 And like promised, we're going to kick start the awards night with this very robust panel who's going to be discussing programmatic buying and different perspectives, the media owners, the brands and the agencies. One versus the other. Which one wins? What are the pros and cons and the dynamics of this industry are ever evolving on a day-to-day basis so literally nobody can sit on a high chair and say, I've cracked this and this is how it's going to be. But we've got some very fine gentlemen here who are going to throw some light on this. I'll be calling out their names. Would request you to please come up on stage and take your place. This panel is being chaired by Mr. Ashish Bhasin, Chairman and CEO of South Asia Densu Ages Network, Chairman, Pososcope and MKTG Asia Pacific. Not much of an introduction required here. He's a very well-known person, a globally recognized media veteran, been a part of the media advertising marketing community for the past 29 years and known for turning loss-making entities into ambitious stories. He joined AG's media in June 2008 at the cusp of global recession and the company was loss-making. 50 people company within six years of taking the onus of turning its fate around. Mr. Ashish transformed Densu Ages Network into a 2,200 strong company. Thank you so much Ashish for exceeding to chairing this particular session. I'll be calling out the panelist's name. Mr. Arun Anandth, Director of Revenue and Strategy, HD Media Limited. Thank you so much Arun for taking the time for being here. Arun has over 25 years of experience in advertising, marketing and media and there is a dictate that nobody will start saying anything unless they are properly acknowledged with a loud round of applause. This is the agency cloud. This is Mumbai for God's sake. Alright, our next panelist, Mr. Avinash Pandey, Chief Revenue Officer ANN and COO ABP News with a rich experience in media sales spanning over 16 years as a post-graduate in modern history from Delhi University. I'm curious how does modern history help you do what you're doing right now? We've got to discuss that as well. Our next panelist, Mr. Partho Dasgupta, Chief Executive Officer, Barq India. A keen observer of consumer and media trends, Partho is the first CEO of Barq, the joint initiative of broadcasters, advertising agencies and advertisers to develop a new broadcast audience measurement system and we're looking for some very specific answers from him here tonight. Mr. Siddharth Banerjee, Senior Vice President, Marketing, Vodafone India Limited. Siddharth was here, right? He's still inside the bridal room? Can someone please go and call Mr. Banerjee here? I'll move on to our next panelist, Mr. Sudeep Ghosh, Vice President, Marketing, VIP Industry. Personal professional goal of ensuring complete leadership in the industry. He's a great cricketing fan, feels that a brand needs to play a 2020 match for every new launch and announcement of a product and yet understands that a brand can only be built over a period of time with a test match. Thank you so much, Sudeep, for taking the time for being here and you play cricket as well, do you? Used to. Okay, I'll be kind, I'm not saying anything. Thank you Siddharth, I was told you're still in the bridal room. All right, Mr. Banerjee has 15 years of FMCG, CPG experience including the last 13 years in Unilever and now of course he heads marketing in Vodafone and amongst the very different feathers that he has in his hat, he's also an evening scholar. So we've, like promised, we have a very, very robust panel here. May I also invite on stage Mr. Sabesachi Mithar, Managing Director, IBS, who offered the very necessary nuances as far as a digital agency perspective and knowledge goes. He started working in the second bedroom of his house is what his resume says and now after 11 years, it's a 150 strong people company and have had some very interesting digital campaigns under their wing. Last but definitely not the least, we have Mr. Ashish Segel, COOZ Unimedia with over 20 years of media sales background managing the complete facets of media and entertainment industry. He's known for change management and turnaround strategies bringing path breaking changes taking the group to the next level of growth. Thank you all fine gentlemen. I wish there was a woman on this panel unfortunately there isn't. Thank you so much for taking the time for being here. We're looking at about 45 minutes as the panel time and 10 minutes we'll keep for a Q&A with the audience. All yours Ashish. I think it's only a media crowd that can get excited about programmatic for 45 minutes so we'll probably try to restrict it to a little lesser than that. It's a very important topic because it's hot and pressing for almost every agency, every client and several media owners as well. What we will do is we'll start off with each of the panelists giving their point of view as opening comments. I will request them to restrict the opening comments to not more than two or three minutes at most and then if time permits we'll probably have a bit of a discussion or questions and answers amongst ourselves and then open it to the public if that's okay with everybody. So maybe I'll kick it off with Partho. Observe Partho carefully, pre and post and see if there is any variation but Partho would you like to kick off with your comments on this topic? Yeah okay thanks Ashish. So it's interesting that we are discussing programmatic at this stage. I think to be honest I see this as a fairly, I should say fairly ahead of time that we are speaking about and it's good that we are speaking because in India today what I clearly see is there is not too much of a culture