 The keynote session, of course, Ms. Amy Karon-Panya. I hope I've got that correct. I know I clarified from you. Is that how you say it? Excellent. Director of Policy and Communications, Asia Pacific, Uber, and she's worked with Cork, Google prior to this, and she's also, well, an activist in her own right. She's working for a lot of non-for-profit media. Thank you so much for flying in and doing this for us, Amy. Over to you. Firstly, let me just say thank you so much for the invitation to be here today. India is an incredibly important market for Uber. It is a market that I have learned a lot from when I think about how we have evolved as communications professionals. When Supana and I were first speaking about doing this keynote, one of the things she asked me to do was talk about what I have learned from working at Uber. In some ways I feel like what I have learned is probably what you have been reading for the last nine to 10 months because we have had quite a bit of press this year. Not all of it has been exactly as communications professionals would desire, but it certainly has been a wild ride and quite a learning experience in and of itself. What I'd like to do for the next 15 to 20 minutes is tell you just a little bit about me, a little bit about what I have learned, and the way I thought I would do this is kind of 10 things that I think make great PR. I don't want to get too deep in the weeds if there are questions, I'm very happy to take them, but I thought maybe we could take a step back. I always think zooming out before you zoom in sometimes provides good context. So here we go, a few minutes of me and then a little bit more perspective on the communications profession. So while I am an Australian, you can probably tell from my accent, I've actually been living and working in Asia for 20 going on 21 years, not in my home country. For those of you who may have seen my LinkedIn profile, I speak eight Asian languages. Unfortunately, none of them are from South Asia, which is much too much a grin. And I'm told every time I come here that that is a failing and I have to do better. So I'm going to make sure that I finish with at least one of the words that I have learned and used frequently every time I am in India. My experience across both public policy, government relations and communications, generally I would describe myself as a public affairs professional, but tonight I'm going to wear a pure communications hat. I wear two hats at Uber and it has certainly for me over the last two years and working at this company, we have really gone through quite an evolution of how we think about and how we do communications. I started my career as a civil servant for the very unfortunate acronym DFAT, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, things that are not on my public profile. I worked for the Australian government in mainland China. I also worked for the Australian government in Myanmar. At the time that I did this, which is in the late 90s, there were lots of fun and very controversial things going on. I find that when I talk about working for different political parties, that often is a polarizing thing. So I like to start from a clean slate with people. The companies that I have worked for, and I know Deepak is was in the room earlier, when I worked at Coca-Cola, believe it or not, it was the world's most valuable brand. There is something to be said for the evolution of how technology has transformed the way we think about value. And now for myself thinking about having worked at Google, not only one of the world's most valuable brands, but a company that is consistently a company that is the most admired or desired workplace. I spent time now working at Uber, as I mentioned, for about two years. And an interesting evolution is actually seeing how despite some of the challenges and the very significant reputation challenges we have had this year in particular, we are still among the top companies on LinkedIn for places people want to come and work. And if I was to say why I think that is the case, obviously this is not something that I would chalk up to purely a communications or a PR success, but I really believe it comes back to things that I'm gonna talk about tonight in terms of the 10 things I think really make great PR. I'm gonna try to avoid too many acronyms or Western analogies, there are a few in here, so please bear with me. But let's dive into what those 10 things are. So the first thing for me is you need to be where your people are. Now in the States we often talk about you hunt where the ducks are or you skate to where the puck is, for those of us who know anything about hockey, which is not me as an Australian. But most people that I know, when I think about people who are part of our user community, riders, drivers, even journalists, they're not spending all their time reading international wires. If you are in the finance space, these guys really matter from an investment perspective. But the power of being where your people are means that you actually have to have media relationships in mainstream media, in lifestyle media, in where people are reading and being influenced by. I'm constantly challenging my team to identify who are the media that matter, not full stop, but to a specific audience. So you have to be where your people are and you define who those people are, but if you are not there, you are not part of the conversation and you are missing out on a great opportunity to engage. The second thing, and this is very true from a technology perspective, but certainly also from an FMCG perspective, you should always lead with your product. It's what people love about tech companies. And if you ever notice when tech companies are in crisis, they go back to product PR 101. Why do they do that? Because when you talk about your product, you remind people of the magic, of the thing that they love. We often talk this year of learnings that we have from Uber, that people love it, meaning the service, the convenience, the reliability, the affordability, but they don't yet love us, meaning the company and who we stand for, because they don't yet know who we are. So the loving it