 I'm now going to take up the next session with the two leading experts in the OTT and Martek domain. Let me introduce the panelists I have today. I have with me Tarun Katyal, whom I'm sure a lot of you in the Indian media advertising ecosystem know. He's a media veteran of over two decades. Tarun Katyal is the CEO of C5. In his current role, Tarun is responsible as you know for steering C5. Steering C5, India's largest and most comprehensive digital entertainment platform for language content towards gaining industry leadership position. As you also know, Tarun has a varied and diverse background across India's leading media companies. He was last at Big FM where he was the founder, CEO and CEO during his duration. He also set up Twink, the content incubator and the big TV channels Magic and Ganga. Tarun began his career with advertising agencies, but now as you see, he's a content advertising tech expert. He also worked with Star Network where he rose to head the content and communications across the network in India. He also became instrumental in the record of accomplishment through successful shows like KBC. Apart from that, he was famous for launching Indian media practice and a lot of other shows in India. Welcome Tarun on board. Glad you are here doing this with us. And as I mentioned, Tarun is now a part of Z5, which is India's leading OTT network. I was going through some of the stuff Z5 has been doing and from what I understand in the last three, four months, their consumption is shot up by almost 80% during the lockdown period. They made aggressive investments in Z5 ads, ad tech. They also have partnership with Airtel and Geofiber and they are also launching their own hyper shots, which is India's first ever fully homegrown short video platform. So all the best to you on that, Tarun. In addition to Tarun, what we also thought was to invite eating expert from Europe, Macha Zawadinski is with us. Good to see you. Macha is an expert. Thanks for having me. And advertising technology and a founder of several successful companies. Macha is also currently devoting his knowledge and skills to developing PIVIC Pro, a privacy focused analytics platform and the perfect alternate as this lead to Google analytics. He's also in the past led clear code to its question as a world leading software specializing in customer advertising and marketing technology. Thank you for joining us, Macha, all the way from Poland. So thank you gentlemen for being part of this session. We have people tuned in already. And as has been announced already, the topic of what we are discussing today is around the collapsing web banner and third party data while shifting ad budgets to OTT. Before I get into the detailed thought points about what's going to happen, let me ask you a very elementary question. We've seen over the last many years, Google Facebook have had a kind of duopoly when it comes to customer attention as well as advertising money. Why don't you tell our both of you tell our viewers, what are the three big reasons? Why do you think over the next 12, 18 months, this money, the advertising money, as well as consumer attention is likely to shift from that duopoly to also the third pillar, which is gaining currency very fast in India and outside India, which is the OTT ecosystem. Why don't we start with you? So thank you for a long introduction. I was almost embarrassed at the end of it. Thank you Macha for joining us from Poland. It's really good to have you around and I hope it isn't too early in the morning for you. So it's a good question, right? Where is digital advertising going? What is going to happen to independent publishers? What's going to happen to the big, large networks of Facebook and Google? For anybody to say that Facebook and Google are going to go away would be quite kind of very foolish, right? Will they reduce their influence on digital advertising? Maybe. Will other publishers come in and come in with scale? I think definitely yes. And why is that? I think for many years, the capability of segmented and targeted advertising, the capability of doing good big data, having great ad servers, digital ad servers, being able to do a great consumer profiling 360 through a good CDP, light or was only a domain of the big tech, right? Which was Google and Facebook and a little bit of Amazon when they started their advertising program for a couple of years ago. But I think the democratization of technology and the democratization of platforms and their ability to attract users and users at scale is aligned for this paradigm to change, for this picture to shift. Platforms like ours and even others like Hotstar or many others are now over, you know, closing to 100 million over 100 million users with some significant amount of video consumption around some very quality content with a higher amount of loyalty. And I think the picture started to change about two to three years ago when most broadcasters in India and across the world realized that they couldn't let the OTT game be secondary and be played by either syndicating content to platforms like Netflix or Amazon or putting their content on a revenue share on platforms like YouTube. But they had to control their own digital destiny. They started building their own platforms. But once they build their platforms and they started to see some very scaled up consumption, they realized that they hadn't invested enough behind analytics and ad tech. And I think the last 12 and the next 12 to 18 months, we'll see some significant investments and building up of independent networks on the base, on the back of, you know, partners like Lekor and others actually getting what they deserve and owning the end to