 On agenda, very insightful session on realizing the potential of digital marketing in India by the very insightful Mr. V. Chandramali, CEO of Special Project Speedelight Industries. Good evening everybody. You know normally when you're doing a session in the afternoon you say I'm keeping you between me and I'm between you and lunch. In this case I recognize I'm between you and beer and wine and that's even more challenging than you know between food. But let's hope for the next 20-30 minutes you get something out of it and we get to have an interaction on this topic. I've been thinking about this question and the previous panel was exactly that to say if the eyeballs are there then why is the money not there? And I think it's a very very important question and I'm going to take the opportunity to be somewhat provocative. I think it's very easy in this bandwagon to say digital is a given, it's a future, nothing can stop it, the money is going to come and a whole host of things and I believe in all of that. I believe in all of that but I don't believe it will happen if we don't do some fundamental things to accelerate the pace at which the digital marketing business grows. And I think it's important for me to present that mirror to you. So please allow me the latitude to be a little provocative, I'm doing it with a good intent of wanting to grow your business, many of you are digital marketers, many of my friends from the consumer industry are here and I do want to take the opportunity to present the mirror. I think this is the stuff that you hear all the time. The stuff that you hear is digital is everywhere, the consumers are on digital and there is tremendous amount of time and engagement that consumers have in digital. This is the common story that you hear on why digital marketing must be the most important marketing that you do. And I completely buy all this, this is the fact, right, that 50% of the time is spent in digital, they don't see any other media, they wake up with their phone, they sleep with their phones or on so forth. And digital possibly reaches 95% of all consumption in India. So if you take the consumers who are on digital, they possibly account for 95% of all consumption. So logically if you got your digital marketing act right, there is no other marketing that you need to do, right, the only marketing that you need to do is digital marketing if you got it right. If a huge 800, 900 million consumers are there, 95% of consumption is there, why is it that it's still 10% of marketing and today I learned that it's now 15% of marketing, so my apologies, I'm a little consumer industry oriented. But so this is I think a very fundamental question, to say I represent the consumers of 95% of consumption but I account for 10% or 15% of marketing. And there is obviously an extraordinary gap and this extraordinary gap is not going to go away just because the consumers are there and the industry needs to do something actively to make it go away and I just want to talk to you on some of the barriers which might be existing. You know if we simply go by the number of consumers and the reach and the time spent and if those were the variables based on which market has made decisions to say how many consumers are there and how much time are they spending there, what do you think should be the number one advertising media in Bombay, anybody wants to kind of put up their hands. The local train by that logic should be the number one advertising media of Bombay. If you went by the number of consumers which is in tens of millions and they spend about two hours a day and there is nothing else they are able to do when they are there. So if we simply went by saying millions of eyeballs and amount of time spent there then the number one advertising medium in Bombay historically should have been the local train but it didn't happen. So if we are in the mindset of saying we have eyeballs and we have the time then we could end up being like the local train which never monetize the eyeballs and the time. So how do we kind of understand that it is not just about eyeballs and the time but it is also about what else you do. And if we ask this question why is Mumbai trains and not the number one media in Bombay, I think there are two kind of broad answers we would all give. The first of the broad answer we would give is that I am not sure of effectiveness of my advertising in that medium. I am not sure that if I put in marketing out there and advertising out there it will be very effective. So I know the consumer is there, I know the consumer spends time but I am not sure of effectiveness of my marketing in that medium. And the second it is not easy for me to do marketing in that medium. It is too complex and too challenging and there is processes, bureaucracy so on and so forth. I think the same two questions is what we got to ask as a digital marketing ecosystem and say how do we solve these two issues. And hence the two pieces I would ask each one of you to think about both as a digital marketing ecosystem and as clients is we got to solve for the marketing suitability of digital and we got to solve for the market tier suitability of digital. And if you really want to plug the gap between 15 percent and 95 percent then we got to become more marketing suitable and we got to become more market tier suitable. And both these are opportunities to improve and I do want to spend a little bit of time on each of these to say what is my thoughts on it. I am not going to give you all the answers, you guys are going to solve the answers over time but I do want to kind of just put some questions and thoughts. I think the marketing suitability I think there are two challenges on marketing suitability that we have to solve for. The eyeballs are there but are those eyeballs willing to consume marketing in that medium is still a very