 It is time for us to begin the year 2023 with a great start. We would personally like to thank each and every one of you for your valuable time. And on that note, let's get more energy in the room and kickstart with this wonderful event. To get more energy, of course, I believe that all of us out here, the leaders, the dignitaries, are eminent guests of honour, deserve a warm round of applause. So why don't we just clap for one another and begin this wonderful event? So very good morning, everyone. Firstly, welcome to the fifth edition of Exchange for Media's TV First Conference, the par of big screen presented by Times Network, co-partnered by MediaSmart. My name is Bhavna Bhatia and the industry for over a decade, hosting landmark events and it's my honour to associate with the Exchange for Media group on this wonderful event. The theme of this year's conference is television, the par of big screen. Well, with the increasing growth in new age media and substantial shift in the medium, television is still the first choice for marketers and consumers, if you all may agree. As for the survey, about 57% respondents claim that online streaming services have not impacted their television viewing habits, signifying that TV is still a dominant medium. 69% prefer to watch the current T20 World Cup on TV. Daily consumption of TV has increased to 3.5 hours in 2022 as compared to 3 hours in 2020. 29% use the internet to serve social media, 23% use it for chatting and for watching, downloading videos and 8% for video calling. The E4M TV First Conclay brings together countries leading advertisers, brand leaders to discuss how TV even today is the best mass communication medium and how synthetic media can be incorporated with TV and can digital media and TV survive together by incorporating digital media in television. Ladies and gentlemen, on that note, let's get geared up for a great day ahead and I would encourage all of you, since all of you would have a presence on social media, we'd request you to kindly hashtag E4M TV First as one word being our hashtag. So keep tweeting, keep sharing what you learn from today, keep applauding for one another and on that note, I'd like to once again thank all our partners. First up, the presenting partner being Times Network Now or Nothing and partner being Star Sports and our co-partner being MediaSmart, integrating consumer journeys across screens unified programmatic platform. On that note, let's have a look at the audio visuals. So ladies and gentlemen, on that note, I'd like to thank Times Network MediaSmart and Star Sports. Could we give them once a big round of applause for partnering with us and making this all happen. Ladies and gentlemen on that note, it is now my honor to invite none other than Dr. Anurag Bhattra, Chairman and Editor in Chief BW Business World, founder E4M for the welcome address and sharing his insights for today. Let's give him a warm warm welcome as we invite Dr. Anurag Bhattra. And it's my honor and privilege to be at the Primetime Summit, which is exchange for media's TV advertising summit, and in the evening we have the TV advertising awards. We have a pioneer of TV advertising in Mr. Sambalzara here, both as a client pre-1986. You know, he built brands using the power of TV advertising. And then in the last three decades plus with Madison working with clients, our keynote speaker, Anuj, again, he believes in the power of TV advertising and invests in TV. I don't have to evangelize the advantages of TV advertising with this audience because you believe in TV advertising. Internet is growing, digital is growing, influencer marketing is growing, programmatic is growing. All that is happening. But as RMC said TV continues to be the most trusted form of advertising. And again, I'm reiterating what some of the speakers and Sam and Anuj may say. One is TV advertising. You take any market, you take any research, not done by broadcaster and TV platforms. The TV is the most trusted advertising media. It builds an enhanced trust. Second is, you know, ultimately you want brand building and sales both. TV is possibly one of those mediums that does both brand building and sales effectively. These days we all are screenagers. We're doing multiple things on a screen. TV advertising for most part is a full screen experience. It does not split your screen into multiple screens and your ads are not fighting for screen space. Also, in spite of the growth of digital and every other medium, TV is still a huge audience. The larger challenge for TV broadcasters and news broadcasters is how to grow the already existing audience. Also TV advertising effectiveness and results can be tracked. There is advertising rating mechanism systems. There is audience rating mechanism systems. Also TV advertising overnight makes small brands into big brands. Also TV ads benefit from, you know, second screening or multiple screenings. Now let me also say the validation of TV advertising working is all the D2C brands and all the digital first brands in the last three years went on to television. Because the founders, like Vanity, they want to be big boys, so to say. But most of it is also to the fact that if you want to do long term brand building, TV is still the most credible, trusted and effective medium. I must also focus, you know, traditionally when I was in advertising 26 years back, the average advertising spend was 8%. Even for large, mature businesses, advertising spends are still between 5 to 8%, mostly more than 4%, going up till 10%. In the last three years, most startups invested anything between 14% to 27% because they were at an early stage of their journey. Even if you took an average spend of 6% a company, that is 5,000 square, 5,000 crores of turnovers, spends 300 crores on advertising. And more than 50% of that goes into television. I stress test that with most. So television advertising still has the mainstay in terms of advertising dollars. Mrs. Tara is there, 15th of Feb. In this room, we have the Pitch Madison Advertising Outlook Survey. And it is just before IPL. And we know that IPL this year went at, you know, record rates between both television and digital. And digital rates were acquisition or content rates were similar to television, but they were both 20,000 crores. So really we'll wait to see if cricket, IPL and TV all can garner advertising money. But as a wise man told me that cricket has FOMO, brands don't miss television and cricket. So clearly the next 15 months will be very crucial. The reason I say next 14 and a half, 15 months is because there are three things that were driving the changes. One is the fact that there is a softening in the world, there is high inflation and demand in a lot of product categories across the globe has softened. So really there is a cautious approach to investing. Second is startups over the last 12 months saw winter of investing. Even in the winter of investing, startups got $45 billion in India's investing. But, you know, the expectations are more like 100 billion. So clearly startups and digital only and D2C funded brands in the last six to eight months reduce their advertising and hence TV advertising. And third is the big tech. Again, the big tech spends a lot on television. The big tech seems to have slowed down. It's laying off people. So it's a time of caution. The next 14 months. We'll see India still, you know, while there is a recession expected, India may be the only bright spot in the world to have a lesser impact of recession. So advertising in general may go into more ROI driven mechanisms and TV is a ROI driven. As I said, TV creates both advertising sales and long-term brand building with this background. I don't want to stay between you and the keynote speakers and practitioners of the TV advertising craft. I only want to say that in the evening, we have the prime time awards, which is done through a jury process. And we have overwhelming number of the winners coming today to receive awards. I wish you luck and I know that the TV advertising ecosystem will reinvent itself in terms of audience strategies in terms of content acquisition strategy. And most importantly, in terms of enhancing brands ROI by using TV as advertising. Thank you. God bless you. Thank you so much, Dr. Anurag Bhattra. Well, ladies and gentlemen, as you rightly put, it is going to be now our time for a great conversation coming up. Firstly, a very warm welcome to all our dignitaries. We do have them all in the room. Of course, Mr. Balsara brings a lot of joy and great enthusiasm to the industry. We've got such great dignitaries who've taken out their valuable time. Well, on that note, with our first session for the day, which is going to be a fireside chat. It is now my honor to welcome none other than the MDM CEO, Bajaj Electricals Limited, Anurash Bodar, joined by Dr. Anurag Bhattra, Chairman and Attorney Chief BW Business World Founder, E4M. Well, ladies and gentlemen, on that note, let's welcome both our dignitaries on the stage for a great conversation ahead. Which is a power of speech. By far, it's the largest speech medium. Again, Sam will tell you the numbers, but it's a medium that teaches 800 million people. I don't think you have another two lines. Does that? You have the power of video. Again, you know, advertising, you're trying to tell a story. And the video form is the best form to tell a story, right? A print, a static creative cannot, you know, think of right from the times of the nirma girl and the little girl in the, you know, categories, etc. You can't tell a story without the video form. There's a power of video. Third is the power of big screen, you know, telling a story on that small device. If you're a brand manager, it's never going to convey things with impact like telling a story in a big screen. And last, which are most important, which is where numbers come into play is the power of efficiency. And I say power of efficiency. Just run the Excel, you run the, you know, support rate, you run the audience, you run the RF on that. You run the measurement, which is third party independent measurement. So I think these big four P's are big for power. It's clearly loaded in front of television. Let me also ask you, Anuj, because you have a large balance sheet and a large company to run. How do you see the next three to six months in terms of overall consumer optics? Then we'll come to the consumer durable business. So, you know, I always try to differentiate the short term from the long term and the tactical from the strategic. I think we are in a tough market. It is not an easy economy. I think consumer sentiment has been difficult for a few quarters and maybe the next two quarters will be the same. But when you're in the brand business, you have to therefore not lose sight of the strategic thing. You have a relationship with the consumer that a relationship cannot be restricted to the point of time when they're purchasing. That relationship has to sustain. I can't call you up only when I have work from you. I have to talk to you even when I don't have work from you. And that's a relationship between us as a brand and the consumers. So I think the base level advertising communication brand messaging has to continue all through. That said, you know, you will vary the budgets a little bit. You will tactically alternate or should I say, change your plans a little bit, your sales conversion may be low, etc. So those are tactical changes that you make. But I don't think as a brand manager, brand owner, you know, running a consumer relationship, we should really change things because if you have a soft market base. Okay. I know I sure all the wise entrepreneurs who run large companies believe in that. Let me give you an example in COVID. The company called Amul upped up its pens across mediums. And of course, a live share of that input television. An opportunity where there is softening of markets. Is this an opportunity to get better advertising deals, better TV advertising deals, and hence be able to get better market share. Absolutely. So now I'm born contrarian. When I say that, you know, to this one, I would say you don't talk when everybody shouting because you will not be worried. So you talk in a silent