end ad tech pipeline for themselves. Right. Ache, you work very, you know, deeply in this entire audience measurement or the audience journey measurement and the, you know, martech space. What is your sense globally also a lot of media, traditional legacy media companies are investing a lot in the OTT space. Disney just, you know, pulled out all their content from Netflix and has launched their own platform. What's your sense of what the future looks like? Sure. I mean, I think I totally agree with what Tyrone said. I want to add one point before I answer this question is that the very big advantage of OTT is creating this brand experiences. Like there is no ad blog, banner blindness and they're like, you know, ways that will be distracted from seeing the brand message. So this is a big advantage where I see this advantage and why there is so much investment into this space is that the advertising on the web or in mobile apps has been with us for decades now and maybe for mobile apps not decades, but for web definitely decades and the technology is very advanced today. There is a lot of attribution platform segmentation and so on. We'll come to that probably why some of these platforms will no longer work with the demise of cookies, but they are very advanced compared to what's in OTT and there is a big investment into this creating these ecosystems where there is end-to-end ad buying data analytics attribution for the OTT channel because basically we are building in a matter of the last few years everything that has been created on the web for over a decade. So I see there is a big need because there is a big opportunity and great inventory, great experience, but we need to catch up with the technology and some of the players like Z5 is already doing or in the process of doing that, but there's a lot of legacy players even in the US that are years behind and they are starting to build this technology for the OTT. So would you brought up this point about you know third party cookies, extinction of the third party cookies, so what happens you know how do you see the future of audience buying and advertising on digital changing and how does the OTT system gain out of that, give us some granularity, you know what do you think will happen say in the next 12 months, how does the balance of power kind of shift especially also given the fact that privacy laws are becoming very strict. Yeah that's one point so I think there are two things that influence that one is the regulatory space and not only what happened in Europe with GDPR but also what's happening in Brazil, what's happening in India, in other countries where the privacy laws gets tricker and there is a limitation in what we can do in context of sharing the data between Brenda. That's why I see that there will be a bigger alliance on first party data and some of the big publishers on web like even New York Times announced that they would like no longer do the third party audience selling or buy or inventory selling it will be all based on the first party data and the OTT has a big advantage as by design we know everything like we the users identified they log in with their like username or their telecom into the OTT platform so they're identified it's not like with web where we can lose the cookie when the user blocks it or changes the browser so I think this is like by design a huge advantage of OTT that we are dealing with primarily identified audiences and that's what all other channels are going shifting to primarily on web where the cookies are used and they will no longer be relevant. What I see also is that there is more interest in the first party data technologies so CDPs in particular building the customer data platforms to aggregate data across different sources that these organizations have and I think again OTT has a big advantage that they can do great partnerships with various players whether there are telecoms or whether there are other like internet providers or there are other partners that have data and having identified audience helps you to match this data with the partner and reach your audience data and that is a matter of like selling that at inventory at the high premium price versus selling it unidentified users at the low price. Right so let me stay on this point about data and hop across to Tarun. Tarun these are interrelated things you know if you look at the large publishers non-OTT publishers the Google and the Facebook books of the world they inherently require registration and hence their ability to you know mine that data because they know who exactly is using a Gmail and who's using the Facebook account they've managed to build huge you know programmatic plays on top of this layer of data that they are primarily collecting directly from the users. OTT players on the other hand have a mixed bag so in cases where you have subscriber data obviously people are paying and you know they are they are kind of holding accounts but there's a large number of users who are who are consuming OTT content without really you know registering and giving you access to that kind of data so how do you think OTT players over the next 12 months can overcome this you know primary data deficit that currently they have because that also kind of means more earnings the more the advertiser can map the data the primary data the more his confidence in investing in the platform goes up. So you're right Naval I think OTT made a mistake when they launched that there are a lot more guest users onto their platform without registering you know directly with the OTT platform so I'll tell you two or three things that OTT platforms data shouldn't have done one we all allowed guest users to keep