 So with that, ladies and gentlemen, we will be moving on to the next session and it's an interesting one. When it comes to user-generated content, homegrown short video maker application, Josh, made in India for creators of Bharat has seen significant growth, particularly in tier two markets. The platform provides brands an opportunity to connect with content creators and leverage the creators' follow-up base. Taking us through this journey is Mr. Venkatesh Adhavi, Vice President Monetization Strategy and Partnerships, the worst innovation sharing his insights on the topic, keeping the Josh high for users, creators and brands. I'll hand over to Venkatesh. Over to you, sir. I'll just bring up my screen and request you to confirm if you can see it. Yeah, can you see the screen now, sir? Great. Thanks, Ravind. Very warm welcome to everyone here, the audience, the panelists, and thanks to E4M for putting together this evening for us. I think let me start by going back in time just about a couple of years before I dive into the presentation. What we saw about a year ago when we started on this journey, and it's hard to imagine that it's been just about a year because so much has happened, and that is all due to the fact that we are in a country of a billion talented Indians, right? It's actually, I would say it's more than a billion talented Indians that we are, we see in India today. And all these users or consumers, as we used to call it now, are eventually turning into creators. I think that's the beauty of Josh as a short video platform that we are enabling the content creation and expression of so much talent in the country that it's unimaginable. And for me personally, when I look at the videos that come up on Josh on my feed every day, it's just astounding that what we earlier thought was creative in terms of whether it was long format movies or television shows or music, etc. There's just so much, so much more that our country has in terms of talented people to offer. And how I want to talk about the next few minutes of this presentation is to say, in keeping with the theme of the event of brands that matter. I want to talk about why Josh matters to a billion Indians. When we think of them as users and content creators. How are we thinking of our platform? How do we want to evolve our product? What kind of features do we want to provide? What is the music? What is the other forms of talent that we want to encourage on the platform? And trust me, this is not a one way street because every day we get amazed by the different kinds of talent that this country has to offer. And we think it is not just a responsibility but a privilege to provide a platform where our country folks can express themselves, get recognized, be promoted and eventually of course monetize their talents. So we are thrilled to be on this journey. And I think it's just about getting started. There's a long, long way to go. So we want to be a brand that matters to a billion Indians. And like I said, when you look on the app today or if you've already opened Josh and scrolled through it, you will just see a plethora of talent that is exploding on the platform. And some of these things you wouldn't have even imagined because what has happened is we've been so used to the traditional forms of media and promotion that we didn't think somebody who could dance underwater is something that is a kind of content that can go across on any other regular media platforms. But Josh as a platform gives that opportunity for talent such as this, even for people who want to ride an existing trend, we know that trends is a big thing in the short video ecosystem. But till now we only used to see folks from overseas superstars from overseas riding these trends. Now we see that so many people in our country are able to participate in global trends and express themselves and in a way that is appealing not just to the people of India but also abroad. Right. So we are a country of a billion plus talented people and Josh is very proud and privileged to be carrying the responsibility to give a platform for all these folks to express themselves. Now what we want to do through the product is that we want to encourage the creator each and every one of us. Think about it, you know, you may be in your jobs for a few years now. But if you thought about, you know, how you were in school or college, or even towards the early part of your career, or now that the lockdown has given us all of us a lot of time to think about our hobbies and what we would want to do in our free time, and we suddenly find that, you know, we have some time which was spent in traveling to work back and forth or otherwise. We see that there is creativity in each of us, whether it is in singing in dancing, whether it is in cooking, whether it is, you know, like I said in some really amazing talent like underwater dancing, for example, whatever it be. Josh wants to provide a platform through a combination of three things. The first is product tools. We want to give you the tools which we already have a significant number of user creation tools in forms of video enhancement filters, dynamic IR IR filters, you know, the duet features, etc. But we also want to combine that with music. So we have partnered with most of the leading music labels in the country and also overseas, and we are enabling a lot of content creation using original music. In fact, one of the things that has, you know, come across as a very pleasant surprise to us that it's not just music that drives content creation. Lip syncing to famous dialogues. I think this is something that all of us have done in, you know, in school and college or with our friends or, you know, just hanging out at office or after office hours. You know, there's a lot of talent in mimicry or in, you know, recreating the kind of scene from a famous movie. We see that dialogues are doing incredibly well on the platform. That's another form of an audio track that you want to enable and we've enabled for our users. And of course, a lot of this is around very popular genres. In fact, some of the famous genres that are emerging on the