 Welcome, welcome everyone. Thank you guys. So I'll directly start the conversation. I'll tell you, we've been on few panels together, Sundar. What we try to do always is we try to have a conversation and not a interrogation, so to say. You know, it's suddenly when we speak, it's like few friends talking and we would want, of course Rohan is a good friend as well. We've done, like we've known each other for a while. So the idea is the creator economy right now, when pre COVID, it was about a 50 million creators or people of influence in India, right, which now is soon to touch about 100 million. So there are 100 million odd people of influence slash creators in India that of course there are so many platforms. Let's begin the conversation. Maybe, you know, we could start with here, Gagan, go all the way up to Sundar, which has been your favorite creator campaign you've done in any of the brands you've worked on or any creator campaign you've seen. So I think it's not a campaign, but currently what we are doing at Cardico is we are purely focusing on Instagram, right. We were a serious brand, but now if you see the channel or the Instagram channels, it's purely cookie brands, right. So the reels were released two months back. Our average view on a reel is three to four lakh video plays on the reel. This reel got 30 million video plays. The reel is about one of a host is driving an automatic car, but he's changing the gear with a water bottle and he's crying because he's missing the manual transmission. Like he loves cars, but it's always automatic right now. And that's and that's not among us. The song is playing in the background. The 30 million views. Right. So this is how I think it's no more a paid thing, but just all quirky content that's working for us right now. Interesting. Very interesting. Rohan, difficult to choose amongst all your children, all your campaigns that you're running, but something that's really close to our hearts right now is this campaign. When we are doing for HDFC bank called V for vigilante. It's also actually we've created an influencer while using influencers in the campaign itself. V for vigilante is actually run by Lola Kutty, who you'll know from the past. And it's a unique take on how do you manage this problem of banking frauds and finance frauds that are happening. And the content goes across WhatsApp, Instagram, Josh and a lot of other platforms. And we invite celebrities into that content and it's a beautiful piece of campaign because it's a long term campaign. It's not something that we've done which is a flash in the pan. It's something that we've invested for over a year and continue to invest and has also become synonymous with the brand and probably one of the most clutter breaking campaigns in that space. Interesting. Of course that campaign has been winning awards across the globe. Congratulations for that as well. Thank you. Shreya. So, of course, influencers are our bread and butter, but one of the things that we did that was very different from working with typical content creators or something we did March of last year. And the inside was, well, today everybody is a content creator or wants to be a content creator, but maybe doesn't have the means to do it, right? Because everybody wants well shot content for all of their social media platforms, but they don't necessarily have access to professional cameras or setup or even professional photographers. So for Women's Day last year, we turned a huge number of our stores across the country into photo shoot setups, right? So we had a professional photographer, we had a backdrop created and you could come in and wear our clothes. You didn't have to buy them and you could pose for pictures, which you would get, we basically used a bit of backend tech integration and an API link to poma.com. So you would automatically get the email in your inbox with your images, but you would also immediately feature on poma.com, right? And not just on a homepage that we created or a landing page that we created, but also on the various product pages, right? So if you're wearing a particular product, we were actually scanning that product and you would turn up on that products page, right? So we had 1,200 women actually walk into our stores and model our products for us and then actually turn up on the product display pages on poma.com, right? And of course we saw massive reach click-throughs traffic, but also massive, massive jump in sales. I mean, we were sold out beginning of the season. I think very interesting the affinity which the brand would have created, especially amongst the first two circles of these 200 women would be crazy. Very interesting. Sujata, how about you? So my category is a little different financial services and it's something people are very, very careful and want to be safe about. And as we know during the pandemic and lockdown, people were forced to go from cash to cashless. There were a lot of people who didn't know how, didn't know the transactions would be safe, didn't know what to do, especially the older population. So what we did was we ran an influencer campaign where we got people who were experts in certain areas. We got technical Guruji to come and teach people how do you actually make an online transaction? How do you make sure you're safe? How do you pay contactless and how do you make sure you're safe? So while we've done a lot, I think that was very, very close to my heart because we had a lot of people write back saying thank you. You know you saved us from, we talked about the dangers of fishing, we talked about the dangers of all this online frauds. People actually wrote back to us saying thank you, you saved us from what could have been potentially a horrible situation. Also we had a lot of people who were living alone and said they didn't know what to do so they didn't buy anything for two weeks and they were just managing what they had in the house and because of