 So, this is a very interesting panel, of course, the earlier ones are social responsibility and all. I think you were there, right? You're not there, okay. This is the role of influencers and how mainstream it has become, from an option that it used to be to something which is competitive as, you know, print and television. It has evolved over the last few years. So, my first question to all of you, I'll start right from that corner. Can we claim that influencer marketing has mainstreamed or is it too early to say? Can you repeat the question, please? Can we say that the influencer marketing has mainstreamed? Has it come to the fore? Is it as massive as a mainstream medium? Well, interestingly, I think looking at what part of the world you are, the US today is talking about is almost reached its peak and it's on the way down. But in India, I think it's still early days for it. Just taking a step back, influencer has always been a part of marketing. I think all we do is to influence people day in and day out. What influencers are doing brands do now is reach out to a captive audience. In India, yes, making strides, but I'll be very wary of how soon we sort of explode with this because what's happening today is looking at the influencer as a cash cow too soon and the honesty, the credibility that the influencer used to bring in because the captive audience was people who were relating to them. They had to connect with them on topics that were relevant to those audiences. Brands today want to just sort of leverage those people and dump their own content through them. So that's not going to happen, but interesting space for influencer marketing in India. The park as a group has been using influencers to reach out to customers. I think you have a fairly long case study of it. Could you share what is your experience of using influencer marketing? Sure. I think hotels have been using influencers for a very long time, even when influencer marketing was really not even, there was nothing called influencer marketing per se. We used to use it differently at that point of time. We used to call them brand ambassadors. We used to have people who had an impact or had an influence on a certain kind of audience and we used to use them more for offline subjects rather than online. The only difference now that has become is that it's all become online. Everything is so digitally amplified that it's important to actually look at people who are still considered brand ambassadors or influencers in that space. We have and we are continuing to use the influencers for various projects. Definitely when we are launching a product, let's say be it a restaurant, be it a hotel, be it a new facility, we tend to use a lot of influencers to reach out to our guests. So it also depends exactly at what marketing funnel are we looking at them. I mean, are we looking at them to create an awareness? Are we looking at them to for a certain call to action that they should come and use our facilities? Or are we just ensuring that as a challenge, as a marketing scope, we're just reaching out to everybody through each and every medium. So obviously it depends on that also. While when we are launching a hotel, we usually use them as an awareness campaign more than as a call to action to immediately use it. We use them also during pre-opening times so that there is a little buzz that gets around it. One has to be very careful because influencers is becoming a very abused word. Everybody and anybody is calling themselves influencers. So I think very important challenge for all of us as communicators is to actually find out who are the right influencers. Of course, you have data analytics that is available. You have AI that's come into play and now you can actually deep dive into who's right for you and who's not right for you. But what is becoming very critical for all of us is to actually show a be sure, is it the right influencer we're using? Because like I said, everybody calls themselves influencers these days. What started as a blog, as a blogging, now even writing a quote on an Instagram is considered as a blog. So those are the certain challenges I think as communicators. We have to figure out what works for us as a brand and what doesn't work for us as a brand. Now the newer challenges are going to be Instagram removing, let's say, likes from its platform. So how is it that we're going to actually ensure where is our message going and not going? So it's a very interesting space to be at. It's a very interesting space to look at as a marketer because it's a lot of challenge. It's a lot of fun. It is definitely less expensive than most other mediums. So it can be used wisely. There are a lot of scopes of using macro and micro influencers. So one doesn't necessarily has to spend a lot of marketing budgets over it. But there are challenges equally involved with that. Mr. Charyan, your thoughts on influencer marketing become an alternate to mainstream platforms? So I have a bad habit of deep diving into who I'm dealing with. And what I've realized is that there are tools today which give you, taking off from what Ruchika mentioned, there are tools today which enable you to understand which influencer is the right fit for you. It's not based on the likes. It's not based on the followers