unsure unanswered question. So there could be two platforms both could have 100 eyeballs but in one platform for whatever reason 95 of those 100 eyeballs are willing to consume marketing and in the other platform 5 out of those 100 eyeballs are willing to consume marketing. Now measured by eyeballs both are the same but measured by the willingness to consume marketing both are not the same. Yeah and I think as an ecosystem and as digital media we got to say what does it take not just to get the eyeballs a lot of the focus of the digital industry is on getting the eyeballs. It's not only a question of what does it take to get the eyeballs it is a question of what can you do to get those eyeballs in a state of mind where they are willing to consume marketing otherwise we could be the local trade right. So that is I think one kind of core question to solve for in terms of marketing suitability. I think the second question to solve for in marketing suitability is really the ability to deliver a time bound impact and not just impact the consumer but impact the ecosystem. Right now a lot of marketing budgets are actually time bound. So if you take for example a new product launch now a marketing of a new product launch has to work in a 45 day cycle it has to be highly predictable highly reliable. It cannot be maybe it will go viral maybe it will work because the whole sequence of trial repeat distribution everything will get disturbed if I don't have time bound impact. A lot of the marketing money in India and marketing budgets in India is on festive occasions. Diwali is 25 percent of all marketing. Now if your marketing doesn't work in the 30 day period before Diwali then that budget is not of any value right and so on and so forth there are infinite other occasions. A lot of marketing budget in India is actually very time bound based on festivals based on promotions based on new products so on and so forth. Yeah and time bound marketing requires reliable effectiveness to say if I do this I get this response. Yeah time bound marketing cannot be a game of hope to say I do this and maybe I will get a explosive response maybe I will get a poor response. Yeah so how do we also create the digital marketing ecosystem where there is a degree of reliability to say if I do this this happens how do we create that right is a question which is still an open question and it is very much a dimension of marketing suitability that we need to consider. The second question is influencing the ecosystem and again let me go to the new product launch. The job of advertising is not just the consumer but it is when my sales force goes to the retailer and they say here is a new product keep it one of the biggest drivers of that person keeping it is to say TV mad I got ya now suppose you say your TV mad me I got digital mad I got I don't know right now my and my sense and the sense of many market years is that that retailer will say take a man here around up to demand I got a right now hence it's not only enough to be effective with the consumer it's also important that there is effectiveness in the ecosystem of distribution distributors influencers users whatever you want to call it right. So for example in a pediliter carpenter is a super important entity now my advertising might be very effective in digital with the consumer but if it is not effective with the carpenter then do I do separate marketing so those are I think the other kind of questions that one needs to solve for I think the other question so one is marketing suitability I think the other one is really market tier suitability and my market here I am using the lexicon of marketing organizations clients it's not just the individual it's a slightly wider space of market years and I think there are two issues to solve for and this is the issue that both the digital marketing ecosystem has to solve and the market years has to solve the first is the market year organization structure today is not suitable for digital market yeah the market year organization systems are very lean and they been designed for a few creatives high spend per creator that is what the market year organization is designed for yeah if you tell that organization it's the other way round which is there are many creatives and very limited spend per creative that organization is not designed for that right and one of my understanding of digital is there is no shortage of money to spend on digital all my life I've told my team cut blanch spend as much as you want but we don't have the number of people who can spend that kind of money it's possible to create one creative and spend 50 crores on conventional media but if I have to spend 50 crores on digital then I need 10 X the number of people to be able to manage the same process yeah so the market year structure today is oriented for few creatives high spend per creator and I don't see this changing in a hurry because there's tremendous cost pressure on market years people are not going to change headcount overnight yeah but I would still urge market years to think differently about your org structure in a digital era and the second thing about the market year structure the market year structure is not designed for coordination it is designed for strategy and brand management now in the earlier ecosystem the coordination was actually done by the so-called agency right there was one agency which did coordination right in the digital era the person who makes a video is different from the person who does media buying is the person who is different from the search engine optimization is the person is different from the social media system right now the suddenly the coordination owners are shifted from agency to a market year because I can land all of this at the same time I can make all of them top to each other so on and so forth and again market year organizations