 As I invite Mr. Vinay Prasad, VP Sales South and East of Colors, also Bobby Paul, GM Marketing of M.M. Online. We are requested to a few to step up on stage and hand over tokens of gratitude to our speakers in the fireside chat. I think, like I was saying, from potatoes to ultra-national brands, lots of ground covered aloo is well with the world of brands, I must say. Thank you and maybe hear it for the two of them. Mr. Heymanth Malik and Mr. Pradeep Svivedi, thank you for all the insights. Ladies and gentlemen, it's now time to have a look at what about rewriting the marketing value chain and how do you, you know, in this quest to build purposeful brands. And we have someone very, very appropriate for the job. His name has already been mentioned, but it's always a pleasure to introduce him a little more to this audience, CVL Srinivas, known as Srinia, the Vice Chief Executive Officer of South Asia Group M worldwide since October 2012. And over five years, he has worked closely with many teams, particularly with the Unilever team on the foods and personal care portfolio. He's also worked with leading media agencies in India, and during his tenure, Group M continues to dominate the industry awards. We've seen that happen when they won the country of the year at the Group M APAC EMI's awards. Let's hear it for Srinia and invite him onto the stage for his address. Thanks to Anurag and Navel, Ephraim Group for inviting me to my favorite city and my hometown. Many excuse to be in Bangalore, but thanks for having me here. And Heyman, thanks for that brilliant presentation, very, very inspiring. For a change, I sat in the audience and you presented every other week where in your office presenting boring media stuff to you. And today it was awesome. Thank you so much. And especially the story on responsible competition, I think is something which all of us have lessons to learn from. Okay, so the topic that was given to me was looking at the marketing value chain in this day and age and trying to see if the whole marketing value chain, be it brand management, marketing, media advertising, and everything else that actually brings marketing alive. The way it is currently, is it kind of relevant? Is it in tune with the times or does it have to be rewired? Let me start by saying that, and this is a statement which most conference speakers start with nowadays, which is we live in unprecedented times, so I obviously agree to that. But if you look at what really the issues are, I think there are four axes on which there are challenges building up for brand owners and marketers. One is obviously the consumer itself, which is central to this whole, I would say, problem and solution in a sense, ever-evolving, very vocal, very unforgiving. Then of course you have competition today, Hemant touched upon that, you have competition of all shapes and sizes. You have competition not just in the real world, but also in the online world. You also have in a country like India a lot of structural changes which are going on, putting a lot of pressure on brand owners, their new policies being announced, and the whole country is moving from an informal to a formal economy, and that brings its own challenges. And on the fourth dimension, there's obviously this massive, massive explosion of data, of insights. All of us leave trails of information every single day, wherever we go. And that again is a challenge, it's also an opportunity. So these are really the four axes on which things are really beginning to kind of shake up the whole world of marketing and advertising. One of the more interesting reports that's come out recently is the Kantar-Milward-Brown report on marketing in the world of 24-hour data. Those of you who don't have access to it, I mean it's available for download. It's a very interesting report. What Milward-Brown has done is they've looked at studies like Brand Z, they've also looked at the Kantar world panel data, and also done researches across several countries to try and outline what are the key principles today to kind of drive brand growth. And I just picked up a few which I thought are relevant just to set the context to what I'm going to say later. I think first and foremost, they say that today brand owners need to act quickly to gain competitive advantage. Acting quickly or being extremely responsive, acting with speed is very, very important. So what it means is it's not just about real time brand tracking or real time listening, but not just doing all of that but also taking action, which is very important. So that's really the first principle that Kantar-Milward-Brown outlines. The second really is to be first to mind or rather the importance of salience for brand growth. Here again, extensive research done across various countries. If you look at Brand Z data along with Kantar world panel data, there's obviously very, very high correlation between brands that are salient and brands that do well. But salience often is mistaken for just advertising. Salience is mistaken for high share of voice, a lot of GRPs being seen day in and day out. And again, Kantar-Milward-Brown has proved that salience, yes, advertising does play a role. But salience also depends on the kind of or the number of distinctive assets you can build for your brand. And I'll give you the example of McDonald's in the US, 2016 data. Their salience score versus their competition. I mean that gap was pretty much the highest amongst all categories. And when you dig deeper and you see the reasons for it, yes, advertising is one part of it. But it was because of the assets that the brand had built over the years. Stuff like the Golden Arches logo, Ronald McDonald, the famous person you see when you enter any McDonald's store. And of course, stuff like the carton of fries, so on and so forth. So all of it put together gives McDonald's that saliency. The third principle that they talk about is identify what drives sales, not only now, but also in the future. Because sometimes saliency gets you into the trap of just being visible in the short term and not really building your brand for the long run. And for the long run, obviously what you need to do is to build brands that are meaningful, that are differentiated. And again, a lot of examples that Heyman showed, it goes beyond just marketing and advertising. And last but not the least, and