 A very warm welcome to all of you. And it's my privilege to anchor this post-lunch session. The beauty of this segment is that you get a niche audience. So let's have a quick quiz that will increase your attention span further. So can you guess on average how much mobile data an Indian consumes per month? Can anyone guess? So it's 20 GB. As per a Nokia report that came out in 2022, and it is likely to be doubled by 2024. Let's begin the session. So our guests for the panel are Shaya Khokharji, is the co-founder, co-founder and director of Brandways Communication, Pramod Maloo, founder and CEO of Creative Machines, Nimesh Shah, founder of WinChime, communications, Kuntal Chatterjee, CEO of DigitalGoogle, and Jason Thomas, co-founder CMO, Blue Steak Media. A very warm welcome to all of you. And absolutely an honor to have you here on this panel. And Priyanka has given us a really interesting topic, balancing technology and creativity in terms of digital marketing in regional parts of India. As we all have seen that how digital landscape of the country has undergone significant change in terms of audience, content, format, and consumption pattern, from English speaking India to Bharat with diverse languages, and from small data packs to 24 by 7 Wi-Fi, and from media to a bookie of social media platforms, short videos. So digital ecosystem has evolved quickly over a decade, I guess. And the number of internet consumers have also gone up to 750 million as per a Kandar report. And there is a strong adoption of 5G as well. I mean, according to report, the 70 million devices were shipped in India in 2022. So of course, I think there is a huge scope for brands in terms of digital. And we would like to understand from our panelists how brands are navigating this digital landscape. Shaiq, my first question goes to you. What is the major difference between the marketing approaches of the national and regional brands? Hello, everyone. Good afternoon. Thanks, Kanchin, for welcoming us. I would first respond to your question. So I think national brands have a more 360 degree approach when it comes to taking their campaigns ahead, be it like television, outdoor, radio, and digital, and multiple channels. Whereas because regional brands are limited in terms of their market presence, their channel distribution, they opt for more, I think, targeted communication, which are like sponsorships and local community events getting associated with cultural festivals specific to a particular region, which has a larger impact, I believe. But then regional brands also have to justify their brand ambassador costs and sponsorships because they are limited by the markets that they operate. However, one thing that we distinctly find is, I think, local brands or regional brands because of their language and cultural connect, I think they create more brand affinity within that local region among themselves. I think there are a lot of examples of brands from East, which enjoys a huge market share in that market, whereas there are other brands nationally who find it difficult penetrating into that particular region. So this, I think, by far, culture and economics are two distinct things which make sure that the national strategies and regional strategies are very different from one another. Yeah, interesting. So how do urban, semi-urban, and rural markets differ from each other when it comes to ad-spent? So I think if I were to respond to this, first we need to understand the different kind of audiences. It boils down to the basic formula that we use whenever we have to look at a campaign. The formula is ABC, understanding the audience, understanding the brand, and then understanding the category that it represents. To respond to this question, I think that A becomes more important than the B and C. It is about the kind of audience which is in the urban market, whether it's semi-urban and rural markets. And the difference can be represented by the kind of audience size to the taste and preferences, the way they consume content, and so on and so forth. But I would sum it up in one word, which is the cosmopolitan crowd in case of a urban case, whether it's a semi-urban and rural. And with the cosmopolitan crowd coming into consideration, I think you get better results if you're looking at the same budgets in the two contexts because of one language that can work in case of a rural market vis-a-vis multiple languages that you need to run the ads in case of a cosmopolitan, in case of urban market. So ad spend needs to be worked around considering the key objective and the kind of audiences that we are catering to if anybody wants to add something to this. Yeah, Namesh, yeah. Well, I think the audience part is totally taken into account. I think people in the room would say that any market you're right now would know that if you wanna tap into a tier two, tier three, or a rural market, you typically have four A's that you need to look at. You have awareness, availability, your acceptability, and affordability. These are the four A's that you need to tap into if you really wanna make any kind of dent in that market. So if you see right now the aspiration level in the rural market has, or the tier two, three, four markets has really gone up. And to me, you know, that is like, I see like a big change that's come in and you have brands now, let's say like, you see LG, they have launched a brand, a variant called Sampoorn, you know, which is made specially for the tier two, three, four markets, so that the acceptability and the affordability kind of goes up. So I think that when you have that audience that is changing now, people in that area are moving from becoming price conscious to more value conscious, right? There