digital acts for content so there is this gap what gives, how is this paradox even existing? first of all I think let me talk about our organization so overall in terms of digital now when I say digital it is both content as well as content production as well as pure media that percentage has gone up tremendously approximately on a category like chocolate it will be as very high double digit now obviously that shift is happening though TV is a category like ours TV has to be there but digital is I have seen in past 3 years the percentage contribution which is allocated to digital has really gone up content is one piece I think as an organization we are really working on because it is exactly like when you make a film the film also needs to have you make that much effort to create go to the right production house to make it similarly when you do a digital campaign you need to make sure that the quality in terms of the content has to be that powerful so I think the organization has realized it chocolates when we do it today we ensure that even if it is a digital only content it is the right investment support in the content piece itself but I think overall as an industry and FMCG particularly we have some way to go we have 2 more minutes that was a 3 minute buzzer we are not out of time yet but so quickly Ankush the right amount of money going somewhere when you did that campaign did you do PPMs did you do PPMs the typical way of commissioning content where the production house then comes and presents the concept before they go to shoot did you have detailed PPMs no and so this is my point that in the same structure if you try and execute this and not sort of let it lose and take that risk it is impossible to execute so just tell us why when do you see this gap getting bridged between what is happening in the market and the opportunity and the brands actually spending the money to fill that gap how many years 6 months 3 years 5 years 2 years maybe another 12 to 18 months that is fantastic news then see it is a gap of 2 points basically one is the education now most of the as a digital team when we sit in a marketing conversation with our brand teams you will see there is a 90% people who are from the offline world and only 10% people are from the digital world it is there is a responsibility of a digital manager to speak the language of the 90% if you can explain your data points going back to sham's point also you need to drill it down to 2 or 3 data points which are relevant to those people sitting across the table if you can tell them what they want to know the money will shift automatically point number one why is the construct of people that way why is the construct of people that skewed them does it mean you need to change the that is what are the people who are sitting on the table having this discussion that is the second part of the entire conversation that people in the marketing world need to accept that marketing is no more what it used to be 2 years or 3 years back the sooner you accept it that it is being driven by an 18 year old by a 20 year old by a 30 year old decentralized and people creating brand on the digital platforms the sooner that shift will happen where a balance is going to come up Sonil before we end with sham's what is your time prediction when is the 250 crores going to go to 2000 crores he said 18 months I am putting words in your mouth when is this market this gap that is between brands spending money and everything that we are talking about is not translating to actual revenue when is that gap going to get fulfilled I have been at this for about 7 years and it was very slow to begin with but we are at a tipping point right now I would also put it between 12 to 24 months okay awesome I have a slightly different point of view first 12,000 crores is not enough that is when we spoke about digital itself but at least that is growing at 30% it is growing at 30% correct but it is still not enough number one number two is that now to leverage that 12,000 crores 12,000 crores is only media please understand that what is being tracked there is pure media if the content the assets that are being created are not tracked the disproportionate spends between media that is being spent and the creation of content the amount of money that is being spent on content is extremely disproportionate that proportion is not on television on television you pay a bomb to create that content and you pay a bomb to also get that content out on digital it is not like that it is commoditized the client comes and says 5,000 crores make a video that is where the start of the brief happens the start of the brief is not like what is done with the AIB that is not the start of the brief the start of the brief is 5,000 crores what do you end up creating sometimes we put on our pockets we need content which is some level let's try to create that level that will only change once we are able to put content on the table with the client and say let's talk about these KPIs that is what I was talking about digital can make a difference to your brand in your business you need to invest in the right kind of assets to take advantage of that and that is when the conversation changes can we take one question if there is a question or we can wrap up I know we are a minute over I have been told you can't take questions but I love breaking rules I have asked you before the lady there I love you baby I love you so much I wish I could give you the whole lady to ask questions it's a long one we can take it offline it seems like a long one sorry I have never worked with a small and medium enterprise I am sure there are smaller influencers available there the sense is not about influencer marketing it's about what your challenges and how to best achieve that challenge I will give you an example like Dhruv Rathi the example that Sameer gave that guy has 20,000 subscribers his YouTube channel is about 500,000 now sorry I am sure there are new up and coming talent in the market which have those 20,000, 30,000, 40,000 followers which the followers of those people can be the clients of your clients that you are looking at so you need to look at a match between what size and what investments you can do but don't look at it only as a piece of influencer marketing look at first what's your objective and who can best deliver it the right skill of influencer for the right department yes ok thanks so much thank you very much gentlemen thank you thank you for being a lovely audience you guys are phenomenal man give it up for the fours on the stage alright so well that's Sameer man I got a little insecure of you thinking over my job because you are so well spoken that's not what my life feels but anyways ok hold on guys we've got Mr. Ago Sivastav Lakshmi the group executive director and CEO he is yearning to give you all gifts sir can you please come up on stage and I will take the names Sameer for you this is a customized gift come on ladies and gentlemen applaud it and of course after that sir sir is your own sir so I will take you very nicely you have to hold my hand we will hold each other's hands Shyam Shrutin there he is the short of this group sir after that but we won't give it to him we will have a contest hold on since Sameer said he counted like he said 6 times all India Baksho ok we will now have a 10 second contest where you say all India Baksho as many times in 10 seconds and then you get a gift come on come on right sir love you love you ok AIB AIB AIB AIB AIB AIB AIB AIB AIB AIB AIB AIB AIB AIB AIB AIB AIB AIB AIB AIB AIB AIB AIB AIB AIB AIB AIB AIB Ladies and gentlemen can I tell you the inside thing he's got an AIB tattoo on his thighs as well which he exposed in the awards tonight sir next gift to him sir sir that lovely smile that you give to your neighbor's wife give it to him as well sir alright out next Abhishek Alwalia hold on let's see who's Abhishek out of these two oh superb sir you've been following that's how you keep a tab on who's following and Shaniu Charles he deserves one too love you sir well done so wanted a picture with all of you as well because he has to tell his wife that he's been here for a conference alright here you go wonderful tech march hashtag thank you so much gentlemen