or what should I say education or awareness of you being data driven marketing. There's a lot to go and especially when you travel in countries which have been using it today and especially even in the media agency levels you'll see how much they use data for decision making and programmatic is one of those legs that we are talking about. It's challenging at this point of time in India because there's not too much of data per se. There is definitely a lack of data across the industry so there's a lot to be done. I think awareness, other big thing is awareness, education which needs to come across. We see there are, I mean two types, one is the so called demand side programmatic another is the supply side programmatic offerings that are there. Even now I think it's a very small inventory that gets traded when I'm saying small maybe 10, 15 odd percent not more than that. Quality of the inventory is also an issue because many a times this is not the prime inventory that we are talking about at the same time when it comes to so we are all talking about digital at this point of time. In terms of TV, I mean there's a very, very long way to go to be honest. Ashish will I think talk about it more better that there are impact-wise and there are rate-wise so to speak so on the impact but I really don't know how to implement programmatic at this stage but I think the essential thing that I am talking about is I think it's very encouraging that we are discussing this and the awareness about data-driven marketing is very, very important. At BARC we are looking at many, many such offshoots of by-products as we go along not today but maybe tomorrow or day after for marketing effectiveness per se and we are not talking about a trading desk or a programmatic engine. That's something that Ashish and his colleagues will obviously work at but it's encouraging that we are talking about it. Thanks Partho Avinash from a TV channel perspective and particularly a news channel perspective. Love to hear your views. Sir, we also run an ABP live with 264 million page views and I have programmatic advertising happening on my site right now and I have two concerns so I will take more than two minutes to voice that. Programmatic advertising is about data and they are likely to find out a buyer a prospective buyer of your product because of your internet behavior. All our life and when she asked me about history in history we learn about what's gone wrong in the history, right? All our life we were taught about advertising is a business which reaches to those consumers who are not a likely buyer whom you are enticing to buy a random consumer. Programmatic buying finishes all of that. It goes to the person who is most likely already a consumer or is interested in that kind of product. So the first thing that it does, I do not know how much it works for the client and there are clients sitting here who can voice their opinion but we get programmatic advertising. It's easy to sell for a small publisher like us because the inventory is now in bulk available in the market and based on some data, some good intelligent people sitting in this audience writes what rate that they want to give to that programmatic advertising for that inventory. But what it does is that it kills the complete relationship which has developed over many decades between a buyer and a media owner to develop a communication strategy that works best for the brands and I think the biggest casualty that happens in this is the branding. So I do not know if the programmatic advertising is the right way to go but with you, Ashish, I was in a conference and one of the Fox News Wall Street Journalist showed us that there was an Uber ad appearing in programmatic advertising just below a news item in Wall Street Journal that Uber driver jailed for raping passenger and below that you want a free ride? Download Uber today. That's what happens in programmatic advertising. It completely finishes off the social relationship which we have developed. A value that we have developed for society advertising as at the end of the day is creating content and that value completely diminishes when you just buy based on these random numbers of those people who are most likely to be your own consumer. I'll give you one personal example, Ashish, before I finish this off. I was in Paris before Cannes and I rented a car. I reached Cannes. Whenever I opened my ABP life page, I was flooded with car rental companies. Is that the right audience? I am. No. I just rented the car once and I'll rent the car based on already available data that is available in the market, not based on what the ads are being pushed at. That's all that I have to say about this ad. See that as a client that this is possibly a huge opportunity and I'm sure also a great concern area, particularly in your segment telecom which is so active and on the one hand it's got a performance into it as well as it's got a task of brand building. How do you see it? Sure, Ashish. But before I just come to the question, Suparna kicked off this panel discussion by saying that there were no women on the audience. Suparna, the question from the panel is why are there no women on the audience? Naval, you guys were supposed to compose the audience. Okay, so the panel. Yeah. Okay, so coming back to the topic at hand, I think thank you for those two examples of what I would consider as a brand owner, definitely not great examples of programmatic because programmatic involves buying at low cost, serving the right message in the right context, right down to a desired target audience of one. That's what the soul of programmatic is. So if somebody has bought cheap but provided a