versus loving us, you need to be out there talking about your product. And when I say talking about your product, for most journalists, especially tech journalists, a demo is worth 100 press releases. Know your product, be bold in engaging people in it. Deskside briefings are a beautiful thing. And if someone has an actual hands-on experience with your product, they are much more likely to have an opinion about how it could change someone's life. A lot of people have said this tonight, but great PR is about great storytelling, which requires heart and emotion. These are traits that don't come naturally to tech companies. We need to show the human impact. So for Uber, for example, when we're talking about writers, I will share a really simple story that someone told me probably earlier on this year, maybe January, February, when I was visiting our Gauguin office. It was a woman and she lives in Noida. And she said to me, I really have to thank Uber and I really want to thank you for my promotion. And I said to her, well, congratulations on your promotion. I don't think I can take any credit for that. Can you give me some context? And she said, you know, if it was a few years ago, this never would have happened. But the company that I work in, they made an announcement internally and they said they were going to put a position up and anyone could apply. And so I thought to myself, dare I do this? I talked to my husband, I talked to my family and I said, you know, this is really going to require a lot from me. I'm going to have to work really long hours. Are you going to support me in doing this? And her husband and her family said, we're not worried about how you get home at night, go for it. So she said to me because she could do the same hours as her male colleagues, because she could leave the office at 10 or 11 or 12, if it may be, and wasn't concerned about how she got home because her family was fully behind her. She pursued an opportunity that three or four years ago may not have been possible to her. That's humbling, that's heart, and that is a real life story. Every single day I get people emailing me, talking about the things that aren't working as well as the things that are. So when we're talking about riders, it needs to be real. In a similar way, when we talk about drivers, I sit in drive around tables very frequently and they are not always pretty. We're talking about real life. And this is one of the things that for me is a beautiful evolution in working in the tech space, which I've been in for about 10 years now. We are in this wonderful, messy, somewhat uncomfortable space between the online bubble of a pure technology company and the offline world of human beings interacting and needing someone to be somewhere in the middle. So when we're talking about drivers and we talk about push a button and get work, what does that mean in the context of India? What does it mean in the context of a Southeast Asian developing nation? What does it mean in terms of a developed country? Because they are very, very different and they impact the business model. But we need to know the real people who have real experiences with our products if we are going to tell stories that connect with people on an emotional level. When I think about telling stories how we serve cities, and I say this, everyone I have talked to is telling me that the weather is much better in Delhi this week than it was last week. But this for me is a great opportunity to give an example. If you care about the quality of air that you are breathing, if you care about the environment that you are living as a legacy for your children, why not be part of something that could have a direct impact on improving that? Because that is the proposition of ride-sharing. It's a very simple invitation, but if we're not having that conversation in a way that is real, that has heart, that resonates with people, we're in trouble. So real great storytelling has to come from here. One of my favorites, number four, repetition never spoils the prayer. Messages take a lot of time to think in. Everybody in this room knows that because you're out telling the story every day. And especially when we talk about the noisy media and non-traditional social media environment, I would say Uber is probably one of the most written or talked about brands that there is. When I talk to PR agencies, when I talk to my communications team, I'm not asking them for more coverage. I'm actually asking them for less. What I want is to make sure that the thing that we are talking about, the thing we stand for, the thing we are trying to change, gets through to people. And in my opinion, the only way that happens is sustained communications efforts. Get really good at telling the same story over and over and over and over again. And when you think you've told it so many times that everybody has heard it, tell it again. Thank you. Thank you. Obviously telling the story over and over again, the trick is find new and creative ways to do it. The greatest thing about disruption when we talk about social media is it gives you immediate angles. It gives you points of interest. It gives you something that is topical, that is now that you can hook yourself into. We were talking tonight about disruption and how that impacts, whether you can catch onto a trend and be part of it. I want to give you an example that isn't from India, but I think could give kind of a how we lean into technology. Some of you may have seen in Australia earlier this year, there was a commentary about how millennials were driving up the price of housing because they're obsessed with eating avocados. Now these two things seem perhaps not so congruent. And when Uber was looking at this with our business Uber Eats, we thought, well, that sounds like a bit of a harsh opinion about millennials. So we appreciate that the housing in Australia is rising, but we really don't think that millennials eating avocados is the reason for it. So we started to participate in a hashtag. Now of course in Australia everyone has a sense of humor. The hashtag was AVO for avocados, AVO gate. And we decided that we would use our Uber Eats platform to deliver