platform right now, very popular ones are devotional, which is, you know, again, something that you would not find as a form of expression to so many millions of people in the country. Right. And finally, how do we encourage all of this is to content creation prompts, because we know it's difficult to get up every day and think of newer things to put out. So we as a platform encourage you to create content around trending topics around daily challenges around some popular themes that are emerging in India or overseas and I'll talk a little bit more about that as we go along. So we not only provide you the tools and the music and the dialogues, etc. But we also provide you with prompts so that you are at your creative best every day. There's a little bit of a busy slide, but I'm just going to talk about it very briefly that. Sure, you go ahead and create content, but most of the times or for some people all of the time you are consuming content. And you want to consume content that you like, you know, because each of us has specific preferences and hand on your heart. You watch certain genres you watch certain actors and actresses, and then there are those that you don't want to watch right because it just doesn't fit in with your sort of entertainment sensibility. So as a platform, our responsibility is to enable not just a variety of content and innovative content because that's really important for us as a platform and like I said we continue to be surprised by the level of innovation that people have in this country. But at the same time we want to personalize that content for every user that comes on and opens Josh every day. So it is our responsibility because only then will we matter more to you as a consumer that I know what you want. I know what you like to see. I have some idea about the kind of videos that you've seen in the past. I know, given your own input into us, what kind of, you know, user demographic you belong to. What are your content choices, because end of the day I don't want to show you something that you don't like to consume. And in fact I would like to show you more of what you want to consume. And a lot of this is influenced by environment all around us. Some things are very topical, right, which we want to see more of and some things maybe die after a while because that's the nature of trends and fads, and we want to not see that anymore. All of this means that there's a very strong technology layer at the background, working on personalization using artificial intelligence and machine learning to create a feed that is customized for every user in the country. And think about it. If we have to customize the platform for a billion users, you know, just imagine the kind of infrastructure and technology and, you know, pure science that goes behind all of this. Now coming moving from the users to content creators, why should Josh matter so much to content creators, right, and, and what are we doing to make sure that we are always relevant. And we are always at the forefront of a creator's thought process, when they think about creating something new every day. So for us, it's not just hey, this is the app. These are the features, go ahead and create content. Right. No, it just it's not as simple as that. What we do is, we know that in this country of a billion plus talented Indians, there are so many who are waiting just to be identified. They want to showcase their talents. They want to popularize themselves and eventually they want to monetize, but they're not even being identified. So what Josh has done as a way to show creators that, you know, we are here for you is we have organized several talent hunts, not just virtual, but also on ground when there was relaxation in the COVID restrictions in the country. We did, we did events like World Famous in Lucknow that I'm going to talk about a little bit as we go along. We are always searching for new talent through a lot of individuals who approach us themselves or influencer marketing agencies who come to us. And then of course we do a proactive reach out where we see talent that exists in this country in different forums, and we approach them to say why don't you come and you know, create an account and show your content on George. That's about identification. But what happens after that you need to mentor content creators. This is a new platform. This is something which you know where you would ideally not make content which is longer than let's say two or three or five minutes. You would want to make short form content because that's the consumption pattern on the app. How do you make your content more appealing? How do you make it more interesting? What is the user insights we have that we can help creators with to make content that is consumed like shared and of course then it results in the users following that particular creator. Moving on from mentorship where we have programs and again I'm going to talk about this in detail. This is just a placeholder slide. How do you popularize these creators? Many of them are looking for ways to become popular with the masses or at least with a niche that follows their kind of talent, right? What we've done at George is we've provided not just traditional media coverage but also on the app when you select certain categories that you know you like to watch or even sometimes for introduction introducing brand new talent, right? So that's also where we make our own product led interventions and make sure that all new talent is promoted and popularized and shown to people so that they have a chance to be discovered and followed. And finally coming to monetization because that really completes the journey and that's how we will matter a lot more to creators than just being able to identify mentor and popularize. We have a brand team that connects these creators to brands to make some amazingly creative content, right? This is not your traditional advertising, okay? This is not your traditional endorsement or promotion. This is marrying the creators talent to the brand promise and creating something spectacular, right? And we've done that in the past. It's worked very