 Now it is time for our first session with a very powerful keynote speaker. Well, he's the Executive Director of Foods and Refreshment for Hindustan Unilever and the Vice President FNR for Unilever South. He joined the company as a management trainee in 1999, post his MBA from IAM Kolkata. Over the past 25 years, he's had a stellar experience spanning customer development and marketing across a range of categories. He's held leadership roles in CD across general trade and modern trade. He was previously the Executive Director, HUL, and the Vice President, South Asia for Customer Development. Through his leadership, he has successfully transformed HUL's customer development function moving to a technology backed strategy and data-driven approach to problem solving. Well, he completed the Senior Executive Leadership Program from the Harvard Business School, where he represented the batch as a speaker at the Harvard Club Dinner. He is a big buff of Bollywood movies, cricket, and is a big believer in technology-led process innovations. Well, ladies and gentlemen, now let's put our hand together for none other than and welcome on the stage and screen our speaker, Mr. Srinandan Sundaram, the Executive Director of Foods and Refreshment, FNR Hindustan Unilever, Limited and Vice President, FNR Unilever, South Asia, and he's going to be talking about content marketing from creation to commerce. Well, with this, we humbly welcome our speaker on the stage and screen. Thank you so much for joining us, Srinandan. With this, the stage and screen is all yours. How are you doing today? So thank you everyone, and thanks for that kind words of introduction. I really hope I'd be able to live up to it. What I'm really going to speak to all of you is about content to commerce, and really more than anything, share some of the principles and some of the approaches that we take at HUL, which I'm sure a lot of you will find useful. But before we deep dive on to content, I really thought it'd be useful to understand why this particular topic. And if we just draw a macro view, when we talk to a lot of our partners, you've got on the one hand, where you see the YouTube logo, saying people are speeding up to 2x or 3x and consuming content, and it becomes really difficult for us as advertisers then to be able to draw the message when people are really zooming at it fast. Then the other bit, which all of us I'm sure are aware, is increasingly we are becoming much more restless and our attention span is a lot lower. So from the world of 30-second advertising, the attention span that time used to be 12 seconds. Now the attention span is 8, and if you listen to the world of the Facebook and the Google, it comes down to 3 and 6 seconds. And therefore it becomes much more difficult for us to drive the message that a brand wants to give when the consumer is willing to give you this lesson, attention span. But here's where the inherent duality exists. On the one hand, when it comes to seeing advertising in isolation, we're getting 3, 6, 8 seconds to see. But on the other hand, each of us and our consumers are perfectly fine binge watching if the content is relevant. And therefore, if you look at average time spent consuming TV, look spending on OTT platforms, that time is significantly higher. And many of us have spent hours binge watching something as recent as Squid Games where you just don't want to swap the remote. You don't want to change the channel, but you want to spend hours watching it. And therefore, at the center here, sits what people are consuming. And the truth is people are consuming content. And hence it's only logical and it makes sound business sense to try and see how the brand can leverage content and therefore present itself. And that's really where my pitch is. It's because this is where the party is. Either we go down the three seconds, which is important. We continue to do what we are very good at, which is 30 seconds, but equally go to the emerging party, which is about 30 minutes, three hours and four hours. Now that's really the setup. And that's my view of looking at how content is so crucial for brands to be able to explain their own narrative and their own story. Now the beauty of this is it requires a fundamental shift in thinking. What's the fundamental shift? They're used to a certain ecosystem of brand, a creative agency and a media partner, where you work in isolation or with two, three partners to create content like a 30 seconder. You then work with a media agency who deploys it in the best possible manner. That world changes a lot more when you start looking at how to partner with content. And therefore what we did as a company is really look at a much more collaborative approach on content creation because this is a space where we as manufacturers, as marketers are not the experts. And one consistent approach, and this is the fourth year in a row that this is happening, is about content day, which is really bringing the experts into our company and therefore being able to understand their point of view and therefore educate us on what's the best way to weave in content. I'm just gonna play a short video to give you a sense of what it is like during those days when we do the content day. While you see a lot of visuals which are about the physical content day, COVID hasn't helped creating the physical ambience for the last two years have been virtual, but we've stuck to this