are not designed for coordination yeah so fundamentally one of the issues why digital is not exploding is market year organization is not designed for this yeah now part of the problem has to be solved for market years but part of the problem has to be solved by the ecosystem to recognize that this is the nature of the market year organization it is not going to change overnight and how are we going to solve for it I think the second piece which is why digital is struggling for market year suitability is accountability yeah and accountability and I'm kind of using earlier era and new era loosely but there is no such thing for a moment in the conventional media it's a lot more simpler to hold one agency accountable not just for advertising but for brand performance and business performance yeah so it's a single linear conversation and I say I don't really care will be a method whether you do TV or print or holding or this or that but I will measure you by brand performance and business performance yeah and it was a linear conversation suddenly that game is also shifted the nature of fragmentation means that the accountability is now shifted to the marketing person everybody else is a vendor is a creative provider or fitting one part of the jigsaw puzzle yeah so these are I think the kind of issues that we have to solve for from a market year lens in terms of market year suitability and as I was grappling with this question one of the real pieces that came into my head was one other extraordinary great transition happened just 30 years back somebody said 50 years but television is not 50 years it's late 80s early 90s the Asian games was sometime I think 82 82 and penetration of television was 85 85 to 95 is when the game shifted yeah and and I think I was really asking the question before TV print accounted for 80% of advertising in about 10 to 12 years and my numbers might be wrong TV became the number one medium it took all of just 12 years it didn't take 25 years for TV to get to 60% 50% whatever it is yeah it's about 10 or 12 years why is it that transition happened so easily you know all the pieces that we speak of to say oh the ecosystems are built for the old advertising it is not built for digital all that was valid then also the ecosystems are built for print advertising the ecosystem was not built for TV advertising the market years of that time was cooled in print advertising they didn't know how to do TV advertising the agencies were schooled in print advertising they did not know how to do TV advertising in yet the shift seemed to be seamless the advertising followed the eyeballs it was very seamless we didn't need conferences like this to engineer the shift right but in this case that shift seems to be a lot more painful and when I go back in my own experience I started in a print era and then graduated to a TV era and I asked what are the single difference why the transition happened so easily and the single difference was that the client facing marketing facing entity did not change I went to the same Ogilvian method for print and the same Ogilvian method for television yeah and hence the importance of the conversation was not about the medium the importance of the conversation was how do I build the business how do I build a brand and we naturally graduate to the medium yeah so it was a very seamless conversation there were no vested entities anywhere everybody was focused on brand performance nobody had any specific ownership for any specific media to say my ownership is for a media the ownership was for business and brand performance yeah and we seamlessly shifted from what we were doing to the next era I think the current transition has got very complicated because there are a lot of people who are vested into specific media there is only one entity who is vested into business and brand performance that's the brand owner everybody else is vested into one or the other media yeah and I think the there is a learning process in this of saying how do we keep the client front end the same why is the client front end changing that is what can be the single greatest unlock for digital marketing in India is my belief is that the client front end reminds the same so that's one part of what I wanted to say and I've spoken a lot on challenges of digital marketing now let me do the evangelization of digital marketing as well yeah and I will do this evangelization from a deeply personal experience I'm going through right now yeah and I'm saying by God if digital marketing didn't exist then I wouldn't be able to do what I'm doing right now yeah so deeply personal positive experience on digital marketing as well right and I'm I'm just launching in the middle of launching my book it's called the catalyst it's just on pre-order and it's going to be launched in the first week of February and really if there was no digital marketing then I wouldn't be able to launch a book yeah it's the simplicity of the reality of where it is so I want to evangelize through this case study how digital marketing is working and hence then find how do we converge how do we solve for this game yeah it's a book on helping people succeed and it's been a great personal marketing challenge for me always thought that I'm I'm amongst the brighter marketeers you know and I can solve any marketing problem but then I realized as I was trying to market my book that two fundamental factors have changed all my life I've done marketing with huge budget this is the first time I'm doing marketing with a few lack of rupees which is my own by the way which is not even a company budget so there's a phenomenal difference in being a good marketer with money and a good marketer with no money the second challenge is all my life I've done good marketing on good brands so I always had the asset called the brand and all I needed was marketing skills