room and everybody listened to you. I think I would completely agree your brand, your communication, when it was not a crowded space, you know, when the inventory was going empty, COVID, etc. For a long-term brand relationship and you're getting the best deals. So you're getting the best deals lowest portraits, no clutter of advertising, etc. Why would you miss that off? You should do that, right? That goes back to the point I made that, you know, strategically, that's the best time to do it. Of course, tactically, you're not selling enough. So you may not mount a campaign, you may not have a specific, you know, sales pitch at that point of time. So you will, you know, manage your budgets. You do have budgets to manage as a PNL manager. You have to look at a bottom line. But these are just rare windows of opportunity. You must take it. Seasons and festivals in India are a huge part of the demand and offtake of all kinds of products, especially in the consumer and durable industry. You have products for every season, so to say, not the, how do you see the upcoming summer season? Where is the fag end of Jan? Winter is not yet gone, but maybe in 30 days it'll be cool. I'm sure you're preparing for the summer season. What are your thoughts about the impending summer season? Are you going to invest a lot in IPL? Give us a sense of broadly what you're thinking in terms of how to leverage the environment and the TV opportunities, TV advertising opportunities to help sell and build the brands. So, you know, I'll answer this from the lens of our view or our lens. We are a multi-category company. We do have seasonal products. We have heating products, which work well in winter. And we have cooling products, which work well in summer. And just before this, when we were talking in the side room, Anurad comes from Delhi. Even I think Sam asked him, you know, how's the weather? And is it bad? And Anurad said it's cold. And I said, cold does not mean bad because it sells more heaters for us, right? So we won't be cold. Lots of liquor. Yeah, I'm not in the liquor business, but I do want. I don't drink water. Yeah. I would rather you warm yourself with a heater than with something else. I agree with you. No, so I think, you know, we do want, you know, good winters, we do want good summers. Summer is a very important season for us. Two of our largest categories are the fans and room coolers. So, you know, it is a key season for us. The planning for that starts much in advance. We have a campaign, but campaigns around products. So we have specific products that launch at that period of time. And therefore the campaigns around that. And we have to make a noise at that point of time. And therefore when we have to make a noise, we have to cover the media. That said, I feel non IPL is to me, like I said, you know, it's Excel decision. And when I say it's an Excel decision, it takes the burden off our media planning or binding from coming from the CEO says I tell you that that distorts the decision making. So I think decision making needs to be done rationally on numbers on Excel. Of course, we'll have a conversation with sports 18 or wherever else is which that star, sorry, I should mention star sports since they are one of the sponsors. But those, you know, at that level, we are very, very hard moves on our decision making. Okay. Now, I know since last 10 to 14 years, you've been actively involved in this in making terms of media brand building apart from overall being in charge of the business, especially post COVID, what has changed in your conversations with your own brand managers with your agency partners and the ecosystem that helps you build brands. So let me answer this slightly differently. I think we are living in a very complex world. The world is becoming more and more complex. It would look at in terms of just not the economic and geopolitics around us. But in terms of the whole consumer marketplace, the competition in the noise factor all around, you know, the things that are cluttering us all around. And therefore also the market advertising is becoming more complex. This media buying what you buy or buying for attention, et cetera. And, you know, let me throw another saying that in a complex world, simplicity wins. And if you can, you know, learn to distance yourself from all of this complexity, we have so much data inputs coming at you and so many claims coming at you. You need to be able to shut your eyes and just go back to what I call the first principles. And that's the way I try to, you know, do my decision making that it's too complex. No, you're not going to make any sensible decision rationing is going to be very muddled. So go ask yourself a very basic simple questions, right? And the very simple basic question is, and I'm now putting this in the context of as a marketer or advertiser, what are you trying to do? It's very two simple things. You are trying to get your message across the right message to the right audience. And you are trying to buy the media in an efficient way as to where to get the message. So getting the message across is a creative thought. What are you saying? How are we going to save the content piece? Again, make that as simple. I used to brand examples, right? Simple, uncluttered. You know what they stand for. One is Nike. Just do it. And look at the campaign. So clean. It's Nike. It's just do it. Everybody understands that. And they will take that across whichever form and manner. They don't have to say too much. Right. And take the second example. Shreddy can Indian brand. We call much boot Jordan. They've established that positioning source rock solid. So simple. And that reflects in every campaign that they do. Every creator of the story can keep wearing. That's very simple. What they want to say. Most brands try to say too much. They're so confused in their head. They're trying to say this touch point that consumer is for you. They go over there. I'll be digital. It is not so difficult. The consumer is a human. He needs a simple message. Figure what your message is. Be very sharp on that. And then bring all the complexity of influencer line. But be very clear on the message. The second part is, You know, get your media right. The media part doesn't come from all this abstract rate of thinking. It comes from hard nose numbers. You know, show me the numbers. I'm going to say that in God we trust the rest ring numbers to the table. So media is simply what's your job as media. You have a certain marketing budget as you know, as a brand or as a company, we have three brands. Bajaj, Murphy Richards and Nidaleh. Each of them have a defined budget as percent of sales. Now the job of the media buying and planning team is simply that's the money you have 100 bucks. Spend it in the most efficient way. Reach the maximum eyeballs. Take this lessons to accident people with impact. And they have to work a lot more logically rather than be confused by all of this complex around. So I'm coming back to the different way to answer question that we are in an increasingly complex world that requires us not to confuse ourselves more but actually become simple in a complex world simplicity wins. I know we are in the era of connected TVs. Almost all the new procedures in a certain audience profile are connected TVs. What is your view on the era of connected TVs? Is it becoming substantial addressable market as a medium to look at? How does it change the way you interact with your consumers? So I'll build on what I'm saying, right? TV, which is I'm seeing the non-connected general TV remains by far the largest reach number, you know, platform, right? Again, some of the other speakers will talk about it. But top of my head, 210 million, you know, TV households, 800 plus million viewers. If you break that down to, you know, you're not buying 200 million houses or buying a channel or a service, right? If you take any of the leading GCs, they'll be in a particular week. I think so in 20 odd million, you know, reach sector that they have. So that's what you're buying. That said, I think connected TV is a reality while TV may be the largest reach. Increasingly, there are mutually exclusive audiences, including people in this room who probably never switch on a TV. So you do have to reach them, either they on connected TV or another platforms. You can't ignore them. So while I said everything I said, bulk of our budgets will go on conventional TV. You do have to cover these guys, but that's what I call the top up. And therefore we'll top that up. Top that up. We do connected TV since the last few months, which we do not in the past, et cetera. That said, the other challenge is measurement. A good or bad TV has a third party independent measurement that may have a margin of error. But it's somewhat there. It gives you good friends. All of these other platforms. We don't have a measurement system that you can rely on. And if I'm paying money, I would not be aggregators for now, bringing all the data connected TV on single platform. So I think it will be available in the near short term. But you do have to cover them in your plan. It's just, you know, I think the tipping point when that takes over from TV is far away. This is a whole thing. It's a cliche when the going gets tough, the tough get going. The festive season for consumer variables. I'm not talking of just your business or about your brand or your business. But when I talked to a lot of my friends in the consumer variables across brands, Indian brands, MNC brands, some Chinese brands. It was new. It didn't go as expected. And with the impending softening with the inflation being what it is, the cost of supply chain and materials going high. What do you see happening in the near short term? And as a business leader, what are you doing to be able to deal with it? That's a lot of questions packed into one. I think every day you're firefighting. Every day you're dealing with different challenges. You never have the tailwinds. It's always against headwinds. But I think that's the job description. I do think festive period, you know, has been a tougher festive period. Post festive also seen a big drop this year. That said, you know, again, it's been a tough time. Like I said, I differentiate between a long term and short term, a strategic and tactical. I differentiate between the job of marketing and selling. My brand is not built in the festive period. My sales do happen in the festive period. The fact is for our category, consumer appliances, we have a lot, a lot of purchase that is concentrated at point of time. So you cannot afford to not talk to the consumers at that point of time. You have to drive. Sales at that point of time. But that's not the time to build a brand. That is just a focus period of window for sales conversion. But I'll go back to what I said that, you know, you don't talk when everybody shouting will not be heard. So that's the time everybody shouting. You're not going to be heard at best to put out some campaigns, etc. To drive the conversion and the trade and everybody needs that. But if you're going to build a brand. So more of the money is parked outside of that. But because we have to sell, you know, we have to be there when the consumers are purchasing. We do cover that. In the last three years, direct to consumer digital to consumer. Has seen a lot of new brands or 30,000 brands, about 802,000 brands that have done really well. And traditional businesses, big brands like yours. Have also started to leverage the power of D2C. How's been your journey? And I say, you're, I mean, your business and brand journey with respect to D2C. So I will tell you, you know, I think as Bajaj Electricals be one of the real movers on to e-commerce online selling today about 12 to 13% of our sales comes from online. That's a few hundred crores. And therefore, if you compare that to any of the pure D2C brands in our world. While it's only 10, 12% of our sales in absolute numbers, that's probably as bigger than any of the D2C brands. It remains a very, very high focus. Channel for us. What's also special about the channel is it's a two way channel. When I say two way, that's a channel where you get direct and immediate and response feedback