 Well, on that note, it's now time to invite the man who is recognized as one of the most influential persons in the media and entertainment industry and, in fact, continues to lead Madison as the largest independent media agency in the country. He comes with a prolific experience of more than 30 years at the forefront of the media and the advertising industry. Ladies and gentlemen, it's time to have a smiling and a cheerful round of applause for the very own chairman of the Madison world, Mr. Sam Balsara. Okay, hello everyone and welcome once again to the release of the Pitch Madison Advertising Outlook Report 2018. As Anurag says, I stand before you for the 16th year in succession to present this report. Most of you in this room will recall the tsunami that hit us in November and December 2016 because of demonetization, which took away as much as 1650 crores from ADEX and because of which growth in 16 came down from a good 16 percent to an also good 12.5 percent. Unfortunately, the effect of demonetization continued in the first quarter of 2017 and the quarter actually de-grew in 2017 according to us. This was not what anybody had predicted. We had thought that at the turn of the year, things would begin to get back to normal but quarter one was really disappointing and in quarter two, whilst we registered a growth, the growth was as low as just 2 percent. So the first six months of last year virtually got written off and then just when we thought that ADEX was gathering steam, GST hit us and ADEX saw a drop of close to 20 percent over June 2017 and a drop of 5 percent compared to July 2016. Whilst growth picked up to 13 percent for the period August to December, because of the dismal growth in first half, we ended up we believe with a full year growth of just 7.4 percent, which is why we described 2017 as the year of stunted growth. With a 7.4 percent growth, the advertising industry grew according to our estimates from 49,480 crores to 53,180 crores. This is the lowest growth we have seen in half a decade. The figure 7.4 percent hides another dismal fact and that is that traditional media grew only by 4 percent, yes 4 percent. It is digital media that continued its onward march, demonetization and GST notwithstanding and grew by a whopping 27 percent in a year that we described as that of stunted growth. With a 7.4 percent growth, India has lost its stellar position of being the fastest growing advertising market in the world and has conceded that position to Russia going by walk estimates of international markets. It's some consolation though that despite the low growth rate in the year, India grew at two and a half times the average global growth rate of just 3 percent. But of course the global advertising market is humongous, now estimated at 547 US dollars billion which means India has a market share of just 1.5 percent, a rather sobering thought for our media barons. On the other hand, India with a population share of 17 percent and a GDP share of 7.45 percent has an addict share of just 1.5 percent. So media owners can draw inspiration from the fact that headroom for growth in media is phenomenal and India is certainly the place to be because I'm sure nowhere else in the world could the headroom be as high as this. Look at the numbers for China and US where addicts in both countries is substantially higher than both the population contribution and the GDP contribution. And in India is the other way around. Major markets that contributed to the global addicts are US, China, Japan and UK contributing to almost 60 percent, there's no major surprise there, no major movement in respective shares except that China has marginally moved up and UK and Japan marginally moved down. India has moved up in share from 1.3 to 1.5 percent but Russia pipped us growing from 1.2 percent to 1.6 percent market share. Coming back to India, let's now take a look at the medium voice figures. With 37 percent share, television continues to be the single largest contributor to addicts followed closely by print at 35 percent share. Digital gained rapid share once again in 2017 and now accounts for 17.5 percent of total addicts. As recently as just five years ago, digital share was only 8 percent of the addicts. Outdoor cinema and radio continue to be marginal players at 6, 4 and 1 percent but appear resilient because they don't seem to have lost share. Digital that now has a 17.5 percent share of addicts and has gained three share points at the expense of TV and print who lost 1 percent and 2 percent share points respectively. You will notice that print and TV have steadily declined from a share of approximately 40 percent level in 2012 to around 35 to 37 percent in 2017. As I said, radio, OH and cinema have maintained their share. Digital having crossed the combined share of outdoor radio and cinema in 2014 now continues to grow rapidly and has substantially increased the gap as expected FMCG continues to be the most dominant sector maintaining its share at 32 percent of total addicts. FMCG is followed by auto at 10 percent, telecom at 8 percent and education at 5 percent. E-commerce that had taken the media market by storm three years ago contributed only 4 percent to addicts last year and comes at 6 position in the pecking order. Addex added 1433 crores to TV, print and radio in 2017. The categories that contributed most to this growth are the evergreen FMCG sector followed by telecom and auto. E-commerce at 6th rank has contributed about 100 crores to the overall growth. Real estate, though a large category, is no longer a major contributor to the growth in 2017, possibly thanks to RERA. Coming to our list of top advertisers, top 50 advertisers, this year Patanjali enters the top five list and is now in the August company of Unilever, Amazon, Procter and Gamble and Rekit. Thus, two of the top five advertisers in this elite list are you could say relative newcomers Patanjali and Amazon. Of the next five, also there are surprises, three are new entrants to the top 10 list, Samsung, Oppo and Hero Motor Cop. Top 50 advertisers account for 34 percent of the advertising market. The number is significant considering that there are over two lakh advertisers in print and