consuming video because we thought it was early stage without having compulsory or mandatory registration. Two while doing the mandatory registration we didn't take enough fields like age and gender and so on and so forth. Third we allowed a lot more social logins on our platform which didn't give us enough data pipeline from the social platforms like Google and Facebook and all of this is something that we corrected over a period of time I think you'll live to learn and learn to live. So to help you understand a platform like ours now if you watch over five videos without being registered you have to go back and register so it's mandatory registration at one level. At the second level even if you were to come in and register through social which is because of convenience we still allow which is Facebook and Google you have to enrich your profile in terms of age and gender and it's even more important for us because increasingly government laws and regulation around content and around age and guard rates around that make it very important for us to get that data both data both as well as gender for us. Then lastly I think we've also all built a network of relationships on data partnerships to be able to enrich this first party data with other partners who have similar logins and we work with other loyalty programs, we also work with other telcos who are able to actually bring alive our data management platforms and much like Marchesh was saying we now have a fairly big investment in building a consumer data platform which where not only our first party data and registered verified users flowing but a lot more data partners who flow in their data or basis are their understanding and their consumption of the same users and we've been able to multiply that those attributes and that profile in a fairly rich manner and that investment continues to grow and grow. So much as you know India is a unique country to convert users into subscribers is far more tougher as compared to some other parts of the world and hence as Tarun said a lot of the OTT usage started as a sampling service to lower users in and keep the barrier of entry as low as possible not even ask them for basic details. So what do you think like Tarun was explaining what do you think are the ways that now that there is a substantial chunk of user base and advertisers are looking at the platforms very seriously to invest in what are the ways in which you can we can sort of short circuit the process and jump over because you can't have now suddenly millions of people registering and sharing their data overnight. So I think like what Tarun mentioned about gated content and forcing the users after they experience the service to sign in is the way that like it's a global trend even for non OTT content and that's basically you know how you gain the identified users the moment you have identified users you can do much more in context of the data and what's most important you can collect bits of data over time and you don't lose it in the cookie words like the moment that the browser clears the cookies you are losing all the history and here like the moment we don't have to collect all the data at once we can do it very slowly we can also build it based on the content consumption over time how it changes we can do a lot of analytics based on that that will help us later to classify the users into audiences that will be very valuable for the advertisers and you know sorry never can I come in and I think the big advantage that OTT players bring it into the country is that advertisers are used to buying on some of their key market shows on broadcast right but advertisers didn't know what the psychographics and what the other attributes of these users were the same users and a fair amount of them migrate from watching on tv to watching on OTT you now know them one at an n equal to one level and two you now know them far more than what you knew before which you knew them through a panel and you knew them through a panel into age and gender and so on and so forth but as more data flows in and as you grow to know them more and more your ability to get those many signals into the same set of users that you were doing through broadcast now on OTT is far richer a platform like ours which is becoming 360 degree in terms of being a super app we now have hypershots coming and hypershots becomes almost quasi-social right where where you have far more many signals because there's user generated content and people like and share and display affinity to certain kind of users or certain kind of story or certain kind of you know even products and all of those signals keep enriching your first party data which is all verified through a signal identifier. Tell me that's very interesting the hyper locals point tell me something why don't you tell us a little more about it especially how do you plan to dovetail user generated content into the existing content on the platform how will it work the synchronization it doesn't really synchronize in that sense it's a separate section within the app so it's much like a super app where you have different different areas but what we thought was really that you know for several years the influencer game built the social platforms right and who are these influencers these influence was were all these tv stars who are really on our shows for so many years right so all the 40 channels of the z network and all the characters and actors within that actually build the entire influencer list in the country a part of it not all of it and then there is bollywood and there is sports and and there are newscasts and we thought that we had we had access to so many of these their fans wanted