 He left, but Vikram, you can answer, does the creativity suffering, is creativity suffering because of too much of emphasis on data, programmatic advertising and performance marketing, where in two seconds add, two second view is counted as an ad. So if you have to show something in two seconds or six seconds, then I do not know what creativity we're talking about. This fellow industry peer distinguished guest out here, colleagues, a very warm good evening to you. I have been voicing about this since last one month. I spoke also on this subject in DNPA, those of you attended it, please pardon me for this. I can say it clearly, it is one of those days where it is not easy to read the room. While we are here to emphasize various truth about the current media landscape, let me start by saying that first of all what Sam said, what Mr. Kosla said, that television is here to stay, where in the world you'll get in $3, 300 channels to watch every single month, right? And India which has still media dark areas where people are still growing, what Piyush Gold told me once that once electricity is supplied in a household to supply for the pumping for the water for agricultural areas. The first thing that they do, they buy a TV set and they put a plug for the pumping, but instead of putting the pump there, they first buy a TV set and put in there. Now the same guys are buying connected devices which we are going to talk about in this. So television is here going to stay and its impact will remain unparalleled. And how it is going to be, we'll talk about it. In the big tech world of gamma, which we famously call Google, Apple, Meta and Amazon, TV still controls more mind than what digital world may have, and digital world which has so many platforms is, and as the digital world is finding to its own peril, the story teller of the future is going to be increasingly platform agnostic. If one platform loses its relevance, there is another one out there, which is why it is important to remember that though the internet connects with staggering about 510 million plus viewers monthly, television is still about 843 million as per the comm score. TV is right now is generating a colossal about 1.5 billion impressions annually and a stand stall. I am deliberately not quoting Vikram Bach's figure. It is still comm score. The digital realm has such a irresistible allure that I agree with this that digital presence is no longer a luxury but a necessity for most brands. However, the established brands digital serves as a supplementary tool rather than a game changer. If I, and it came out in Sam's presentation also that at the forefront of the television advertising today, industry titans like Rekit, HUL, PNG, Godrej Koch, Colgate, Wipro, Reliance, and Nation Pants reign supreme. While they explore the digital sphere, their commitment to television remains unwavering. A few brands even today and us in news business work on those brands a lot. Consider TV as the only lifeline remaining which is conspicuously absent in the digital era. Winnie cosmetics, for example, agro tech foods, Sona Biscuits, Raja Udyogh, these Indian companies when they start advertising and our team in news companies go out to smaller towns and cities and talk to these manufacturers and bring them into advertising fold. Sam, if you remember me and you worked together with Fikki to educate the value of advertising in small towns and we must have brought more than 200 clients into advertising fold during those campaigns in three months. So talking about brands cast your mind back to late 90s and early 2000 when whirlpool actually surged ahead, overshadowing stalwarts like Godrej just through their thunderous presence on the TV screens. Patanjali, all of us admit that is a brand built largely over TV. Largely what? It was only on TV for many years before they ventured into anything else. There are numerous brands which we, you know, you may know because of TV it must be flat out honest. They say Saria category or the building material category what we call is largely built by television. In fact, one Saria clients start advertising and other Saria clients join in and you'll find a lot of these Saria clients buying laptops, branding to advance to everything on television channel. To reaffirm my point with the growth of digital TV is still the most affordable source of media and it is grossly enterprise. The reach is of course spans symmetrical and for brands and advertising budget for TV still highly valued proposition. It is as per the last pitch medicine advertising report which sam you presented. Traditional media index share was about 62% in 2022 and absolute terms grew over by 14%. TV still was supreme. 2023 also mentioned split of traditional of digital index was 55,000 crore to 34,000 crore. So what is causing this disruption in the whole business of creativity what Balki also talked about? Due to COVID pandemic significant transformation has happened in our industry transition from traditional platform to digital media and you may say that the news viewership is digressing or moving to YouTube or meta or any other platform but we all know that they are still consuming the content in the video format which is produced on TV and sam it is for us to discuss which also Balki slightly mentioned it but he was because he was I think he was very angry with the way the creativity is so he could not emphasize on that point but look at it what is happening in our system what are we calling digital? A mode of signal delivery to the same content. So today let's assume that on an average our TV news channels delivering 50 to 60 million through traditional cable network about 20 million of them are watching on connected devices whether through YouTube their own connect apps or etc. So the emergence of ctv and other ways of consuming content have only brought a new set of on-demand audience and we say fresh eyeballs are now watching TV content be it YouTube, meta or through connected TV. Initially for TV business and this is a this is a very important point for advertisers, advertising agencies and us that for you know hundreds of years Sam the system was a very close-knit system. We produced content. We went to advertising agencies to sell space between the two content break to sell ads and looking at the platform, creative companies designed ads which Balki also spoke about and then we inserted into that