over 12,500 in TV. Top 10 advertisers account for as much as 16 percent of the total market. So the job of the media owner is relatively easy and contribute to 46 percent of the total 50 list. In keeping with the tumultuous nature of the year, there are a large number of shifts in the pecking order with 17 advertisers gaining rank and another 22 dropping rank. Advertisers who have gained substantially in rank are Vivo, Gio, Google, Oppo, Patanjali, Bajaj Auto, Apple and Tata Motors. Advertisers who have lost many ranks are Flipkart, Ford, Idea, Airtel, Winnie, Renault and Nissan. New advertisers who have joined this elite list are Honda Cars, Reliance Retail, Future Retail, United Spirits and Vico Laboratories. Our report of course will give you the list of full 50 in descending order of spends. What's our growth forecast for 2018 given that all this happened in 2017? Whilst the growth in 2017 was defined by the word stunted, I must say we are optimistic about 2018 and are tempted to predict a high growth here because you can't keep advertising or for that matter the Indian economy down for too long. Our optimism is only tempered by the fact that the government is set on its reform agenda for long term good of the economy. So some other reform introduced during this year which is good for the economy in the long run may have the adverse short term effect of again destabilizing the economy the way demonetization and GST did and therefore we say fingers crossed for 2018. We predict ADEX to grow by 12% in 2018 taking the total size of the market to nearly 60,000 crores. We debated a lot before arriving at this figure. Our reasons of arriving at 12% are some of what I'm just now going to outline. There are early signs of consumer spending returning in a big way. See yesterday's economic times headline. See the report see the growth reported by QSR, jewelry, apparel and many brands in the last quarter and first quarters of this year. We believe the benefits of GST should start accruing this year GDP growth if one goes by government estimates is expected to be between 7.1 and 7.5%. The government's investment in infrastructure and rural schemes should put more money in the hands of consumers. More specifically there are as many as eight state assembly elections in 2018 which will be preceded as usual by an avalanche of state government publicity drive to publicize its achievements. It is likely to be increased publicity by the central government on account of the ensuing Lok Sabha elections in 2019 even if the elections are not preponed. Finally, a richer IPL with star getting into overdrive should add to growth. We also see increased activity in the sporting arena from both cricketing and non-cricketing leagues as many as 16 new auto launches are expected. We see a strong comeback by FMCG companies on the back of increased rural demand and we also see some increase in BFSI activity especially from small banks and payment banks. If ADEX in 2018 is as per our forecast, we will learn the distinction of being the only country to double ADEX in six years. A 10-year review of the advertising market looks something like this. We have moved up from just under 20,000 crores in 2009 to 60,000 crores over these years. It's significant that our compounded average annual growth in nine years has been 13.15% high by global standards. Moving to individual media on television, ADEX grew in our estimate by a mere 4.3% and reached 19,650 crores. This is the lowest growth television has witnessed in the last five years. It is significant in our view that despite this growth is so low, despite the addition of 100 new channels including cable channels and HD channels which in turn contributed to an increase in additional FCT supply in the market of 11%. But these new channels contributed only to 100 crores of ADEX. We expect television to grow by a robust 13% in 2018 for all the reasons outlined earlier. However, on the negative side, we see TV may begin to start to lose some advertising to OTT platforms because some viewers may prefer to watch television content on OTT platform thanks to low data tariff. Hindi GECs including FTA contribute 28% to the overall television ADEX and Hindi is by far the largest contributor. FTA channels have seen robust growth in viewership during the year and now account for 19% of the GEC genre. In terms of FCT growth, Hindi movies, English infotainment, movies and regional satellites show substantial increase in 2017. HD2 emerged stronger during the year with the launch of 22 HD channels now reaching 50 million homes split equally between urban and rural. Viewership of HD has also seen exponential growth and we estimate that HD is today a 2000 crore advertising market contributing over 10% to television ADEX. FMCG of course continues to rule the roost in the television market contributing 51% to the total. Television is followed by telecom at 12% and auto at 8%. E-commerce maintained its contribution at 4%. The main categories that again contributed to television growth are FMCG and telecom. In television, whilst the ADEX growth has been only 4%, the FCT growth has been put at 18% in 2017. On the other hand, our comparison of like-to-like channels shows an increased FCT supply of 7%, leading one to conclude that on an average, television rates were suppressed. But advertisers could not reap the benefit of these lower rates which media owners had to suffer because ratings of the most used programs were also suppressed. Length of average duration of a commercial has marginally gone up from 23.6 to 23.8 seconds. Let us now take a look at print. Print in our view grew by a mere 2.7% during the year. This is the lowest growth we have seen in 9 years. But of course it continues to be the second highest contributor after television with a share of 35%. Dailies increased 3.4% a bit higher than the total ADEX than the print ADEX because magazines as a medium again failed to gain advertiser interest for the third year in succession. It is significant to note that for the last 3 years, print has been steadily losing share at the rate of 1% share point every year for the last 3 years. But this year, the decline accelerated and print lost 2% share points. In 