 Good evening and welcome. I have with me Mr. Stuart Bounder, Global Strategy Head for WaveMaker. Sir, how has CANS changed this year? Are you liking its compact version? I think I am actually. I think it's good that it's a little more gang beat this year. I think with the changes inside the industry, the changes inside WPP and that this is here, it feels less pressured perhaps. And I think people are doing more real work. I certainly get the sense that people are having more business meetings, there's less emphasis on social networking. And I do feel that people are getting more value from it this year than they have in previous years. So WaveMaker is a relatively new entity. Have you overcome the challenges of merger? I think we've overcome a lot of the challenges of two large businesses coming together. There are inevitably more to overcome, as there always are. We are fully embarked on the journey. I think a lot of the heavy lifting is behind us. I think inevitably making questions about the right talent, the people we want to bring into the business the way we want to work, the areas we want to focus in. I think a lot of that heavy lifting has been done. Obviously making it real everywhere and making it consistent for us. The WaveMaker way of working, our purchase journey, our interest in how audiences sit behind that. Those behaviour changes in market and making those products real for our clients is a multi-year mission for us, I think. WaveMaker India is doing particularly very well in the last one year. What do you think is working for your Indian team? I think our Indian team have got a lot of the skills and the attitude which other top 10 markets need to show to succeed. There's a very strong entrepreneurial spirit, a very strong leadership team there who understand their markets, understand their clients, understand the opportunities and they're very quick to change, they're very quick to spot opportunities, they're very quick to get things done. I think it's that speed and agility of building the business, taking opportunities, building new tech, seeing where clients' needs are and responding to them very fast, which is what makes them so successful. It's one of the hardest things for a network business to be able to do, to maintain its local freedom of manoeuvre for its management team and not become weighed down by global processes and global operations and Karthik and his team there are exemplars for us. I know that Tim mentioned it when you met with him last time but it's absolutely true that we hear from him on a weekly basis about the work, the wins, the people and the initiatives that he's driving through there and I'm so amazed and proud of the speed at which that business is working and changing. How about your other markets? Which other markets are doing as well as India? I would say Sicily actually would be the other market that internally we would look at in our large scale markets and once again there's actually quite a lot of similarities between those two markets in terms of how they're led, how they're structured and the entrepreneurial spirit that's behind it, Maxis and MEC were both primarily local businesses most of our clients are local and multi-market clients, they aren't global and that means that we're lucky that lots of our CEOs and our management boards are people who have had to go and win clients themselves in their markets face to face and prove that they're worth that relationship but they haven't been given business globally just to manage so I think we've got more than our fair share of entrepreneurs and more than our fair share of people who are prepared to roll their sleeves up and go and work with clients to find ways to do things better and that's certainly present in Italy our operation initially is I think the largest big agency initially and that's been built by brick by brick by that team there in the same way they're doing in India. So when the wave maker was in the inception stage there was a lot of discussion around purchase journey so how has that thing helped you and how do you look at strengthening it further? You're absolutely right, purchase journey for us was a kind of founding principle and I think the big opportunity for us in creating a new business out of MEC and Maxis was the chance to step back and think about the ways that we wanted to work and the way we wanted to build up our tools and our processes so that we knew what product was that we were making for clients and purchase journey helps us in all of those areas it helps clarify our thinking internally and it helps us understand it gives us a consistent lens of client problems I think complexity for clients the range of choices that they're asked to make with their marketing budget can become debilitating it's almost impossible for them to make a rational choice about where do I spend my next dollar to grow my business which is what they've been given their budget for it's a business growing budget that they're given and I think purchase journey helps remind us all at a higher level what it is we're there for our professional services value to the client is to guide that investment choice to grow their business it's as simple as that and it's allowed us to build a process internally that sits behind that and to your point in terms of what happens next it helps guide our tech roadmap because when we're working with tech partners or building our own tech it lets us be really straightforward how does this deepen our understanding about how consumers navigate the purchase journey in this category does it help us know where to place those financial bets for clients where are they over invested, where are they under invested how does the purchase journey work and it means that when we're building out our tool systems we can be really clear that we want to deepen our purchase journey understanding so at the moment there are 400,000 individual purchase journeys that we've surveyed globally that will reach a million by the end of 2018 let me have data at that scale to understand how consumers decide how important is primary stage bias so the kind of preference which we build up through forecast advertising how important is that versus being associated with the triggers that bring people into the category or being really strong at point of sale because these are all relative decisions about what way you want to focus so with a million journeys analysed by the end of this year we have a very strong analytical position to sit behind the investment recommendations that we're making to clients my last question is about the statement that Mr Keith Wheats made yesterday about distancing himself his organisation from influencers because he feels that that's affecting the trust factor in advertising so what do you have as an agency you know somebody's running the media business if more marketers feel like this what do you think is the way forward we have a large and successful content business that there are maybe 750 people who work in wave maker content globally and part of that is influencer marketing I think that but I do share a lot of his concerns about it but influencer marketing is quite a broad church and there's a little noise isn't it just a little louder sorry we can pop into it I think I've never almost done anything I'll add it influencer marketing is a very broad church and I think that he's right to raise concerns about things which look as if they are properly influencer generated content and things which are advertising and lots of markets that strongly legislated on lots of platforms that's kind of clearly distinguished what's sponsored content and what isn't a lot of clients in the same way they can send back brand trust and rep the firm what are you doing about brand trust and safety any measures that wave maker has taken around fixing the problems around brand safety and trust Group M is very heavily invested in brand safety and brand trust we've got the only full time very senior brand safety guy called John Washington who's here this week I'm talking on it so we are very heavily involved in our own white listing in working with leading white listing tech to bring it in every client will make their own choice about the range of risk that they're prepared to accept even in direct IO based buys it's very hard to guarantee 100% brand safety and if you're a highly performance based client if you're very focused on sales outcomes you'll probably accept a larger degree of risk in order to reach a larger number of potential customers but most brand clients will have a pretty clear conversation with us about the degree of white listing that they insist on and we actually take that stream seriously Thank you for speaking to Exchange for Media We wish you all the best Thank you