this is the most tricky part, know where and how to invest. How do you actually invest in marketing or media platforms that actually drive outcomes for your business? So if one looks at these four or five principles that have been laid out in the Kantar report on managing brands in this day and age. And one has to really sum up this whole thing. What it's actually boiling down to is marketers today need not only fast access to metrics that matter, but they also need to understand that not all measures need to be measured all the time. I think the trick is to be able to kind of pick up which are those metrics that actually drive your brand or your category and could be different for different brands and categories. And have the right technology, process systems, and structures to actually focus on those. And don't end up kind of trying to measure everything. So given that background, I just kind of sat back and over the last many years, given the experience we've had managing clients across different categories and different sectors and looking at how client organizations have evolved. Just a few observations in terms of how brand owners today are faring and what really are the big challenges that they're facing. First and foremost, I think the biggest challenge obviously that they're all facing is the challenge of profitable growth. And therefore that's reflecting in cost pressures. We have seen, I've been in the advertising business now for close to 25 years and the role of procurement, the role of people who kind of negotiate hard on prices, etc. Has become a paramount importance to brand owners today. Because of the cost pressures that they're under. And this is obviously leading to a shorter term cycles for everything. For evaluating whether a brand is doing well or not. For evaluating whether an agency is doing well or not. And for even evaluating perhaps whether a CMO or a CEO is doing well or not. It's also leading to obviously a lot more uncertainty. The goalpost keeps shifting every other day. And cost control is all very fine, but too much of cost control obviously means you often lose sight of longer term imperatives. That's one big issue all of us are grappling with. And it's almost like the elephant in the room when we talk about brand building. The second observation is, and again this has happened over the last maybe ten years or so, is most brand organizations and obviously most agency organizations as well have got extremely siloed. Because back in the early days when I started off in Lintas, Bangalore in the year 93, it was a full service agency. We had media, we had creative, we had copywriters. In fact, the guy sitting on my right used to write jingles for radio ads. And the person sitting on my left was servicing one of the big clients in Bangalore. And I was doing media and sitting in between. And it was a very holistic and a wholesome experience those days. Post which obviously we've gotten to the age of specialization not just on the agency side but the client side as well. Leading to organizations which are today extremely siloed. Lots of specialists even within marketing teams, you have brands, you have media departments, you have digital, you have social, you have analytics. And very often there is a lot of transmission loss because of the silos that organizations create and in turn it leads to the organizations becoming a lot slower. The third change that we've seen over the years is the number of, I mean it kind of builds off the previous point. The number of agency partners that clients deal with today is humongous. In fact, if you look at the top 10 or 15 advertisers in India, each of them deals with over 30 agencies. This is if you add creative media, PR, social, digital, analytics, content, etc, etc. There are over 30, 35 agencies clients deal with. Even if you look at the mid-sized advertisers in India, they deal with at least 15 to 20 agencies today. And even the smaller clients with not too much of spend, maybe single brand companies deal with at least five to ten agencies. So the whole partner ecosystem has got fragmented. So those really are some of the issues as we see, as far as the brand owner organization is concerned. And these are all realities of life. I don't think we can run away from any of these because of, like we spoke earlier, the kind of disruption that's happening. And a lot of this is also reflected on the agency partners. So a lot of the cost pressure gets transferred onto the agencies. Every time you have to pitch for a new account today, despite all the song and dance agencies do around the investments in data and technology and content and everything else. Every pitch in India finally boils down to an Excel spreadsheet. And whoever quotes the lowest price wins the business. And people are today free to quote anything they want to get a business. That's again a sad reflection of our times, but there's no escaping from the fact that because of the cost pressures clients are under, it's getting transferred to agencies. It's also therefore leading to a lot of issues down the line. Challenges for agencies in terms of investing in the right talent, in the right technology, data, and so on and so forth. So given all of this, in the challenging times that we live in, if you actually look at the way the whole marketing value chain has evolved, one has to actually seriously think whether to even call it a value chain. Or is it a marketing commodity chain today, given the changes that have happened? So, like I said, I mean, is this going to change or is this a new normal? Obviously, most of us realize that cost pressures and some of these other things are not going to go away. Competition is going to only get more intense. Ecom is just beginning to make a mark. Just imagine over the next five years, ten years what Ecom is going to do in terms of disrupting the whole ecosystem. So given all of that, how do we therefore rewire this whole marketing value chain? So again, just going back and looking at some of the best practices across the clients we handle in this market and other markets as well. Just put together a few points which probably answer that question. I think the first and foremost point really before you get into structures, before you get into investments in anything else. I think the first point is really let go and I think it's the most