these educational videos and all the influencers posting, they could comfortably make the move from cash to cashless and we continue that till today. So what we do is meet new people coming in Gen Z, everyone's coming into cashless. So that's something that is our standard and it's something I think that for me is a big thing that we are helping people do so close to my heart. Very interesting. Sundar, you work with creators around the clock. I think I should thank Rohan for that campaign. That one is really interesting, the SGC campaign. But the one that is very close to our heart is that we worked with Joss Alukas in the Kerala market and one of the reasons that the campaign did very well for us is because traditionally Joss Alukas always had a Russian woman on their hoodies across Kerala and they believed that all Malayalees look like Russians. That's never the truth. I mean, South India has made it into four states and we all look different. We're not the same Andhugundu people. So our aim was to ensure to Joss Alukas that we actually show them the real face of Ernakulam, Kerala and stuff and all where we actually got a series of women who actually used a wedding trend called Mangalya Tantuna Meena. When you get married, you get that sloak by the priest. So we made a music piece out of it and we just ran a transition of women just coming into the frame and getting into women jewelry. For the first time, Joss Alukas picked up the winner and made them the face of the campaign and today Om Nakuti is the face of Joss Alukas across Kerala. I think that's a big win for us. Wow. So you actually put a creator on a hooding. And made him the brand ambassador of a particular brand. Wow. And this is across the whole region. Across Kerala. Wow. Very interesting. Very interesting. So I think very interesting thoughts and what I see is a good mix where someone is utilizing their own content to utilizing a long-term influencer to doing things with their customers. I think it's a good mix. Let me jump to the next point. We all know that the customers, the consumers have become very, very smart, right? And with say, you know, the number which I just mentioned about 100 million soon to touch in terms of people of influence. Consumers want authenticity. How do you figure and what are there some tricks of the trade which you guys have been using or any examples you can cite where you chose an influencer who was authentic to a brand. I would actually like to start with one example. We used to work with this fantasy app called Dream Levin. And for the brand, I think about two and three IPLs back, I think this was peak of COVID. We chose an influencer by the name Caby Lame. Caby Lame happens to be world's biggest influencer, has about 200 million followers across the world. The best thing about him is he doesn't speak a word, right? I'm sure all of you would have seen Caby Lame's content, right? He creates a lot of funny content on his page. Now what we realize is, so that year Dream Levin's campaign was So that was the campaign that time. Of course, if you would know Game of Skill versus Game of Luck, those were the days, right? We realized every single video of Caby Lame would potentially become a Dream Levin ad because that's what Caby Lame used to do, right? Pick up any, think of any video which you would have done. It's technically the tagline of that video could be, If you want to put your mind on Dream Levin, then put it on Dream Levin, right? We realized that that's the most authentic influencer collaboration one can have, especially the campaigns which I had seen, which we'd done at White Reverse. We realized that this match is killer match, we would not get a similar match for Dream Levin and that's why we utilized him and that video literally went viral. Like everywhere for the next few days on LinkedIn or wherever you would see on the ANM media, you would see news about the campaign. So we realized authenticity travels much more than great content. What is your take? Any of you can pick this up. You could cite any of your examples of authenticity in influencer campaigns. Yeah, so we are in a very unique position, right? Car Deco is a very niche vertical. We can't be massy. We can't go to everywhere or any category. We have to remain somewhere very close to auto. And the reason is that the total car sales in India in a month is three and a half lakh. I get 50 million traffic on my site per month. So I don't know, right? All my customers are already on my site. Now, who do I target outside? It's difficult to figure out. But anyways, coming to a point, one of the most important things in auto is the passion. If you're not, it's a passion topic. Like mobile or auto is a passion topic. So we were creating a content in Dubai with one of the partners in handset. We were shooting there and it was all about fast cars and how our handset work along the fast cars, right? Now, we were looking for an influencer. Now, which influencer should we pick? Which category it was in? So eventually we picked technical Guruji for a few reasons. One, yeah, he's based out of Dubai. Second, he's passionate about fast cars. And in that video, it's a series of four videos which is live on PowerDrift and Discovery Plus. He uses his own cars, right? And he drove them in the video. As an influencer, we had a small role, right? But in this video, he actually played a much bigger role. And the payment was also not that high, right? It was because it was a topic that he was passionate about. And the video went so popular, the series, because the cars were amazing. And everybody in that video was passionate about cars. There was no misfit at all, whether it's influencer or own host or even the brand CEO. Everybody was the same person in terms of passion. Technical Guruji seems to be very popular because we use him. I think the point you made is authenticity. So gone are the days where you just get a big name and you get them to speak