is lower persuasion now. Earlier in the smaller markets, you would see a lot more persuasion required, so that's kind of, you know, come down. So I think that we see a lot of newness now, you know, that's coming into those new trends coming in. I see also in these tier three and four markets the rise of nano-influencers. Like, you know, if you ask me what are some things, the new trends that are coming up, you know, one of them would be that where we've seen brands who have now worked at connecting with Sarpanch, you know, at that level, connecting with who you would have like a master in every village, and they've made WhatsApp groups with them. And they've been building communication now through WhatsApp. And they're realizing that while ATL does its job, you support it with these kind of WhatsApp communities. Then you have a good blend of offline, online, you know, I mean, both the things moving in together. I mean, so you have multi-mediums that are at play. I've also seen, you know, the rise of targeted advertising. Like, when you're working for a lot of these tier two brands, I mean, brands catering to tier two, three markets, I saw micro-influent insurance, sorry, you know, growing a lot. So you had guys who were reaching out to small outlets and getting them to do insurance for their entire outlet. And they were using advertising, digital ads, in local online versions of newspapers and all, and tapping into those small shops and giving them insurance for, you know, 50,000 or one like the summer short of 50,000 to one like. So they were insuring and all of that. And they were using targeted digital advertising. So, you know, you see these kind of very interesting trends and patterns coming in to, you know, which the brands are able to now tap into. Very interesting insight, Namesh, thank you. And Kuntil, how do you optimize ads? How do you optimize ads? When you look at India's geography, look at diversity, the cultural differences, how do you optimize that? Hello. Right now, the internet user and smartphone user is increasing day by day. So, we can easily reach right now. And right now, the rural and village area, the internet and smartphone users are also increasing. So, they are know about the brand. People's lifestyle is also changing. So, it's not difficult to reach here. But here, my experience and what I feel is, I think we should highlight three things so that we can optimize the ad. And we can engage that customer. One is the local language. We are talking about Bengali. Whenever we do a campaign in a rural area, we use Bengali language. We use English, what about the ad copy of Arban, and the copy of rural language? There are a lot of differences. One thing is, second, we have culture, rural area culture, they have emotions. If we find these three things and make some advertising and campaign, it will be very easy to engage them. So, in today's date, reaching is not a factor. How to engage, that is our biggest challenge. But the budget will be less if we talk about rural. In tier 2, 3 cities, the ad budget will be less. How can you do this? Is it easy to do that in a limited budget? Your product, service, budget, target audience is rural area. So, maybe this budget, we are not talking about the budget here. We are talking about ad optimized. We are talking about language. And until we can't engage it, your budget will be wasted. Can I add? I think that the fact that national brands come with a lot of budget when it comes to a pan India campaign, they are aware that the spillage is very high. The sheer fact that regional brands don't have that high volume of budget, even they don't have the, you know, mind space to really go off that kind of a spillage, the pressure is on the marketing team and the agency to optimize the campaign as much as possible and maximize the results in terms of maybe impression or, you know, engagement. I think that is what Kuntul is trying to say. That's where we have to, you know, for example, what works in Bengal will not work in Orissa. It's so complicated. What works in Orissa will not work in Jharkhand. So, for example, Kolkata is a very strong headquarter for the entire east and northeast. Almost operate campaigns for brands in this larger region. We face the heat of customizing state-wise communications so much because we strongly know that, you know, what works here will not, just a few kilometers apart, it will not work. It's a very interesting point here. Jason, I think, you know, building upon Ashaic's argument, I mean, your question is what is the difference between the big brands and the small brands when it comes to ad widgets? Yeah. So we work with both, you know, big and small brands in the commercial space space and also in the performance marketing space. So what I have seen is that when it comes to bigger brands, we usually sign off a 12-month contract, at least, and we have to forecast and media spends and everything for 12 months. So it is not flexible after that. It is very hard to add a new platform to optimize something new extra into that because it has a bigger hierarchy, and at the point of contact that we have, might not have the, you know, the, you know, the ambition or something like that to go ahead and change that, right? So there are both pros and cons for that. Like, we can test with a huge budget and as the budget goes higher and when the brand becomes, you know, more, you know, when the brand is bigger, the CTRs, for example, the click-through rates, the engagement also grows because it's very familiar, right? People already know about the brand, so we don't really need to optimize the ads that much because whenever they see that the logo is there, there will be a brand ambassador. For