particular communication message in the wrong context or absolutely horrible context in the case of Uber, like you said, then that's actually not programmatic. That is very, very bad marketing both from a client, media owner, or an agency context. So it's a total disaster without saying that. I do think as a brand owner having worked both in the consumer space of FMCG as well as in the consumer space of telecom that we are just about beginning to scratch the surface of programmatic in India because one of the discussions that's happening is about the sheer maths of it which is about getting a certain decision engine to buy stuff, buy inventory, and then to sell it to prospective clients which are about optimization, the magic, the logic part of it. But in order to get the most out of programmatic, the second part which is the magic needs to be there, which means that if you were earlier as let's say a famous sports brand buying impressions of soccer fans, today you are able to buy audiences of soccer fans and not sports channels, but indeed audiences using programmatic, which also therefore means that you are not buying sports channels or sports or impressions on sports channels but actually you can go across news, music, etc. wherever there are soccer fans in the relevant context, in the right mood, ready to be served up a message. Exactly like you said, you would have in Europe on your way to Cannes done your car rental already. You don't need the car rental again but what you might need is something to do with what are the hot spots to check out in Cannes. Could you get a fantastic evening in Cannes and so therefore can programmatic come down to that level. So thank you for that example because that's exactly what programmatic is supposed to do. So I think the challenge that brand owners like myself have is that we might have the maths of programmatic courtesy of either a media agency or a publisher platform but what do I do with it? Am I actually building creatives? Am I actually serving up different messages for different audiences? I think that's a journey that a lot of us as brand owners yet have to kind of walk that path because we still are pretty much in the initial stages of beginning to see how we can have that same message but start tailoring it to different audiences. What programmatic actually means is that if you have a set of target audiences which you have been able to define let's say 50 different cuts of it you should actually be able to produce 50 different pieces of communication which are targeted at the right context and at the right maybe the day of the week or the particular viewing hour etc. I do see a few brands having done that. We were reviewing a case study earlier this afternoon of LACME having done that. That's an interesting one which you want to, if you'd like to take a look at but I think we're just about starting the journey on programmatic in India. Thanks Siddharth. Ashish, your group is unique in a sense because you have several television channels, some of them are large GC channels, some are regional channels but you're also now looking at digital in several ways. So in a sense programmatic for you becomes a big business opportunity in a sense it could also become something that puts a downward pressure on your yields if so to speak. So how does a group like yours view this? So first, you know, I've come on the fourth in the panel. There's a lot being said already so let me kind of take it forward from there. I'll agree with the Partho where he said that we are too early to discuss programmatic in India. The reason being you're talking programmatic in India only on digital. So digital, what's the reach of digital today in this country, everybody knows. TV is still the biggest medium and that's where bread and butter is. So the challenge for us to think from here is how we bring programmatic buying on television if that remains to be the large chunk of entrepreneurship in future. Just to take a step back, today worldwide in western countries programmatic has already reached 60% of buying. So it's around close to 13 to 14 billion dollars and projected to be about 20 billion dollars in a couple of years. That's the speed at which it is growing almost 20% increase in programmatic buying itself in the western countries. But they have the technology. They invested in infrastructure right from the beginning. They have a two-way path. Here, firstly, we don't have technology. Secondly, we don't have infrastructure from where and today we are almost close to 180 million TV households. Not even a single box has a return path except probably Tata Sky, which doesn't use it. So it's hardly more 20, 30 million households. So even they are not doing anything about it. So what else happening is where programmatic buying is happening is on the digital space, that too only with those people where they have those technologies. Programmatic buying has five pillars. One, obviously the media and the buying agencies and the advertiser. Second is the demand site platform. Then the supply site platform. And the third one is your data management platform. Because this data management platform kind of correlates the data between the demand and the supply. And then comes the advertiser who puts his money on to that. So as Avinash was saying that currently we only have two people, media, buying agency and clients. There are these three pieces missing in between. They will come in only when the technology comes in. It will kick in, of course. But we have to think how the future is going to be on television and obviously progressively on your digital platform. Now coming to us, we understand this piece as a network and as