discipline of making sure there's a content day where experts come, share with us, share with the brand team, what brands can do in their space. Every time there've been some interesting ideas that have come our way to get our brand message across. So far, I really like the YouTube creators stall. I think it's interesting to say, how do you leverage these million-plus creators to bring brand-purpose message alive? My God, this place is just alive with so many things. There are creators, there are publishers, there are platforms, all of these. I really love the vibe. Usually, you don't expect that brand events are gonna have so much energy, there's music, there's all these fun little booths. Great talent on stage, right from Gully Boys, Mati Bani, that's Nirali Kartik. I love it. I wish I could come here. So you've got a sense, and I think the larger message here is, we can't create content ourselves, the broader ecosystem we've got to reach out to, which also means we've got to be crystal clear on what is the essence of what the brand wants to say, because that's what the content creator is gonna take and try and figure out how it best leaves into content. Now, this can be a very, very wide area, so I thought for the benefit of the audience, we share the structure and the approach we use. So our path to breakthrough content is really around these pillars. One is on purpose, and I'll give you some examples with some results to tell you how this works for the best of the brands. The second is platforms, then pop culture, eventually partnerships and performance. I'll move to the first one, where we nearly would truly believe that brands with purpose grow. Now, you could say that that's a pitch or a corporate pitch from a company, but I'm gonna share an example of this being actually put to test that scale and the impact it has had on the brand. India, a country where 90% of marriages are arranged. They say marriages are made in heaven, but not till they are approved by families. Dars believes that beauty should be a source of confidence, not anxiety. It launched Stop the Beauty test campaign with real life rejected brides to challenge this unfair tradition. Partnering the largest matrimony platform, Shadi.com, we created history by making every bride profile nudge every bride seeker with inspiring real beauty messages. These rejected brides became the cover of leading fashion publishers for the first time. Purpose platforms like Humans of Bombay feature their inspiring stories. Popular influencers came forward and encouraged other women to share their real stories on social media. Stop the Beauty test was a fully integrated, high-scale, high-impact, and highly engaging campaign. Dove created history by challenging matrimony and media platforms and killing the beauty biases and stereotypes with its real beauty stands. It built confidence and stirred conversations with women posing a question. How much beauty is enough? Yes, you saw an example of real scale and you saw the results at the end. So it delivers what is good for society and picking up a key theme, but at the same time does incredible benefit to the brand. Now, when you see the video, at what point it is a brand pitch and what point it is a great content, is an ever-ending debate, but that's what powerful brands can do. They can spark a movement and therefore generate a host of content which our consumers would love to see. The second bit is on creating platforms for engagement. This is another area where content is really king or queen, I might say. And just to share an example again from a very different category within the HUL fold, I'm going to share this example with you. In the world of home care, Clinipedia began as an exclusive web destination, housing over 2,000 pieces of solution-led content that were prioritized as per growing search categories like laundry, floor, and kitchen cleaning, made in multiple formats to be easily demonstratable. Now with the intent of furthering discovery, Clinipedia had to be present on the platforms our homemakers consumed most. On YouTube, where she's five times more likely to seek cleaning solutions, we created DIY videos for trending searches. As homemakers spent one out of four minutes on social, we customized our solutions as gifs and infographics to make them instantly shareable. As no two news feeds looked the same, her social persona determined what solution she saw. We partnered with Daily Hunt, a content aggregator since 60% of our homemakers were more comfortable with vernacular consumption. Fueled by Consumer Insights, optimized basis platform, personalized by identifiable traits, Clinipedia today is a virtual content engine. That's again a category approach in using a platform. Moving forward, I mean, having spent about 12 years in sales, I had to make this pitch it's from my own stable and one of the things that we're doing on a brand called Boost. Sports is entertaining because it has always had a way to measure success, speed, strength, distance, and a lot more. Apart from the one that keeps every legend going, Stamina. Boost is a chocolate health drink brand for kids that stands for Stamina being the secret behind champion cricketers. So we joined hands with a team of data scientists and analysts from Sports Interactive to develop a first of its kind currency that measured Stamina. Introducing the Boost Stamina Meter. The Boost Stamina Meter made its first