example, we are working with one client who has 13 different brand ambassadors and we are marketing it in 13 different languages all across India. And we can see that from each state, they are using the prime superstar. Like, for example, from Caroline, it's the biggest star, Mohanlal, or from Tamil Nadu, it could be the biggest star there, right? So that is there. The con is that it's not flexible. There is no room for experimentation. We have to, if we give a word, we have to do that for the next 12 months until the next renewal comes, right? And the other part comes, right? When it comes to small businesses, experimentation, right? That's where we actually learn. We learn a lot of... We make a lot of mistakes with smaller brands because we are in touch with maybe the brand owner itself, and they can feel our passion and they can really feel that we want to, you know, do a lot of experiments and bring results, right? So we can do a lot of new experiments and we learn from these small brands and we apply to bigger brands, right? But the other part is that smaller businesses want quicker, tangible results faster. For example, when we work with a D2C company, they want to give... They want, even before we getting onboarded, they want us to give them exact figures on how much return on ad spend are you going to give us, et cetera, right? And if everybody knows that when we start a campaign, we at least need 15 to 20 years, even a month's time to understand what works and what doesn't, right? So sometimes smaller brands are not that patient enough, right? So there are a lot of pros and cons and we learn from both, but I think smaller brands are more exciting to work with because our impact really comes there and then bigger brands, definitely, we need that also, right, to make sure that everything goes well in the agency. Pramod, Shaheq or maybe Kuntal, would you like to share some perspective from eastern parts of the country? I mean, he's sharing from south, right? Look, so whenever... I completely agree with what he's saying that when you work with a smaller brand, A, there is a better coordination and the results, when you're able to bring some results with the limited budgets and optimizing those budgets, you can see the visible results and not just visible results on the Excel sheet but also on the face of the client. So that is where working with a smaller client, SME segment, to say so, is more satisfying as an agency, I would say. Yeah, thank you so much. I just want to add here that, you know, a lot of times, you know, digital is technology and technology is science and science cannot work without experimentation, right? What works for one client will never work for maybe the same client in the same category. That's one of the challenges, like every business is very different from each other, be it its audience, its pitch, its positioning, everything. But, you know, a lot of clients do, like smaller clients do come with the gap of faith that, you know, media spends would, like we have had clients who have, say, 400 CR annual budget in marketing and next year they're making it 550 CR. This is purely from their faith which they have gained in the last few years. But for a new start-up to really start-up with even a 25 CR media budget is very, very difficult unless they get that. And that is where, you know, a lot of, like, we collaborating with PR agency, with the media agency, coming together, maybe a mainline agency and giving that faith to the client becomes very, very important. I think that's where even the CMO's role becomes very, very important to, you know, motivate the promoter of the business. Brands and CMOs are listening to this. Just a thought, I know. Slightly different one as that. So, you know, we started out with Bombay Delhi, right, for quite a few years and then as we started growing, we started getting into the more tier two, three markets to set up our branches out there. Trust me, between whether it's a Bombay-based client or, you know, another state capital client, all clients really want bang for the buck. You know, so I've really not come across any client who's been, you know, less enthusiastic or less demanding from the kind of results that they would want. As an agency, our job is to be very honest to the brand and to them, right, to be able to say that, look, this is what is going to work and, or this is not going to work and only spend X amount and don't spend more. So it's their ability to kind of work with them, be it from a metro client or a small client, a small city client. It's building that trust, showing them results along the way and we've seen huge budgets even coming from regional brands. So long as you're able to deliver results, be honest with them, guide them properly, those rules remain the same, you know, irrespective of a national brand or a regional brand at play. Yeah, money is important for everyone, I guess, yeah. Moving on to the second round and Shaiyat, how do regional markets, you know, differ, you know, from the national in terms of brand communication? Okay, so I would like to start off with something amazing that is going on in our country right now, right? Like when we were growing up, the heroes of yesterday's years used to sing songs in OTA and Darjeeling, right? And then in the 90s, we saw them go out to Switzerland and New York and all these places. All of a sudden, you know, if you see in the last three, four years, the heroes are from Bareilly and Ranchi and, you know, Mirzapur and that's a huge shift that is happening. People are unable to relate with Switzerland anymore. I don't see those visuals in any of the recent movies, even the top stars understand that very, very well, right? So, you