to connect to them directly and the fans anyway came to consume their characters on our platform on a daily basis yeah and we could extend that experience of fandom onto a hyper shorts platform also you know all our reality shows allowed regular users to become superstars or you know at least celebrities of their own and this hyper shorts platform will also funnel that talent into our you know our various reality shows and so on and so forth so really there were three vectors that we were working on one was fandom one was fun and we thought that there's a lot out there that you can play and play with music play with dialogues and all that and the last was factual and we think that there is a lot of DIY content in short form that is waiting to be done and and all of it had a great overlap with our existing audiences and we thought that you know while audiences in India find it difficult to have too many apps on their phone largely because of low memory low real estate in on the phones one super app could do it all for them fantastic uh let me just pick up an audience question now uh there's somebody who's uh wants to know what OTT overtake television or cinema in the next five years I think that answer that question has been answered in many research reports but I'm not going to uh but I'm not going to put my job why don't you tell us what is pitch pitch Madison report saying well I mean my sense is that uh in India you know like it's happened with mobile telephony it's happened so many times in media things move on parallel tracks so it's not like one thing takes over the other OTT will grow at at its own pace television penetration is still growing you know a lot of companies have been very fast to uh pronounce the death of print but look at regional print you know it continues to grow at a healthy rate year after year so I think a lot of learning that we have from western markets might not be exactly replicable in India at least for the next five years television will continue to grow obviously the pace of growth will be different because OTT's base is low I was reading another report which said over the next five years OTT ecosystem is expected to grow 24% compound annual rate of growth which is significant given the fact that that advertising market in the last four five years that has grown at what a CAGR of 11 12 person give or take so at 2x and obviously uh one of the components that will fuel the growth is also subscription monies uh which for television has also started coming in if you see in the last five six years which was a very small pie you know before digitization and television started so the simple answer is I don't think anybody can really predict whether it'll overtake cinema or television but one thing is for sure OTT will become a very very large pie of the entire digital ecosystem which will be large enough maybe it'll be equal to TV in five years that is certainly a possibility this year from what I understand digital itself would have reached 17-18 thousand crores in India which is from some 1.5 billion dollars but maybe because of covid the growth will be lesser but in five years yeah but one of the segments that will grow even this year they say even after all of this possibly digital and digital video will possibly grow the fastest yeah that's right so let me come back to you uh see you answered this much better than me oh you I've learned from you Darul let me hop back across to uh to machi you know one of the things uh that we keep talking about machi is uh data you know privacy of data I think that's globally a massive issue in countries like India how the data is going to be used I was reading uh today actually that I think it's Germany that is a disallowed facebook a german supreme court has disallowed facebook to mine user data for selling to third parties right and yeah why don't you tell us a little more right you you have an idea about what's going on there sure so I mean I think with facebook is very interesting uh case because um they collect the user actions etc so they have locations almost everything that we do there there is a significant amount of time there so um the supreme court banned them from selling to third parties but what they say they don't sell the data because they sell advertising targeted by the data and the data does not leave the ecosystem um so there is still like I think uh some uh dispute over like whether they are using it's like in my opinion they are using it for advertising not for the purpose of like serving the user the content and using the service so they are using it for advertising purposes and the user has to agree to that but in their opinion they are not sending they are selling advertising and they are not exporting the data outside of their their ecosystem talking a bit more broadly about privacy yes it gets much stricter and I think like the this is the good thing like the at-tech and marketing technology space just got out of control and we like the whole industry earns that that they are now forced to adapt and there will be a lot of changes uh regarding regarding that but it's not that you know uh we won't be able to to track the users we have to do it with the uh certain uh either consent or certain anonymization uh so that we cannot target an individual rather than audience uh but uh but it's not that it's end of the world for at-tech companies now like we see like even uh clearly the company I founded sees the growth in the at-tech projects mainly because they have to adopt or there are new channels uh there's a lot of investment into the first party space uh compared to the third party data that it's it used to be for the last decade um so yeah I mean uh not