an organization. We are working on it how to marry the two digital and TV and take viewership as a marketplace and not as a platform. So I'm going to tomorrow propose, if I have all the platform with me, I'm going to propose a client saying I'm a marketplace. This is the viewership across various devices I have. What do you want to buy? I can sell it to you. Wherever I have a possible technology, I can give you programmatic. Rest you by the way you've been buying traditionally. So I think that's the near future. But I think if the technology develops here, people invest in infrastructure and infrastructure development, I mean has to be done by all the big media owners, etc. and various players who will come in to play in coming future if this becomes the major play. Digital guys are already, I mean they are investing in it. So I think there is still to be seen how this programmatic buying goes forward. Now coming to what Siddharth said, it has to be also contextual. Programmatic buying alone will not help. Otherwise you will be buying cheap but you don't know what you're buying. So programmatic with contextual is a learning we should have right from the beginning and we should focus on that once we develop this process. I think that's what I want to say. Arun, you have years and years of decades and decades of experience in media. At the moment you're in a print group which is largely into print and of course digital part of it. Print I would think would relatively be less impacted by programmatic but your digital wings also would be significantly sort of involved in or looking at programmatic or sort of trading on it. What is the HD view on this? I think firstly it's really wonderful that someone from the print side has been invited for this discussion. Having said that I did get a call from exchange a couple of weeks back and my mobile phone wasn't, the signal wasn't good and what I heard was there's going to be a panel discussion and it's going to be on problematic buying. I said this is wonderful, like 400 media buyers and I'm going to talk about problematic buying and I said yes I want to be there. And then of course the mail came and here I am. It's still problematic buying. It is still problematic buying. That said, to me it is about advertising and buying is really the last part of it and that's where I started life from and the creative and strategic side of communication and finally advertising is, if I have to put it very simply, it's one of two things when it finally reaches the media level which is that it has to either envelope the customer or it has to surprise the customer. And if programmatic buying can do it and I believe it can then I think it is quite definitely going to be the way forward or at least one way forward. As is the case with every new technology that comes in it's never going to fully replace what's already there but it's going to supplement or complement what is already existing in the media space. Quite definitely advertising is about different kind of messaging for different objectives. So for example if you want to change attitude then one message once is not going to be enough you need to present the message anywhere from 5 to 15 times and it cannot be the same message every time it can be the same theme but it will have to be different expressions and I think for something like that programmatic buying can ensure that you are reaching the same audience with multiple expressions so that you can actually persuade that customer to change attitude towards a brand and that's when changing attitude is your objective but on the other hand if you are running a promotion coming from the newspaper side I would say advertising the newspaper because it's not going to take you 15 days to reach your audience it's going to take you one half an hour in the morning for you to reach. So different messages would require different objectives and therefore different media vehicles. Programmatic buying can definitely make a big difference there are of course technology issues because finally programmatic buying is about an algorithm that works in the background and say for us in newspapers we are all talking about digital front-end as well as the morning newspaper so the morning newspaper would offer reach and programmatic buying over time when it captures concepts like artificial intelligence and natural language processing which can capture tone, themes, personality, moods etc. that can work very well in building frequency and therefore the combination of enveloping the audience and therefore becoming part of the conversation in society as well as individually targeting through programmatic buying is something that I think can work quite well but finally it comes to what kind of a program what NLP's you're using, what algorithms you're using to create that surprise. Thanks Arun. Goshna you've got as a brand owner of course the task of building your brand but I assume that you would also be involved in e-commerce for your brands etc. That now puts a slightly different perspective on programmatic so we'd love to hear what your views are. Okay, to start with let me try to put a context we are talking about programmatic buying in the current situation that we have so if I have to do analogy to this and I am coming from an organization which is mid-size we have medium spends and on digital there is an X amount of spend that we do and it's not large from a digital spend perspective so imagine you are in a war and you know there are enemies in various pockets and you have a set of bullets and you know that these bullets are expensive you want to use them effectively so you spray and some of them hit, some of them