he has, also the industry, the influencer thing he represents. It's entirely based on his audience base and how they respond to what they are posting. So for example, most of the influencers today are polymats. They will be talking about three or four or trying to say that we are experienced on three or four verticals. For example, tech, lifestyle, and travel. However, for a brand, we were mobile, it's going to be very important to understand whether this influencer might have the numbers, but it's the right fit for me. So proprietary tools come to play there. Similarly, I think influencer management is changing because of new platforms such as TikTok which entirely depend on 15 second videos. We've seen Instagram, we've seen lots of influence on Facebook and blogs, which I think is now stereotype, but I think something we've got to watch out for is TikTok influencers. These guys cater to tier two and tier three markets. They communicate the messages in 15 seconds and they have role plays in it. So if you will ever follow TikTok influencers, these guys might be from Jharkhand, but the followers are amazing. And they will have set of five friends who keep creating episodes, 15 second episodes, about a day in a school, a day teasing someone, stuff like that. But then there's a good chance for you to place your products there. So I think that's the new kind of platform you've got to watch out for in the future. Also, before I end, if you look at globally, there is a trend of influencers who are eight years old. They're not the IGEN. The IGEN influencers are below eight years old and so there's an interesting kid known as Ryan. He's on YouTube and he has 23 million followers. What this kid does is he just picks up toys and he just plays with his toys for five minutes. But my kids love seeing him play. The only problem is that I go to buy the toilet later on, right? But the point is it really works. So that's the new kind of set of influencers we're looking at. Amit, you at PepsiCo, PepsiCo has taken influencer marketing to another level with TikTok videos especially. Tell me how much is the faith in this kind of marketing? Has it got you the right ROI as well? So let me just briefly talk about how influencer marketing is becoming mainstream. I think an important point to understand is that how companies and marketers are now investing more and more in digital. If you talk about 10 years back, the spends on digital were hardly five to 10% but now it's almost 30 to 40% a lot of brands are investing money. And as a result, I think influencer marketing is coming up. In India, if you go by numbers, we are the second largest in terms of Instagram, fastest growing on TikTok, Facebook. So I think to me, I think a lot of marketers are looking into influencer marketing. And on behalf of PepsiCo, if I can speak about, I think we have done some amazing campaigns over the last one year where influencers played a very key role. But what as a brand, what we are looking at is how do we engage with influencers in a long term way rather than just get them to pay for an event and you can have a competition also coming forward and paying them money and get them to endorse their products. So on TikTok, for example, we launched the campaign today on Pepsi. So I think the one is releasing tomorrow. So we have Salman as our new brand ambassador and there's a big campaign going on TikTok. You've done amazing campaigns for Laze and then SevenUp. So TikTok has been a platform which we've explored over the last eight months now. I think the numbers have been huge. I mean, we were very astonished to see that if you go and see right now, the Pepsi Anthem has 23 billion views. It's like the world has seen it three times, right? Now, those are astonished numbers. We're still figuring out how the algorithm work. But the influencers are playing a very critical role in ensuring the message of the brand reaches to the masses. And like you mentioned, that it goes to the tier two and tier three cities. Whereas on Instagram, which is a different platform itself, we launched the Laze Smile campaign where we have a very interesting strategy of engaging with influencers but we didn't monetize it. We had an experiential method of engaging with them and we ensured that what we offered to them, they put it up on the platform because that was so special. That has become a case study and a lot of other companies are talking about it. So I think it's really important. I personally feel that it is becoming the part of mainstream influencer marketing. And very soon, you'll see a lot of brands who have not explored influencer marketing talk about it and engage with influencers. Ruchika, you mentioned choosing the right brand ambassador for your campaign. If this is becoming another alternative to mainstream marketing, what are the similarities and differences between choosing a brand ambassador sale for your TV campaign versus your Instagram campaign or a Facebook campaign? Are there any similarities? What are the main differences? I just want to understand. Sure. Even if it becomes mainstream, though I would want to say that the other, this is still going to remain one of the channels. It's not going to overtake many other channels. I think we're going to continue to use the other channels