today. They speak on one brand tomorrow than the other. What we've seen is you have to look at the segment. So for us, payments, there is payments for fun and leisure, like if you're traveling. And then there's payments for more serious things. So I talked about technical Guruji. We use him for the serious part. But a big part of people using digital payments is when they travel. So what we do is then we get experts in that. So we get Bruce Passports, we got different people who are traveling, got them to actually travel to a certain place, showed how the whole journey could be cashless, digital, without any issues. Then when we come to Gen Z, we realize that they have passion points again. So whether it's music, whether it's fashion, and we take micro-influences. I think the bigger thing is to look at people who have about 30,000 followers, but they have very loyal followers. And we get them to talk a point there. So that's what we do, which is segment by segment, and take the micro-influencer in that segment and have them talk. I think to add to a point, one of the most base point about Josh is that it's very Bharati nature. The old platform is built on real people. The KOLs of the world hardly exist today because the UGC is able to travel from being a normal creator to become a micro or a macro. So one of the things that we did is that when the Patan movie came out, Yashraj wanted a real review of what they felt the movie was. We normally see the reviews by our fellow journalists who give you a very safe review of what the thing should be. So we actually rolled out a thing called as a real review. It actually tells people across Bharat to talk whatever they feel about the campaign. And in the reward of that, we ensured that we will fill up the screens in 10 screens across India. So the real review actually spoke about how Patan was good, but how Sharukh was done better, how the song was about this, that. But in the end, we were able to fill in 20,000 tickets from Bharat in various pockets of India. The influence we just called out and said, come watch the movie, I'll give you a discount code and people watch the movie. Interesting, interesting. I'll just add one more question and then you can answer because I'm sure you would have some aspects of that. So while, of course, authenticity is what we are talking about, right? That is followed by success, right? If you could possibly, and maybe I also see Shreya with the mic, and we've had conversation about success matrix for some of our conversations in past, how do you marry authenticity slash the content which you put up with the success matrix? And what are the success matrix with which you choose or with, you know, you mentioned 30 million views to a reel? Is that success, maybe or maybe not? How do you measure success to any of your influencer campaigns if you could merge both answers? So let me try and cover both in one. I think authenticity is at the core of the kind of campaigns which really gained traction these days and gone are the days where we are chasing vanity matrix of reach and sometimes engagement and even followership while we are choosing an influencer or a creator as the term has evolved when picking someone for the campaign. So very interesting example for this is something that we are doing for Lenovo with the Yoga Book. So the Yoga Book is targeted at creators and people who are, you know, artistic in nature. So you put together a series of content, one which featured a belly dancer creating art along with a visualizer. So the campaign is called Brave New Art. And the second one is got a rapper working along with the AI artist to create a very interesting piece of content. We've not only utilized their own platforms, but these now feature as a series on Hotstar also because we see our audience, you know, does come to that platform and now we're going to have a longer set of episodes coming up from that. The point I'm making out here is that we made the entire content using the Yoga Book. So the Yoga Book was integral to the shooting, the editing of the content and it was integrated into every aspect of it rather than just an influencer push saying, hey, this is good to use for my work. So the brand is at the very core of the idea itself and while the vanity metrics might not be the biggest or 30 million kind of zone, it's the brand tracks which really, you know, start moving for these things like this. So to answer the question on what kind of metrics do we look, well, the absolute best metric would be of course sales, but while that's not possible, you have other metrics which are still deeper in nature like website visits, like leads or else brand tracks and these are becoming much better metrics to gauge work on because clients, brands are also taking a much longer term approach on to influencer marketing. It's no more a flash in the pan and therefore a brand track can showcase, you know, the kind of effect it's having on that brand. So those are the ones we use and in the absence of those, you have the older ones that still exist. Interesting. Shreya? No, I think it's undeniable everybody's spoken about authenticity, right? So I thought maybe I'll speak a bit about how you can do some of this, right? And maybe contextualize it a bit with what we do. For every brand, this process of finding the right influencers is very different, right? Because you exist in different industries, your objectives are different, the audience that you talk to is different, your price points are different, your product is different, right? But I think it's important to find that intersection of what your product is with what the influencer talks about and who their audience is, right? So very simple, basic ways that we do this, for example, is when we're evaluating an influencer, very, very hygiene thing we check is do they wear athleisure and sneakers, right? It doesn't matter what your metrics say, it doesn't matter what your reach