don't and that's programmatic buying for a smaller organization but if you have five bullets you need to aim it properly and if you don't aim it, you are going to lose it because you can't spray five bullets so for an organization which is about say maybe 15-20 crores of spends on digital currently that really makes sense because it helps the reach and reach even a little bit of spillage is okay because the inventory is not expensive but for organizations which are smaller which are the spends are limited I think direct buying makes more sense because I know if I'm buying a master then I'm buying a master I'm not going to buy, it's typically like an RODP which I've got no control on if I have to take a traditional example of programmatic buying currently so for a mid-size spender I think the time has still not come because of the ecosystem which is available now and we would like to kind of wait and watch because my monies are limited and rather go and buy what I know is going to be seen rather than not buy or buy and wonder where it's going to come under which ad so for me I think for an organization like us as of now I think we would still prefer a direct buy Thanks Satya you're probably most closely involved in programmatic compared to any of us on this panel because it's something you do day in and day out as a digital agency what are the sort of obstacles that you're seeing what are the sort of opportunities that you're seeing and do you agree with the view that it's an idea whose time is just about started coming but still has a long way to go which is the inherent thought that seems to be coming out from some of the speakers let me start by saying in science and in theory programmatic sounds great right I mean the segment of one that Siddharth talked about I mean it's a wet dream now a lot of the conversation that we've heard over here is about optimum right so I get the audience I get the audience cheap I get the audience contextuality but that's just one part of programmatic first party and second party data is what makes programmatic actually deliver the magic now let's look at second party data India doesn't have it now let's look at first party data how many brands and I will raise the question even to Siddharth and Vodafone's example because one of my clients we're trying to get first party data loaded into the DMP it's been 6 months there is a 10 member team and we are struggling to clean the data get it accessible from the back end and put it on so that my cookie is enriched end of the day programmatic is about an enriched cookie if I'm not able to enrich that cookie and I'm only dependent on a publisher to tell me this guy loves sport and therefore don't only be on a sports channel reach him across the internet that's one part of it when I say that if India really has to go to 60% programmatic you need first party data to integrate with the third party data at the very minimum if I can't even get second party data that to me as a working professional doing this day in and day out for the last 6 months is a long shot maybe some of the other brand owners over here and maybe some in the audience will tell us how are you going to get the first party data to enrich it so are we only chasing efficiencies of buying or are we chasing efficiencies of targeting because the moment you're chasing efficiencies of targeting there's a completely different life cycle management that you can kick in like what if one can manage recharges by figuring out when that person's data balance is down to 10 rupees and then the ad even if it comes contextually incorrect is still relevant because the guy is just about to run out of balance and that's when I show him an ad saying your balance is running out please recharge what we are largely trying to do today is it's a toy in our hands it's an effective toy I agree but we are trying to build in efficiencies on the buying side of it saying that instead of going to 50 different publishers 40 different platforms why can't I go to one tool and I bid for this audience and I get the most effective audience at the cheapest possible rate so if you ask me what is programmatic supposed to deliver it's supposed to deliver a whole lot of stuff in the immediate short term probably not but it can still be a good thing to do and I mean you're running a network probably 10-15% is about the kind of budget allocation that people should be doing at this point in time in programmatic to learn the tool and trust me the biggest challenge that I feel in programmatic is people the topic for today is said that should it be through an agency or should it be directly through a platform my point is whoever has the best talent if the client has the best talent you don't even need the agency you can do it yourself because programmatic is not about impact buys it is a science you need to understand the science it's data you need to analyze data and unfortunately I've seen even in my context with my people media planners and buyers are not necessarily data scientists and if you're doing programmatic there's a lot of hypothesis that you have to work towards the use cases that you build so that talk about 50 different campaigns it could be a million different campaigns with a million different dynamically generated creatives so there's a lot of technologies there's a lot of data science and there's a whole lot more which goes into making a successful programmatic experience whether your agency can deliver it whether Google can deliver it whether Facebook can deliver it that's a separate choice and the last point and parting that I would say is it also depends on the evolution of the client there are many clients who still don't