sure if you want me to elaborate on anything else in in particular here right so there's a specific question for you this is what kind of tools do you offer to the marketers to empower them to use your channel or your shows so what we're developing now um while we have four ad products which is advault amplify uh and we also have a big dmp called infonomics which we allow marketers to set up their campaigns and and set up their audience segments and so on and so forth what we now work with clear code is to build out an entire cell sub platform uh which will allow and empower marketers to be able to do almost everything themselves forget setting up audiences and campaigns but also do biddable advertising buy biddable advertising uh and to hold so also to be able to do optimization waterfall analytics um and basically end-to-end optimization on their campaign so our entire vision is that are that the advertiser or the advertising agency will be fully empowered in every in every way to be able to advertise on our platform and it will have very low managed services or human intervention right fantastic we don't have uh time left so I'll ask one last question which is also very relevant to the Indian market uh to both of you gentlemen measurement in digital uh has been uh kind of a bone of contention for the last many years unlike the legacy media which has you know third-party measurement tools run by companies like nilson in india you have a bar for tv you have a mr uc uh which does irs the readership studies uh digital does not have any third-party measurement tools do you think the time has come turn to have third-party independent measurement tools it will allow the industry to go and to grow at a much faster rate so digital having said that digital is far more transparent in terms of data as compared to legacy media but do you think if we have third-party measurement at this point of time it'll help us jump the curve and faster so there is uh so to let me correct you here now but there is no single currency that measures everybody together but there is measurement of individual platforms which is third party right okay so on our platform we have oracles mode which uh measures view through rates so how much of the advertising did anybody see we also have nilson's dar which gives advertisers an ability to see who saw an advertise who are so on advertising which is what age what genders and whatever filters we decide to sell and they decide to measure so those two parameters already exist on most good quality platforms uh but i think there is a need for all platforms to come together and build a single currency and i think that even you know at imai i'm trying to work with almost all platforms to see you know we can come to a consensus there is a obviously word that is work that is happening at bark and ecamp there is work that is happening at nilson individually so yes there are platforms there is kondiba which is also trying to do something on the smart tv side collectively so there are lots of options and opportunities that that are coming together and i can tell you with all my experience in this space it's not more than 18 to 24 months away we will find a solution to something and this right and people like marches are doing a lot of this kind of work through public so let him tell us a little bit actually why don't you tell us globally how is the third party independent data measurement uh being tackled we know that facebook are not on third party platforms yeah so i mean there are ecosystems like google and facebook does not let independent measurement and there is a lot of controversy and even losses uh because of that uh what i see is what i want to point out is maybe something different so uh when it comes to independent measurement on uh web for example when it comes to audiences this space will get disrupted by the demise of cookies that we that we covered uh earlier as well as by privacy laws because by tracking these users you share their information and there needs to be some new mechanisms developed and similarly to ott we have to develop some new currency and new systems uh how to do it uh in a privacy friendly way and at the same time so that we can compare apples to apples rather than have uh like right now like even with some leading platforms you have significant differences in kinds of measurement and that has been always the case like with every time we go into integrating for example real-time building platforms we see these discrepancies we get them down quite a lot but they are always there and that's because like different vendors uh have a different let's say currency of how how certain things are being measured so to sum up it there are still challenges i had to to make it uh independent of the channel but we'll get there i i'm sure that we'll get there uh globally as well brilliant uh we are we are out of time and as you know we are this is a you know larger martech event and we have the next speaker already waiting so thank you to both of you gentlemen it's exciting i'm sure to be in the otd space it's a sunrise sector uh while legacy media is looking at many confronting many many issues especially during the lockdown otd is a sector which is likely to continue to grow at a very fast pace but with the challenges of having technology and having more competition one of the reports i read said india alone has 95 otd platforms now and growing because you know every month one or two new otd platforms are launching so with that thank you to both of you for spending your valuable time and we'll try and take some of the conversation offline thank you darun thank you ruhail thank you thank you everyone for joining us thank you