 And yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is now time to listen into a man who honestly needs no introduction. He's recognized as one of the most influential persons in the media and entertainment industry and continues to lead Madison as the largest independent media agency in the country. With more than 30 years at the forefront of media and advertising industry, Mr. Sambal Sara, chairman of Madison World, has an ocean of knowledge and insights that very few in this industry have. May I now invite Sam to share with us the key highlights for the Pitch Madison Advertising Report 2021. A very warm welcome to you, Mr. Bal Sara. Good afternoon, friends. I stand before you once again this time within a short gap of just five months since we had presented to you an interim report in August last year. Thank you very much indeed for participating in this webinar and for keeping your date with us year after year. Last year was the year when COVID virus brought about a catastrophic disruption in our personal, social and business lives and caused havoc in the economy. So, it's no surprise that Indian addicts could not remain insulated from the environment around us. In our estimate, addicts dropped in 2020 by as much as 20% and digital was the only medium that bucked the trend and grew last year by 10%. However, if you look at only traditional media, it has dropped by a dramatic 29%. So, almost one-third of traditional addicts got shaved off last year. If you look at figures for H1 and H2, they are even more dramatic both in terms of drop in H1 and in terms of the recovery in H2. The drop being as much as 39% in H1 and almost a full recovery in H2 with a minor 1% growth over H2. Quarter-wise, the data is even more startling with three-quarters declining and only the last quarter registering a substantial increase of 16% over quarter 419. Predictably, quarter 2, when a strict lockdown was imposed, saw a decline of as much as 65%. That is why in 2020, the quarter-wise contribution looks very different from earlier years. Quarter 4 last year contributed as much as 37% and quarter 2 only 12%. In absolute terms, addicts has degrown from 67,603 crore in 2019 to 54,151 crore, a drop of a whopping 13,452 crore, the highest drop ever in one year in Indian addicts' history. With this drop, addicts in 2020 has receded back to almost its 2017 number and if you look at only traditional addicts, we went back five years to the 2015 number, thus resulting in a 20% degrowth in addicts. It is a bit disappointing to see that Indian addicts is not as robust as the global addicts and is more susceptible to vagaries of economic changes because work tells us that globally, addicts de-grow only by 9% whereas in India, as I told you, we de-grow by 20%. US addicts will be surprised to know de-grow only by 4% and Chinese addicts by just 5%. Though UK addicts de-grow by a substantial 14%, our de-growth of 20% makes India the most impacted advertising market in the world. Coming back to India, each medium behaved very different. Digital came out unscathed and as I said earlier was the only medium to grow by 10%. All other mediums were negatively affected though TV was the least affected with a de-growth of just 11%. Print de-grew by 41%. But percentages here don't tell the real story. Print being a large medium actually contributed 8,120 crore or 54% to the total de-growth of almost 15,000 crore. OH and radio also suffered substantially but since these are smaller mediums the actual numbers of de-growth are not very high. Cinema understandably because of lockdown of cinema halls virtually got knocked out of addicts with a 83% drop and ended up with a share of just 0.34%. In terms of share of each medium, the big news is that digital has overtaken print as the second largest medium with a share of 31% and print has lost as much as 8 percentage points having dropped in share from 30% to 22% and slipped down to third rank. TV not only continues to be the largest medium but it further improved its share by 4 percentage points from 37% to almost 42%. Share of digital continued its onward march eating into traditional media as this chart shows with traditional media losing its share by as much as 8 percentage points from 77% to 69%. Mind you traditional addicts in India one would have to recognize is quite resilient because even at a 69% share it is probably the only major country in the world with such a high share. Globally traditional media is 41% of total addicts. Coming to different categories e-commerce and education are the only two categories that buck the trend and showed positive growth in groupie terms. FMCG though it degroup by 13% jumped up in share from 33% to 38% and became an even more dominant category in our addicts. Many advertisers deserted