data on what not just what consumers are buying or not buying. But also what they're saying in terms of reviews, et cetera, et cetera. So your ability to engage with them and get feedback is much better there. So it is an important part. That said, scale in India will not be achieved by D2C, which is what you referred to also initially. That's why the details. Even D2C brands are now partnering with existing FMCC companies or consumer durable companies. Flip ITC just bought Yoga Bar because if Yoga Bar wants to become big, it has to become mainstream. Mainstream is all channels. So I agree with you. My last question to you, Anuj, before we get followed. Now, as a business leader, what are the three trends that you see becoming bigger in the near short term? I wouldn't say what are your predictions, but what are the three things that you see becoming bigger in the near short term? I wouldn't say what are your predictions, but what are the three things that you can share with this audience that will help this audience? So the stop of my head. I haven't thought this through. I think what I started with saying on complexity, the world will keep getting more and more complex. When I say complex, consumers will be spoiled for more choices. Reaching out to them will be tougher. Competition will keep getting tougher. Business models will keep getting tougher. Complexity is a way of life and this keeps getting more and more. The answer to that is to actually not do what everybody does. Focus on the basics. Yeah, focus on the basics and as simple as that. You've been using the word WUKA. It's a 10x WUKA now. WUKA to power of x, etc. I think second aspect is going to be tougher and tougher to make money. And when I say that, you have this inflation, you have commodity, you have climate change, you have all kinds of challenges. So I think financial complexity. I don't want to use the word complexity again, but I just think it will become tougher and tougher to make money. I will talk about our company itself. We got away with doing a lot of things and not doing a lot of things in the last 20 years. And to be honest, we are a slow company. If I say between the year 2000 to 2020, today, if we are not changing fast enough, we would be dead. So it's going to be tougher and tougher to make money. It's going to be tougher and tougher to survive. So the need for not just agility and speed, but the need for frugality is going to be extremely high. When I call it frugality, look at what's happening in the startup ecosystem. That whole cash burn, all of this stuff. At some point, truth is going to catch up with you. And the best time to be frugal is not in tough times. The best time to be frugal is in good times because that's when you lose control. So if you're making lots of money, and this is a legacy from Bajaj Auto. They are the most profitable two wheeler company in the world. And they're absolutely frugal on every distributed making. And that's not being penny pinching. That's just being ensuring sustainability. So second trend really is going to be tougher and tougher to make money. You have to do that. Third, I don't know if it's a trend, but some of the people parts that I'll touch. And this is probably what should I say oxymoron. We are finding it tougher and tougher to get good talent, the type we want, and to retain talent. Sorry, I think a lot of youngsters in the room, their aspirations are very high, which is good. But sometimes not mirrored or grounded in reality. And therefore you see a lot of job journey every three years, four years. I don't think, at least maybe I'm old. I don't think that's how you build a long term career, et cetera. So our ability to get and retain quality talent is becoming very difficult. On the flip side, I think the job market is going to keep shrinking. Everybody to be employed in a good job. Around this time, tech guys are getting 600% raise last year. Today they're being laid off. Clearly, there is a correction in the hiring side. So I think this third trend I put in the bucket of people, you are going to have a fundamental misfit on fitting good people and all of them finding good jobs. And how do you solve for that both as individual professionals and as companies? Thank you, Anuj, for giving us very authentic and very direct answers. If there are questions for Anuj, I can take one or two questions. Please raise your hand and tell us who you are. A gentleman there near the camera. Can we get him a mic? Can we get a mic for our gentleman out there, a cordless mic? Sagar. Sagar, could you help us on that? Thank you. Dr. Bhattra, one second. You can stand up and ask. Just allow me a moment, sir. So I was just going through the celebrity endorsement rates, you know, close to 70 kilos and all. How do you think it is going to shape up in the future? Is it going to go up or down? I didn't fully hear you. Celebrity endorsement rates and... Celebrity is a continuation chart. You know, my previous job was in the media company, including film studio and I think star talent costs, you know, just keep going up and unconnected to, you know, reality. I think we have, let's talk the positive of celebrity endorsement or brand endorsement or influencers, whatever you call it. You do have, as a brand, sometimes a need to reposition your brand or convey certain brand attributes in your launching or create some, you know, attention span for certain segment of consumers and that really helps you. But you have to be very clear therefore why you're bringing on that endorser, influencer, brand ambassador and be very focused on that purpose and every purpose has to have a shelf life. If permanently you need a brand endorser or celeb endorser, then your brand is not standing for itself. I do believe at least I come from a camp that ultimately a brand, you know, has to stand for itself and the celebs have to be part of that journey and for a particular purpose of finite time. So that's the part. I think a challenge is not just the pricing, you know, pricing a matter of negotiation. You must have a walk away price that you have and it's never one celeb. You should have a, you know, set of celebs that you have as a target that you can look at. But more important than that is this look at what's happening out. There's this last week, there's a new guidelines on every influencer will have to put a explicit disclaimer or actually details of what is a relationship. I don't know how that's going to manifest itself. It's going to be very complicated. Every time when we produce a TVC or we produce an ad, I insist on perpetually rights by the way. It's an ad, we fully paid for, fully funded by us, conceived by us. I need to be able to use that asset for perpetuity anywhere in the world, any medium, any platform. The moment you bring a celeb, anybody else into it, all of those things go out of the window. Celeb will have a year. It's your asset, but after a year, you can't use it. You can't use it in certain territory. You can't use it in some platform. So then you have to be willing to compromise on some of those things. So price is one aspect, but the regulation in some of these restrictions is the other aspect, which is why I think if you want to be independent, which I say, you know, have control on your brand, ultimately, your brand has to stand for itself. Colgate stands for itself. Pepsi stands for itself, you know, little stands for itself, cat breeze, whatever, take the strongest FMCT brands. They stand for themselves. They stand for themselves and they may all bring in a celeb and also for a period of time, for a purpose, but ultimately a brand can't handle the touch of the celeb. Also, I think celebs get overpriced over a period of time, whether they are starring in movies or in, so you have to find celebs on the cusp of being big. They're sizable and that's the job for brand manager or a celebrity talent coach to be able to bring you celebs that are on the cusp of being discovered. So you catch them. I mean, I remember there's a brand that I invested in just before a certain cricketer became big hit. You know, we talked to someone on board and he's now a hundred times over what he was four years back. So you can guess who it is. So clearly you have to catch people before they become big. Look for newer options. That's one advice. In one last risk, which I think hopefully is not a permanent risk, a short-term India specific risk, is a boycott trend, right? You've got a celeb, you know, and then suddenly the social media trolling in backlash was completely unrelated agenda, most often misplaced, misguided. But as a brand, you know, they're risking too much in, you know, in this thing. So you get the backlash on that. Gentlemen, very seasoned gentlemen in the audience who just gave a creative idea to, I know he said for your for your heaters, you should do this hat, say everybody except Raul Gandhi needs heaters. Buy bhaja heaters, you know. So that could have a risk. Any more questions? Okay. We have one gentleman in the back. Can we get a mic? At the back. Thank you. Hi. My name is Dharmendra Rai. Since we spoke about complexity, Google has laid off plenty of people. Apparently, Apple has not laid off any people or laid off very few people. And some people are praising Apple for that, which are fine to be an absolutely regressive anti-capitalistic sentiment. We are in the age of social media, not in the age of socialism. Your views. I couldn't hear it, please. The starting part, right? Could you actually, could you just repeat the first part of your question? Slowly, I think the acoustics are echoing. Google, I know what you said. Google has laid off plenty of people. Yes. This, I'm asking you this question because you spoke about complexity and which of these two companies has handled complexity better? I just wanted your views on that. So Google has laid off plenty of people. Apple has apparently laid off nobody or laid off very few people. And some people are praising Apple because of that. See, can I, because I studied this last three, four days. There's a guy a follower who studies all these companies. Apple always has not overhired. That's his analysis. They've kept, I mean, for their size, they are very lean for the size of top line and bottom line. So they never overhired. They're more steady where other organizations overhired. It's a simplistic answer. But in part, it is true. So firstly, as a non-startup, non-tech company with all this fascination of a talent towards that, I'm happy sanity is coming back. There's a real world. So I think all of this is often, et cetera. That was, you know, I think distorting the whole talent market. I think hopefully sanity is coming back. That said, it's not fair for me to come into a particular company in their management. I'm sure they have their reasons of rationale of context to their decision making. I will just put it this way. I think we do have responsibility as management to not be very short-term or very tactical in these decisions because we are playing with lives, right? So I can't suddenly staff up people and fire them. And I can't have a higher-than-fire policy. So hopefully, you know, we are responsible. We try to factor that into our planning cycles, et cetera. And if you can do that, then, you know, I would yet give them some benefit of doubt that sometimes things turn or, you know, things evolve in a different way than you anticipated. Maybe that's the healthiest thing. You know, you've read about 12,000 people or something that, you know, we will let go. But maybe making that tough decision saved a lot more jobs as opposed to ships thinking slowly, et cetera. So sometimes you have to take a heart ball in some of these things. Thank you. That's my general answer. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And on that note, Dr. Bhattra, if you may request to please hand over to Memento. Just request me to please stay back. Could we have the team on the stage? Ladies and gentlemen, a very warm round of applause for Mr. Anuj Podar, MD and CEO of Bajaj Electricals Limited in conversation with Dr. Anurag Bhattra. Well, a tall order has been in place. Firstly, I'd like to acknowledge the presence of Mr. Vikram Sekhuja, group CEO, Madison Media and OH Madison World. Let's give him a warm round of applause. Thank you, Vikram, for joining us. And on that note, it is time for us for our special address on the power of TV in sports. Well, we couldn't be more elated to have none other than the president head marketing ultra tech Aditya Billa group, Mr. Ajay Rang to kindly join us. Let's give a warm round of applause. Ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, Ajay. Ladies and gentlemen, just allow us a moment. We're getting the presentation in check. Thank you. Meanwhile, Ajay, just some opening from your side. Thank you so much. Hi, Vikram. Hi, Sam. So normally exchange for media does a good job thorough job in terms of the validation and they do a thorough job in terms of waiting people that they get there. This time they seem to have made some mistake because I remember 2000 I was remembering 2011. This city itself. I put forth a campaign along with my team which was no TV day. And that's about 2011, right? And about 12 years back. So the irony of life and fun. And maybe I think your scrutiny programs need to be slightly slightly more rigorous. But jokes apart, I think I'll just take you through. You'll have numbers enough per se. I've tried to take a little bit of a different approach in terms of talking about. Not so much the traditional numbers in terms of reach, etc. Those numbers are public, you know. And please, if there are any mistakes, you've got to blame the gentleman sitting on that table because he taught me all about media. And so the blame goes there. So we'll start as we do. So I think one piece that I think about from a media point of view, TV point of view, I think we've got to do first principle stuff. And I agree with the previous panel Anurag on the front that I think we need to get some of those basic questions sorted in terms of what are you trying to achieve per se. Would you have a clicker? The fellow to blame if I go wrong is Sam and to an extent Vikram in terms of sorting things out. So this is what I did about 2011 about 12, 13 years back. So I think two bits which I think we've got to sort out. And there is a little bit of a model in people's mind in terms of what we are trying to achieve but it's to me not simply just a numbers game. It's not Excel exercise because you're trying to do something you're trying to achieve something from a business point of view. There's a end objective that is in mind. And first we've got to figure out I think very, very plain simple English Hindi or Punjabi whatever frames get you simplicity as to who's your customer and what can the medium do in that sense of the word. And I think the world has moved away from a little bit of the salesmanship and selling a unique proposition to as many number of people as possible at the lowest cost possible. The word in my experience I think of handling brands for I think the last 2025 years. I think this is not the formula that follows and if we do only Excel stuff I think the accountants are better and I think we can leave the job to them. This gentleman you might recognize he got the Nobel Prize in 2002 2014 or 11 he came out with a fairly elaborate book in terms of human thinking because the first piece the consumers that we are talking to are human beings. They are not just wallets they are not just cement mixers like the business that I sell in and dealing with human beings I think there are a few facts that you need to be really really clear of as to how do they make decisions because that's what you are trying to encourage from your business point of view. A lot of these consumers use not very hardwired Excel sheet analysis in terms of making decisions even the most complex decisions in life and that's the system one thinking that this gentleman talked a lot about and given that you people make decisions basis the number of associations that they have for a job that they have in their mind therefore I think being vivid in consumers mind in as many ways as possible I think that's the task for somebody to achieve therefore I think the two big pieces that the current thinking talks about is I think building mental availability and building physical availability those are the two important things rather than doing the USB and efficiency piece is something that you've got I think really really think about and always remembering I think some piece that most business leaders and marketers forget that you're always dealing with human beings and those are the people that you're trying to nudge a lot of times and we've been guilty of that I think businesses have fallen for the latest shiny shiny object that comes along their way and we get metrics and people have gone to I think lead metrics and push those things but we've got to remember in the complicated job that we have at one level I think things are very very simple the biggest search engine that you have as consumers is your mind you tap the Google screen later I think first thing that you think about is what comes to your mind and that's what you're trying to influence in in one fashion so rather than talk numbers I think there are three things which I believe and I don't believe I think TV is a panacea because if you have a headache you've got to take the headache medicine and if you have a stomach ache the medicine has to be different but from a TV point of view I think three things stand out which are which is validated by a little bit of experience, little bit of numbers and little bit of science now I think first thing is attention second thing is emotion and third thing is fame and all those things are really really critical from the point of view of building mental availability and building the prompt of your brand and your category when the consumer thinks of a particular problem I don't know I'm not so sure if you can see the chart because it's slightly blurred here what this says the latest science says that as attention goes up your business results stand up your top of the funnel numbers and the bottom of the funnel numbers both go up as if you are going through a particular media the attention goes up these are some of the numbers as to how various media stack from the point of view of attention so starting from the left this is what TV does and going to the extreme right is what digital out of form press etc do now what this tells us is that the attention currency while we buy most media from the point of view of opportunity to see and opportunity to view and those are the very metrics that the industry has built however the basic piece if you are trying to communicate to human beings and trying to build mental availability I think attention matters quite a bit and you are talking in very starkly different numbers as far as attention is concerned across medium when you serve your message or when you serve your position to be good and I think most digital mediums do not cross the there needs to be a certain threshold in terms of attention for things to move a message to move into your memory right the number I think the latest neuroscience is roughly about two and a half second unfortunately I think most digital media does not cross that threshold so if we are talking and it's horses for causes because if we are talking in terms of building long term brand building if we are talking versus if you may harvesting the business and only talking in terms of same sales conversion then you need to go to media which is slightly more long term and slightly more attention driving right rather than stuff and the worry is that most there is a chart which tracks roughly about 130,000 ad views and on digital less than 85% brands don't cross the two and a half second threshold in terms of attention right and therefore that's something that you got to keep in mind from the objective that you have in mind the second piece is and therefore if we can all have science and huge amount of intellectual debates if people don't see advertising and it doesn't get the requisite attention even beyond the viewability numbers that are being talked about then all of rest is pure academic stuff right the second piece I think there is latest thinking that calls that the right side of brain talks in terms of or takes in information which is slightly more vivid it's information which is slightly context driven and that drives long term brand building and long term mental availability and the left side of the brain which is largely transactional looks at stuff on a one on one basis that drives too much of kind of emotion per se and right about this time what do you see the two graphs as to what various advertising over the years has been driving and you see that curve splitting up around about the time about 2000s early 2000s kind of stuff and that's the time where you see I think the increase in digital advertising what's happened so far therefore there's been a huge dip in terms of effectiveness of advertising and that coincides with how I think people have taken the shiny object digital advertising by the way is not bad but how people have taken the shiny object and gone ahead and deployed it for means or deployed it for objectives which advertising clearly does not sell kind of stuff right so we've been seduced by the formal we've been seduced by the free eyeball stuff we've been seduced by having something to talk with our CFOs and saying that we have instant measurement that comes our way and therefore I think a lot of advertising has moved towards short termism right and we've focused largely in terms of efficiency rather than effectiveness and harvesting rather than showing and doing long term brand building right so the last piece that I'll put on board after attention and emotion is I think it's a fairly profound I think statement that somebody made this gentleman Marshall McCullum he made this statement in some 1960s and he said medium is the message and I don't think we've really profoundly appreciate how simple yet really really pointed his point of views and the real point about this is that the content of the of a particular medium can play in inside only the boundaries of that particular medium right beyond that so if you look at television and television is is entertainment you see news you see cricket you see soaps all fall within the genre within the quote unquote extending towards entertainment as you would the second piece that's very very critical is how the medium is shifting and medium is in one sense enabling irrespective of the content it's enabling a communal experience and therefore building fame if I take the world the 911 piece if I take Desert Storm if I take the IPL all those events while there are 22 men playing on the field you've had almost 200 million people enjoying that same communal experience at the same time which only a medium like television can do and therefore television builds huge amount of fame and these three principles if you may of attention of emotion and the third piece of fame are things which are created into the medium itself while numbers might go up in terms of penetration or come down I think because we are dealing with human beings and because we are dealing with a medium I think those principles remain the same and therefore for the right reason in terms of brand building long-term brand building there doesn't seem to be a equivalent comparison to television as of now or the large screen as of now because it's it's a stand back medium where I give and engage with that particular medium and allow messages to come to you and therefore enable the ability to do to do if you may mental availability and long-term brand building right. Last piece I think there is I think Peter Field and let Winnell call that we have been in this business in terms of rather than doing long-term brand building which does the top of the funnel work as well as the as well as the incremental work we focus largely on things which are in the harvesting mode and only in terms of efficiency and not looking at the long-term play right TV does that job reasonably well you've got to keep the faith and not keep things moving up and down all the time right so that's all that I had to say these three things from our TV learning point of view any questions you can direct at the