to leverage that brand this is the first time where I have a great product but I know I don't have a brand which is equal to the product yeah so two very fundamental challenges and it has challenged me as a marketer to say how do I bring my marketing skills to be able to solve this problem yeah and I mean I'm not going to go through the strategy but as a good marketer I put down some starting points to say what is it that I have what is the strengths that I have that I can put into play in this marketing game and amongst as I started the realization started after a long time opened my social media I mean I was into regular on social media till about three four months back I opened I found about thousand unaccepted invites in a few forums and so on and so forth I quickly cleaned that up so I entered with a some amount of social media assets it's not big by any imagination but that's what I had I had about you know 6,000 people all told following me on social media I had done a series of sessions over time in 17 companies on the content and the mission this book is a mission for me it's not a commercial transaction it's a mission of helping people succeed and I had done a series of sessions and I knew I have the goodwill of those people who attended those sessions and I also know that many of those people follow me in social media yeah so I knew that I knew that there's a large network of friends I have and the nature of my relationships is such that my friends will be willing to bend their back for me yeah now these are I think the assets I came in with and I had a degree of reputation yeah and hence I had to construct a strategy of digital media and marketing to say how do I sell and market my book and my mission with these assets and this is I have and how do I do it of course I had the strength of a one of the most reputed publishers in India Penguin Random House and they did help my process so I said all I'm going to do is social media apart from of course phone calls but bulk of my effort was social media and let me talk you through what I have done and how is it working for me so here is the first post I put it's about 8 days back which here it's catalyst written with all my heart passion and 26 years of experience all packed in one 200 page book hope it proves to be a catalyst for greater success in your career and life so I just put this first post out and recognizing from saying I don't have too many people following me but I know that the people who are following me are highly interested in me and hence I had to put a very personal message out there I didn't want to put a excerpt of the book or something like that I wanted to put a highly personal message and I got fair traction fair number of shares it went a fair amount of impact got created and then of course somebody was saying video is the game right so then I put a second post which was a video which had this comment which was thank you for the fantastic support to my book catalyst here is a short video on what you can expect from the book happy viewing and feel free to share and this is something I learned from the first post to say you need to nudge people to share so I said feel free to share and I just put this post out I'm just going to show you one minute of the video maybe it plays hello everybody imagine you put vegetables spices oil all together in a saucepan with no flame with no heat for a few hours and then want to eat it after that would it be eatable no these are just the ingredients they don't become an eatable dish unless they are cooked on a flame just because we get all the ingredients together does not mean that it automatically becomes a dish that is eatable it needs a catalyst and cooking on a flame is the catalyst that brings the ingredients together and makes it an edible successful dish I see the same myth prevalent amongst people about careers and life most people think I have the ingredients for success like education a job IQ EQ hard work etc and hence I will be successful no the ingredients are just the ingredients without bringing in the catalyst these ingredients won't convert to success automatically which then brings us to the question what are the catalysts that are required to be successful that is what I try to answer in the book titled catalyst thank you so of course I broke one of the biggest norms of videos which is my social media advices told me it can't be more than a minute I put a 4 minute video and I will explain why so we will talk about it but this one just exploded right I got about 5,400 views of the video on 2 days in facebook and I got 12,000 views of the video on 2 days in lington no promotion no money it is just organic and people were just sharing and letting it go and of course the results so it does move stock of the shelves whoever are the marketeers for 6 days in a row amongst all the pre-order books my book was a number one in amazon for 6 days in a row so thanks to just 2 posts in digital marketing and social media one the previous post which was the announcer and one which was a video which explained the book I created tremendous results so it tells me that this medium is hyper powerful it tells me that this medium is hyper powerful I am going through a deeply personal experience on leveraging this medium for success the next steps that I am focusing on is there is a lot of crowd sourcing I am kind of turning it around to crowd supporting to say I am never going to have a sales and marketing team for the book but I need sales and marketing people so I am actually recruiting a set of volunteers through social media and I know there are a lot of committed people out there who want to help me succeed and who want to help the message in the book because they have experienced the message in the book the book has been something that a lot of people have experienced outside the book in other