platform whether it is an IPL whether it is a news channel or a documentary program people used to wait for the world this week or the program until he last anchored. There was a symbolic relationship between the client agency and publisher. It was a close group. An agency plays a very important role in bridging this gap between content creators and brands. As I said the ecosystem of publisher, advertiser and client was a close loop. So for example even newspaper business, when the newspaper was produced it was put on a cart which used to deliver to the delivery boy which was your employee. That delivery boy finally gave it to a hawker which used to work for you and deliver it at your home. What in your famous lecture on Subhash Gosal Memorial lecture what Arun Puri pointed out that print is the only business where it continues to get distributed even if someone is not consuming. But it was a close-knit system and that is how the advertising delivery happened. Advent of digital era has disrupted all of this. The power of distribution has gone out of the hand of the media owners. And that is not the only problem for media owners. It is reflecting in your ad-ex report and decline in advertising, decline in the creativity and et cetera. In a nutshell if a brand walked up to me today to an agency and just asked me where they want to place the product on our network and I could manage the supply to assure the client that where exactly ads are placed. The client knows that which kind of audience it is reaching. Agency knows what kind of audience it is reaching. It can observe it physically by watching it. Today if you place an ad and I can share an example with you of our own campaign. It is human nature that what you don't consume yourself it is very difficult to assume others are enjoying it. At AVP network like all media companies in your list there are media companies who are on top advertising categories in top 50 or top 20. We also advertise a lot. And once we decided that we will only take met a platform for advertising and we spent tons of money for that. I have my colleagues sitting here who are a party to it and we targeted a group of people advertising community between the age group of 25 to 40 largely working in multinational and I wanted three times that had to be seen. Our agency India's largest media company they said that you have reached five times job is done. After which we went for a presentation to a big beverage client in Gurgaon and we targeted Gurgaon. And the first slide my colleague had put that ad and one of my other colleagues said why you're putting this ad in the first place because they must have seen it. Let's move to the second slide once they come. I said I bet upon you and I put a bet on that. I said 50,000 rupees. The other person said no it's 10,000. I said okay. Three people walked in. All three of you are well known to most of us and they said what is this ad about? And I asked them are you not on Facebook? They said yeah. Did not you see this ad? I said no. And that is the difference between placing an ad on television and digital. We have a very large digital business which I'm coming to that and how it can we can help this work. Currently the predominant digital platforms are overshadowing the traditional disruption channel with a significant shift of power towards the big tech companies. Distribution mechanism have become more complex and advertising serving technologies has undergone substantial changes resulting into what we call the degree of chaos in the industry. Creativity which Balki spoke about a cornerstone of media has suffered and we all realize this. As clients have expressed dissatisfaction with the current digital scenario. Advertisers whose primary goal is to create demand for its users. Find themselves grappling with the new challenges presented by the digital landscape. As a publisher we don't control our own inventory today because that power has been taken away from us by the big tech. They decide that what you are going to watch and I'll give you another interesting data. Fiki data, government of India data is showing that digital consumption in India is going up, right? People are consuming more and more content on digital and I'm seeing him here. He's going to present it next. The e-commerce has gone up. The use of e-rupee has gone up. E-money has gone up. Digital penetration has gone up. Mobile penetration has gone up. But what they are showing is that the media consumption through the traditional media owners have declined. How is that possible? So as a publisher, because we don't control our own inventory, they own both the supply side and demand side, I am not in a position to tell you with all honesty that I can provide the demography and the geography that you are asking for. So can we reverse this funnel? There is a growing realization that power needs to be reclaimed from the big tech companies. There must be an advocacy for shift through regulatory mechanism and the aim is to restore the balance in the news industry. Let us look at the duopoly of Google and Meta in the current Indian market. As per the com score, the news information space is also increased by Meta and Google with at least 90% or more penetration in the total internet audience. They are supposed to have some overarching users and some share of revenue through different boundaries to overlap. But if you look at the profit and loss statement and revenues of Google, it would be outbidding all of us combined. There should be a call to reverse this funnel because there is no incentive for media owners to produce content which is engaging. I do not know how we are going to create an environment for a healthy advertising. In a recently released DNY report at DNPA Conclave, it highlighted that digital media is generating advertising revenue totaling to about 40,000, 41,000 crore in India. However, news generating companies received a 4% share out of this. I do not have the data right now, but I can safely tell you about 70%, 65% to 70% of the consumption on Google and Meta has happened because of news items. It is just about 1,500 crore for my digital news publisher association out of that 41,000 crore. DNY also reports that 44% of the revenue of digital publisher is also located towards customer acquisition and technology development. So what is happening now is that that because they arrive at an algorithm to