TV, print and radio in quarter 2 but by quarter 4 almost all advertisers have returned to the advertising fold. I will come to a new list of top 50 advertisers and what changes one saw in this tumultuous year in a minute. But before that I want to say that looking at the total number of advertisers in India one will have to recognize that in a country of 1.2 billion with a GDP of almost 3 trillion US dollars then this number is abysmally small. A large number and medium India businesses it would appear are yet to discover the power and business building potential of let us see who were the top advertisers in 2020. Our list is diverse with FMCG, telecom, auto e-commerce, mobile gaming and consumer durables. But FMCG dominates the list with as many as 19 in top 50 and as many as 6 in top 10. Rekit made a big push last year and rose up in rank from rank 11 to rank 2 this year. Contribution of top 50 advertisers went up marginally to 35%. Top 10 advertisers contribution went up to 18%. TV and digital are getting stronger by the day in Indian ad-ex and therefore it is no surprise that our top advertisers spend 86% of their ATL budgets on these two mediums. Top advertisers spend 86% of their budgets on TV and digital establishing firmly that these are two dominant mediums of ad-ex and the relative size also confirm this. Last year this number was 78%. 10 new advertisers entered an elite list prominent amongst them are PhonePay, PepsiCo, Facebook and Hotstar. Many advertisers like Rekit, Hero, Colgate, Nestle and GSK have moved up many ranks. Whereas Dream11, Samsung, Google, ATL and Oppo have dropped many ranks. The million dollar question to now ask is what growth can we expect? In 2021, the COVID strain in India is receding. Commercial activities have returned with a vengeance. GST collection, January 2021 has been at an all-time high of 1.20 lakh crores. The economic survey projects that the Indian economy will grow in 21-22 by 11% in terms of real growth and 15.4% in terms of nominal growth and our finance budget is more pro-growth than any previous budget. Vaccination has started and chances of a second wave which has engulfed UK and parts of Europe are low. What's more, Indian ad-ex in quarter 4-20 has grown by 61% over quarter 3 and by 16% over quarter 4 of 2019. All this gives us the confidence to predict a growth rate of a substantial 26% which will take ad-ex to 68,325 crore. The last time that Indian ad-ex had grown by 26% or even higher was in the year 2010 when it grew by 28% following a degrowth in 2009 by 9%. If we grow by 26%, India will become the fastest growing ad-ex market in the world followed only distantly by UK with a growth rate of 14.7% and Australia 13.2%. Whilst in the past digital has always grown at a higher pace than traditional media, this year we predict that the growth rates of the two will be similar given that traditional media has degrown by as much as 27% and digital on the other hand has grown by 10% because many traditional media users who stopped advertising have come back only in quarter 4 and we expect them to continue to advertise in 2021. Now even if we grow by 26% in 2021, we feel ad-ex will still settle at the same number we achieved in 2019 thus highlighting that the corona virus has knocked out two years from ad-ex's life. Besides the fact that ad-ex de-grew substantially in 2020, there are a number of enabling events likely to take place this year which we believe will help us to realize our 26% growth forecast. More categories and new advertisers are likely to get active after a hiatus and advertisers in OTT, edutect, mobile gaming and digital payment categories are expected to spend heavily besides many new launches are expected in the auto sector. Again, we expect a wide variation in growth rates across different mediums with digital expected to grow by 25%, TV by 17% and print by as much as 35%. It could perhaps be more meaningful to view growth in 2021 against 2019 which shows up that digital should grow up by 37% followed by TV at 4%. Of course, we do not expect cinema, radio and print to return to the 2019 numbers. TV we believe will drop in share marginally but OH and print will grow their shares from last year. Digital cinema, radio and outdoor more or less will maintain moving to individual media. Let us see television in a little more detail. Now, for television, the year 2020 saw it all with the mood swinging from despair to confidence. Slowdown in the first quarter, pre-COVID collapsed in the second quarter due to COVID, no original programming on GEC, repeat of old Durudarshan classics which busted the charts in terms of viewership, all-time high viewership in news genre, IPL in quarter four and an astounding performance in quarter four in terms of ADEX. Whilst television