 Good afternoon and today we have with us Mr Ben Page who is the Chief Executive Officer at Ipsos. Ben, thank you so much for taking the time out to speak to exchange for media. Pleasure, it's great to be here and India is one of the most exciting markets that we're in so I'm really happy to be with you. Starting off Ben, you were appointed as Global CEO at Ipsos at a very interesting time in September 2021 at a time when people globally were just coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic. What were your three top priorities at that point? Well, they haven't really changed to be honest. It's about making sure that our people have the right technology to let them focus on their clients so that they spend less time data wrangling and more time thinking about business problems and also really working to make sure that our people because fundamentally we're about people are about 19,000 of us at Ipsos including many thousands in India making sure that they're able to be to be to really understand and focus on the client's business problems. So those are the macro things. They haven't changed since the pandemic but I think the rapid evolution of the economy, the post pandemic boom, the inflation surge, the energy crisis in the West after the Ukrainian war, all of those things have of course disrupted markets around the world. But what do you believe you've achieved and what have you still got left to achieve? Well, the share price has improved a bit but no we are on a four-year journey and we outlined it. I outlined it in my first investor day in June 2022. So we're investing more money in modernizing our technology in adding and now of course adding things like generative AI and making that work. I've got 190 people working on that around the world but then of course really looking at expansion in the United States. We're currently number six in the United States but America is the majority of the entire global expenditure on market research. So if I'm number three around the world, I ought to be better than number six in America so I've got real growth to do there and focusing on things like government as a sector. There are a few sectors we're focusing on. We do a lot of work for the Indian government for example. You mentioned nothing much has changed in terms of research whether it was pre-pandemic or post-pandemic but has there been any change in methodology? I think clients because of the urgency of the pandemic, people want things. There is a constant demand for getting things faster. That has certainly happened. The pandemic encouraged more clients around the world to use online solutions. They also showed the importance of having physical infrastructure which we do in many countries in order to be able to actually take COVID samples from the population and test them to understand how many people actually had COVID and link that to their attitudes or their beliefs in conspiracy theories for example. So there's been an on part an ongoing acceleration but I think the biggest change has been the arrival of generative AI which ought to see us being able to automate more processes and save time. When you say online research, if you were to compare online and physical research do you think that the results which come out of online are comparable to meeting people or face-to-face? In some markets in the west, in markets where there's a very high penetration of the internet and where people can all read and write, then internet surveys have been proven to be very accurate but in many parts of the world and this is key to Ipsos's strategy in countries like India, like Nigeria, if you think you can do all the research sitting at a laptop in Delhi or in Lagos, you are out of your mind. I mean, take India, you've still got a quarter of people who are illiterate. I know that we interview in India in at least 37 languages and I suspect you have many more that are actually spoken and of course the people's life away from the larger cities is completely different. So if you're just relying on internet research for India, you will not understand India. With the usage of customer data platform and data management platforms, how does a purely market research remain relevant? Well, I think very simply the data that you have on a customer database is limited to your customers. So it's good if you want to understand your existing customers. If you want to understand potential customers or customers who've left you, your database may not be so much help, to be quite honest. And secondly, although owning your own first party data is many big companies solution to some of the challenges posed by the abolition of cookies by Google and Apple, our approach is to be able to understand the total human. And that means being able to go the last mile. We want a dip sauce to be able to reach everybody all over the planet. So from the smallest Indian village to the largest city. And that means having real people able to go and find people in India. We're doing a project. We've been doing a project for the government, which actually Mr Modi launched on India's Independence Day, which measures water quality in 27,500 locations across India and links it to the attitudes of people living in these different settlements. I think half a million people, you know, you can't do that with a with a customer database. And also can obviously human empathy also cannot be captured online, right? Well, no, and one of the reasons Google is one of our largest clients is as they put it, we partner with Ipsos to understand emotions in a way machines cannot. That's why Google buys a lot of help from us. Because although they have a lot of data, they can't reach on their own, the total human. You know, wherever we go now, whichever report we read, market research reports. One thing that comes out is for a marketer or for a brand and an agency, the number of data points have drastically improved, increased, sorry, over the last many years. But does the increased number of data point accurately translate to the needed data? Well, I think we have much more information potentially about people. The only thing I'd say is you need to be very, very careful about this. And actually one of the things we've been discussing here at Cans Lions is the need to make sure you're measuring effectiveness. For example, if you look at advertising, the spend on digital advertising has exploded over the last decade. And yet the return on investment is absolutely flat. So it's, you