know, regions are very different from each other. We, as I said, like, we have offices in Kolkata and Hyderabad. Kolkata is a very different region because from Kolkata we cater to Assam market as well as Orissa market. But sitting in Hyderabad, it's very challenging for us to even cater to Karnataka, which is just maybe a few kilometers away because, you know, we don't understand anything about that side of the border. Even Maharashtra is closed. However, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana share the same culture. Like you can have a brand who signs up junior NTR and who goes massively, you know, that campaign will be successful in these two markets, but it will absolutely have no impact in Karnataka, Nerala, Tamil Nadu, anywhere. And you have to have, like, you know, Jason mentioned, you have to have separate faces for different. This is completely different from North. You know, you can have one superstar and it will cut through the entire North market. So, regions do vary in terms of, you know, not just culture, language, but also, you know, how these festivals come up. For example, like, if you know Bengal market, Durga Puja, of course, is not just a five-day festival, but the entire shopping season is just pre-Durga Puja. So, most of our clients have started their campaigns and, you know, they will have a huge sales season coming up. Whereas this kind of a phenomena where almost, I would say that brands spend 50 to 60 percent of their annual budget in this period because they do make 50, 60 percent of their entire sales in this tenure. This is completely, you know, like a season like Ganesh Chaturthi has no impact in Bengal at all, right? And that kind of a Durga Puja festival is not replicated anywhere in the country. So, every region is very different and that's where today you see a lot of national brands approaching regional agencies to, you know, help them out, extend their communication. Maybe the routes have been set nationally, but you extend those campaigns and help us penetrate into the rural mindsets. That's where I think most of the regional agencies play a very, very important role. Pramod, would you like to add something? Just to add to the last point that Shaikh made, we are in talks with CRED trying to get them, you know, CRED has recently introduced UPI transactions as part of the offerings and, you know, looking at the madness of Durga Puja, we're trying to, you know, do something in terms of brand awareness, in terms of increasing the app installs, in terms of increasing the transactions made via UPI of CRED. So, absolutely, regional agencies have the ability to do something which the main stream, central agencies cannot. This is one of the classic examples that CRED is trying to work with creative machines in collaboration to activate the UPI transaction offerings that they have launched very recently, just about two months back. Pramod, would you also, you know, like you to explain the importance of rich media content and videos in marketing? Rich media content, videos is one of the most efficient ways in which an advertiser is able to, A, increase the awareness, brand awareness, improve the conversions and get better attention. Why so? Because the attention span of users is just decreasing with every passing year. I remember seven, eight years back, it used to be 15 seconds from there, it came down to 12, 10, 8, and now in our agency at Creative Machines, we have a clear mandate, 2.5 seconds. Yes, 2.5 seconds. If you get the customer on your side, it's a win, otherwise, you know, there's something wrong. We are at the strategy level deciding on the communication, the creative, and the overall process. We always keep that in mind that it has to create an impact in 2.5 seconds precisely. Thank you, Pramod. Nimesh, I mean, do consumers' sensibilities and creatives vary, you know, from state to state? Yeah, I think India is one of the most heterogeneous market ever, right? I mean, in terms of not just creatives, but you look at the copy, you look at the mediums that are there. I'll give you a few examples, you know, just to remember this for one of our you know, baby care clients, right? They wanted to do a national campaign, a digital campaign. So we were running ads on multiple sites and catering to the metros and also the tier 2 and 3 cities, right? So these ads, while they were running, we got a very good response from the metro audience first. We could see a lot of conversions happening. And mind you, the creatives were fairly simple, but just an example, this shows, you know, you need to understand your consumer mindset. I mean, you know, where they are and how they operate. So we got a good response from the women or the moms, the new moms, who were residing in metros. But we were not getting such a good response from the tier 2 and 3 cities. So we started figuring out what's going on. And we realized that in a lot of those cities, they were relying on the digital behavior. So they were relying on surfing at late evenings or night. So either when their kids who are using desktops at their home have, you know, post their dinner or when their husbands typically would come back and they would now get the laptop to themselves. So you would see a lot of women in tier 2 and 3 cities who were digitally savvy, but they were getting access to the machine only later in the evening or night. So when they would finish dinner and the kids, you know, would be put to sleep, they would actually log on and they would surf from 10 p.m. to midnight. And we saw a far higher conversion of those baby care products during that time. Right? So, I mean, it's just one of those examples. I once even, I'll just give you another one pretty quickly