 Our next session is by Georgie George. He's a seasoned business leader with over 20 years of experience in media, broadcasting, sports, brand management, entertainment, digital and live events globally. Currently, he's the founder at Go Nuts, Asia's largest and most influential platform for human connection, communication and commerce uses celebrities to make lives richer. Now I'd like all of you to join me in a welcoming Georgie George and he will be talking on how content is shaping celebrity commerce. The Go Nuts story and in conversation with him is our very own Ruheil Amin, senior editor exchange for media. A very warm welcome to both of you gentlemen. Thank you, Georgie. Thank you so much, Georgie. And welcome, George, to this discussion and thank you for your time. No, my pleasure. I want to start by asking you the journey that you have had over the years and what was the start-up, what was the inspiration behind the start-up if I may ask such a simple question? Yes. So, I was fundamentally in Singapore for a long period of time working with MTV Asia, with Yahoo and then with a brand consultancy called the Global Brand Forum where we used to do country branding. And one of the things that we did was we actually created an event for the government of Singapore called the Global Brand Forum. And in one of those engagements, I had the opportunity of listening to a futurist, a brand futurist called Faith Popcorn. And one of the things she said, and this was almost a decade and a half ago, she said, we will have communities online and these online communities will work or will engage with avatars or behave like avatars of themselves and engage with people who are their avatars. And people will get to touch, people will forget to hug, and there will be places where you will have to pay to get hugs. Now, this seemed like she had lost her head or she was actually talking out of her hat, but look at where we are today. And so that kind of stayed with me. And one of the other two co-founders happened to be at a birthday party of a friend and the whole conversation engaged around what happens if one of the cartoon characters were to pop out and wish that child in a personalized video message or some kind of personal way. And these two ideas collided when we met and that was the birth of gonads. Right, right. You know, there is an overdose of celebrities. If we see, we are seeing them everywhere now, so many platforms, but Temi Gona definitely has curated a different experience. What kind of, how do you use content to your advantage? Amidst this entire cacophony of celebrities and celebrities everywhere. So that's a very good question, Rahel, because at the end of the day, what is our purpose? I think one has to distill this back to when you, that, you know, the era of the, in this era of the experience economy, the differentiation is going to be about content. It is not about how many stars you have or how many people are on your platform. If you cannot navigate the content part of things to be able to connect with your customers. Because the whole idea is our purpose is to bring joy and memories to make people's lives richer. That's from where we started. So if we were to do that, what do we need to do to build a content strategy? And by content, it's not about creating, our idea of creating content is creating powerful videos using our celebrities that would create memories in the minds of the customer and make, you know, truly create an immersive experience for them both offline as well as online. Because that memory at a wedding, at a birthday party with a family just creates a multiplier effect. And that's from where we started off actually focusing on content and not about 300 celebrities, 500 celebrities or whatever number that people throw on many other platforms. Our focus has been, can we sit with the audience and curate that content to create an immersive experience for our customer? Right, right. You have a roster of great singers and other, you know, top actors. Can you tell us what kind of messaging are like dominantly, predominantly in demand in the market and is it just limited to the open centers? Where's the demand coming from for all this content? Actually, Rohil, you know, what's really interesting and I'd like to attack this question a little differently. So what we did was one is about, we understood that content only when you build content and you create a very powerful connection, can you build a community? So these were the three pillars of our strategy, build powerful content, make sure that that content creates a connection and from that connection build the community. So what we did was we fundamentally worked with artists and we kind of understood that people's needs are not limited. I mean, if I were to ask you a question, Rohil, you love music, I'm sure you love eating out, you know, we are a summation of various experiences and that's part of the brand. If I can actually be able to touch you through various people who are part of your fandom and we all are fans of somebody, it could be authors, it could be culinary experts, it could be musicians, it could be actors and the idea was what therefore would touch you or touch somebody who wants to make an impact to you or cares enough for you to be able to do that or give you a wow experience with somebody you care for and that's from where this kind of began. So what we have done is ensure that we are multi-genre, multi-lingual, multi-price points and more importantly, available across multi-platforms. So our distribution too is what we have done is for example, we are on creds. For example, we are on, you know, on bulbul.tv, which is a social commerce platform. So all of these things are our strategy to make ourselves available on demand and everywhere the customer is, right? There's also a very sensitive element as far as dealing with celebrities is concerned. For example, a small controversy in the entire system kind of has to be dealt with. As somebody who is closely working with these people, are there concerns? I mean, how do you kind of foresee such or try to avoid such conflicts if ever they arise? So in the last eight to nine months that we've been in existence, we've never had a single controversy at all. So I would really go down to a very basic, should I say core idea, that people inherently are good and