know, TV remains far more effective than digital overall in building brands. But everybody's obsessed about digital. So we need to be careful. And I think, yes, the challenge is that if you take something like social media, you say, look, I've got all this data about what they're clicking on, et cetera. What they click on is not necessarily what they buy. It's the same as you might find somebody who's got a huge TikTok audience, for example, but then you'll try and get them to sell your product and you'll find that very few people buy it. And that's because there's a disconnect between how we behave online and what we actually do in the same way that there's a disconnect between what we say we do and what we actually do. And so generally you need high quality research to understand that. So yes, in theory, there's more data, but you have to be very sophisticated in your use of it, because you cannot take anything literally. It's interesting you say that because today digital has also digital, at Spence towards digital has also exploded in India. And well, there are two sides of it. While people say digital promises better ROI, when you actually have to come to brand building and when your brand has reached a particular stage, especially new age D2C brands, you do rely on television. So isn't that kind of a paradox? Well, I think the point is not to confuse short term activation and sales from longer term, you know, longer term brand building. And the bottom line is any significant brand is going to need both. If you put all your money on short term activation, you'll find that actually your ROI is decreasing. You need to mix it up with some longer term, some longer term brand building. So allocate your resources wisely. And yes, I think, you know, in my head, I've still got the copy from loads of long dead advertising people from the 1970s in Britain, because I was exposed to TV constantly advertising as a child like that stuff is stuck. The stuff I was looking at in magazines, or the equivalent is online has gone. So it's, you know, it's a mixture of short term activation and longer term brand building is the is the answer, rather than just putting everything on black. Marketers keep talking about reinventing the rule marketing rule book. But in the era of the shiny objects syndrome, does the basic principle of market research also need to be rewritten? I think the basic principles of human research are understand to make sure you really understand people wherever they are. And, you know, they're obviously they spend a lot more time online than they did 50 years ago because it didn't exist. But at the same time that the basic principles, am I asking the right questions? Are they questions that they will actually answer? Can they answer the question? A lot of people can't remember why they do things. They just do them automatically. So that means asking the question or collecting the data in different ways. Increasingly, we ask fewer questions, because we realize people can't answer them. And instead, we are watching them with their permission, either on their digital devices by collecting those devices, data from those devices, or from literally filming them, our ethnography team, or from just talking to people our qualitative research, where we're number one globally is is more, you know, is really, really important because just because people filling in questionnaires online will never tell you all about them. Also, if you could just you mentioned AI. So if you could just tell us what is Ipsos doing on this front? So on Generative AI, we have already identified 12 applications where we can immediately roll it into our business. We have 190 different people working on different potential applications. Can it write reports for clients that are better than ones written by a human being? We know that it's more comprehensive. It never forgets. It remembers everything, of course, it's digital. But can it make lateral connections in a way a human can? And those are some of the experiments. But for things like translation, the transcribing video for transcribing tape voice, hugely more productive than previously. So we can see a lot of productivity gains, whether it will actually give us real insight, because it's let it's better with text than it is with numbers at the moment. But it's I think we need to be ready to use it and roll it out across the business. You know, you've spoken about Gen Z quite a bit. And I recently spoke to a marketer who told me that this is one segment that they're still struggling to understand. And this is a very prominent DTC marketer in the country. So with what is and all and what he mentioned is we are struggling to capture their attention. So what would you say distinguishes this cohort from others? Well, if you're I'm going to generalize about the world rather than about India, because I'm less than less of an expert on Gen Z in India, the global picture, actually, I suspect some of these things will be true is that actually, the main characteristics of Gen Z that make them different from everybody else. The first is obviously they've grown up with digital. So they're much more just relaxed with it. And they have a slightly different attitude. But the other is that their incomes are squeezed compared to say their parents at the same age. They're also globally fatter than their parents at the same age. And I think one thing that when you're thinking about generations is to be very clear, not confuse life stage effects from life from period effects. And I'll talk about these things and finally cohort effects. So I'm talking about the cohort effects for Gen Z are this digital native stuff and the fact that they have less money than other generations at the same at the same age. But they still want a career. They still would like to get married. You know, they were still, you know, they want it's not that Gen Z are just massively different from everybody else. And when you think about it, think about all the Gen Zs in India. So say all the people being born between saying 1995 and 2010, 15 years. So maybe I don't know how many hundreds of millions of people that is the idea that hundreds of millions of people are all identical because they were born in a 15 year period is clearly the more you examine it, the crazier it becomes as an idea. So we wrote a report which is on our website called millennial myths about them about your generation, the millennials, if I think you might be a