2018, we expect print to grow by 932 crores and reach a figure of almost 20,000 crores, a 5% increase. Total space consumed in print is at par with the 2016 figure at 342 million column centimetres whilst I told you that FCT in television grew phenomenally. The average size of an ad has also been increasing steadily and has moved up from 42 column centimetres to 55 today. In terms of volume, Hindi publications continue to be ahead of English contributing 34% of the total volume. English comes close behind at 27%. Contrary to popular belief, volume in English publications has grown by 4% while volume in Hindi publications de-grew by 4%. The de-growth in volume of Hindi publications has been observed for the first time in many years. Among other languages, Kannada and Gujarati have shown substantial increase in volume but Punjabi, Urdu and Tamil show a decline. In terms of category contribution, again FMCG and AUTO are the largest contributors with a contribution of 14% each followed by education at 10%. While only four categories account for 75% of television advertising, it takes as many as 13 categories to contribute the same percentage to print advertising thus demonstrating that print has a very wide list of clientele and therefore is less vulnerable to volatility in individual categories. Let us now come to digital. Despite demonetization, despite GST, the digital ad-ex had an impressive growth in 2017 in our view grew at 27%. Digital, I must confess, is the only medium that grew more than our last year's projected growth rate of 25%. Digital advertising market is now almost 10,000 crores, a little short at 9,300 crores. Digital has grown at a compounded annual growth rate of 38% over last eight years and is now 17.5% of ad-ex. We expect digital to continue its onward march and grow by 25% to reach 11,629 crores in 2018. All the headwinds being put out by large FMCG companies about all kinds of problems that digital face notwithstanding because we have seen in the past that whenever these issues are raised by my advertiser friends, they continue to spend in digital nevertheless and digital ad-ex continues to grow. So, contribution of digital advertising therefore is galloping and has moved from just 4% in 2010 to 17.5% and it is now expected to contribute almost 20% in 2018. Even in absolute terms digital has added more than 4,150 crores in last two years from 15 to 17. Mobile as a platform now contributes to 78% of the total digital spends and share of desktop has further dropped to 22%. There has been as one can well imagine and see for ourselves an exponential growth in video consumption over the past year and is now at 75% although display native and programmatic have also all picked up rather well. Let's see what's happening in outdoor. In our estimate the outdoor market has grown by 6% to clock in 3085 crores. Conventional outdoor market grew by 7% and transit by 4%. However, outdoor again has maintained its contribution to total ad-ex at 6%. We now expect outdoor to grow at 10% taking the total outdoor advertising market close to 3,400 crores. Retail consumer services with that covers hospitals, restaurants and education and real estate are the top three categories for outdoor. However, consumer services last year reduced spends by 8% and real estate to declined by 11%. The highest growth in outdoor was actually telecom at 29% attributed to the launch of Reliance Geo with its aggressive pricing strategy. Moving on to radio, radio has grown and shown good growth of 7% when seen through the lens of television and print. To become a 1875 crore market and has maintained its share of ad-ex at 3.5%. Although in absolute terms because of its small base radio has added only 126 crores to its kitty during the year. Real estate FMCG, BFSI and auto contributed substantially to radio's growth. We expect radio again to grow by 10% to reach 2063 crores in 2018. Real estate FMCG, BFSI and auto sectors are the big four categories for radio and contribute to 33% of the ad-ex. Finally, we come to cinema. Cinema continues to be a marginal player in ad-ex with approximately 1% share and a total ad spend of 586 crores. Cinema though is the only traditional medium that has registered growth in double digits in 2017 but because of its low base doesn't amount to much. We expect cinema to grow by 14% and reach 668 crores in 2018. As usual, I would like to end the presentation of this report with some advice for my advertiser friends. Peter Drucker introduced the concept decades ago of management by objectives and it was a newfangled thing when I was in management school eons ago. I say today, let's manage media by objectives. A new terminology in the lexicon of advertisers should emerge. Why? Because in a market full of brand proliferation and little distinctiveness, I believe you can make media the differentiator to meet brand and business goals. A second piece of advice is let's focus on outcomes and not media output. Media choices should lead to brand being seen more, explored more, shared more or work harder at point of purchase. And therefore we must choose the one that is most important for the brand and then set our KPI in stone. A third piece of advice is that we feel sometimes that marketers and advertisers forget that delivering reach at the lowest cost is just one parameter on which they should evaluate media. And I can see Sudhanshu and Rohit nodding in full agreement, but this is what we genuinely feel because we do feel that in the current scenario of both the state of brands and the state of media, you can't grow brands only by driving CPRP down. We need to use media properties put out by media owners wisely and fearlessly. No risk, no gain as they say. And our last piece of advice is don't follow the herd blindly. Use each medium to its strength and this is specially applicable in the area of digital. Don't use a medium because everyone is using it, but exploit each medium's unique strengths. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed, Mr. Balsara. What an insightful evening it's turned out to be as you've driven home all those wonderful perspectives and insights in compassing the highlights of the Pitch Madison Advertising Report 2018.