people inherently don't wanna manipulate things, especially when they've got a great experience. So it comes back to the experience economy. It comes back to the kind of content that you give them. And more importantly, answering your part of the question. So how do you save yourself from any such kind of an embarrassment? The legality on the site, the terms and conditions of engagement indemnifies both the artist and the platform should any of the videos be misused for any reason. Right, right. Tell me, when we look at globally where we stand as far as celebrity influences are concerned and using them in a very personalized way, how involved is this market in India compared to rest of the world? And where do you see it going? I mean, what's the scope in this? I think I would answer that question in two ways. One is what is the growth of video commerce in India? And if you see what is the growth of UPI or payments online in India, what is the growth of the online video market in general? And you would see that all these are exponentially growing by over, between 50 and 100% to be honest with you. I mean, when you see that your average Dhobi is transacting on Google Pay, you know that UPI has really dived deeper. I am of the opinion at something like this and especially we have grown on fandom. We are equal people listening to Coldplay as we are listening to Kishore Kumar. We are equally comfortable watching Don Robert De Niro as Shahrukh Khan. And therefore the point is, and today if you look at from a sociological point of view, people have forgotten to communicate. People have forgotten to read. People have forgotten to write. People have forgotten to express, which explains why things like depression is cool. If you know what I mean. The whole idea is we are constantly looking for environment media to communicate. Let's go back, let's flash back to 15 years ago when you walked into a store to buy a card for your mother or your girlfriend. Okay, let's take a girlfriend as a hypothetical example. You went to the card center, you looked at the cards, you went to the section that says love. You picked up the card, you looked at the wordings, you looked at the visuals, and then you bought the card. We've moved that to a big situation. Right, right, right. There's another concern. What has happened is we talk about, we spoke about one, one is I want to understand from you. We spoke about demographic. And second is the age. Give me a sense of what kind of customers, I mean, what is the age group like? Is it just the college students? What dominates this space in terms of consumer profile? It's a bit, I mean, if I were to kind of mirror this, it would be what were the initial pickup from demographic point of view as far as e-commerce was concerned. It wouldn't be the college. It is more somebody who has a little more dispensable income and would therefore go online because he's heard about this product to test it. He first went down to the low hanging fruit and low value products and slowly went up the Arpo chain. That's how people build Arpo. But what's really important right now is that there is no definition. Is it more female or male? Certainly right now it's male in that sense of the word. I would think that it is anybody from about 25 all the way up to 45 to 50 who are currently purchasing this. It's still a very metro-centric phenomenon, but we are betting on the fact that as this moves into Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, there is going to be an explosion of video commerce and with the explosion of video commerce and broadband and all of the other factors that will help giving this tailwind, we will be able to really make this a successful business. And actually, Mr. Yulia, would you like to say a few words to the rest of Asia? Absolutely, absolutely. Mr. George, tell me, this pandemic has impacted all the sectors, all the businesses. Of course, I mean, just want to understand how did you, what was the kind of impact it had on the kind of work that you do? Was there any impact at all and how did you deal with it? Well, there were two kinds of impact. The first impact was we actually had a term sheet that was signed up before and we went into COVID and that went into cold storage. So that was the first impact. But I would think that we thrived during this COVID for two reasons. One is we really understood the value of resilience. We understood what it is like to make sure that your allocation of funds and money with what you had is effectively put to use and to make sure that you work lean and effectively. And last but not the least, it really made us think hard about developing a product that makes it stand out from anything else in its category, which I think might not have happened if it weren't for the COVID. So we were forced to rethink on a lot of things that we thought were, you know, kind of Bible truths in that sense of the word, but I, you know, going forward, we realized that those content strategies really needed to be revisited for us to be able to create the product that we have today. Right. There's another factor which I want to, I think you would best know this. This is a, when we talk about celebrities, we have always looked at Bollywood and maybe cricket mostly, you know? We have kind of narrowed down to this. Do you think we need to redefine it in some way or is the redefinition already at work and are you pushing the boundaries of the definition of celebrity? That's a very good question, Royal. In fact, we did push the boundary from the time, from its inception, to be honest with you. We were the first to actually have a set of impersonators. If you've gone to our site, you will see that Donald Trump is also there, by the way. And we were the first to bring him in. We were the first to ensure that musicians, we fronted it with musicians and not your typical television stars or Bollywood stars. We were the first to bring in celebrity chefs. We were the first to bring in photographers, you know, and now we're creating a layer of authors. You'd be also very, very pleased to know that we have Milka Singh, the legendary Milka Singh, also coming on board Go Nuts in a couple of days from now, you know, Jeeve Milka Singh, you know, John T. Rhodes. Now these are people, you know, who typically would not have looked at a platform like this, probably a couple