millennial, you can tell me. I'm a baby boom adjust. I was born in 1965. But this this idea that you can generalize about a whole generation, there's actually more differences between countries than there are between generations, even inside a country. So we need to be careful. But there are there are some differences. I think in terms of their attention, that's some to be honest, getting anybody's attention. People like, you know, marketeers have this obsession with catching young people because the idea is you'll start using this toothpaste at the age of 20. And then you'll use it for the rest of your life until you die. But actually, things are changing even for older people now. So you need to be a little bit careful about that assumption. But yes, this we would challenge this general idea that everybody born in a 15 year period is identical. Anyway, it's a bit lazy, we need to be a bit more thoughtful about that. And also, as I say, identify how much of the stuff we write about Gen Z is actually just people being young. And how much of it is actually this particular set of young people, because actually, you know, there was a great piece and people like Goldman Sachs make these mistakes. It's all yes, young people are all about exercise and they're all going to the gym. And then you look at how much the average 27 year old weighs now, compared to 40 years ago. And you find that, well, they may be going to the gym more, but they're actually they're all part of the growing obesity crisis that fills the world, right? Everybody weighs more, we all do we're less active than we were, we have plenty of calories at our disposal. I know, my God. So I think we need to be a little bit careful. But in terms of capturing their attention, I would say that's the wrong question, actually, think about capturing humans attention. There's a lot of chatter about recession. What is your take on that? Well, I mean, I think it depends where you look. So India seems to be growing very nicely, you know, huge economic growth. And in much of Asia, I think when we talk about recession, we're talking more likely about the United States and about Europe. And there, there are real threats. We have very slow growth. Inflation is, you know, is is rising job, job pay rises are rising. And as a result, the central banks are having to keep interest rates higher for longer. But inflation in India remains relatively, relatively under control, despite really good economic growth. Your challenge, of course, is inequality. And how, you know, how you take how you lift all boats in India, rather than just some people in some of the cities? You know, you mentioned about increasing investments in the United States, but are there any other markets that you see likely who would likely drive Ipsos growth? India. I mean, it's the obvious one. You've got more people than anywhere else in the world. If you were able to get to Chinese and to have the Chinese trajectory in terms of your average income, you are going to be an enormous market. The question is whether your politics, some of your internal infrastructure challenges, all of that, your bureaucracy, all of that stuff will work in the same way that the Chinese Communist Party was able to work. At the moment, I would say the jury's out. So it may be that India isn't going to be able to make the same journey that China has made. If you're looking in terms of average disposable income that they've now achieved. Time will tell. But from an Ipsos perspective, India is one of the most exciting markets for us. And also, I think, just the skills of the people, the amazing graduates. So we want to build teams now that always, for any developed market, that would always be a part, the team would be partly in Germany and partly in India, partly in Britain, partly in India, because we've got so many great graduates. And the way and what we, this is not about building a team where the Indians are doing the back office stuff. This is about building a fully integrated team, where you're working with both Indians and Germans or British people, and where people have careers, etc. They move around between the countries. Because I've just been so impressed at the quality of the people that we're able to find. Seamless. Yeah, that's what we're aiming for. Finally, if you were to just tell me what are the key trends that marketers should be focusing on? Well, I just think what we're saying it can here is that the importance of understanding and managing consumer expectations, and we can see that brands that do that perform better than those that don't, really understanding context. So people aren't just consumers of your brands, they've got more to think about than your brand. So what is their context? And finally, showing empathy, being on people's side because of the pressures that they're under. If you get those three things right, as we will be showing at the contagious filler later this week, you will be much more likely to succeed, particularly if you can combine that with creativity. So it's not all about you and your brand, it's really about putting consumers at the heart, but really understanding their context, and it varies dramatically. And that's why research is so important. As Ipsos stones 50 in the next couple of years, where are you looking to steer the company? Well, we're trying to continue invest in technology, keep it also combining it with the best people. So we are not about which some companies in my sector are trying to do, getting rid of people, just automating everything. We do want more automation, but it's so that our people themselves can be more productive and spend more time thinking about clients' business problems. So we're trying to do that. We're trying to expand in the United States. We're trying to expand in our work with government and in healthcare, which are two huge markets that have structural drivers of growth. And of course, we'll continue to serve the CPG companies who are our traditional clients. But also, and I think this is why we're so focused on being strong in countries like India, Mexico, Brazil, China. As the Indian economy develops and as your national champions, I mean, I drive a Tata car, you know, it's a Jaguar. So I drive a Tata car as Indian business expands and globalizes. We want to take our strong local connections in India. And we're probably at least number two and number one in some sectors and grow with Indian businesses as they globalize. Thank you so much for your time.