too. I remember once while traveling in Tamil Nadu for one of the beauty brands. And, you know, when you see beauty queues, you want to look out what really beauty stands for in each state. Now in Tamil Nadu, again, in the smaller towns, we could see a lot of women making at home a turmeric paste. You know, because turmeric is like, the yellow color is very auspicious, right? And they make this paste and they apply it on their face for a better skin. And so the beauty queue for a brand was that if it's slightly yellow in color, it would have a much better impact for me and it would hold a high beauty value. But the same yellow color, if you were to show it in your creatives in, let's say, a northern or a western region, it would mean completely different. Right? So I think the, there's a very high level of understanding required from your Indian consumer how they operate, how they react to different color schemes, copy, content, media vehicles. So it's very important to kind of understand that and then do the campaigns. We nicely put. Kuntil, come on, let's understand the brand, understand your consumer. But brands say for digital spending, it's very tough. I mean, are they, you know, it's very easy to get, you know, money for digital, especially in, you know, regional parts? See, now the regional brand, they are understood that digital marketing is required for them. So they are come we are getting for marketing. So here we face one thing that how much we are spending, how much return is coming. So we have to work hard in this. Like a hotel management school, how much leads are coming, leads are okay, whether it's being converted or not, we have to see that too. Because until it's converted, even I won't be a business secret for the next month. So we work like a chain, we maintain our software, how much money the client is spending, how much leads are coming and how it's converted. So here we do this too, the sales of the client, we have started training that too. So that the client gets results. Like I have a super detection company. We are working last 6 years. Last 3 years they have stopped the ATL budget and shifted the entire budget to digital marketing. That's why the marketing cost is less and the return is more. So the market area we are focusing on where the product is available. So this is one thing but we have to see whether the client is getting business-generated or not. We have to work hard until the next month. Very interesting point. What is your feedback on this? Yeah, I think probably I would say that before COVID was very hard whenever we see a brand we had to pitch what digital marketing was. That was the first one hour conversation like this is digital marketing you can put ads here and there people are actually using it etc. But post COVID that conversation has ended. And especially internet usage has exceeded a lot of even after COVID, the graph has gone I don't think it is linear. I think it has gone kind of exponential. So I don't think even especially in my region, Kerala Kerala has the most amount of internet users in terms of population percentage I think after so it's kind of already the space is already established and they are okay right now if you take an example last month two clients came to us and said that they both are South India clients they said that we are not spending anything on TV or ads or offline or OOH and we are experimenting this year with just digital and we are interesting you guys we don't know what is exactly that but everybody around us they have a lot of people maybe friends or other brands or consultants everybody is telling them to just stop TV and invest everything on I don't absolutely agree to that I believe that sometimes some use cases digital cannot give you all kind of solutions for example if you want to build a national brand you need to advertise on IPL or something like that I think it differs from state to state as you rightly mentioned that Kerala has inviting one of the highest internet penetration one more thing I wanted to add is I think the chief marketing officer has to play a very big role where I feel that and this is my experience personally that in the regional markets it's very difficult for a brand to get a good CMO because as a digital agent we also work in mainline but I know that when we work as a digital agency and there is a mainline you need a CMO who needs to strategize because digital agencies don't set the path the brands need to come across and share the guidelines with us which a lot of brands do face that difficulty I think a lot of founders and entrepreneurs don't have that skill in them and they need a good CMO within their brand manager to really pull forward but the problem is that it's very difficult to retain a brand manager most of them have career aspirations and they will move towards Bangalore and Bombay and all where on the other side when you meet such brands where they understand the importance that this category is a marketing driven category and we need a CMO as maybe co-founder or on the board it becomes very easy for agencies to engage because you don't need to do the hard work of convincing the client that why should you invest in marketing that's an added struggle which we all face where we kind of have a co-founder or a founder in front of us instead of a CMO so if anyone wishes to see the job you know where to apply thank you for this insight and I had just one question I mean as Kaila has one of the highest penetration in India so how do brands look at the internet penetration and high speed internet and also we have a lot of AI virtual influence a lot of things are coming how do brands look at this the numbers are great as you said I think in India