or your followers are. If you don't wear athleisure every day, there's no point partnering with me because that's not authentic content, right? I remember that was the first few minutes of our conversation last time. You were like, do they wear our products? Exactly. So these are very... And you don't need an intense social media analytics app to tell you that, right? It's very intuitive. Even the kind of content that they create, right? Now, again, this differs a lot from brand to brand, but we have this term in Puma that we say, are they pulmarized, right? Do they make the right kind of content that resonates with what we as a brand stand for? It's not cool, edgy, new age. Maybe they're not the right vibe. It doesn't matter if they have, again, great metrics, their audience loves them. If they create content for us, it just won't gel with what we stand for, right? So you have your hygiene metrics and you have too many tools today that exist, right? That can tell you everything from what the active audience is to what is their gender split to which countries and cities they are following from, what is the age group that they are following from, and all of them are great, right? It really helps you narrow down which audience you're talking to, right? But again, very intuitive things, right? If I'm looking at a female content creator and 85% of our audience is male, how will I sell my clothes to a female audience through her, right? So it doesn't matter if our metrics are great, she's probably not the right fit for me, right? So there are a lot of ways as a brand that you can select the creator for you that makes sense and is authentic, and a lot of it is very first principle, right? You don't need detailed social media metrics to figure some of this out. I think the second piece that sometimes maybe brands forget that it's very important when activating that partnership is how you activate that partnership, right? A very important thing to keep in mind is that, you know, if you've partnered with an influencer and for you it's very important to get ROI, so there's this tendency to say, have they mentioned my brand three times? Have they tagged them everywhere? Are they going overboard? Is my logo visible? If that kind of content is not something that they create regularly and their audiences don't engage with, the results on that content would be absolutely trash, right? So it's important to step back as a brand manager and say, yes, this is what I want, but if I'm talking to their audience through them, I have to ask, what does their audience want to hear, right? And again, a very basic and simple thing, right? When we work with running influencers, for example, a lot of them have a lot of clout in their community, but they're not necessarily content creators by profession, right? So telling them, make a reel about my shoe is not going to work because they don't do that. But what they do is very genuine reviews about the technicalities of the product. So if you tell them, why don't you just simply do that, right? Just review this product that I'm giving you, exactly the way you do all of your content. It works great because that's why their community follows them, right? So I think some of these very simple first principle tricks help a lot. I think one of the things that we do as a practices, of course, we work with creators and influencers of all types across the board. But given that this tends to be an extremely crowded space, sometimes you lose authenticity because the creators working with you and 20 other brands in your space, right? So what we've really started to do now is if we feel a creator is really working for us, this partnership is authentic, people are responding to the content they're creating for us, we sign longer term exclusive deals with them, right? Because then you build recall across a period of time rather than one off because then that's one content piece and a sea of content that a consumer will just scroll through to the day and they'll see it and they'll forget it instantly. Versus if there's constant recall for your brand on an influencer or content creators page, the likelihood that they will register longer term is higher. Right? So I think these are some of the very first principle things that we do. You can break it down way more scientifically but it's just very logical on how you approach a particular campaign, right? And talking about the success piece, again, I think, look, it's very different for different brands, right? It's also very industry specific. So beauty industry, for example, sees great results for bottom of the funnel, right? Because their price points and their basket size is just that small. For a brand like ours, if we were to go that route, no influencer campaign would ever be successful, right? Our shoes start at 7K and 8K, right? You can't be looking at massive bottom of the funnel. But depending on are you looking at a product campaign, are you looking at a brand campaign, like what is it that you're trying to solve for, you create your objective beforehand, right? And it can be anything. It can be something as basic as did I see an uplift in Google search trends for a particular product after I seeded 100 influencers with that product, right? It can be as unrelated as that. It depends on what your objective is. It's important to realize that not always can sales be an objective. Sometimes it can be. But if you only go with that, you'll never face success. You have to have a longer term perspective. And you have to remember that as a consumer, if I'm interacting with a product the first time, it's not like I will purchase the first time, right? There's a process to the funnel. You first engage, you see it a couple more times then maybe at some point you'll want to purchase, right? And attribution becomes a bit difficult then. Correct. Because I saw the influencer content now, but I went to the store maybe two weeks later and