 Good afternoon. If there's one brand as a marketer, which you all would have heard of and I'm sure studied as case studies It is the Mastercard brand The brand reinvented itself with its priceless campaign and we have Mr. Raja Raja Raja Manar with us to speak about more about the brand Sir you had a session at the consuline festival and You know the two words in your session with happy intention. These are two words that usually do not go together But your session was called happy tension the power of CMO and CFO partnership So how do you see the relationship between the CMO and CFO evolved in the last five to six years? So firstly you're absolutely right the two words happy and tension you don't put them in the same sentence, right? And that was intentional how we put it together Historically, there was always and there is always a tension between the CFOs and the CMOs of organizations While the larger objective of both is to drive the results of the company for the better The immediate focus of both is very different. The CMO is focused on three pillars is my brand moving in the right direction Is it really becoming stronger by the day? Is it being more preferred by the consumers and so on but the second pillar is is marketing driving the business results Whether it is top of the line funnel or it's a bottom of the funnel. It's about the margin improvement It's retention loyalty all these are concerns that marketers have on the business side Then you got a third one where marketers you want their focus on is on building Platforms that give the company an advantage the competitive advantage on an ongoing basis So these are the three pillars of marketers are focused on now something like a brand may not be Immediately producing results for you within the same quarter So when you're having a huge brand spend, it's very natural that people outside of marketing particularly the CFO can say Why are we spending this and why can't we actually take it back? Particularly during times of economic crisis when the company's results get to be a little under pressure You got revenue you got expense and then you have got your e-bidda So when you look at your revenue of the revenues coming down, you have to cut back your expenses for a CFO to cut back expenses There are three big heads. One is you have got your people second You got technology third is you got marketing People you don't want to play with people quarter to quarter Technology has long lead times today that the startup or the close So people particularly CFOs find it easier to gravitate to marketing to take in the funds out of In a short term or to give funds more funds either way, they see a lot of fungibility in how marketing pools operate Now that is where the problem lies in because in during the economic crisis If a brand pulls back on its investment, it will lose ground Particularly if the competitor is not pulling back and the amount of money you have to spend to regain your ground is going to be huge Well business results seem to be something which are more appreciated immediately Brands impact on business results is less understood and less appreciated But the fault of that is also of CMOs where you have to make your colleagues understand You have to evangelize and you have to not evangelize based on emotion But based on facts based on data and you need to understand the language of the CFO Now this is where the pension have actually happens And so this time actually what it decided is to share with the group from the main stage of can lands on day one With my colleague and the chief financial officer of Mastercard So both of us with the stage together and we started telling what is life from each one of our respective lenses And how do we crack the code at Mastercard in an effective way? So now I consider my CFO as a best buddy a great partner and it's been working for years And so I was actually diving into those areas and explaining to people the tension will always remain There's no question about it But you can make it a happy tension by understanding each of the well by talking in each of this language and Coming to certain working arrangement where You make them as an finance folks understand what marketing surreal impact is and for us as marketers to understand What is a predicament of the CF house particularly when there is an economic down? Rightly sir because even whenever you see when the economic downturn is turn is here Like you mentioned the marketing budgets are first cut and you also use the word evangelize So if you could just tell you know of a conversation that you had with your CFO and how did you evangelize him? So I'll tell you in fact my conversation with one of the previous CFOs It was very interesting and there were a lot of questions about does really brand matter Because if you go and you give a fantastic price either to your client, which is a bank or a Merchant things will happen. Why do you really have to build a brand for the consumers, etc? Not to say that the brand is unimportant, but the amount of money that you spend on brand is it really worth it? I just asked the person Which watch are you wearing? Of course, it was a luxury brand So I said, why do you wear this because at the end of the day this particular brand that you're wearing Only shows time and nothing else. I can give you a Antacrona cost them in the thousands of dollars