well and we have more and more brands that are coming to us and say can you please, you know, connect us with the best of what India has to offer in our particular line of work. World famous in India was our first superstar event. It was hosted by some of the leading celebrities in India. We got more than 10,000 entry from Lucknow alone. Now that just tells you how many talented people are just waiting to be discovered in this country, right? We did that in Lucknow when the relaxations were on and eventually we would like to do this in a lot more cities as we go along. Lights Camera Josh is another brainchild of our community where we look at developing the talent. Like I said, it's not just enough to identify but you have to mentor the creator. More than 150 creators were mentored in just one of the on-ground mentorship events that we had. And each of these creators are very happy to say today has an average of 20,000 plus followers on the Josh app. That just goes to show you if you identify and mentor the talent in this country, then, you know, there are so many people who are just waiting to consume their content and appreciate their talent. It was a roaring success, both the World Famous in Lucknow event as well as the Lights Camera Josh event. We also have always on mentorship programs. So these are not one-offs and these can never be one-offs, right? Because like I said, one is the talent pool is just so massive. And the second is that creators need to be continuously mentored on using the product to make sure the talents are coming out the way they want to. So we had the Josh Creator Thon which we hosted in Pondicherry and Maldives and we got a lot of creators to attend these. They were handpicked. There was a selection criteria and once they went to these locations, they were mentored and trained on how to make their content which is more appealing to the users in the country. Agents of Josh is another leading, I think, program in the country. I've not seen something like this anywhere where we have a group of superstars of your particular genre who will mentor and guide you to create content. This is not just about anyone who doesn't have expertise in that area, but if you think about, let's say, if you think about fashion, we will have the leading fashionistas telling you how to create videos. If you are a cook or a chef, we'll have the leading chefs in the country coming and talking to you about how to create content and how to show that on a platform like this. It's a very customized program and we believe that we owe it to the creative community in the country to be able to identify, mentor and provide programs like these so that they get to stand to be discovered, popularized and eventually monetized. Like I said, we did a lot of traditional media promotion. You can see some of the articles which are just very organic where we just gave people an outlet for their talents to be expressed and exposed to the outside world. And these are picked up as stories by a lot of the media publications. Of course, we also promote some of our creators on all our social media handle and on the app where there's a section called popular creators. And if your videos start trending and you start getting, you know, a lot of traction, then you are taken as on this particular section to further increase your reach and visibility. And finally rounding it off comes to monetization and brands, you know, they have a lot of objectives as we know, even from other forms of media, whether they want to launch a new product, they want to increase their brand awareness, so on and so forth. And Josh as a platform, we are very cognizant that, you know, we don't want it to be just an empty endorsement platform because that's not how we will matter to our set of creators and to the brands that we represent. We want to be able to marry the talent of the creators back to the brand promise. Case in point, if you're launching, let's say a show, which one of the leading OTT platforms did for us, we get together the creators who can do the dialogue delivery or it could be a hook step or a dance in the best possible manner that reflects the ethos of that particular show or movie. Now, once that is done, think about the domino effect. One popular creator may have millions and has millions of followers on Josh. In fact, there are several creators who have millions of followers on Josh. Now, since they follow this creator, this particular video gets shown on all those million plus followers of the creator. And most of them get inspired to also create a content around that particular theme. You know, whether it's a dialogue or a song. So that's the really the domino effect. And I think it's it's done phenomenally well for brand where they just don't have reach from a particular influencer, but they have engagement in the form of so many thousands of, you know, user, normal users, I mean, people whom you and I don't know about, but are incredibly talented, and bring that talent to the forefront by just mimicking their favorite superstar, who's performing that particular dance or a song on the app. And all of this ties back very well to the brand promise or to the brand personality, I would say. So it's not one superstar who, you know, advertises for hundreds of categories, but we make that match in such a way that the brand itself stands out because the creator has the other talents that map back to its brand's promise. Right. So we've had very good success with OTT players, consumer electronics brands, dating apps, mobile handsets, even the BFSI category, traditionally, which is very strong on performance marketing, realizes that, hey, I can get amazing brand awareness. If I'm just able to tie back my brand promise with the amazing set of creators that we have on Josh, right, and just to get its message across. So we've had participants from BFSI space and e-commerce of course, who continue to innovate on the way they want to approach the millions of consumers that are willing to buy online. Now, all of this means that if you download the app, you watch, if you watch, you end up creating. And if you create, then you