there are about 750 million people online but still I think it's about 50% of the population so there is room for improvement but it is the biggest market in the globe when it comes to if you want views or downloads or numbers right so that's why you know India is the biggest market for Facebook WhatsApp or any kind of consumer facing apps but the one thing is that the conversion percentage or the viewership to payment or viewership to subscription or click to purchase these kind of matrices are still not there yet when you compare it with the US or UK definitely not there yet I heard the CEO of Spotify India talking about the percentage of people who are actively subscribed to the 50 rupee per month stat right that is just 12% in India right so but if you look at the number of users for Spotify India is in the top 5 of the countries but if you look at the people who are paying for that subscription it is in the other countries section right so that is a problem that I think we need to fix because we need to make maybe still you know people need to need some offline convincing to make a purchase right so that is one thing there are two parts of the coin one is really great like the numbers are great now if we get at least you know 100 million or 200 million people who are willing to pay for all kind of services online then it will be like brands will be like brands will go crazy globally so let's have a rapid fire round it's a fun round and I wish you answer you know no sugar coating so I will start with Shia so two most promising independent agencies apart from your own of course okay it's a very tricky question see I personally I think when we started as a web design company we used to follow BC web wise a lot from Bombay they were doing some really good work now of course you know I am a big fan of Shabang and social beat I think I know they are here they do a great work I think I personally follow them a lot a huge round of applause for both of you please Kunthal when brands don't give money then who makes the best two excuses payments are delayed everywhere who makes the best sir is not here sir is outside you get such an answer like this business is not good you have to provide these are the excuses I think one of the biggest things is there is a server issue in net banking server issue okay interesting I think the most complex is payment is in process you know you don't know when that process will end you understand I think all of these are put together the question for you is have you ever blacklisted any brands because of payment or other issues quite a few please don't ask me to name them because I am sure if their CMOs change they could still become good brands they would go off the blacklist but surely otherwise quite a few Pramod giving a chance which agency you would like to lead independent or otherwise which agency I would like to take lead I would like to lead apart from mine of course so I think I just go down to my memory lane and go back to the agency where I started my career while pursuing my MBA I was fortunate enough one of the 820 students who had a chance to intern during the program at net elixir hydra bar still remains very close to my heart net elixir founded by Mr. Udayan Bose doing fantastic work in paid performance campaigns I think given a chance net elixir has given me best of the memories so why not net elixir Jason how do you feel you know when you learn that your family members and maybe friends they have they are using ad blockers oh last day when I was looking at the threads right new app that sakra work recently launched so one of my friends first post was that hey these are the best ad block that you can use and he was naming some ad blockers so my first thread comment was that hey please don't use ad blockers thank you so moving on to the third round Nishayak I think you just mentioned that you have a couple of your offices in different states so what prompted you to set up offices in hydra bar then as we discussed that the importance of regional agencies are really going big and we have had a long experience in Kolkata for almost like 15 16 years we were in Kolkata after that we started going into another territory that's primarily because of the kind of clientele we were working say from Bombay or Delhi whom we were representing in Bengal or Assam or Orissa we were you know we could understand that they are still facing a lot of challenges I think you know brands in the north have a lot of challenge penetrating in the south and you know though it sounds like digital agencies you can sit in one location and do ban India you can do that only when the brand communicates in English if you have to get regional you know you cannot google and understand the culture of Karnataka and Tamil Nadu you need to be there and trust me when we swear we first started with Hyderabad now we are by the end of this year we will get into Bangalore we know that we have understood that you know we cannot play any role there you know we don't know anything about that market right we just know that maybe Ugari is a holiday but nothing more than that you know what does that culture work and how does it work and that's not our job so getting the best of local talent I think plays a very very important role and you know when you when we went outside Bengal we just found that you know the collaboration of these talents from multiple regions have a huge impact on how you know what we serve to our clients today we have started using our you know team from Hyderabad for some campaigns in Bengal also and you know that really really helps a lot I think certainly for I don't want to say this but we have seen a lot of brain drain from the east because of