sessions and other formats and I am actually running a process of recruiting people through social media to help me market the book and I am getting great success I am thinking through how to leverage influencers and I have a set of influencers who will be willing to help me how to do that and lastly community building to say this is not about marketing a book this is about helping people succeed that is the mission of my book and how do I create a community where people can be continuously engaged on their mission to succeed so that is really the steps I am thinking through and in this deeply personal journey the key insights for me firstly is digital marketing and social media is hyper powerful and I think what it does is it democratizes marketing it lets talent to win as opposed to money power win a lot of conventional marketing favors money power digital marketing favors talent if you have talent then it is a democratized process of marketing and I think the combination of social media and amazon has suddenly leveled the field I could not have thought of launching a book 15 years back because I would not know how to create awareness for it and how to distribute it the second learning for me is you have to be brand authentic and if you saw my video if you saw my post there was a lot of static I was getting from my advice to say digital media you have to have purple hair and look cool and I am exaggerating for the purpose of exaggeration but there was a lot of advice to say this is digital media this is how you have to be you have to be cool you have to be snappy you have to crack more jokes you have to look funky and a whole host of things but honestly I said I am going to be brand authentic this is what I am this is how people know me this is how they will see me digital media kind of confuses the fact that it is a medium and it is not the message right and as marketeers and as brand owners and as digital ecosystem we have to separate the two we have to say the message is different from the medium and the medium does not dictate the message it is the message that dictates the medium so that is the other kind of learning for me of course learning is digital marketing and social media is exhausting right because in the past I would put out an ad put it out on TV and there was no pressure on me to respond to every comment that came somebody asked a question somebody did this somebody did that and I put these posts out and I possibly spent 48 to 50 hours responding to every comment every question that comes and I mean it is rude if you do not do it and it is exhausting I mean I know I am doing it for a few days as a joke I have two jobs one job from 10 to 7 the other job from 7 to 10 in the last you know week or so but it is exhausting so I think there is a question I am asking myself to say this is how I am going to market how do I make it sustainable and how do I make it feasible for me to do it I cannot keep up this intensity for a sustainable period so those are I think three kind of deeply personal learnings for me in social media so I want to summarize by saying firstly eyeballs reach viewership time these are necessary not sufficient and if as an ecosystem we sit on our hunches thinking we have these and the money will flow then it might flow a lot slower than you think it will and to make it flow faster you got to do two things you got to say I am going to make my medium more marketing suitable and these are two very important inflections which will accelerate the pace of conversion there is conversion the pace is slow you do these two things you will accelerate the pace of conversion and from my deeply personal experience of having benefited from social media and marketing I would say we have to leverage the democratization of marketing and one of my pushes to us as individuals and to clients and I have been a client many times if ever ten brands I have budget only for three brands and hence I don't promote brands 7, 8, 9, 10 at all but I think with this experience now I am a lot more convinced that in some cases I want other money but all I need is two intelligent people thinking the hell out of how do I lose digital marketing for the brands I don't have money on digital marketing can support democratization of marketing and the last message for me is be brand authentic the medium cannot change the message you must be brand authentic thank you and all the best in building a 5 billion dollar business thank you Mr. Shandramoli for sharing your very personal story that helps us realize the potential of digital marketing please stay back with me as I would like to invite on stage Mr. Munish Atre national sales head ABP news network sir to kindly present a token of our gratitude to Mr. Shandramoli thank you very much Thursdays once again and as we come to the close of this evening I'd like to quickly call on stage our final Twitter contest winner it is Oza Pankaj Pankaj Oza is that you? Okay that's him I'd like to request Mr. Naboojit Kulia digital sales head ABP news network to kindly come on stage to present the gift to Pankaj Oza congratulations Pankaj the answer to this question was live TV good job thank you okay ladies and gentlemen we come to the end of all our sessions but before we leave I'd like to thank our presenting partners Sony live we live to entertain co-powered by partners ABP live keeps you ahead and Google a co-goal partners MTV and HD digital and our associate partners first post news 18 Hindi satik sub say phase B video technology partner videogram and live webcast partner 24 frames digital well this was the second edition of Dan E4M digital report I'm Xenia Fernandez thank you so much for joining us this evening I'm going to say now the bar is open and in our has been served have a great rest of the evening and we're going to close today by taking a quick look at our partner AVs