gentleman there he'll help you answer those questions but happy to take a comment or two do we have any questions if yes please do raise your hand we'll get the mic passed could we get the mic passed I hope I don't need to step down here thank you my name is everybody thinks they're being very cool when they are using digital cards instead of hard copies of business cards isn't that against the concept of mental availability isn't that against the concept of encouraging mental availability mental availability you're going to look at a digital card for less than 2.5 sorry I didn't get what digital cards are you talking about plenty of people are not using physical business cards they're using digital business cards which are pretty ugly and you don't feel like looking at them even for a second and you need 2.5 seconds for mental availability so I think your analogy works well I think if you want to do long term brand building with a person that you want to engage with I think a deeper conversation is far more the order of the day and a continuous conversation is far more of the order of the day rather than doing transactional stuff so I think you make the point yeah thank you do we have further questions yes mom can we get the mic passed and please if you can just mention your name as well thank you my name is Dr. Yashoda Durge content on TV has not changed but distribution has changed OTT platforms are taking over so how do companies find a way around that to get their advertisements across sorry could you be loud let me just inform the audience why we are facing an issue the amplifiers towards you so sometimes you have to be a little more loud for us to understand so could you repeat your first part content is remain more or less the same content on television but what has happened is OTT platforms have taken over there's no ads out there distribution of content has changed so we are accessing TVs on different kinds of platforms so what are the new ways you think advertisers can work to getting their ads to the audiences I think your point is valid I think look at it from the audience point of view right if the large screen experiences where I sit back and handover control of a particular time across to content creator or a media owner I think whether it is TV or whether it is OTT I think those debates we can have those quibbles here in the industry I think from a consumers point of view they are just watching a piece of video content on a large screen and they are absorbing stuff that's what they are doing as a normal human being and serving advertising is a different order but you have their attention you have their engagement and you also have if you can have 100 million people watching that same OTT content at the same time you have fame alongside so from the consumers point of view it doesn't make too much of a difference whether you watch the same thing that comes from star sports or whether it is a hot star content on a large screen coming across to you it doesn't matter to you as a consumer wow could we have a mic quickly passed to Mr. Sakuja firstly sir an honour to have you and over to you hi Ajay other things remaining the same does the size of the screen between a TV and a mobile make a difference because arguably attention same, emotion same, fame question mark the question is are you in a lean back mode are you sitting together for entertainment in my view or are you actively engaged into some stuff right if I am looking at a large or a small screen but I am engaged into a very purposeive search going into stuff then my attention clearly is not on the stuff that you are doing so lean back other things remaining same lean back I am watching content on a small screen versus big screen OTT you could say any TV serial I think there is the other P switches on demand versus being a communal experience if I look at IPL for example if I have I think 200 million people watching at the same time on a small screen it's fine because we are enjoying stuff as a community and therefore doing some stuff together builds fame I have all the attention and this is emotionally engaging stuff the only question that you have to look at from an advertiser's point of view do I have the visibility, viewability etc etc within that small screen from my point of view otherwise from a consumer's experience I don't think there is too much of a difference thanks so one thing is you cannot skip ads on television compared to a digital media so if you don't mind can we extend a little later because we are running in short of time let's keep a warm warm round of applause for Ajay and Ajay if you may stay back if you may stay back I would now have the honour of calling upon the chairman of Madison world Sambhalsara to help us in felicitating Ajay if you could have both of you in the centre this truly calls for a hashtag e4m TV first moment right there thank you so much well ladies and gentlemen we are divulging into our panel discussion before we begin of course the stage is going to be set I have the opportunity of introducing to you the topic and then we get on to calling our speakers but moving forward we are talking about television which is the chosen destination for IPL viewing IPL of course is watched by people indoors and outdoors and IPL being a huge event that Indians are engaging with and of course they are engaging with on television because live sports is made for collective and connected watching we all feel it together and we want to watch it together with friends and family outdoors IPL of course being a huge brand we've seen that how it has grown over the years new launches of commercials happen in IPL and definitely it has doubled if you may agree the recall value for brands so the brands we watch during our IPL viewing we definitely recall them more than what we watch otherwise and as you know IPL is of course a much longer event so ladies and gentlemen on that note as the stage is being set it is my honour to call upon our esteemed panellists on the stage first up joining us virtually would be the head of media Mondalis India Miss Anjali Krishnan we're going to have her on screen just about in a moment do connect with Anjali on the same next up the honour of in charge marketing NPCI to kindly join us firstly Anjali if you can hear us a very warm welcome I can hear you thank you for having me on the panel Anjali I'm still not able to get your audio we'll just get that sorted thank you could we have the team talk with Anjali on the audio front please next up we have an officer of PolyCab Nilesh Malani also if I could have the head marketing and e-commerce cooling and purification appliances blue star thank you for joining us if I could now have the president head marketing to kindly join us back and before we call upon our session chair let me just remind the audience of the session being television the chosen destination for IAPL viewing on that front it is time for me to now call upon our session chair CEO of Madison media Sigma Madison world Vanita Keshwani on that note Vanita all yours wonderful it was beautiful actually hearing from you Ajay already so a lot of context has been set since morning so very very I love to see such a beautiful audience so thank you everyone let's give a clap for all of us to be in this room and to each one of us so I was just reading this a match made in heaven wow right sounds sounds beautiful so yes sports and television are truly made for each other there's no doubt about that and it is the chosen destination and so let us hear each one of us you know we can speak we all have had so many experiences and I'm going to have a really lovely time interacting with such a lovely panel some of whom I have personally also worked with you know so that's really really nice so I'll start with Ajay actually to just ask because I think Ultratech has done something both on ground and on television that's truly something remarkable a lot of brands tend to do that but with the you know expenses rising and the choice to be made on television and on ground how do you make that choice of you know what's the best way to go and would you give up on ground for TV thanks thanks Manila I think clearly goes by the objectives that you have I think as a brand you can hit so as a brand we are roughly about a 55-60,000 cross brand which about 70 percent of that is B2C given the stature that we have within the industry we do not have a problem in terms of awareness and consideration set right so we don't need a logo to be flashed across somebody is just to remind somebody of Ultratech when they are in this very very momentous journey in terms of building their home which most times for Indians is once in a lifetime they want to know more because they have not experienced the brand before and they don't have a context how to evaluate a brand I think our switch has been from putting logos across the ground and across sports to getting into storytelling we are not a natural ally in terms of right we are not Nike we are not Aridas or Reebok or any other sports brand so the fit is largely from an audience gathering perspective there if we can build a narrative which is very very simple from our population point of view we are happy to do that and considering if our friends on star sports support we need to do that that's the simple context that we have from a brand out and objectives point of view. So what did you exactly do on ground and if you could just share some experience of how you amplified it on TV So from our perspective I think across media properties I think there are two very simple propositions that we put across from Ultratech point of view one I think putting together the context of this purchase that you are building your home only once and there are some things that you don't want they are irreversible and some things that you don't want to take a chance on and therein I think making the best choice if you want to get your heart operated you go to the best surgeon in town and that's what the equivalent parallel is and given the choices rather than get too complicated you go into the best image which is India's number one and backed by most technocrats and experts in the industry I think that's the simple we simplify choice for consumers if we can blend within the sports without in one sense being intrusive in the sports because between Virat Kohli and Ultratech house so much I love Ultratech I think people are there to watch Virat and they didn't blend it without being too intrusive that's I've done my job so I'll move on to Hilesh so PolyCab has been rather consistent on IPL on television and you've actually built your brand on IPL so I'd love to hear you share your experience so at PolyCab the brand building exercise started maybe you know to make it back the philosophy was that let's reach out to the heartland of the country from a distribution point of view supply chain point of view and then in 2017 when we were sure of that we are in the space where consideration set of our core influences with the electricians and the trade partners that is the time we thought let's go to the consumers and talk about the story of why PolyCab and you know why a usage of a safest wire in the country is important and that's where we started going to consumers and we wanted to reach out the most effective and faster way and we thought that time the IPL was would have given the best reach in the shortest period of time so that's the reason we chose IPL from then the objective was in 2018 we went public and again we wanted to reach out to consumers with our larger portfolio of products which is the FMEG category which is fans and lights and smart automation and that's where we decided to continue our journey on IPL to reach out the mass that brings me to the next question that between both the categories did you see a difference simply because of the stage in which the brand was and overall brand was in terms of PolyCab you had already tested IPL for one set of categories what were your learnings in comparison to each other so while cables and wires as a segment we have been enjoying leadership position over the last 7-8 years FMEG is a different ball game where you are talking to consumers and they are choosing