opportunities but when we as an agency move to another territory we could find some talent maybe in terms of not just creative area but also in technology and digital and that's where you know we are focusing more on building that sort of a team from Hyderabad who could help brands in the east also so this is one of the key I think it is a very significant trend you have pointed out and Pramod we have seen a lot of merger and acquisitions happening in the ad sector what do you feel when you see some acquisitions and you feel threatened or maybe you feel happy whatever so you know mostly mostly national agencies they acquire regional agencies okay so I understand you are saying when a national agency acquires a regional agency I think it's a fantastic thing it's a win-win the regional agency benefits by getting to know more about the better practices better systems the learning curve is faster and the bigger agency which is acquiring gets to you know play an important role in the campaigns that they are delivering in the regional markets they can never understand sitting in Delhi what's happening what is going to work the psyche of the consumers in Hyderabad or in Kolkata so I think it's a win-win and at the end why I think it's a win-win not just for the two parties but for the consumer more than anybody else because at the end in a partnership like this the value that a consumer gets what better than a consumer getting the maximum bucks for the money as you rightly pointed that's the only thing that matters and as a smaller agency bigger agency if a collaboration is able to derive that for the consumer nothing better than that but what about the other agencies in the market I mean referring to independent agencies yeah yeah I think independent agencies if they strive to see it's all about your personal goal and the choices that you make to reach your goal so if a agency a smaller agency is looking to be part of one of these dense shoes and the WPPs and so on and so forth there are opportunities and that could be the winning formula for them and on the other side there are agencies like ours we are dominating the eastern India market we are one of the fastest growing in spite of not being part of any of these bigger agencies and it's working fine for us you know it's totally purely a call of the founder of the company what is the route that he wants to take to excel move ahead and make progress thank you Pramod my question is how challenging is to acquire skill man power in smaller cities after we set up our presence in Bombay and Gurgaon we then move to Guwahati Guwahati was we got a huge government project and we set up shop there and I was amazed with the kind of talent that's available in the northern east and I feel a little ashamed to admit that initially that area was such a like a blind spot for us but once we set up shop over there we saw the kind of especially in the space of designers video editors graphic animation artist the entire region, northeast region was just amazing with the kind of people and the talent that they had similarly later when we set up a branch in Bhopal and we came across a huge set of people so well versed with writing scripts and especially in Hindi Hindi was just so brilliant that you could write scripts very well they could write you know and it's just amazing the kind of talent that is available right now in a lot of these cities a little bit of grooming is required if you want to keep them in the client facing role but that's true with everyone right so even if you hire from a metro you still need to do a bit of grooming for the team but I think we are blessed with some really talented people across the country you know be it that or at least part where we face that or you know middle of the country in Bhopal where the writers and script writers and the poets you know were brilliant so no problem at all in recruiting just to add to what Mr. Shah said I think one of the key positions where the grooming and nurturing of the resource becomes the most important is the client facing individual if that aspect is taken care we can manage with a little bit of less and more. I think Kuntal would like to respond to this question I think he is setting up an institution to train people right Kuntal can you please quickly first the challenges we are facing that is skill and train manpower so that's why we are planning training already we are planning how to work in the industry how to train the client's behaviour the client's requirement we are training on that so that we can train the people for industry industry how to train manpower the client's requirement the client's behaviour depending on that we will train the manpower we will start training in a few months thank you Kuntal just two biggest opportunities and two constraints just quickly you mean two biggest opportunities in regional parts opportunities are the same as national light in terms of you know what you say like the creatives the creatives are the opportunities the key that differentiates it's not about technical stuff but it's about creatives that is the biggest opportunity and the next opportunity is that lesser competition everybody knows each other in my area we almost know each other we know which brand is working with and anyways that brand if they didn't get the brand they will come to us so we know what's happening in the industry the cons it's really hard to get a national brand who is based out of Mumbai or Delhi they would want us to be here but still we have managed to grab some clients from Mumbai and Delhi but that works given that the CMO is good with working remotely with the team any questions from the audience thank you we really enjoyed talking to you thank you