difficult thing to do, the first thing, which is to just let go of the old mental models. I think all of us have grown up, if I can speak on behalf of all of us in the media industry, we've all grown up with our whole formula based approach of GRP and reach and frequency and SOV and CPT and CPRP and so on and so on and so on and so forth. I don't know how many of these metrics are even relevant today, frankly. Clients are struggling to build businesses. Clients are struggling to grow their volume share. And I still think a lot of the industry time goes in just measuring output, where all of us need to be focusing on trying to build outcomes, trying to actually come up with models that tell our clients how much investment gives you what kind of return. So I think that's the first shift to be made. Let go of old mental models. I also think debates on is it TV more important, is digital more important, is print more important, I don't think are at all needed today. I think that's a secondary point. I think the key point is who really is your consumer? How can you actually reach him or her in the most effective way? And how can you actually impact the business of the brand? What do you need to do short term? What do you need to do long term? So on and so forth, because when you talk about purposeful brands, purposeful brands have to be built across many, many vectors. So sometimes you lose track of all of this if you just get caught up in the old mental model. So I think that's really the first point and this is like I said, it's challenging. It needs a mindset change. It needs sometimes senior leadership to be challenged. One of the things which we've done with GroupM which has actually worked for us is we realized four or five years ago when we're trying to bring about some change in the organization, trying to learn about new media, trying to learn about new technology. We actually realized that the people who actually know most about all of this are the junior most rungs of the organization. But they don't normally have a voice in the company. They're not empowered to speak up. And the people sitting at the very top are not very clued into what's happening, especially in our space of digital and technology and so on. So by creating the youth executive committee or the YCO as we call it in GroupM, we actually gave the youngsters in our organization a platform and a voice to actually participate in decision making in the organization. A lot of the decisions we take today in GroupM as an XCO, the senior leadership team, is guided by the YCO. So the XCO and YCO actually sit together very often and take decisions on the areas we need to invest in. So I think things like that would help in challenging old mental models and processes. The second one, of course, is to break the silos. And this again is easier said than done. But I think one way of breaking silos and getting teams to kind of work together is to do it around obviously a certain cause or a certain foundation. And I think this day and age with the explosion of data that is there, I think creating an organization that's data and consumer centric and getting your different units to work together would help build brands more effectively. And then of course, there's this whole point of looking at brand building, not just as an expense, but an investment. And Hemant again touched upon this point. And going back to my earlier point of getting fixated and measuring outputs versus trying to kind of drive outcomes. Last but not the least, we live in an age again of specialization. There is no organization, neither a brand owner nor an agency, can hope to be a master of everything. And we're also fortunate to be living in a country which has got a great entrepreneurial culture. There are a lot of exciting young companies which have come into the space of data, technology, digital content, whatever. So I think one of the tricks going forward is how can you as an organization leverage this whole partnership ecosystem? I mean, can you even put a structure in place to work with some of these companies, maybe formally, maybe informally, and get all their best practices, etc. in? So I thought for some of the ways in which organizations today, whether it's brand owners, whether it's people on the agency side, can start to rewire the way they handle marketing, the way they handle brands to make them more purposeful. So that's broadly what I had to share. So just to kind of summarize what I spoke about in the last 10, 15 minutes. First and foremost, we all know there are dramatic shifts happening, whether it's because of the consumer, the competition landscape, the structural changes in a market like India, or the whole explosion of data. If you look at some of the recent reports, like the Kantar report, and if you look at some of the key principles that lead to effective brand building today, they all talk about speed, they all talk about saliency, they all talk about building meaningful brands. So don't just focus on the short term, but focus on the long term as well, and know when and how to invest. But if you look at the marketing value chain today, I mean, most of it goes against what one really needs to do. It's complicated, it's fragmented, speed of response is just not there. We're focusing on the wrong metrics most of the time. We're too short term and we just over complicate things. So the lessons maybe one can draw, and if you look at successful companies, if you look at companies that have continued to build strong brands in these challenging times, it's obviously simplified, it's integrated. It's treat brand building as an investment. Don't think advertising is the only factor that will build a meaningful brand or a salient brand. So look at all the different vectors and see what role each of them can play for your brand or your category. Thank you. Let me first invite Mr. Amit Gupta, CEO, AsianNet News, Media and Entertainment Limited, and also Sriniv back on stage to receive the memento, many takeaways from this conversation, going beyond really the traditional and only focus on advertising and how you can leverage what seems like a confusing time and to ride the wave. Thank you so much, Sriniv, for that address. Thanks indeed. Reviving the marketing value chain, that was the one and we really enjoyed the presentation. Thank you both of you gentlemen.