ADEX did suffer on account of COVID, the drop in ADEX could be considered minor at just 11% compared to other traditional media's degrowth to reach close to 22,500 crore almost at par with the year 2018. The ego boosting fact for the television industry is that TV has grown its share of ADEX to a high of 42% from 37% in 2019. TV ADEX moved like a yo-yo during the year. The year started poorly with quarter one registering an unusual 13% degrowth over quarter one 19 which rose to a 61% degrowth in quarter two thanks to COVID. Quarter three saw a quick recovery to almost the same level as 2019 but quarter four saw an astounding increase of 56% thanks to IPL and festival period. Whilst TV medium returned almost to normalcy as early as August 2020, January 21 volumes suggest that TV is booming. This gives us confidence to predict a 17% increase in 2021 which will take TV ADEX to 26,350 crore. While 17 is a good number, if you compare our 21 number with 2019, it's merely 4% higher. Two categories that stand out in TV ADEX are e-commerce and education. E-commerce almost doubled in size growing 95% with its share going up from 5% to 11% and education tripled in size taking its share from 1% to 4%. White hat junior Vedantu and Baiju's helped their education category grow. Whilst FMCG de-grew by 9%, it increased its share from 49% to 51%. Taking a closer look at genre wise contribution by FCT, it appears that degrowth in regional channels has been the least implying that national brands prioritize campaigns in their strong markets and regional brands came back to ADEX faster than national brands. Hindi GEC channels, the largest contributor to TV ADEX also suffered but not as much as Hindi GEC second line with de-grew by as much as 24%. Though we estimate IPL to have contributed as much as 2700 crores or 30% to TV ADEX in quarter 4, share of sports genre shows a degrowth of 26% given that live sports resume play only from September 20 onwards. A major casualty of COVID has been English channels who suffered a 40% decline in FCT. Now let's see print. COVID damage to print has indeed been massive and print ADEX lost as much as 8120 crore or 41% due to COVID and lost its number 2 rank in ADEX with its share having dropped from 30% to 22%. Understandably the ravage done in quarter 2 when newspapers could not be distributed was massive at a minus 79%. But the good news is that in quarter 4, print ADEX is recovering to the pre-COVID level of quarter 1 though it is still lower compared to quarter 4 of last year by 15%. We are bullish on print making a sharp recovery this year and adding another 4000 crore which would mean a growth of as high as 35%. We believe a media barons will use every trick in the book fight tooth and nail to at least partially regain their share of ADEX. Coming to categories, all categories we see have got affected in print including e-commerce with degrowth by as much as 57%. Also education, auto and FMCG were affected though to a lesser degree. In terms of share, education has increased its share of ADEX from 10% to 15%, FMCG from 14% to 17% and auto from 13% to 16%. And these three categories account for almost half of our print ADEX. Newspapers circulation in metros was affected a little more and recovery seems to have taken longer because of the share of Hindi newspapers has moved up from 35% to 38% and English from 25 come down marginally to 24%. Canada and Malayalam newspapers showed lowest degrowth whereas Tamil, Telugu and Marathi newspapers degroup the most. Now let's look at the superstar of all media, digital. As I mentioned earlier, digital is the only medium that grew in 2020 by a decent 10%. With this growth digital ADEX has reached a value of 17000 crores and a share of 31% of ADEX. It's also significant that digital has grown in three quarters last year and degroup only in quarter two by 35% when there was a strict lockdown. This drop of 35% is to be seen in comparison to print's drop of 79% and TV's drop of 69% for the same quarter. We expect digital to grow by a further 25% this year to touch 21000 crores. Over two years 2020 and 2021 digital will add 5773 crores compared to TV which will add only 1059 crores. 