equally. As it is evolving, we're going to see how impactful influencer marketing is going to be. When it comes to choosing a brand ambassador as an influencer, I think the strategy is always the same. Whether it is a TV campaign or whether it's a digital campaign, that what is the value that that individual person is known for and how well does that match to our values, our brand values. That's, I think, where the first funnel of discrimination or choosing or selection process begins. The second, of course, is who's the audience that is actually going to? And what the lip set, sorry, Chirag said, sorry, what Chirag said very correctly, that you have a lot of proprietary tools that comes into play in understanding the audience because just having a two million, let's say, people following you or thousands of likes coming into you doesn't really help the brand if it is not the right audience. And especially for a brand like us, which is a luxury brand, of course, we play in different categories. There is a certain kind of audience that we want to attract to. So sure, as a brand awareness, it's nice to be known across, but eventually what is it that we want? We want people to come to the hotels and use its services. So it's very critical to know who are these followers and will they actually come and use my product? Because if it's only going to somebody who's a 10-year-old or going to somebody who doesn't really have the propensity to spend, unfortunately, it doesn't really help the brand. So it's very critical to see, A, the person is the value systems that they bring across is kind of similar and matches to the brand value systems that our brands have. And secondly, of course, where is it going to? What is the audience that we are reaching to? So I'd rather have a less number of followers and less number of likes, but more, more compete, more, more accurate, I mean, our kind of audience, rather than having large numbers, because we are not an FMCG brand, we are not really looking at a mass product, we are looking at a luxury product at a certain price level. So we are happy with that. So I think these are something critical things that we keep in mind. I'm very similar at some level to what you would do as a TV campaign and choose a brand ambassador to fall. So I have a comment. Because we're talking about brand promotions, right now we're aggressively using influencers for crisis management, or for ORM. So there is a brand I work for actively who over promised and delivered in terms of delivery of the product. Now people who booked the products have paid 5,000 rupees and said, okay, I want my product in December, but the product isn't coming out in December. It's delayed by a month. So there is where influencers came into action and we said, you know what? It might be one month's extra weight, but then you'll have to go all the way back in the queue to get it again, which that means you might get it in June. But we have amazing people who are talking amazing things about this product. So what's happening is every month we have 60, 70 influencers who are going out, checking out the product and saying, you know what, I would rather buy this product, then cancel it, and then wait for it for six months. It works very well for us. Similarly in terms of crisis, today you have influencers not only for the regular genres, but you also have influencers for different sectors. Today a journal on Twitter is also influencer. So there's a thin line about who your influencer is. So getting the message across to the right person is the key. Is there a downside to the influencer on online medium, for example? They are in TikTok, a lot of videos and you have their huge followers and then they are nowhere after a couple of months. Is there a downside to the influencer category of the online version of influencers? Not really a downside. I mean, you take Salman Khan for Pepsi. You know, today he drives a car in some other place on some other platform. Their money is down the drain, right? So there's a risk running with the personality. You know, you rope in these influencers looking at leveraging the people who sort of are following them. The downside always is the people can't go wrong. The people that you're putting your trust and your money in, they can't go wrong. So you spoke about ROI there, right? Lots of money, I'm sure Salman would have taken. A brand who probably doesn't have so much money, let's say Pizza Hut. They just sort of wanted to change their perception. They were very classy brand. They just roped in Bhuvan Bham. Crazy ass video that he's sort of made. You know, the number of transactions for the store are up and everything is up. What it does it, what influencers do is you wanna pull people in. Some other brand probably did not have the money, you know, those deep pockets. So at least these influencers allow them because these are mini celebrities in their own rights, right? This allows them to again connect with people that they want to. It does give them an opportunity with lesser money and you also brought up the point about ROI. ROI on these people right now is great because you get so much content also made of these people. Just imagine you're picking up five people who's making content for you and thanks to smart phones today. You