appearance as the Indian Premier League, the Super Bowl of India. Stamina scores of 184 players were displayed in real time. Leading commentators and experts reiterated the impact of Stamina on a game. With 500 plus contextual creatives, Boost Stamina Meter killed a one stop destination for all things Stamina. The campaign garnered 35 million video views, a whopping four billion impressions, aided awareness increased by 1000 basis points, market share increased by 900 basis points. It generated four times the value of a typical IPL campaign. Not just that, Boost Stamina Meter created an answer to a very important question in the world of sports. What's your Stamina score? Yeah, sports. That's therefore the one you saw on popular culture with cricket. The other bit which we're learning and building a lot of content around is partnerships. And this is really commerce with cord cutters because increasingly there's about 25 million audience who doesn't see most of television and they're onto completely different genre. And here's an example of a hygiene brand called Life Boy delivering its message. Traditionally, Indians eat food with their hands. However, only 35.8% Indian households wash hands before eating. Life Boy, India's number one hygiene brand has always relied on traditional media to educate consumers on the importance of hand hygiene. National lockdown led to a rise in online food ordering. We saw this as an apt opportunity and struck an alliance with India's number one food delivery app, Swiggy. We built brand awareness by nudging the consumer with a 10 second contextual brand video while he tracked his food order. We transformed 2.1 lakh Swiggy delivery agents into ambassadors of change, reminding consumers to wash hands. We served the consumer with an additional reminder through push notifications post delivery. The consumer asked for their intent for purchasing Life Boy liquid hand wash. We created a listing for Life Boy products on Swiggy's B2B app Staples Plus. The video reached 4 million consumers. The brand received a phenomenal positive feedback. Life Boy liquid hand wash packs reached 1.8 million households. Life Boy stood out by breaking away from the usual go-to-media avenues and made hungry Indians ask one another. Khaane se pehle haad doeya kya. Traditionally... And of course, then more conventional is deep to see. This is easier. Most of you are aware of this. We have our own DTC with lackmayindia.com, which is really personalization at scale to drive imagery engagement and of course commerce. And therefore, in this case, it's much more simple. There's an algorithm which determines what's the remarketing creative is. You deploy the creative, enrich data profile with the attributes and then you bucket individuals into cohort so that what she is most keen to see, that's what is served through the entire portfolio that we have as lackmayindia. So here are a few examples that you saw covering the different forms in which we can weave our message into content. And just to bring that together in one bit, this is at the heart of what it is, which is the path to breakthrough content can come for brands through their purpose. It can come through a platform so it need not just be a brand, it can be agnostic to brand within a category. It can definitely come with pop culture. It can come through partnership and you can do it through performance marketing. And I think the common thing around all of this is requirement for us as marketers to be really clear and pithy about what is it that our brand stands for and then be much more open, inclusive and inviting for various content creators to dabble with our brand. They'll get close to what you intend to do as a brand if you're very, very clear on what your brand stands for and it is evocative enough for content creators to create content. In many ways, it requires a lot more humility to say that I will control what the central theme of my brand is and then open it up for consumers and content creators to make sure they're able to engage with it and therefore put it out in front of consumers to consume and spend time with. And remember, spend time with is the biggest problem that each of us face and I would bring back your attention to three seconds, six seconds, 30 seconds and then 30 minutes or more. And since our consumers are spending time on certain kind of content and binge watching, the other side of the argument is you really don't have choice. You've got to be able to view in content otherwise the time people are spending to understand what our brands have to say is diminishing by the day, if not by the minute. In summary, my personal take on it is content is critical to drive new age commerce. New age commerce is not just about lower funnel marketing. It is as important to build brand attributes, build the brand positioning through upper funnel and lower funnel. And therefore for this to be done effectively with a large population of our consumers either watching content on the phone at the rural side of the country or watching content without TV in the extreme top. In both cases, weaving in content is the best bet for brands to pitch their story and for consumers to spend more time engaging with the brands. That's what I had to share. Thank you. So much, Mr. Shunandan Sundaram for joining us and giving us this experiential sharing you had, it was great to have you today to kickstart. Thank you once again.