the product the most important point was to talk to them in their language and tonality which was very different than in cables and wires where you are still kind of trying to connect with the user segment which is the electricians so the impact and when you start talking about consumers you have to be consistent really talking to them so within the first 2 years after 2019 when we started talking to consumers on the fast moving electrical goods we were the last entrance probably the most organized player in the last entrance in the space but within couple of years we came in top 7 as a brand in the fast moving electrical goods wonderful so Anjali sorry for having you keeping waited there so let's bring in Anjali and 2008 is when we started IPL in India been a long innings from there till now how differently in category in Mondelees as we say speaks of innovation I think of Mondelees and I think of innovation especially being in media industry and having worked also as part of not the core team but as Madison so would you like to shed some light on how IPL has added to the innovation quotient over the years for Mondelees can you hear me yes we can so before I answer that let me go in little bit into the history of our association with IPL and with star sports I think the first time we invested in IPL was nearly 5 years ago and the reason we were putting a bet on IPL was that we had new communication that was coming out in the market and typically during IPL the ratings fall across general entertainment channels and with the launch coming up we needed to make sure we have the right impact in the shortest amount of time and so we partnered with IPL to bridge that reach gap for us and give us some impact for our new forms and like everything in Mondelees we measured the outcome of this investment through a mixed model and it showed us that while ROI was lower compared to regular inventory obviously because IPL is expensive the effectiveness that Cricut delivered for us was nearly twice than regular inventory on brands which brought us to the conclusion that this is a great platform for building brands and that is what we've been focusing on for the last so many years so our partnership with star sports is a very strong one we work to bring the communication strategy to life and so IPL is not a spot buy for us but it's more go around our content marketing strategy and we launched a new communication almost every year for Cadbury dairy milk using IPL as the launch pad now CDM which is Cadbury dairy milk stands for generosity and acknowledging the unacknowledged so we've worked with the star sports team to bring content around acknowledging people so we've worked one year with them on behind the scenes staff at the star sports office these are the people who bring cricket to our homes we've worked one year with the groundsmen and the cricketing clubs to acknowledge their effort and so on so every year we pick something that drives purpose around IPL and we've seen phenomenal results coming out of it which is why we've been invested in it for the last five years and for us it's not just you know putting our money on a campaign over there it's about building surround and building a whole communication in a strategy, peace and place yeah could you elaborate on that because most of the times it's just putting new news on new news copy itself is good that's why I started with the question because Mondalis is known to do more than that right so how have you had some experience on using your new communication on IPL as a chosen destination but further doing things around it right so we've always run our new copy on IPL because it gives you great you know teach in a very very short period of time but the other thing that we've done is every single year our partnership with star sports takes us one step forward where we take the brand communication and the purpose of the brand and we leave it into stories which are about people who are associated with IPL and mostly people who you know otherwise don't get the recognition and their due because they work behind the scenes so because the brand stands for generosity we've been you know doing content pieces around generosity and how you know you can bring the generous spirit in each and everyone with the IPL into the storyline so interesting thank you thank you we'll come back to you perhaps a bit later moving on to Girish well Girish and me personally have worked on IPL right from 2008 the starting year if I was just chatting and going back oh really it's been so long I think he is on the panel the first person who must have amongst you been on IPL and you know it was so interesting that today we're talking about IPL chosen destination TV for the first year in 2008 actually they tied up with BCCL print to co-sell IPL we actually have come such a long way from there so we did a where we did X square centimeter and why don't you just speak about your learnings and then we've gone such a long way then we've gone to TV alone then we've gone to TV digital hot star and now Geo it's amazing right now how we do various combinations it's quite a lovely journey so Girish would have some interesting anecdotes to share yeah I know so it's quite nostalgic here because we have Sakeith here and that's the first time we struck a deal with him he was part of Times of India IPL was co-sold on television but we actually bought print so we bought some six inserts of quarter page that year we bought some 30 expert opinion columns and we got some 1200 seconds on IPL it was with Sony in those days and we didn't really have a very good idea what IPL was about of course a lot of the teams had approached us then in terms of sponsorship and in terms of branding but we weren't certain what IPL was and that 1200 seconds we had to choose our matches and we didn't even know how to choose right because it was Mumbai Indians and there was you know RCB and all of that and we didn't know what to do how do we choose those matches and we were trying to kind of correlate it with our priority markets should I choose this should I choose that oh yeah we've come a long way so we've been on IPL since 2008 I think every year barring just a couple of years so yeah would be the perhaps the most consistent brand on IPL for us it's in the bank of the season our booster is an air conditioner brand I was we were a B2B player then we turn into a B2C player in 2011 and that transition also helped us because of most of our new campaigns we generally shoot a new TV commercial during the summer season IPL typically begins mid-march early April and we launched our campaign during that season so obviously I'd acknowledge the fact that a lot of the success of booster as a brand goes to IPL my only humble endeavors to them is that smaller brands like their large brand with limited pockets like us it should continue to become affordable you know that's the only thing because it's getting more and more expensive every year but it has been our super platform for the booster to build a brand the kind of engagement that we've seen over the years the kind of you know we've realized a lot of aspects that work that don't work for example even if your priority markets are Hyderabad and say Mumbai but where there is Dhoni or where there was other big stars those matches are watched so it doesn't matter it's something that brings the country together every match has an equal TV rating more or less unlike so many other formats of the World Cup etc where the only India matches do very well and the others aren't watched you're more or less every match is watched so we've had a great experience with IPL may hoping to continue that association going forward Thanks Kirish we'll come back to each one of you on some questions but before that Rupee launched contactless cards through IPL in 2022 so you did take digital for some part and then you really I think got some success from the television it would be nice if you could share whatever you would like to share from your experience on how it helped the brand because you're obviously against global multi giants so to answer your question Vanita what happens is that we're literally the new kid on the block amongst all the brands that you're seeing here we are literally recently formed brand like you said we are yes we are in a league where we have brands which have understood this entire path but to go back to your perspective we actually invested in IPL because we believe that our demographic profiling sort of matched also what also happened is that the overall experience that we learned is that Rupee as a brand got a fairly large brand recall more than half of the population that viewed the matches actually had a very high brand you know we became a top brand of choice in fact the product we launched which is Rupee on the go which is basically a product line that we believe accentuates speed it melded quite well with the media property that inevitably got created on screen which is Rupee on the go force which was on ground as well it just matched my product line completely so it became Rupee on the go force and then there was Rupee on the go the product so to correct what you said we didn't launch Rupee contactless we actually launched Rupee on the go force on the go which is a product line where you actually can use Rupee on your watch which is what we launched that was you were very happy with this experience or we are still here and we are looking at it for this year so yes we are still very much here so let me ask a tricky question now let us all rate IPL on TV on a scale of 1 to 10 your experience let's do that 10 to a question but let's say about 6 to 7 out of 10 and would you rate any other event or campaign choice any medium higher than that so as a media vehicle IPL obviously takes the kick it is just the right time it's April to June people are on vacation there is it just brings everybody together IPL by itself is a clutter breaking phenomenon it changed the rules of the game and cricket we associate with it because we believe Rupee is exactly like that we are a clutter breaking brand and product ourselves so therefore for us the match seems to be just about natural wonderful thank you Anjali what would you be your score I would definitely give it a rate on 9 or 10 and this is more coming out of the association that we've had for the longest with IPL and with star sports it's working brilliantly for our brands my largest brand in the portfolio is on IPL so that is testimony itself wonderful thank you Yirish you really have to answer that question I've been on IPL ever since 2008 that speaks it but still choice actually because it's summer not really there are choices but like they say strategy is a choice you make choices and you make it well but having said that there are huge advantages that IPL offers from a clutter breaking perspective so I'll give it a 9 to 9 and a half wonderful it's like the biggest reality show during that period yeah it's interesting to know I think cricket sells in India so which better format than IPL which happens every year so the score I would rate it as at round 6 considering the trend line which is there one third of the consumers have gone away from overall viewership and the rates have gone almost 1.5x so the affinity and the affordability the question so your score is not for what you bought it at your score is as of today wonderful that will itself change I guess the score will change Vanita I stayed true to what I said in the presentation as to whether the medicine is good or bad depends on what ails you and it's a fabulous franchise fabulous tent full property depends upon the brand I think what the context what stage you are in I think it can be a glove fit would be just if it comes at the cost of so my picking order if it comes at the cost of staying consistently across and being a top dollar just to be there depending upon the brand that we are I would possibly go for consistent presence across the board it's a fabulous engagement platform advertising wise there is fair amount of clutter I think as a platform it's done fabulously well but I still think as marketers there are a few shining examples like Monalize has done fabulously well I don't