I can give you a small cashier watch Which will cost you less than five dollars It'll show time. It has calculator. It has contact. It has so many functionalities You being a CFO, how can you be so irrational? And by that luxury item As opposed to this I said that is the power of brand I think that was an aha moment of that individual So we go in this kind of a fashion you have to take time to educate them And you have to understand why they feel in a particular way when you understand the root causes You address those root causes in their language Like for example, you know, I spent half of my career managing PNL's businesses, right? And other half managing marketing When I was managing PNL, I used to ask this tough questions to my marketing folks What exactly am I getting for this investment? I'm giving you And many times I get the looks of a deer caught in headlights In that kind of a situation, I won't get confidence Or worse if they start telling me oh my brand awareness has gone up and my predisposition has gone up As a marketer, I understand but as a business person, I say that looks like a fluff It's it's it's a lot of fluff out there and you're waffling. I know I want you to tell me I'm asking a question in dollars and cents. You answer me in dollars and cents I need to understand if I'm asking you time, tell me what time it is Don't tell me time is philosophical and then it can move Slowly if you're happy or fast, if you're not happy, what a real city I'm not interested in the philosophy. I want facts. That's what the CFOs and the CEOs are looking for And so now when I come over on this side and as the chief marketing and communications officer for Mastercard I'm acutely aware of this particular dynamic and therefore I try to speak always in the language of the CFO So that that person can understand exactly what I'm saying and be able to convince them The CFO, the CFO, I'd like to introduce the third angle, the CTO With technology being such a big part now How is your relationship because it must have been a drastic change in the last 10 years and probably interactions with CTO has probably got up multiple. So how is that changed? So this is another excellent point that you make which is CMOs don't operate in a vacuum Correct We need to collaborate with the CFO on the aspects that we just discussed Marketing is increasingly and a lot more technology driven than ever before And the future is going to be even more tech and data intensive And you don't want to go off and build your own tech stacks or contract with third party vendors Because as a marketer, you may not be knowledgeable enough to make the right call Not just for today, but do you have a map? Do you understand how to get from here to there? Your CTO can be a brilliant partner One of the things at MasterCard what I have done is within my team I have got a head of technology Who reports to me and also to the CTO? I have got a CFO who reports to me and also reports to the company CFO And I have got a human resources person because that's another important point of intersection Who reports into me and into the human resources head? So what we are trying to do is now marketing therefore is not just a standalone entity, which it is in one sense But it is extremely well integrated with other parts of the company on whom we are dependent quite a lot To make the company overall successful through the success of marketing You know, everybody now is talking about experiences But MasterCard was one of the first brands to actually deep dive into this And it's been a decade since you've pivoted from advertising led marketing to an experience led marketing strategy So how is this strategy of and the promise of creating priceless experiences helped MasterCard build brand recall as well as loyalty So in fact, this is something which I feel particularly proud of Right in 2013 when I joined MasterCard, one of the first decisions I took was to pivot priceless from being an advertising platform To having your entire marketing strategy hinged on experiences. So we became an experiential marketing company in a big way And the result of that if you just fast forward today From number 87 in the top 100 brands today. We are at number nine So we advanced 78 slots Which is not bad, right? And we are now at our top 10 brand of the world it is and they That's number one we built What do you call audio brand for the last four years? We have been rated as the world's number one audio brand and we have If you look at our brand likability scores, if you look at the brand momentum If you look at our brand affection scores, they are fortunately very very good So I think this strategy has been paying off extremely well for us and I'm so glad that I have Embarked upon this 10 years back and it continues to work and this is the direction that we continue to keep moving forward on Now we spoke about technology in one sector, which has been significantly disrupted with technology has been the payment segment Now digitization i'm talking particularly from the india standpoint of view Digitization has seen the you know with upi. We've seen the rise of ru pay g pay. What's up payments So how is mark a master card evolving its marketing strategy? in this scenario So firstly, we should look at payments as an enabling activity Okay, so for example, I'm not waking up nobody wakes up in the morning saying