understand programmatic there's still many clients who think in an SSP in a DSP is all that is there to programmatic where's their DMP so depending on what is the level of the evolution of the client the client should choose the right agency who can guide them to the right agency and decide to go and work directly with the platform but that's really case to case how it will change and that's my view Thank you I'll probably throw in a slightly provocative question and anybody in the panel can choose to answer it and maybe after that we can open it out now this panel which is discussing this and of course it is weighed heavily by my age probably as an average age of close to 50 or something like that generally whenever there is something new whenever there is an element of wave of change the older generation tends to have a little bit of a ostrich in the sand kind of a thing so I love it when some of my competitors say that the entire digital environment is only 10% it's not so important etc etc because you know that they are behind times things are going to change much more rapidly etc so is it possible that clients in India and agencies in India and of course media owners because that goes hand in hand are seeing the writing on the wall but are just sort of hoping that this is not going to happen in the near future and it's going to happen in a long while and are not gearing and arming themselves up for it for example Savisachi mentioned that data science is probably more required than media planning skills to be able to do programmatic are we training enough people in that do clients even understand it are digital owners or the other media owners because I do believe one day radio, television will also start going programmatic are they even looking at this possibility are they even geared up for it so if anybody in the panel would like to continue the debate and take it forward Savisachi had hit it on the nail talent and availability of data I think both are a big issue at this point of time some people have to take the leap of faith and invest in it and then you will start seeing it happen I think talent will happen as long as if there is a demand then people will develop skills for it I don't think there is any issue on that the issue will always be as you said the first party data because there is a lot of data out there but most of the data that we have is not really in our kosher there is a lot of garbage in it and that's what creates the problem and then there will be issues of security things like that which will then follow through but talent I don't think will really be a problem but will people be ostrich like in the future I doubt it because I think everybody now knows that things happen after a long time things happen overnight but when that overnight is you do not know irrespective of the business things happen overnight and I think everyone is worried about that everyone is cautious of it nobody thinks that this is not going to happen in my lifetime or in my career or in my work life I think that that part is not there anymore also it depends as I said typically I have six brands I have a brand which is a youth brand called Skybags so that team is very geared they understand digital we try to get young minds who are in day in and day out think digital understands these things probably better than most of the seniors in the organization but there is also a team which is the alpha team an aristocrat team there the ecosystem is such that it's going to be far so it depending upon which category you are operating on for instance we are operating on a category which sells to elderly ladies you can still be a little relaxed as far as the digital is concerned because we have been hearing that digital is going to take over everything but even today Amazon has full page ads on television or full page ads on newspaper and switch on any channel of Amazon advertising so if a digital was so good and it should have taken up then companies like Amazon and Flipkart wouldn't have used traditional medium yes it's coming in we are all aware of it and very rightly put in nobody is going to behave like an ostrich because I don't think that will help anybody to survive in this competitive industry but depending upon where you are and what you are selling and who is your consumer it depends that's how you need to plan and ensure that whether it's going to affect you immediately or maybe you can wait for a couple of years and then get into it see I tell you Arshish to for the age group that you mentioned and we are all saying no no it's not there so I often remember an incident when the American army was already at the Baghdad airport and Saddam Hussein was giving an interview where are they ok digital is here and as a media owner we know that we are in a content dissemination business we are not in a TV business tomorrow if I am going to consume my news item through internet more and more people today on my side are watching the same interview of yesterday RBI governor which was the first interview in Hindi language since that time some over 100,000 people have already watched on the internet on my I am going to serve them an ad now the problem with programmatic as Partho has rightly pointed out clients don't want to share data I am as a media owner little suspicious of sharing the entire data on the DMP how it is going to work is a matter of question there are a lot of young minds here bright minds who can analyze those data they are all educated people it's not a rocket science at the end if you look at the media buying 10 years ago and what is happening now a large client and a large agency today they specifically pick up media owners