would have spent lakhs and lakhs creating your content videos, but these people, they just have a knack of creating content, you know? They are so ambitious at this age. Eight-year-old influencer, four-year-old influencer. People know how to work a GoPro. They know how to use, you know, phones sort of default program to edit videos. The stuff that they produce on phones is kick-ass. It allows brands to do a lot more with a lot of, you know, a lot less money. But as you said, the shelf life is probably not as much. Someone's gonna come tomorrow, be a bigger influencer, have some better ideas about content. These people are all about content. You know, your pummy aunties and your boobanwams, these people just rely on you connecting with them on emotions. There will be downside. There will be shorter life cycle. I think the only thing we need to do is we get too excited about anything new that comes in. Bitcoin comes in, everyone goes. We'll be able to sort of also get link-backs and whatever, and we'll be cool in this, right? The downside is don't over-invest. The downside is just make sure the people that you're looking at take a tech guy and ask him to sell a lifestyle product for you. You know as a product, as a brand, you've got that leverage because your product sort of sits in that category. You can span, right, but don't over-invest. I think the only downside right now is people when they start planning to use influencers, like Roshika Zayn and Charal Zayn. Look at the people that you're working with. Look at what they bring to the table. Don't branch out. They are going to have people unfollow them. I'm not sure how the entire world will see the video, but you know you're getting the metrics, right? As a marketer, you get to have those deliverables, those parameters that sort of take you to a successful campaign, right? Downside, just don't go over-invest too much into them. You'll still, you know, you also have to live with those pitfalls. Tomorrow the government plans TikTok to raise a lot of money, sir. They try to do it once, right? Just to add, I think... Sorry, the government is now on some of the government departments who are on the TikTok now. Yeah. Just to add on that, I think I agree with you. I think the shelf life of... Sorry, sorry, just on that. People get so enthusiastic. You don't know policies around new platforms. You don't know policy around all these people coming up. Today, Mumbai police is a great example of using Twitter today. You know, they've got humor in. Sorry to cut you short, but that's what my point was. You don't rush into anything. It's very traditional. These are people who were probably yesterday influencing their families on WhatsApp. Today, they've found free YouTube and you know, they're sort of influencing far more people. It's still about an individual influencing. It's just the circle of influence grows. That's all. That's a downside. Don't go over-invest. Wonderful. Just to add, I think you rightly said the shelf life of the content also produced by influencers is pretty less. Just to give an example again on say, Instagram or on TikTok. You know, there's an influencer you engage with or a brand, they produce wonderful content, but the problem is there's no contract with that influencer. Tomorrow, a competitor can easily walk down and tell him, hey, this is our product, why don't you do that? And they don't think twice. I think from that point of view, if I am a follower of that influencer, then what is the brand loyalty and whether what he's doing is influencing my decision to buy that brand is still an area which a lot of people are figuring out. We as marketeers have one filter. You talked about filters is that we very, very straightforward tell the influencer that there has to be a lag time before you endorse any product, especially if it is a competitive product. Many of them don't agree, especially the TikTok influencers who have become overnight stars. So I think that's what the filters have to be in place. Being an FMCG brand where for us, you know, mass awareness and mass coverage is important. We do have these filters, but end of the day, I think that's one of the pitfall of influencer engagement where we don't control what else they promote, which we can do with salamans of the world. So this one is for all of you. Are there some set practices that needs to be followed to have an effective influencer campaign? Is it a science actually? Or I mean, are there factors beyond you which you cannot control? How is it like? Since you practice it, you implement it. What are your experiences of that? Anyone against that? I'll go with the campaign, which I'll be very honest. We spent four months designing that campaign. We had goosebumps in our stomach before the campaign went on air because we were dealing with 750 influencers. No brand has done that before in India and 90% of the influencers were being engaged organically. So we never knew what content they're gonna put up there, whether they're gonna put up there or not. But I think one thing which helped us come out successfully was that the content was pretty good. I think that's really, really important that the kind of content you are giving to them or the output which you have in mind has to be of that standard that an influencer would