reach to a certain consumer, you change your backend at the publishing side to reach to those consumers. By the time you have invested, gone to the market, and slowly starts getting advertising, they change the algorithm. And they say now you work on this new algorithm because this is what will take us to the new set of audience. Basically what we have done, we have expanded our operation, entering the digital sphere, and the cost of expansion was thrown on the media owners. The inventories are created through our digital content, again coming at our expenses, and we also spend a lot to acquire new users through these intermediaries, what is called the Big Tech. Now when the turn is to get a sizable share of the revenue generated, which has been riding on our back all this time, we get only a small portion. And I do not know how many of us know this, but a hundred rupees spent by an advertiser on digital medium, less than 20 rupees comes to a publisher. The medium has just reversed. For hundreds of years that money was 80 rupees, my friends and GEO are trying to turn it around, and I hope they are able to do it sooner than later. But this is the major issue today in the industry. What incentive a publisher has got to create content suitable for your advertising in a digital environment? When out of 100 rupees client is spending, we are only getting 20, and earlier we were getting 80. So that is why I am proposing that let us go back to our original ways. For TV or digital, if you want anything to be delivered to any kind of audience, let's deal directly. We can create those environments for you. What you call will deliver as media owners, publishers across the country. Instead of approaching big tech for buying programmatic advertising or performance marketing, if you reach to the publisher, they can actually guarantee you saying that this is the audience. I will show it to you. So seamlessly through newspaper, television, and on the same platform on digital, you know that this is where you are consuming. And Sam, I will also use this platform to tell it to our publishing partners. What has happened is that I was delivering news in a particular house through hawker, through cable, right? When big tech came, they said, look, this is already delivering already. I am going to a new environment. I am reaching out to the new set of consumer, and hence you come and start curating content for them. Instead of looking at it in the same household, while the elderly are watching television and reading newspapers, the youngsters are not doing so. So instead of reaching to them, they started expanding the market and reaching out to more number of people by creating content, saying that it's for the young age. There is no creativity which is not like the cross-age group. And there is no news item which is not relevant across-age group. It is only created by mindless algorithms that companies are marketing and selling these. I mean, if watching two seconds for an ad is counted as an ad watched, while on television we are saying one minute watch is an ad watch, then what kind of creativity difference that we are talking about in the market will never be able to solve this problem. And that is why it is very important that we reach out to the publisher, the advertising agency client and publisher should work together and say that, look, we will create this environment to reach out to a amount of audience and that will use the Big Tech. We are not saying that we will not use the Big Tech. We will use the same Big Tech to reach to our audience in the same household where we are delivering television and newspaper. And that is why, and if this does not change, this change is not done by the Big Tech itself by giving us 80% of our money, then what Union Minister and Rakh Thakur just said the other day that if they want to play the role of a god-like, then we are going to act. Union Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology, Rajiv Chandrasekarji said that there is an asymmetry between the digital news publisher and the Big Tech platforms over revenue sharing model. And he said that if you don't solve this problem sooner, we will act. So it is not the first time that the Big Tech and publisher will go out for an all-out battle. It has already happened in Australia, Canada, France and European Union. And we have taken initiative through our own legislative procedure to act on it. Australia's head-on collision against tech giants over the news media bargaining code is something to be very closely looked at. And it's very interesting. When they went ahead, Australia faced a threat from Google and Facebook including the potential loss of access to the Google search engine. Facebook in February 2021 wiped news links from their platform, causing 13% drop in traffic to the news websites in Australia. By the way, something on a similar scale is already happening in India. All my industry friends are here can attest it that instant articles a glorified feature by Facebook for publisher is now a thing of the past. Around 90% of the news links just do not get traction in the Indian market on Facebook handles. It is what Mr. Miller called the post-work America's consumption model of planned adolescence. Back in Australia, even some within the industry argued that bargaining code was aimed to subsidize the media's struggle with online competition for advertising. Bloomberg in Opet wrote that there is a misdiagnosis of journalism's business model. However, we have outcome from Australia in front of us and Google and Facebook eventually paid up and struck deals with the news organization. We are right now also talking to regulators here to make this model viable. Both for digital and TV, I am urging all publishers and bodies to be united for advertisers and clients. And my request to them is that you let's work together. Three of us can still create those creativity, good content, and reach, call it a war if you will, but it will be a civilized war. But for us, three of us has to come together. Remember that Big Tech is focused on grabbing the attention of and engaging with consumers where the TV and traditional media is oriented towards accuracy and independence. Let us not throw that out. Everything good about the analog world is a race to or for a digital utopia. Let's save journalism, let's save the media, and let's save the creativity. Thank you very much.