and the only thing they talk about is rate because they know that they are reaching the right audience on the price there is no impact discussion happening in those meetings it is happening little bit in television but yes when this medium develops fully then there would be a very different game altogether and I see this changing in next 2 years time can I just add one one politically incorrect statement to be made in front of so many media buyers so Partho you wanted me to be politically incorrect right see my challenge with my team has been that people who have been doing media planning and buying for some period of time consider programmatic to be an extension of AdWords now when you move into programmatic you have to also start thinking about data and hypothesis sorry for that you need to slightly orient yourself to saying there are going to be new things that I have to learn new ways of thinking you cannot say just because I have done media for so long I know how to do media sometimes I have seen resistance in people to say that ok maybe I don't know anything and that's what happened with me I could not understand for almost one month how DSP, DMP, SSP connect to be able to do that segment of one I have to literally go back watch YouTube videos for a month to finally get it clear oh this is how the data cookie matching happens my recommendation to people who want to go into programmatic is to get behind the signs to understand how it works get your hands dirty do trial and error only then you will understand how to do programmatic well as and when it becomes a big thing so that you wanted to say so you can apply this to programmatic but for any new technology that you actually want to use to engage with consumers better to buy media better to target better to get your message across more better I think high performance organizations have two things in common and I think you touched upon one of them which is learning agility so we might want to consider this as a new shiny toy fact of the matter is that we need to have the understanding of what this toy can do for us what this tool can do for us and for that there is no substitute for actually rolling up your sleeves and really really trying to understand what it does for us and therefore the pain that it might cause in terms of either getting the enriched cookie like you said and by the way we've been through months of it before we now have a working model ready so absolutely echo your thought the second bit which again high performance organizations do is capability built ahead of the curve it's very good to say that we will invest in talent once we see the whole scenario shaping up but by that time you know in that sense the battle is lost in one so you've got to invest ahead of the curve actually you touched upon the subject of data scientists for an organization like ours which has a lot of data available to us and in order to string the dots together there are there is an active recruitment of data scientists which is happening and we are increasing the core of data science within our organization so it's the ability to invest ahead of the curve when it is when something is single digit or 10% or 12% rather than wait for it to become substantially larger and I think the last point which is personally my kick and my job working in India is that India let's all remember please India is a leapfrog economy in many categories it's been proven that consumers move extremely fast we used to see something called STD boots now there's a large proportion of India which has mobile phone in their hands you don't necessarily need to go to a booth like that cyber cafes anyone heard of that used to be something that used to dominate how you use to access the internet now I am told and I was with a consumer immersion with the Indian youth recently and they do go to cyber cafes but they go to the internet in doubt finally smartphones we've all seen in the last 2-3 years how smartphones have exploded the larger point being that a 10% does not take too much of time to get into a 20% and a 25% which is again therefore brings us back to learning agility and the ability to invest ahead of the curve on capability build thank you Siddharth that really echoes the study I'll just raise one more question here India while problematic bank is majorly on to internet through laptops and other devices and obviously through cookies right we've not yet cracked and I think there's no technology anywhere in the world which has cracked on mobile and an internet or rather the digital consumption in India is increasingly in mobile not on the other side we have already leapfrogged as he said so how will we do then then somebody has to actually again crack a technology where mobile cookies has to be you know created and then that's where you start to you know start doing programmatic buying so you'll have I mean there is one in a behemoth called television which is you know throwing so much of your ship second side you have another screen which has come up with mobile your laptop your desktops are almost negligible but it's very less so if that's what you're going to do programmatic buying one and then you have a very as he said that will also happen the other things will keep happening so I think that's where the current future of programmatic buying is unless we crack the other two pieces where the large chunk of your ship or your consumers are sitting and that's where you need to reach finally but definitely programmatic is there and if we crack these technologies and if it happens I don't think so you know it will be a cheap buying it's targeted buying and it is obviously efficient buying for the buyer I