be keen to put it up because eventually an influencer also wants to expand his own circle of followers, right? He's also looking at producing that content. And hence, if you see the videos of Pusha Kapila, for example, we have done some campaigns with her, but she does it so nicely that the brand doesn't come inside, right? She creates a nice story around the campaign. So I think that's really important that as a brand, you need to engage with them, give interesting content, and then keep the fingers crossed because for example, we have a campaign running today and there's a crisis happening in the country. So we were in a debate whether we should do it or not. So it's a lot of factors which do play a role, but eventually I think it's, for me, it's how you plan, select your influencers and then create content which is really important. So I had a client who was entirely dependent or entirely but aggressively wanted to reach out to influencers and realized to get the max out of influencers, you have to give them the experience that they cherish and you have to keep them with you for three days. So basically trap them because in those three days when they're with you, they might create content for other brands, but they're not posted. So we took them to Andamanikba Islands, we took them to Manali, we took a set of fashion bloggers who were doing the fashion forecast shoots at Uttar Pahas, whereas we took some bloggers to Andamanikba Islands who were doing shoots there to showcase the camera. So the trick is keep them engaged for a longer time, create experience for them, keep them busy. If you call them for an event, they'll come, they'll create that content or they'll be sitting at home creating that content for you and it goes out. The shelf life will go low. So what impressions we received in the three days of engagement with them with us was definitely I think 10 times four of what we've got with them from one event. So give them experience. I think some of the brand rules that we follow because we've realized then they're very tricky, some of the influencers really handle and deal with. And like Amitwai correctly said, we don't know exactly sometimes what the content they're really going to push out and you have to literally keep your fingers crossed. So sometimes what we've started to do as a thumb rule is to actually tell them what our expectation is in terms of content. Of course we want them to create the way they should because the idea is to get original content and not something that we are prescribing them to but give them a certain direction that this is what we actually expect out of them. And I'll give you one of the examples where we actually burned our fingers. We had this one of the hotel launches happening and we were giving them the experience of staying in the hotel. And the influencers has this tendency of working with multiple brands at the same time and using each of the brands however they can. And they were doing a photo shoot in our hotel room where they used some of the toiletry products which was a competing brand for us. While we use Kama and they were using some other product. Of course for them they were like, oh we showed your hotel so beautifully everything was good but it's a competing brand. End of the day we do not want somebody coming to our hotel to think this is a product that is available because some of the people won't understand that. So I think it is very important if we could create some brand guidelines depending on each brand and that's what we do now and we tell our teams that we have to have some dos and don'ts which we keep which we tell them because otherwise it gets very tricky and we do not want a wrong message to go out. Of course letting them do what they want to do in terms of how they want to create it what they want to say but telling them that this is what we expect. Otherwise it can just go all over. Final comments we're running short on time so we can just make the last comment. You know Ash, so I just think influencers or these social media influencers today they're just a new channel for a brand to go out and share the message. It's always been about the right connect and it's always been about the right emotion that you want to insight in the people that you sort of want to reach out to. It's purely that. The scientific, the science of dealing with these influencers is very, very simple. It's all about planning. What you need them to do whether you want them to get people on to your brand you want them to sort of popular as a hashtag for you. You want them to drive traffic to a store. It's very, very relevant. I think it all starts from really understanding what you want that influencer to do. If you want that guy to get someone to use your product online, deliver online, it just, there are too many nuances to sort of having a scientific framework for these influencers but it's just about knowing what you want them to do. The end result that you want, what tools you have as your disposal. You know that will help you establish the campaign worked or not. And then just working with the right people. Some people are just loose cannons. Perfect. Thank you so much for your time. It's been a wonderful discussion. Can we have a round of applause for all of them? Thank you once again.