free avocados to millennials or meals that have avocados in them and say, we've got your back, we're standing with you. Now, yes, it is a bit of a sense of humor. There's a tongue in cheek with this, but at the end of the day, what we're doing is reinforcing that we have a role to play in society. We understand what is topical and meaningful for the people who use us the most, which at this point in time, well, again, may not be the case explicitly in India, but is largely a younger demographic. People who've actually said, I don't want to buy a car. I see what that has done to my parents from the generation before, and I'm very happy to look at what an alternative is. We want to be part of how they are thinking about the evolution of their cities and their lives. And that means sometimes we have to have a sense of humor and we have to talk about avocados. So repetition never spoils the prayer. This is also a topic that a number of the panelists this evening talked about. My fifth rule of great PR, substance over spin. To be a thought leader, you need a thought. And I speak to a lot of people, including executives in other companies and my own who really want thought leadership PR, but there isn't a thought that starts or sparks that evolution. Narratives that are not rooted in intellectually rigorous arguments tend to be very quickly found out. And I'll say one of the things that I enjoy and that stretches myself and my team the most about working with the Indian media is that this is a country where sophisticated narratives are explored with the service that they deserve. This is a place where people want to have a robust discussion, which means if you have not done your homework and you cannot back it up, you shouldn't be saying it to begin with because you will be found out. So when I think about how we can get our story across, how we can help change not only behavior, but mindset, which to be perfectly honest is somewhat harder to change over the long term. What we have to do is make sure that the communications team takes deeply researched arguments, things that we can stand up credibly in the light of day and stand behind and packages them in a way that is accessible to everyone. A lot of the work that we do when you are in the technology space is about taking very complicated things and making them simple. Packaging is so important, but making sure that the substance within that package is not a line, is not something that falls apart when the very first question is lobbied in your way. That's important because that is the credibility of being a communications professional versus a spin doctor. Number six, and we also talked a lot about different types of journalists, different types of media entities. Know your beat reporters well enough to have them to your house for brunch. A strong relationship buys you time in a crisis, yields interest in information about the industry, about competitors, about trends, and it also helps you find great press people to recruit. Some of the best people that work on my team are ex-journalists. Why? Because they really understand how to tell a story. You need to have relationships with journalists that you work with. Yes, there is a line and it should always be professional, but having said that, if you cannot sit down and say to someone, how is your daughter? How is that holiday? What did you think about that thing that we just did? Did that resonate with you? Then you're not close enough to the people who have an incredible power over your ability to continue to operate. Relationships, we're talking about public relations or media relations. I think all of this is relational. So if you do not practice relational public relations, if you're happy to sit behind your laptop and send attachments, you're really going to miss out. Number seven, great headlines require great planning. It's almost impossible to do good communications work at the very last minute without the full context. The nature of what we do actually requires planning. Time to shape a story. Shore up third parties if you're looking for advocates, if you're looking for independent voices. Or land a column for an important member of the opinion elite. There's always last minute issues with any big decision, but the best way to guarantee a successful landing is to agree to a PR plan and stick with it. A lot of what we've talked about tonight is crisis. So many crisis are actually not a crisis, they're an opportunity. If you know your business, and I really respect this comment from Deeper, if you know your business and you know your operating environment, then you actually have the ability to look around corners and plan. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't be able to turn on a dime or respond and react to things as you need to, but we have to get into a habit where we are not perpetually in crisis mode. What I found in my experience of hiring people to work for Uber is if I hire people who have deep crisis communications experience, everything is a crisis. And so what I want to get to is the idea of very intentional, thoughtful, planful PR. Number eight, it's okay to have fun. When the situation allows, when it makes sense, when it is appropriate, have a sense of humor. Be quirky if that is appropriate for your brand, but answer a press inquiry with a GIF file. Think about whether or not you can send a haiku poem over Facebook or Twitter as a fun way to respond back to a customer inquiry, again, when it's appropriate. Some of this can actually come across as much more authentic and human than the standard corporate line. One of the conversations I have a lot with our social media team, we have work to do to identify what is Uber's unique and authentic voice. It has to be something between dude and on this day, we filed this particular petition. So we have work to do in finding our sense of humor, but every time we have the ability to do that, when we make people laugh, when we surprise them, many times what that means is that we have found a new connection that has a very long-term implication for our business. Number nine, again, I'm drawing from some of the conversations this evening. Stay calm in