think we've done through justice to the platform from a content as to advertising part of it I don't think we leverage it as well pricing of course it's a individual discussion so it's the answer is kind of stuff you've not given the ranking I'm waiting for your ranking it's a very good property as a consumer as a media property it's a fabulous property I think it would be 8, 9, 10 whatever you call so but it depends upon what's your advantage so next let's just discuss what you just brought up which is about consistency versus what really is enough because like you rightly said not all brands are able to do what Monalize can do some part of it being budgets because obviously anyone in the room would agree that if I want to if I get the chance to be an IPL why not there are constraints and like I said we don't have a choice I didn't mean literally of course we've evaluated choices every year but what I mean is you really do want to be there right yes I want to be there that comes out to my heart but what stops from not being there on IPL on TV so let's have some views on that not necessarily being your brand could be from your brand learnings what could stop a brand from not choosing to be on IPL on TV who would like to go this is an open question so I think the most important reason is not what stops us I think it's just clear target audience segmentation and we need to know what up where our product journey lies it is just simply that fit if that fit is not matching then I doubt any of us on this platform will associate with any property irrespective of where our product or brand stands so therefore the whole idea is that if that doesn't connect I doubt any of us will be biased towards a media vehicle just because we like it or we do not like it so the numbers are all there but when you say target audience IPL does deliver to everybody right we have so many in the TV home so there's no question of not delivering what did you mean by that it depends upon again like I said it all depends upon what your priority for the year is it is all depending upon your messaging it's all going to depend upon whether you want have you done this demographic segmentation and have you an example so I'm going to go with mine in my case my demographic profiling fits for say rupee we have multiple other brands in our house there is a chance that those brands may not associate with IPL for various reasons so therefore the brand fit in our stable of brands works with rupee we are associating with it and therefore that's the answer and that may not be required consistently year on year yes it like I said it all depends upon your product and your brand and what do you want to do with it this year and yes of course budgets are always the big question for all of us keeping that aside I know that is of course one of the key reasons but that's not the prerogative anything else that we think one of the things for example a lot of brands do say to us is that you can't innovate and which is why I asked Wanderlis Anjali you can't really innovate much on IPL because you have sports and then you invest on sports and you have to take a minimum of X number of sports and you would land up you know you can't do that much necessarily beyond that so is that a major constraint I think one small piece I think you've got to separate it out as an audience and as a marketer so you've got to be careful that this is a huge passion thing for people who are watching it so it's a huge engagement so in one sense you are if you can't do the blending really well you are in one sense competing with that and that you've got to be careful about right Wanderlis everybody loves chocolate everybody loves cement when they are making homes but I think that's the audience that you want to define that tricky piece as to what's this it's a double-edged sword kind of stuff if you not manage the integrations really well and that's the constant I think struggle a little bit with sports in India kind of stuff sports telecast in India the degree of flexibility in terms of innovation I think there lies a little bit of a hitch especially when brands don't have a very natural fit in terms of a passion or let's say you are not you are not necessarily a sports linked brand so I think that's the tricky piece that you've got to be really careful about but you will get lost you will get lost it's one more thing is it's all about the task in hand so if it's a new product which you are supposed to launch it's a great platform if you want to reach out to large scale heartland of the country it's a great platform because within weeks you are able to reach out to more than 400 million audience what stops people probably would not be advertising on IPL is all about if over the years we have seen the key big players on IPL the number of spots or the total airtime which they have bought are so significantly high that the rest of the 20-30 brands who are advertising have a very very limited share of funds I was just coming for that yeah and that's why one of the reasons is post IPL when people have invested millions of dollars smaller brands also post IPL when they evaluate their scores and all it may not match up to after a month or two in terms of the consumers would have actually recall the brand we want on IPL so yeah I could add to that which is that if any brand desires to be on IPL the big concern would be will I get lost out and clutter will there be will I be overshadowed by other large brands right and obviously we've also experienced that over a period of time but what we've realized is as as long as your content is strong and again coming back to your innovation question if your creative is strong and if your creative is entertaining and if it's memorable and what we've also realized is that shorter duration formats in IPL work so for the first time we did a 10 second or 15 seconder different cuts of the same 15 seconder so not the same story and when you run that frequency and if it's memorable you can stand out of the clutter that's what we've experienced so our focus during IPL is create kickass advertising advertising that in 15 seconds will stand out and if we get there then we don't need innovation we don't need that kind of frequency we shouldn't be bothered there will be overshadowed because through content one can stand out. That's a very strong statement isn't that wonderful and I do remember I think it was second or third season that we had shortage of budgets and we said no we need to be on IPL we took other channels but we took just about I think five matches if I'm not mistaken the first five matches and like Girish said that new communication content can play the king through just your advertising so wow IPL on TVS Girish said a lot so give those to that but yeah sponsorship what's your take as Mondele's Anjali on this whole sponsorship this is a spot buy on IPL because one of the views we all have as media planners is that what else do you get apart from promo tabs you know so I mean of course you do build a lot of content but this is a basic question that do you need to be a sponsor what does that give you I'll be very honest you don't need to be a sponsor but you need to be visible you cannot come on to something that is as large as IPL that lead us to a mass audience with a brand that doesn't have the bandwidth to be on it right so that's the reason why when we are on IPL also we are largely on IPL on TV with brands that are recruiting new users to the category and that is the reason why this is a big ticket item meant for mass brands where you are reaching out to significantly large audience size and if you build a sponsorship into it it has to be more from a perspective of what am I using that sponsorship for our sponsorship works more from the perspective of the whole exercise around building the brand proposition and therefore I don't use the sponsorship only to get you know more inventory on the platform all our efforts go towards building brand proposition and that's why there is a lot of content that's created out of it is consistent so every single year that we come on board we build consistency on the kind of communication that we have with IPL and we have a special idea that is crafted only for IPL when you were speaking and everybody else was speaking about what are the barriers to getting IPL if I was to set cost aside and if I was to set you know the demographics being obviously a fit I think the single largest driver to be on IPL has to be a very very strong brand idea and if you don't have that then you're just using it like any other inventory that you can get which is high impact so if you have a great brand idea you can find great ways to build the brand around it and with consistency you can deliver even brand metrics on it over a period of time which is how we look at IPL wonderful thank you, thank you for sharing that I think one more question that I am getting is like what is the role of B2C versus B2B on IPL because there is a lot of reach a lot of reach but brands that are both B2C, B2B is fine but what about some B2B brands anyone would like to share what they feel about that so we have, I think we have a strange situation we don't need to market in metros right because nobody buys cement as an individual customer most of our 70% of our audience 70% of our audience which buys which is B2C audience that's up country right which is tier one and down so it's a tricky situation what this delivers there is nothing wrong with what they deliver does it fit us that's the question for us to ask having said that I think I want to I just go against that myth that B2B does not need advertising in fact B2B the strongest reason why your sales teams get across the door and get I think when in rooms you are not there and decision is getting made is because somebody's heard and B2B we all know is defensive decision making and people like to go with brands that are salient what they've heard and therefore it makes sense sometimes it makes sense for us yeah we've got to think we've heard of heavy call so from polygap standpoint when we started advertising on IPL which was in 2017 we were a 95% B2B company okay and while both the businesses grew you would be still surprised that our B2B has also grown at a similar pace what B2C has today the ratio is around 70-30 but as he mentioned it gives the brand a stature when you speak to the B2P audience finally you are talking to a individual a human being whether he's a manufacturer or OEM finally he's a consumer he's taking a decision on a brand perception yeah so I think B2B or B2C it's probably the brand stature it has to be built I think it's the best platform yeah I think stature plays a major role imagine telling the trade that okay please watch my spots on digital so on so time can't do that so I still remember Sam is here and I remember his famous statement that if you want to build a brand you can't do it in private you have to do it in public right so whether it's B2B or B2C of course one will only have to assess the efficiencies because a base stitch for a B2B brand will be higher we were only a B2B brand when we started advertising in IPL we turned to B2C in 2011 so for about 4 years we advertised the central air conditioning solutions we advertised only a duct that you see not even a product but the fact of the matter is that consumers both B2B and B2C are watching an event like IPL and therefore it does make sense if you want to like you rightly mentioned it gives you a brand a particular stature because not everybody can invest in IPL you could also add how HD relevance hence was higher earlier because you would need to be just mentioned so primarily at that juncture HD was just kicking in which is why we were one of the first brands to go on HD again because of the same economies in terms of efficiencies because we weren't targeting a B2C audience we were targeting a B2B so when HD came in HD really made sense I've also advertised only on the English feed and not the Hindi feed we've also done those to ensure that the efficiencies are in place by the same time we try to focus on the B2B audience so I'd say irrespective of B2B B2C if one can just keep aside the efficiencies from our platform