bought the product, right? So if you go by direct UTM link attribution, for example, you will struggle because there will be no direct linkage. So you have to step back and figure what is it really that my objective is? Is it sales? Is it brand awareness? Is it whatever? And what are the metrics that I can use in the longer term probably to attribute to something like this because it's a slightly murky area. Interesting. No, I think I love the way you broke down the answer. Since the time is ticking, let me quickly ask a platform. We understood an agency side. We understood a brand side. How does your platform measure success? Something it depends on, like you said, from brands to brands. But from a perspective of an UGC brand, a UGC platform, we normally see that the real metrics actually we follow is, like you said, the views. It actually stands true because the one thing that we tell our brands is that the moment you give us the brief, we give the brief with a guide directly to the creators. So the creator community actually knows what is capable of building because he knows his art form and he will be able to create that form for his community. The moment you try and put any creative logic behind it and say that, change this script, change this structure, that guy will not connect to that particular audience. And hence, the more open we keep the brief and the more he's able to talk to the community in his art form. Like example, a stunt guy is able to communicate better logic in stunt content than fashion content. So we don't mix stunt and fashion most of the time. And like you said, the metrics is important. That million views in the end of the day actually attributes for what we do. Interesting. Since the time's up, let me just ask a super quick, maybe a one liner to each one of you and that's how we can wrap the session. What do you think is the future of creator economy? Creator economy ten years back as a term did not exist. It started as a hobby, it started as a passion. Especially on digital it didn't exist. Of course it existed outside of digital. What do you think, what next? Once India reaches 100 million creators, how do you think it's going to explode? So the next five years, this is a space to be in. I feel that AI will play a big role, because as of now it's all cluttered. As individuals, a brand is too difficult to go through. Like you mentioned that some are intuitive, but not everything is intuitive, right? So AI will play a big role. And I also see that they all become businessmen. Creators will become businesses. They'll have their own offices, own teams. Art will meet commerce. It's already there, but they'll be more structured in their commerce. Very interesting. Rohan, quick thoughts. Yeah, no question. It's going to be a fabulous future for the creator economy. Everyone's a creator now, right? It's not 100 million, it's a billion, because all of us are creating content all the time. I think there'll be a deeper focus on to... Right now still, creators, while they are judged on the brand metrics, they're not paid basis brand metrics. They're paid basis deliverables in most cases. I think that change will happen where there will be some linkage to an outcome for a brand, an outcome for a business, which will become a part of their remuneration. So I think that's a big change that'll happen. It's already started happening in the West, and we start seeing that out here also. Yeah, it will... Again, it marries with the whole point of art meets commerce, right? If they're linked to the profit which the brand makes, I think the scale could be enormous. Shreya, quick thoughts. I'm just rethinking my career choice. Knowing what we pay creators these days. No, but yeah, I think it's... You can't deny that it's going to be, like probably the foremost career choice for any young person today. Like any industry, it will go through a cycle of learning and flux. Things that aren't structured now will get structured. There will be a certain standardization that will come in sometimes with an industry if, you know, at some point you feel like you're overpaying or it's not at par with what you're getting out of it, that industry faces a certain flux and then settles down. So all of that will happen. But this industry is here to stay, right? I mean, young people spend, I think, more time in the virtual world than they do in the real world. So you can't deny that this is probably the foremost career choice for most young people. Interesting perspective. Sujada. Three quick points. First is going to become a full-fledged profession for most people. Second, one size doesn't fit all. So I don't think we should look at one influencer for a campaign all over, and that's where the necessity of vernacular comes in because a huge part of the population is vernacular, so what works in one will not work in all. It's different for different geographies. And the final thing is what Shreya alluded to, which is don't try and push your brand into brand conversations. You want it to be genuine. Take the influencer for what they are strong with and merge your brand into that. Very interesting. And I like how you structured three quick points and went ahead with it. Thank you, Sundar. I think for me, I think I'll live a day to see the dream where, you know, every home should have a creator. Like how you say my son is an MBA doctor, CA. I'm hoping that some of the parents will one day wake up and say that my son's daughter is a creator. Very interesting. Interestingly, there was a study on this that an agency had done a couple of years back where the most common phrase that they heard was, my neighbor's daughter is an influencer. Wow. Wow. Interesting. So again, long story short, creator economies here to stay, creator economies here to explode a lot more, and it is going to become a lot more pure by authenticity and the creators are going to make a lot of money. Right? So thank you very much. Thank you.