that oh I need to today. I want to make payment on On a soap or a shampoo or a movie ticket They want the movie ticket. They want the soap and on the shampoo That's what we think about and payment is a enabler, right? When more companies actually come in into the digital space Because today digital payments are still a tiny fraction of the entire payments space So there is a lot of opportunity to convert from cash and checks into digital payments So when many companies come in consumer education goes up consumers awareness goes up and all the companies rise It's all the boats rise when the tide goes up. That's number one number two What we try to do is to always look at What is it that the consumer truly wants and can we be there? providing Experiences that are truly priceless, which means we connect you to use something which you are passionate about In a way that only master card can do it Part of it. We do it through our priceless platforms Part of it. We would do it through our product construct Part of it. We do ironic certain kinds of loyalty programs, etc And like I'll just give an example now in India. I always keep joking that The three religions in India are cricket, bollywood and music Right. So we got into cricket last year with her partnership at PCCI It has worked like a charm What we did there the way we activated was not very traditional like what typically a brand has we went very very 360 and in very unusual and unexpected fashion That resulted in a wonderful lift in some of our brand scores in some of our brand preferences and so on It really works very well. And I think you know, so the key thing is we're not scared of competition At the same time, we are hopefully smart enough to see the opportunities to connect with the consumers And influence their preference in favor of our brand as opposed to somebody else's brand Can you elaborate on the kind of uptick that you see in post the PCCI association? What I can say is it is significant Unfortunately, we do not reveal in the media what specifics are But I can clearly say and you can quote me on that master card I have seen significant uptake in terms of how the brand is being perceived Post this PCCI Now the chatter at Khan this year has been all about AI And chat GPT You also, you know, priceless expressions is what mastercard goes by So, how do you see this integration for do you see AI being integrated into the mastercard marketing strategy to deliver priceless experiences So, you know, this is one of the common misperceptions That AI is a new phenomena We have been Infusing AI into marketing and to every aspect of marketing at mastercard for the last seven years So for example, about four years back, we launched something called the mastercard digital marketing engine Which we developed and launched out of Singapore That would actually deploy there be deployed artificial intelligence to be able to predict What the next micro trend will be And intelligently look at all the offers and messages that we have in our repository Pick out the most optimal either offer or a promotion or communication message And then leverage that in the context where that message is given or the offer is made and it buys media It creates an ad it does a B testing it optimizes the ad measures the ROI All this was automated and AI was at the center of it. It was a few years back for years back plus So AI is not new Generative AI is what is new So it has really literally broke open into the world so to speak And there is so much amount of excitement around chat GPT and you know, Dal E and mid journey And all this wonderful AI generative AI tools whether it is for creating images or creating music or creating what do you call text etc And We are actually very carefully looking at everything We don't want to rush in and do something because Generative AI if it is trained on public data or data that belongs to somebody else that are IP related issues We have to be careful about There are things which can creep in which have got intrinsic bias. We have to be careful about that So what we are now doing is to train AI Generative AI engines on internal mastercard data or internal mastercard communications, etc And then come up with Things that we can say this is based on our own proprietary information And we are not really taking anything from the public. So this is something which we are on But i'm extremely excited about the possibilities Finally, you mentioned about cricket, but mastercard has also associated with women's cricket badminton golf So what next can we expect from mastercard in the indian context any big sponsorship up on the annual? Uh, we're constantly looking for opportunities right and when some good opportunity comes We do a cost benefit analysis And if it proves to be attractive We absolutely go in and then do it if it fits also with our strategy obviously So it has to be a strategic fit. It has to be economically attractive and then we just go and do it And you're right. We went to the badminton. We went to cricket and you know, we will constantly keep looking for opportunities Like we went to the golf for example in india and uh, it's it's a journey and uh, you will hopefully Uh, sort of you know, see more action coming from mastercard and I cannot say exactly what is going to happen Thank you so much for your time, sir. Thank you. Thank you so much for having this