of, maybe even a year ago, but the opportunity and seeing the kind of work that we are doing, the kind of what our content is, what our objectives and what our vision is, and also seeing the run rate of, you know, companies at the brand that we are building in, they find themselves saying yes to be, to align their brands with ours. Right, right. So offering these solutions in a very kind of a B2C environment, but do you think brands, like, of course, brands involve a lot of celebrities and they need influencers. Is there a kind of, are you looking at that side as well? Is that already a part of your, you know, strategy going forward? It is already a part of our strategy. And in fact, what is really important is we aim to really disrupt the 32nd commercials that are done by the big agencies and big production houses. We, you know, the COVID has also taught that and that it is, you have to be able to translate your brand attributes when you can't shoot a 32nd commercial in a location and with, you know, over a couple of days and et cetera and people have done that with their phone. We, our aim is to be able to cater to almost 800 over million MSMEs in India that have no access to talent or access to big agencies. And they still need to get their brands out there. We want to be, our success will come from complete hyperlocalization of our product where your Kirana store guy will use our product to be able to send a message out to the entire area around where he is business is to let them know and your celebrity, be it a run, be it broad, be it whoever it is to be able to let people know that they can come to his store and use his services. Now that is going to be the success and the opportunity. We have also done in the COVID, actually in the time that we had supported MSMEs, you know, because it was a time where employees were, you know, really, really feeling low. They were very unsure about their jobs, everything wasn't a bit of a turmoil. We supported a lot of startups by giving away free messages, which free corporate messages of encouragement. And another area that we definitely will be looking to disrupt is the HR area. Because, and what I mean by HR is not just the processes or payrolls or those kinds of things. I'm talking about engagement and communication. HR really communicates when you hire or you hire. But we are looking at newer ways for the CEOs and people within the company to talk to stakeholders and who better than a celebrity from a recall perspective. And these are all new areas that we are working on and have actually started engaging with a lot of clients who are very excited to use our product. Right, right. So when it comes to content marketing, for example, you have kind of got the pulse on it. Are there any best practices in your view for all those people who are watching us and all those young bloggers even? Are there any definitive steps that you take and you kind of have that intent that is watched by audience? Is there a rule book to it in your view? The rule book evolves, but if I were to broadly put it into three different, you know, kind of verticals or three different pillars that personally I follow, it is fundamentally to localize, to Indianize and to humanize. These are the three things that I do to follow a pattern because what are you trying to do? You're trying to bring a smile, a moment of joy, a memory. And we've got numerous case studies. We have Shankar Mahadevan reading out a poem of a poet sitting out of Varanasi who wrote it for COVID Warriors to somebody who sent it to an ailing father, somebody who sends a thank you to a doctor, all, I mean, if you were to look at it, I mean, some are sad, some are happy, but it's all about hope. And the idea is, can we use the people on our platform to create a moment of memory in the lives of their customers? Right. So you used a very right word, humanize. And we're talking about big data, AI, VR, and all of that and robotics. And where, how do you humanize this? That's also a big challenge. I mean, how do you build that tone of, kind of that connect, you know? It's a difficult, is it easy? Just want to understand it from you. It's, so what we do is, you know, I've had the good fortune of working with many of these artists who are on this platform. And, you know, in various capacities, be it from music or television or even when I was with the sports and WWE, et cetera, et cetera. One of the things that we definitely do is co-curate this with them. So it's about having those conversations for them to understand what we are trying to do. If you look at any platform, even globally, you would see that a message is sent almost transactionally and without any humanization or humanization of their content. Both pillars are important. For example, we've just got Shekhar Sumanji on board. Now, Shekhar Suman is somebody who's, I mean, if it's also about making sure there is a cohesiveness between their online persona and their offline persona. If I were to make him say a message to you, Rohail, which we say, hi, Rohail, wish you a very happy birthday, all the very best, you'd look at, you know, you'd go back and say, that's not the Shekhar I resonate with. I wanna be able to laugh with him. And our whole thing is, you have a brand, you are a brand, you have certain attributes of a brand, what the consumer at the end wants to see and what he's buying you for is to relive his memory of you as that brand. And that's what makes him laugh, that's what engages him. So that's basically what I follow as my rulebook and we as a company follow as a rulebook to be able to co-curate the content with them to be able to create memories in the lives of our customers. Right, Mr. Josh, what are the big roadblocks since this is an evolving kind of genre I may use this word, as far as content is concerned, what are the big challenges that you are navigating to make it more popular to grow beyond and what's your vision for go nuts maybe over the next two years? So I'll start with the second part first. Our vision is to become Asia's largest and most influential platform for human connection and communication. So we don't look at ourselves as a shout out platform or a celebrity platform, we look at it as bringing joy in the lives of our customers. That's our purpose and everything is defined from that. Coming to the rule blocks part, yes, there are