a crisis. Often the best answer to a PR crisis is to do nothing in the short term. You heard conversations tonight about knowing when to shut up. We always have a choice of what to communicate, and that includes if we are going to say anything at all. It's often not obvious where an issue will go, and by jumping in, you can make matters worse. Typically, by inadvertently saying something that is later proven to be inaccurate, better to be thoughtful and strategic in your response than to be rapid fire. Now, this evening, one of the examples was given that you should respond between six to eight hours, and another point of comparison was within one hour. Most of the time when people tweet at Uber about customer incidents, they are live real-time, and if we are less than a few minutes, we are in trouble. Now, that means that our teams have to work incredibly hard, but that is a goal and a bar that keeps raising, and we should constantly be trying to get after it. My last thought on what makes great PR. Social is more important than ever. The press has become so disaggregated that simply communicating through traditional means is insufficient. Social should be used to bring a sense of spontaneity and accessibility, and to amplify the positive as well as push back on the negative. If you see social as an opportunity, then your business has a great communications person at the helm. If you see it as a threat, this is the world that we live in, and I say this because, yes, everyone this evening talked about activism and talked about disruption. When I think about how I would define myself, I'm an activist, I'm an advocate, I'm a realist, but at heart, above everything else, I'm an optimist. If you do this job, what you are trying to do is create change. I think there's something incredibly powerful about the fact that the words that we write and that we deliver to people ultimately can shift an entire generation in a new direction. It's one of the reasons why I work for Uber, it's why I love getting out of the morning and knowing that I will never know what my day is going to look like, but it's also why I think no matter what the challenge is, we have the skills to rise above that challenge and demonstrate the true value of communications. Thank you very much. But that's quite phenomenal, Amy. Are there any questions in the house? Requested, please raise your hands in case there are. Yes, Pratik. Hi, Pratik here from IIT. So I have a query. This is the 10 points. The first one you said, go to where your people are. So are you looking at some localized campaigns for the country which your rival seems to be doing very well at? Yeah, one of the things that I would say that is somewhat unique about how Uber operates, we use a term internally as a hyper-local business. If you look at the statistics that we use to talk about our presence in a country or in a region, we talk about the number of cities that we operate in. And it's a very deliberate decision because where we are trying to impact is at that city level, not necessarily even at the state or national level. We have teams of people who specifically look at local and regional press specifically, and this is super important. I've said I have a bias towards languages, non-English language press. And as an example, as I know in my previous companies, this would never have been one of the topics. How do we use things like radio? You know, being where your people are as an example, if I want to speak to drivers, the media that will influence them is fundamentally different to the media that will influence writers. So I have to have an opinion about who that media is and how to get into that conversation. We spend a lot of time looking at very, very hyper-local vernacular media. Now I will say this and I say it with a tremendous amount of respect. We see a varying degree of quality of journalism when we branch out, when we look at tier two and tier three cities. But that to me also presents an opportunity. It's back to the conversation if you can show someone not just tell them, you're likely to get a much better quality of coverage. So a lot of the things that we do are about, for example, product 101s, going out into cities and talking to journalists. And I'll give you this as an example. When was the last time if you work in tech or you have anything that is on a mobile phone that needs a data package? You were asked to demo something to a journalist who has a Nokia 3210 that is WAP enabled at best. And inside their office, there is one, no air conditioning and two, no internet. I'm saying this to you because being where you are, that journalist being asked to write about how we have real-time customer service at the click of a button, it's probably not very realistic unless we can show it to them. So we spend a lot of time on the road. One of the, I think we would say KPIs or goals that our team has, it's a stretch goal because it's hard to live up to, that our goal is what we call a 70% hustle. I want people to try and be outside of the office with media that matter, having conversations, demoing products, asking questions and listening, 70% of the time. Please. Speaking about the message, so is there a vernacular, is there a regional message that you have or a hashtag which actually connects locally with India? Because Uber still, if you see Amazon as a competition in the other industry, they've been able to establish themselves as a company which has the India side to it also. But Uber so far is all disregarded as an MNC. So the message itself, do you plan to localize that and make it more Indian? Sure, I think that there is work that is going on now. I think it is work in progress. And I also think when I look at how diverse, how large and also how disaggregated the media landscape is in India, we have work to do. It's not going to necessarily be one size fits all, but I think a bigger piece of work that is going on now I mentioned earlier is this idea of defining the brand. I think there has been some work this year that has made good traction in the market, but I would not suggest that we have this baked and ready to go. I think that this continues to be work. And one of