 Ladies and gentlemen, he's going to be talking about building greatest brand intellectual properties and how to build on a brand's emotion. Ladies and gentlemen, a man who is respected widely in the industry. Please give a big round of applause for the director of Fountainhead Promotions and Events. Please give it up for the man who tells it. Let's give it up for Brian Tellis. Good afternoon. I know I'm coming between or in between you and lunch but you've got to trust me when I say they didn't give me an option on this one. I need the clicker. Okay, so I've got I'm told 15 minutes to kind of take you through how to build an IP around a brand and I'm going to kind of cut to the chase as soon as I possibly can because we are indeed running behind schedule for one and my clock is already counting. So I'm going to skip any more pleasantries and cut to the chase. I'd like to believe broadly that when we are given the task, the exciting task, if I might add, of building an intellectual property, whether it's the greatest or otherwise, is subjective. How to build a property, I think one of the key ingredients really is how to build on a brand's emotion. I just lost the visual on screen completely. Okay. Let me just say that the first thing we need to do is actually get into the need of the brand, understand the brand, understand the brand world attributes, the personality of the brand very carefully because unless we do that, we're not going to get anywhere close to achieving the objective. So let's figure out what the defining purpose of the brand is. Now the defining purpose of the brand, I believe one of the key people or peoples who would be able to take you through it and make you understand it better, obviously are stakeholders of the brand. That doesn't need any convincing, I'm sure. And in my estimation, there are three really broad key elements that will help us determine what the brand is and what its need is or the purpose is. I think the first is actually the product or the service. What is the brand? What is the product? Is there a lineage and what is it about that lineage that we need to talk about? Another obviously very key ingredient because this is B2C in most cases is to understand our audiences, understand the language and tonality of the communication because it's crucial to really understand the demographic of the audience you're talking to, the psychographic nature of the relevant audience, what do they like, their lifestyle, their aspirations, the time they have available and of course the objectives. I mean to decipher the brand journey is a lot easier said than done. Crafting a goal-oriented objective, objectives can include goals that address brand identity, brand imaging, recognition, awareness for the brand, advocates for the brand, engagement, market share, margins. So there are three broad areas that we spoke about. Talking about product service, audience, objective which should lead us really to brand voice and the cultural context. What is the brand voice? What is the brand trying to say? To whom is it trying to say? And when you understand this very carefully you will understand context that you need to provide or should I be saying cultural context that we need to provide. Three broad areas again, once you know exactly what I've spoken about, there are three broad areas that will define how you roll out, curate the IP and how you roll it out. Content, community is the first one, not in any order of importance I must add. There's community, there's content and for obvious reasons there's consistency. Let's talk about community first. Authenticity, when you understand the community that the brand is talking to, you have to dwell on how one can be authentic. Because in this crowded world we live in, authenticity is one of the key or one of the keys rather to creating that creative glue or creating that important glue between brand and potential or existing consumer. Delivering the right core offering. Obviously there is relevance. If you're not relevant in today's day and age forget it, you're out the window. So relevance is extremely important to create for your audiences. Clarity, I think clear objectivity leads to clarity and of course clarity will lead to obviously efficiency in communication and of course the fourth quality that you need when you're talking community is quality. Again I must repeat in today's day and age where engagement and engagement mediums are there a plenty. If you do not have a quality offering you're going to lose your audiences off the bat. So quality is extremely important. I wish I could dwell a little more but I don't have that luxury. But broadly speaking when you're talking community there's authenticity, there's relevance to your audience, clarity of understanding and thought and of course quality in the offering. Let's move to content. So we've highlighted our community whom we are catering to. It's going to help us identify the various, should I say, cultural contexts that the brand could be investing in. Outlining conversations that the brand can dive into and by virtue of which create relevant, interesting, pertinent content. What is the platform we choose? Again this is a little more of a science than we make it out to be. Sometimes we let content be decided by what we love. They engage me, I love music so I want music to be the content. Maybe it could be I love theater and hence I want theater to be the content. Maybe I want food and beverage. You know maybe the brand needs rather food and beverage or theater or music. We have to disassociate our personal likes and dislikes and actually focus on what is the platform we're hoping to adopt, should I say, to actually give resonance or create as the engagement tool between the brand and its objectives and the audience. So deciding the platform very critical. The geography and this can differ from case to case. Look there are many, many objectives or purposes that a brand can have. The budgets could come from marketing budgets and hence the objectives are marketing objectives. It could be sales objectives and quite rightly so it could be budgets coming out of CSR which means it needs to resonate on a far larger, larger scale and so be it. Sometimes there's a combination of two, maybe all three of these engagement mediums. So extremely important to decide what the geography is that you're addressing. It could be something that's city specific. It could be something that's