95% of all digital spends are on mobile. Looking at digital ADEX by various verticals it is noted that share of search has come down by 5 percentage points and now stands at 18%. This is not because search has degrown in numbers but other verticals have degrown much faster. Not only video has the largest share in digital but in fact it has increased its share from 30 to 32% during the year. Both social and display too have marginally improved their share at the expense of search. Programmatic has taken firm route in India and our estimate is that almost 40% of all digital spends are through programmatic. Let's see what's happening in outdoor or OOH. Our estimate is that in 2020 outdoor ADEX lost as much as 2203 crores or 63% taking it to a new low of just 1292 crores. Outdoor has lost as much as 3 percentage points in terms of share dropping from a 5 share to a 2 share. At 1292 crores it has gone back 12 years because that is the number we achieved way back in 2007. Quarter 2 and quarter 3 have been virtually washouts for the outdoor medium but the medium has recovered somewhat in quarter 4 though it is roughly only half of last year's quarter 4. We expect OOH to double its size this year to almost 2500 crores but even with this substantial addition it will be 30% lower than the number for 2019 but it will gain share of ADEX from 2.4% last year to 3.6% this year. Whilst every category in OOH de-grew real estate and media de-grew the least. Real estate is also the largest category followed by FMCG. Let's review radio. Radio ADEX was the third worst affected medium which de-grew by almost 44% and came down in value from 2260 crores to just 1270 crores. This sharp drop has taken radio back to the year 2014 when it was 1300 crores. With this drop radio has lost 1% market share and now has a share of just 2%. Looking at quarter wise figures whilst quarter 2 and quarter 3 were disastrous for radio. Quarter 4 the festival quarter has shown good recovery registering over 4 times the number it achieved in quarter 3 but even with this dramatic increase radio ADEX is still 17% lower than quarter 4 of last year. We expect radio to achieve a growth rate of 38% in 2021. This will take radio ADEX to 1750 crores still falling short by 23% of 2019 levels. Radio share of ADEX is expected to go up marginally from 2 to 3%. Looking at radio ADEX by category whilst all categories showed de-growth the de-growth is least in BFSI at minus 13% and this category has grown its share to 12% to share the credit of being the top most category along with FMCG which improved its share from 9% to 12%. Auto another important category for radio de-grew by 31% but improved its share from 7% to 9%. 5 categories now contribute to 51% of total radio ADEX in 2020. Lastly let's take a look at what happened in cinema. Cinema suffered the most in terms of percentage drop and in our estimate suffered a 83% drop capsizing its low base of just a little over 1000 crore to under 200 crore a number it had achieved way back in 2007. This is understandable since cinema halls remained locked from the third week of March to November last year. Whatever cinema achieved last year was all achieved in quarter one with a balance three quarters being a virtual no show. Cinema will definitely positively jump up in 21 but since most of the steady growth we believe will settle in only from age 2 we expect cinema ADEX this year to be less than half of 2019 at 475 crore. Since I come to the end of our report as usual we would like to end with some advice for all my advertiser friends. Advice number one is that advertisers would be well advised to use attribution modeling to discover uniquely what works and what does not for their brand. To continue to select channels or any medium on CPRP or CPT alone is a mistake in today's noisy and technology backed environment. The old belief that a GRP is a GRP is a GRP is no longer true. A second piece of advice is that advertisers should bring pressure on respective research bodies to restart media research. Currently in print both IRS and ABC are on hold and in TV ratings news channel ratings are not being released. Media owners we believe are under the mistaken notion that by putting media research on hold advertising would quickly return to 2019 level. Such data in fact will provide confidence to advertisers that life is returning to normal. Final piece of advice is that whilst digital and TV are two reigning monarchs of ADEX advertisers would do well to look at using print, outdoor, radio or cinema in a strategic way at least in some markets for some brands for multi brand companies. These are by themselves strong and proven media and advertisers could take advantage of the softening of rates compared to 2019 rates that are likely to prevail in these media in this year. Thank you ladies and gentlemen for patiently listening to me. Ladies and gentlemen it is now time to unveil the much anticipated Pitch Madison Advertising Report 2021. So I hope all of you are ready to join us. Here we go everyone without further ado we present to you the Pitch Madison Advertising Report 2021. Well there you have it ladies and gentlemen that is the cover of the Pitch Madison Advertising Report 2021. Don't forget to keep your conversations going on Twitter using the hashtag PMAR2021. We would love to hear from all of you the report will be made available shortly.