the things that we are trying to do is be a much more active listener to understand what does resonate with our Indian users. Yeah, thank you for the question. Any further questions? Yeah, Reema? Amy, you must be living by, I think one activity after another. Let's call it an activity. And within a second when something happens, there are about 2,000 people without knowing what exactly happened. So that is one part of it. The other part of it is that when I was driving here, a senior journalist said, just remember that media is actually the consumer. Yes. And so this made me think, and I think that's what I shared with everyone. This is a very senior person saying that. So it makes you think and he says that there should be a discussion about this because the media is not the important person anymore. It is the consumer. So how do you manage where you have something in Australia and something in India and somebody in Hong Kong? How do you manage it? We do it, try to do it one by one. So thank you. I don't get a lot of sleep, but it's by choice. So I think if you work in this space, you certainly accept that it is somewhat of an all-consuming, always-on type of a role. I think the reality is that things happen. There's a Murphy's law to issues, that they are Friday evenings, they are public holidays, they are Diwali festivals when everybody is offline and not answering their phones. This is the reality of the world that we live in. So one thing I think is about making sure that internally this is not a communications point, this is a business point, that you have very robust processes in place for when things go wrong. One of the things that was said tonight when we're talking about crisis was about a PR crisis. And I give you this as an example. A lot of people have told me that Uber has had a PR crisis this year. I would suggest that it is not a PR crisis, it's just a crisis full stop. And why is that? Because this is not about whether or not we can spin difficult and unpleasant things, to a better light. It's the fact that we have to acknowledge that difficult things happened, that we have to learn and do better. And we have to own that and now get on with doing the right thing. So part of it for me in thinking about how we deal with an issue that might crop up, with an incident that turns into a crisis, with a request from a government, you name it, it's happening and it's happening in any given country at any given time, is we obviously have to be accessible. And that comes from relationships with journalists as well as good internal relationships with our business partners. It comes from being a trusted and respected member of our community. If people don't trust your word, if they don't trust that you have integrity behind your action, you really don't have a career in this industry. And it's something that I take really seriously, even when I am in the process of holding the line on behalf of my company, it has to be with integrity. Because that at the end of the day is a thing that will protect me no matter what the incident is. Because the journalist that I am speaking to, the editor, the producer, the anchor, knows that when I say to them, I will get back to you. Can you give me two minutes? Give me 30 minutes and I'll find out that they know that my word is what it says. So I would say to you that it's not a perfect system by any means. I think all companies struggle with this because of how real time issues are these days. But I think there is an internal component of the business having robust processes in place when things go wrong. There is a relational component that is both internal and external. And then for me, there's also a personal element of your own integrity and your brand. Yeah, thank you, Prima. Oh, that was cool. Integrity at the core of everything. Any other question? Naval, you had a question, right? Part of that you answered, Amy, hi. One of the things I wanted to ask you, actually you answered part of it, is that you know, as you said, you've not had PR prices, these are prices for the company, for the brand, whatever it is. So what do you do when you face a series, a barrage of incidents that's continuing to happen? In most cases, brands, large companies face prices once in a while, once in two, three years. With Uber, because it's been such a fast growing, industry shaking sort of company, obviously you attract your share of flak and criticism and so on and so forth. So when you have a series and continuous barrage of incidents going on, what do you do? Do you lie low for some time? Do you sort of, how much proactiveness can you do when things are happening on the fly all the time? So I'm not sure there really is a version of lying low in our company. And that's as much about how the business is run, as it is about whether or not our external bodies of interest, like journalists, like social influences, like the government, will sit back and wait for the next thing. I think that we are always on, in the same way that our industry is always on. If I think about the type of communications that we do every day, we do corporate communications, we do investor relations, we do marketing communications, digital and social, crisis, consumer, social, yes, we do do social. But what I will say to you is when you have to say sorry, you have to say sorry. I do litigation PR all the time. And I say this with a lot of respect to colleagues who have degrees that I don't have in law, but I really don't think that lawyers should control a message. Thank you for that. That does not always make me popular with my colleagues, but excellent. You've got to say sorry when you've got to say sorry. Think it better than that. Excellent. I think we'll wrap up at that. Request Novel to hand over a token of appreciation. Novel, the co-founder of the Exchange for Media Group. We're welcoming also our jury chair, Dr. Sanjay Bharu here. I'd also like to request Jyoti Lahiri to please come up on stage along with Novel and hand that token of appreciation as the representative of PRCAI and the grand young lady of PR and corporate communications. Keep tweeting using hashtag IPRCCA. We're going to be taking a very short break.