national by way of you know the target. It could be international. It could be global. So we need to clearly, clearly understand the geography we're talking to and then of course the curation. And here again I know I fall victim to this off and on where when you're curating something for a brand you tend to let personal biases rather than personal knowledge and professionalism actually come to the fore and that could be a big folly. It's a very interesting exercise sometimes not easy to disassociate personal likes and dislikes from brand needs and brand requirements. So very quickly on content, platform, geography and curation. Let's move to consistency. This is a really interesting one because I think there are four clear areas that determine and enable consistency. The first is engagement. Unless you engage your audience, your TG, you're starting off a loser. You're not even off the starting block. Creating a product that has sustained engagement actually keeps the community occupied through the relevant content created for the IP. So it's really important to think really long and hard about the engagement. How are you going to engage? What is going to be the medium of engagement? Like I said earlier and how are you going to keep it alive? How are you going to keep it pertinent? We are talking consistency at the end of the day. I think in most cases, if not all cases, you need to have multiple touch points because we're not just talking about an event. When you say it's an intellectual property, it means you're going to engage on various levels. You're going to engage on the touch and feel level, on the personal level and very importantly as the term suggests on the intellectual level. And if you have to engage on these levels all at once, it needs your offering, needs or your product, call it what you wish, needs to go way beyond just the one day, two day or however long the event is. You have to keep conversations going with your audience, with your prospective audiences and in various ways, various mediums of engagement. So multiple touch points, I think is an absolute necessity for sustainability of an intellectual property or for consistency of an intellectual property. And then of course, we call our business experiential marketing obviously has to have a uniqueness to the experience that helps the brand in creating or monopolizing a conversation, creating a sensorial experience like I said earlier for community, positively connecting experiences that encourage a meaningful dialogue with the brand. It's not just about the product, it's way beyond like I said. And I think most importantly to create consistency, you need to have a high element of emotion in your offering. Catering to the right emotional outcome, creating consistency across the communication platforms being used is critical, ensuring linear brand recall for another way to say it is critical. So I think broadly speaking, there are three areas that we need to look at, community, it's defined here, the content around which you're going to create this offering and of course very importantly consistency because it's a tough one. I'll tell you, I mean, you know, as many of you in the room are, I'm very immersed in this intellectual property exercise, exciting as it might be, it's a tough one to kind of keep going. So here we are, the three pillars, if I could call it that, building a relationship with the consumer outside of the product or service. Again, this is another folly we sometimes fall prey to where we believe that the product will do all the talking. Well, yes, the product does its share of talking, but the very reason you're creating an intellectual property is to create a whole ecosystem around the product that will create resonance with the eventual consumer or buyer. I want to quickly, I think I have five minutes more and I want to quickly take you through two examples which will kind of quantify, I hope, all that I've said over the last 10 minutes. So Aadhyam, the theater project that we conceived and are happily running for the Aditya Bidala group, the core objectives, augmenting the theater industry. So what does that mean? I think enabling large-scale productions or larger-scale productions that have existed in the past in our world of theater, opportunity to new talent because theater is very interesting. Theater really is swatches of manifestation of life, put forth to derive, should I say, a model of the story or some interesting takeouts for the consumers like you and me. So enabling large-scale productions, opportunity to new talent, increase the consumer base also was a very important objective, bringing new audiences to theater because theater, and I will admit it, in India, unfortunately, is considered fuddy-duddy for the old and the irrelevant. All of these additives, all of these statements are statements I've heard for a long time and they are changing, which is a really happy situation to be in. So increasing the consumer base, bringing new audiences to theater, making theater more accessible in today's day and age, to today's potential and current consumers, and breaking the traditional style of theater promotions. And we are hoping that we have achieved that. We'll take a look at some of the results later. Brand building and recall was another key objective in Aadhyam, establishing the brand, the Aditya Birla group as a patron to the arts. That's a softer objective I might add. Working hand in hand with the theater ecosystem, and this truly is one that puts smile on soul as well, generating interesting content in the media. Again, like I said, it has to have multiple arms and that's another really key area to look at, building a theater community via Aadhyam spotlight. One must go beyond the product itself so we have a community that we have developed that we brand under the Monica spotlight. And there are various advantages you achieve as being a member of spotlight. And I won't go into the details, I don't have that luxury of time. Just a little look at some of the objectives or realization of the objective. So interestingly, 3.2 times increase in number of theater productions in the country since the year 2015 when Aadhyam started. So I do believe Aadhyam has helped in adding theater to the cultural currency of the country we live in. Today, theater, you know, there are minimum of 30 theater productions every week in Mumbai. And that's quite staggering. Theater slowly becoming the preferred entertainment option, certainly on weekends. 