some people may think that this is such an easy business and I have a fairly good connection in the market. I can bring this star and bring that star and put it together. It's not as simple as a thing because for starters, we, for example, from a content strategy point of view, if I were to look at it as a triangle, there's a lot that goes in terms of consumer insight, there is a lot that goes in terms of understanding what the experience is going to be. And last but not the least is the performance marketing part of things. So if I were to look at it as a triangle, these are the three pillars of the triangle. And the last part is constantly finding out through performance marketing, what is it that drives the communication with the customer? What is he like? What is he not liking? Where is he engaging? How much is he engaging? How much is he sharing or whatever, whatever. So one of the biggest roadblocks is, as I said, the perception that this is a very easy business, therefore the barriers to entry sometimes is fairly limp. People feel like to start this off. You know, three, four, 10 people bring it up. You will see in the next five months, 90% of most of the platforms that are in the market will cease to exist, simply because it is also a demand creation business and not just a supply generation business. So we have to look at it from both sides of, it is just like e-commerce. You can put as many enterprise stores on the platform, but if there is no demand and there is no transaction, you will not be able to do that. That said, I think we are sitting on an asset value of the platform of a couple of billion dollars because of the sheer value of each of these artists. If you look at them from their own business's point of view, tomorrow when the spike is opened out to tier two, tier three and tier four cities, okay? Who have thus far not had access or a trusted source to be able to create interactions or experiences, imagine what this will do for a person sitting in Varanasi, a certain sitting in UP in Harpur and that's the market. Absolutely, I have two more questions. One is that, I just reminds me of my days when I used to be an entertainment reporter and we would talk about celebrity contracts, especially Bollywood being too complex. So when you sign contracts, are they still complex or have they become too easier levels to come down? You know how artists hate complex contracts, right? That said, we must know that the idea of getting into any contract with an artist is for them to be able to understand that there is a commitment between two parties. It's not to make sure that it goes into legality. No one wants a legal situation. And I think it comes from a stems from mutual respect and what we do for them. So to hear also being somebody who's worked closely with artists, respect begets respect and what you do for them and if they see what you do for them is truly enhancing their own brand image and brand value because what we are doing for them and in many cases, that's the reason why we've grown exponentially is because we have actually been able to create a viable and fairly large alternative source of income from their free time. Because this is not something they can do at shoots. They can still perform. They can go their weddings. They can do all of that. All you need to do is put a phone like a selfie, record this message in the way we've decided to create it, send it out and the money hits your account. You know? Absolutely, I need to look at them. Yeah. No, I'm saying if you look at the current state of affairs where the vaccine is around but the pandemic continues and there are no shoots as such, I think this is the platform that you have. And we've proven it. So we've, what's really interesting is that when I went out initially to speak to artists, everyone's a bit skeptical but they wanted to, they know me and they respect the lineage that I have having the good fortune of working with many companies. And it was almost like, okay, Joji, you're right. Chalo, let's see what happens. Today, they say, bro, you really surprised us. We never thought this is the kind of income we'll make from this, you know? And so now people are taking this very seriously and that's the beauty of what the pandemic, so in some ways the pandemic has been also a blessing for us because artists have now begun to look at this, a firm more seriously, and they understand that this is a viable and an incredible source of additional income to their audio portfolios. Right. My final question, what is your message to your subscribers and those who would be your subscribers? What would you like to tell them? Well, the only thing is, let's go nuts. And by that I mean, let us give us the opportunity to create joy, please come onto the platform. Please know that the artists that are there actually are waiting for you to be able to deliver that piece of joy to somebody that whom you want to communicate to and create a moment of happiness. And I think just as we saw the advent of the pandemic of e-commerce and how people slowly began to adopt, this is a change of consumer behavior, obviously. But where I am really, really heartened is the fact that we are in a scenario in our country where e-commerce is now, and thanks to the pandemic also is exploding because people have had to use the internet to buy products to be delivered to their homes since they couldn't step out. Why I'm really being very extremely encouraged is because we are now getting into a scenario where broadband has gone deeper. If you see the YouTube report, you see the Hotstar report or even the KPMG ecosystem report, the growth of video commerce in India or the growth of the online video industry from a mere 3 million, sorry, 50 million to about 3 billion by 2023, it just goes to show that we are in the right direction and with a little bit of tailwind, all of these factors and I also believe that in spite of all that has happened with the pandemic, I'm hoping that we as a country will rebound in a way where people will go out, they will spend, they will want to kind of make up for all the lost time of last year and that's will be in that position to make their lives richer. Absolutely, it can't be more true because everybody is going digital and that is the way forward. Thank you so much, Mr. George for joining us for this discussion. Thank you.