end up engaging with the rest of the ecosystem. And finally, what is the most important thing for us is that the user stays back on the platform. Right. It's not a one-off. We don't want to be something that you download, watch and move away. We want to be something that stays with you. We want to matter to you, whether you're a user or a creator or a brand, or sometimes all three of them. Right. You could be one, two or three, all three things together. We want to matter to you and look at the kind of love that we've received from the country in barely just about less than a year, then we launched more than a hundred and seven million active monthly users on the platform, half of whom come back to us every day. And that just shows you that all the technology, all the creativity, all the talent in the world, if it doesn't matter to you, then you're not going to be coming back to the app again and again. But this is just a testament of how much we matter. And we are so incredibly lucky and privileged to be serving this community of users, creators and brands. And if I were to say just one more thing on the platform's unique strength in content creation is that even large established media houses beat in broadcast or movie production or music labels have realized that they need to customize their content for a platform like this. It's not enough to host your content as is, because this is a very different consumption pattern. You need to customize your content for this, which is why many of them have broken out their dialogues as separate audio tracks, or small hook steps, which is a subset of a song. It's not even a complete song because that's more than four or five minutes long, but a subset of the song. If you think about some of the latest music creators very exciting and you would have heard about them from various other social media platforms as well is they would have never been able to find an expression in the traditional space. But given the what this platform offers, we have several music producers who are creating soundtracks just so that millions of users can create videos around it, right? So it's large established folks customizing their content for a platform like ours. And if you look on the right hand side of your screen, upcoming creators like Hydro Man, for example, India's first underwater dancer, who would probably not find an medium to express his talent on any of the traditional media platforms. But Josh offers him that kind of capability, the tools, the techniques, the content creation prompts and the music for him to be able to create amazing content, which is short form, which is about 10, 15, 20 seconds, and he's just gets so many millions of followers who appreciate his content. So it's not just like I said, to summarize the big brands were recreating their content, but it's also new folks who are expressing themselves in very different ways, which would not have been possible in the earliest Now, finally, coming back to, you know, all of this is great from a content and creativity perspective, but how clued in are we with what's happening around us? Because if we are not a responsible brand, if we are not someone who creates content which is topical, then, you know, eventually you will not matter that much to users, creators or brands. We launched the Josh Act concert, hashtag breath of life. This happened just about 20 days ago, where we got leading talent in music from India and overseas to promote or to rather perform on an online concert, which actually went across on different platforms as well, including Josh of course. This was very well appreciated. This was something where we expressed gratitude for the people who have supported us during the tough times of COVID. We also launched the Blue Ribbon initiative, where 200 of the top superstars of Josh, who have millions and millions of followers came together to support the cause, talked about vaccine awareness, talked about COVID-19 hygiene, and just, you know, in fact, they even went ahead and changed their profile pictures for a period of 10 days across all social media platforms. So for a period of time, you could see the Blue Ribbon on practically any social media platform that you were part of. So we've created content not just for, you know, consumption and monetization, but also to show that, you know, content creation is a very powerful tool when it comes to social causes and our own corporate social responsibility. And of course, we are very thankful to our creator community and of course our users who came and gave us so much love in terms of the participation, not just from the superstars but also from the user community and the consumption of these, you know, content clips. And we tied that back to a CSR grant that we wanted to tie back in with the kind of views, likes and shares and engagement that you would get, and we managed to raise five crores for the Blue Ribbon initiative. Finally, and I'm down to my last one minute, how we matter to brand. I think I've spoken about this in the past in terms of various content categories that came to us and how we were able to create content. Which was very unique, which talked about their brand promise and was very closely associated with the kind of brand personality that they have by marrying the talent of our creators with the brand's promotion. So we had a lot of brands coming on board and I'm just going to skip through these two or three slides, giving us amazing user generated content clips, amazing number of video views, and a lot of likes shares, which also helps the content go viral on other social media platforms. Just a showcase of some of the brands that partnered with us and we are very grateful to them. And we hope that they continue their association and a lot we see a lot more brands coming on board expressing interest to be a part of this content revolution. With that, I come to the end of the presentation. And I hope all of you are keeping your Josh high. These are tough times. But I think we will all get through this, all of us together. Thank you very much, and have a fantastic weekend everyone. Thank you. Thank you so much.