mean for the advertiser and as well as it's a very good payout for the broadcaster I would say the you know media guy because he's selling the piece by piece stuff and he's getting the sum of all will be always more than the one which you're selling today Thank you, thank you Ashish I think with that we'll open up to the audience for two questions if there are mics around please circulate them there are mics in the audience requested to please raise your hands and introduce yourself briefly and the question you'd like to ask to the particular panellists problematic buying very eloquently put Aruna I think it's becoming problematic for the agencies as well as the brand heads to decide what exactly is happening but Avinash like you mentioned about the Uber instance I remember much before programmatic buying kind of anybody had heard about it also I was watching an English movie channel which was playing a blood diamond and in between the ad that got played and blood diamond is about you know the kind of atrocities that literally in Africa you know people have to go through for mining of that diamond and there was ads of debiers in between and I was like who the hell is gonna buy a debier in between watching a blood diamond No but debiers says it's a fair sourced diamond Yeah so it says that it's a fair sourced diamond so it is at the right platform so the movie is saying look at it what happens when the diamond is sourced unfairly and here am I selling you a good diamond unfortunately for me as a consumer at that point in time when I'm watching blood diamond I do not want to buy any freaking diamond debiers or not that's called the difference between subtle and subtle so partner you will soon realize it is fruitless to argue with the news channel alright do we have any questions in the house looks like everybody is pretty much confused with all of this enriched cookie systems that is happening I think only Sabyasaji has any clue about what's happening yeah Sabyasaji yeah possibly should we wrap this up sure I think I'd like to first of all thank the panel for all their inputs and it's really interesting to get so many different perspectives because all of us come to any any topic from very different angles so when you see it together it really gives a very holistic picture I'd also like to wrap it up a little bit with my own point of view in my organization we clearly believe that in the not so distant future programmatic it's going to be extremely important very much echo word Siddharth said which is that it is important to invest ahead of the curve because I do believe that it is going to happen in a very big way not just in digital but will slowly permeate in other media as well one of our companies in fact isobar did a first buy a programmatic buy on radio a few weeks ago so I think it's something that is going to happen I agree with all the panelists that not enough has been done not enough is known data while it's available in huge quantities is not being analyzed and used very well but that's no reason in my view not to get into it very deeply like someone said got to roll up your sleeves get into it and start getting the hang of it because it is something that is going to happen in a big way and it's going to cause a fairly large change in also in my experience having sat through perhaps a hundred or more pitches media pitches all client briefs say that let's talk about rates later we're very important to know what are your tools what is your planning ability what is your this what is your that all of all of that stuff and once you finish all of it the procurement guy comes in and says ok what's your bloody rate and how much down can you drive it so the fact of the matter is that whichever way you look at it at least for media agencies efficiencies are probably going to become even more important of course impact and contextual and all of that will so these are not mutually exclusive those will also keep going up but we can't run away from the fact that there will be even more pressure on efficiencies we think we've sort of seen the worst I think it's only the beginning and a lot more of that is going to come and certainly there if programmatic or any other tools or data can help us understand it better and add better value for clients I think the entire ecosystem will only benefit from it so thanks once again for your very valuable time and for great inputs and and thank you to the audience for listening to us thank you so much for doing this for us extremely grateful for you having taken the time for doing this and of course we've only gotten started yes this is just the beginning with the tip of the iceberg there's a lot of learning that needs to go into this ever-changing and dynamic dopamine and as a token of appreciation for this august panel may I invite on stage Mr Irfan Khan CEO blogman to please offer a small token of appreciation on behalf of the exchange for media group for this wonderful panel that we have here on stage with a loud round of applause please yes go ahead blow your trumpets Sabyasachi, Sudeep Arun and go ahead tweet also we've got a couple of winners already using hashtag media ace awards I'm going to be giving away the first two goodie bags right after we're done with the felicitations so in case you haven't tweeted yet something innovative nice contextual and efficient do it right now using hashtag media ace awards Siddharth we need to is Deepak Kadam in the house raise your hand Deepak where is he here somewhere where is Deepak I can't see any Deepak Kadam here is Ishran Parik in the house Ishran where is Ishran but where is oh there he is come up come up front thank you all so much thank you all