30 productions every week, that's quite a staggering number. Aadhyam has also set precedents for organizations to be patrons to large-scale theatrical productions. You know, I think we've all seen and heard of The Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, more recently Sing India Sing. And if all things go well, we could be seeing King and I and a whole host of international, large international productions visiting our shores. And how good is that? So Aadhyam has made quality theater accessible to all. I'd like to believe with moderate ticket pricing. Just a quick snapshot. Over four years, 20,240 spots on air. I'm showing arms and how they have worked as well. Print ads, 2,310. 131 days of focused theater. Two cities, Mumbai and Delhi. My eternal hope is that we can take it to more cities than we do already. 191 shows, 19 proscenium productions, which is something that I take great or we take great pride in and the brand does as well. Two black box productions, the slightly smaller, more immersive variety. 232 actors engaged in this process. We do believe that we're building an offering that is going way beyond the hour or hour and a half that you spend in a theater. A 14 crore plus PR valuation. And of course, 141,290 tickets sold. I think that paints a nice happy picture. I must reiterate that it's work in progress. The vision is way larger. And we hope at some point in time we can go much closer to the vision that was charted initially. A quick look at Aadhyam spotlight. But like I said, I've run out of time and I yet have one more very important sharing with y'all. I'm going to move on to again another deep, deep favorite of ours, the Mahindra Blues Festival, which will be going into its 10th year in 2020. Absolutely. And we have two gentlemen here in the room. One of whom will be addressing us, who have played as large, if not a larger role in making it what it is. If I keep smiling through this part of the presentation, you know why. But the core objective was enhancing the blues community, obviously. International quality premium blues music experience, opportunity for new talent to be recognized through what we call the Band Hunt, the Blues Band Hunt, creating content in the blues that is consumable by fans across the globe. And there is stuff to prove that objective, or prove we met the objective. A little bit about Mahindra and Mahindra brand recall, of course, importantly, establishing the brand as a patron of the arts of the blues community, generating interesting content and keeping the blues alive, as we like to say. Building the blues in India and, importantly, the world over, creating the largest global online community of blues enthusiasts. And I say this with incredible pride. 200,000 members on Facebook, and this is the active community. I hope I am right on this, but I think we have the largest active blues community in the world. And that is quite a statement. And yes, thank you very much. I'll soak in that one, because it's with great element of pride. Being the first Indian music festival to have created an international edition in the USA. I mean, talk about taking call to Newcastle. We're taking the blues to America. Over the last couple of years, we have the Mahindra Blues Festival in Chicago. And you'd better believe me when I say soon enough, we're going to be taking it to New Orleans as well. And how cool is that? Pardon me if I'm sounding a little indulgent, but I cannot help it. Being the first Indian music festival, like I said, to have international editions. Again, in another historic first, the Mahindra Blues Festival, an Indian music festival being nominated for keeping the blues alive award by the Blues Foundation of America. It's again a really creditable first. And the festival was the first music festival in India to record and master the entire festival on Dolby Atmos sound. So again, DVD is available. We're taking it way beyond the actual live experience. Again, another quick mapping of what we've been able to achieve so far. I keep reiterating that all of us, while this is really proud achievement, it's work in progress. And hopefully we can lift levels, raise the bar, and really take it to a way higher kind of achievement level. So a digital reach, like I said, a 50 million plus, 14,000 plus radio spots on air, nine years in existence, and we're going into our 10th, like I said, in 2020, early 2020. 5,000 plus square centimeters of print advertising, 46 artists, most of them international that have come into India and performed for us, or 20 crore plus PR valuation, 8,000 attendees. This really is a classic example of the fundamental festival being, I won't say small, but being controlled to control vibe, to control experience. But the brand world extensions of the Mahindra Blues Festival have been astronomical and it's really unprecedented. So a quick snapshot, maintain a constant stream, showcase new and upcoming talent, creating larger-than-life music installations are some of the things that have driven us. Part of the green initiative, this is again very, very important, to create resonance. In our total of 93.7% of the total waste generated was recycled last year. And I think that's phenomenal. The only festival in the country to have a year-long radio campaign in the form of the Mahindra Blues show, and I have a smile on my face for reason, some of you know, it's something that we take great pride in starting with me. I won't take you through the micro details, like I said, I ran out of time a little while ago. What I just want to say, that creating intellectual property not only is a really exciting journey to go through, I think fulfillment, or the sense of fulfillment that one achieves when one, you know, kind of goes on this journey is unparalleled. And I have had the privilege of actually delving, flirting, living with the various forms of the performing arts and ingredients that go into the performing arts. And I have to say creating and indulging in intellectual properties on behalf of and with brand and brand custodians is just quite simply the highlight of my career. Thus far, and I suspect for the swatch to follow. Thank you once again for the opportunity and I hope I've done justice to intellectual properties. Thanks again. Thanks, Brian. Let's give a big round of applause. Ladies and gentlemen, Brian Tellis, let's give a big round of applause, everybody.