perspective there's nothing as powerful as cricket and obviously IPL plays a major role there you want to say something so we are essentially B2B2C brand which just simply means that you can't buy a rupee card just off any shop you have to walk into my partner's branch which is 1300 banks in India and you have to all work with a partner it could be a Tata it could be any of the partners co-branded cards that we have now for us the way it works is that the platforms have actually because they have helped our brand uplift automatically all our B2B customers have worked with us to ensure that the entire campaign has sort of helped leverage even their own business the IPL campaign is a completely B2C facing campaign however the B2B part of it is that we work very closely with our partners to leverage it and it also in turn helps them work in ensuring that their consumers walk into their branch and ask for a rupee card Anjali you want to add anything we are completely B2C so don't have a perspective on that really so I think you are now open to whatever each one of you wants to add to your anything that we missed out through my questions anything else that you would like to share from your side on IPL anything else that we missed out I would always like to add I don't think we are breaking news here saying it's a great property it does well we are not adding too much I think the piece that if we want to build a proposition from an advertiser's point of view really well I think it's not a one size fit all I think the opening up carefully of stuff which is integration and knowing that brand solutions kind of need to fit well I think that needs to be the way of the game while there is tremendous build from the consumer side I am not seeing as much build there is some but as much build from an advertiser proposition point of view because there is sufficient demand maybe I think that flexibility is not happening maybe it will I think that flexibility would get a lot more people to participate into into a property which in any case is fabulous from a consumer's point of view right the second piece from this bit point of view is that we need to have possibly a very different approach I think going segment by segment the third bonus I think it's on advertisers is to build the kind of content the kind of advertising given I think the media owners allow that also makes it not just even from a consumer and cricket point of view also from an advertising and because the only breaking news that I think people love good advertising consumers love good advertising and good content it's not one or the other kind of stuff I think allowing that would add lots of facets to IPL as a property beyond what it already is is a great deal absolutely I think content is very important I think a lot of brands literally look at their calendars and see what are we going to bring out during IPL so that's one of the things short duration has been yes I am I have a very critical question if to be in this kind of car or some view how could we be similarly similar we can dance streets we can we can we can we can we can we can we can just to add to some of the stuff that I added I think we are looking at audience from opportunity to view point of view we've got to discount it from some of the perspectives that we talked about right on attention spam on stuff which is viewing together I think those are things that you've got to be really really careful because I think those things show in our output metrics I think in this case I think TV is the game to go right if there is a choice so what I feel is small is big which means of course the small screen is big and is growing much faster but bigger is better from experience so I think IPL is a mass bombarding platform and if your objective is mass bombarding it's not performance marketing it's not targeting I think television would be far more effective because obviously television even today if you go with the stats there are two 20 million sets I mean installed in the country 150 million are still cathode ray tubes so obviously if you are targeting 3 or 4 or 5 towns television in terms of reach would be far more effective as long as you don't really want to do too much of performance marketing or targeting which I don't think a platform like IPL really needs the focus should be on TV so I don't think it's this versus that because they are both completely in our heads a little different demographic profiling sort of targeting to answer your question will we go with this versus that I doubt we can answer your question at this point but it's a completely different mathematics that works in one and a completely different mathematics that works in the other one that's how we're treating it right now Anjali Yeah so we would go with both and the reason why I'm saying this is because I mean we have enough data to back the fact that large brands with mass presence do extremely well on IPL on television whereas the moment you start looking at niche brands where you just want to get resins and you want to get salience for the brand at an opportune moment it makes sense to go with digital so all the brands of which we are trying to build brand proposition we are trying to deeply penetrate into markets and brands that are recruiting new users to our category are all on TV and the ones that are more niche targeting very small audience segments and have not such ambitious business objectives also are on digital so both are important to us Thank you and I'd just like to end with saying this one point that in the Super Bowl and in a very developed market in the US the trend is again in favor of TV 90% plus of revenues there is from television versus digital India yes even I said in one of the interviews in fact an impact magazine what are the trends to watch like Vikram was asking this is one of the key trends we are all waiting for I wish we had an answer let's see how it unravels because a lot of brands are also looking out for digital in a new way this time but as of now chosen destination seems to be television I was asked not to take too many questions but I'll leave it with the we are running out of time so you could catch us outside maybe during lunch if you don't mind is that okay? I think that's very kind of Vanita to do the same because of course time is of her biggest value and we also value their expertise so ladies and gentlemen a big big round of applause for all our eminent dignitaries if I may now have the honor of calling upon the EVP Network Brand Strategy Times Network Anup Vishwanathan to kindly join us ladies and gentlemen a big big round of applause for Mr. Vishwanathan we now have the felicitations in place for all our dignitaries once again thank you to each and every one of you for joining us first up starting with Vanita thank you Vanita ladies and gentlemen let the applause continue what an excellent session on television the chosen destination for IPL viewing thank you to Ajay thank you Girish, thank you Nilesh and also let's have a big big round of applause for Anjali also for joining us virtually thank you Anjali thank you Lalita, could we have all of you please together for a group photograph would you like them ahead of the tables alright ladies and gentlemen this calls for the perfect shot hashtag E4MTV first a big big gratitude to all our dignitaries for joining us and thank you Anjali for accommodating virtually with us and thank you Vanita for curating it so well thank you thank you to all our panelists once again Girish, Lalita, Nilesh Ajay thank you once again so well the sessions are getting more and more powerful with every minute passing at the E4MTV first conference but ladies and gentlemen next up the person joining us absolutely needs no introduction the entire industry is synonymous to his learnings his shareings ladies and gentlemen a special keynote on the part of big screen it's time to call the big man himself ladies and gentlemen Chairman Madison Goals Sam Balsara Hi good afternoon guys and thank you Arurag and Naval for inviting me to speak again at this conference I hope I will have your attention for the next 20 minutes because as I see it increasingly in a fragmented busy noisy multitasking world getting the attention of another person is proving to be more and more difficult though it is very necessary to achieve anything and this is more so in our world of advertising and media now for decades media experts and marketing gurus have grown up in the belief that maximizing reach at least cost should be our ultimate mantra but increasingly as I see it today's environment demands that to get a response what we need is to importantly focus on attention grabbing the medium through which our message is communicated and the context in which the message is communicated the goldfish is known not just for its beauty and smooth and fast movements but it is supposed to have a very low attention span as low as nine seconds now we all know that in India it is mobile that rules country of 1.3 or now 1.4 billion we are supposed to have 1.6 billion mobiles of which 1 billion are smartphones and a lot of digital advertising is consumed on mobile a recent microsoft study or not so recent actually established that the biggest casualty of mobile adoption has been attention span and it is now down from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2015 even lower than the goldfish's attention span and today in 2023 in India it must have gone even lower now there is no doubt that it is thanks to smartphones access to information has become very easy but unfortunately as I see it this has brought about its own challenges for people like us see what Simon a Nobel laureate says wealth of information creates a poverty of attention these days my mantra in fact for many decades that has been my mantra its always more important not to read a lot read very little but importantly absorb or whatever little you read because otherwise reading a lot is of no use we live in a world today that is marked by lower attention span which makes unfortunately our advertising work not as well as it did a few years ago some of you have heard me talk about a time in 1990 when Madison was very new when I put out a double spot of a 30 second synthol lime ad on 4 consecutive Sundays which helped gain for the newly launched soap a 5.3% share of the premium soap market upsetting the leader Lirrell's apple cart of course gone are those days short term advertising strength or stash is a term or concept that some of us are exposed to and a fast emerging media researcher professor Karen Nelson field demonstrates through extensive studies that attention and stash are closely related see this graph higher the attention higher the short term advertising strength another study by TV vision that also quoted demonstrates that 40% brand awareness can be reached with only 600 grp which are high in attention but you would need 2200 grp ads that have low attention capability some of you have heard me talk about professor Karen Nelson from Australia in our first conference in this series her work on the relative impact of TV exposure versus digital exposure is rapidly gaining ground in many parts of the world now fundamentally she says three things a significant relationship exists between attention and sales and there is a direct relationship between sales and video size and three larger the screen bigger the sales impact recently my colleague met the global CEO of Nelson in Bombay and his view was that screen size is not important what is important is the context but I tend to agree more with professor Nelson she has also written a wonderful new book titled the attention economy and how media works simple truths for marketers all of you in this room to read this book those of us who have read Byron Sharp's book and have been following it I would say sometimes blindly are well advised to read this book a necessary condition of attention and viewability and for viewability there are three critical factors one coverage coverage is the proportion of the screen that the ad covers clutter what else is going around the ad on the screen and basically dwell time or the time for which one is exposed to the ad now we all know that on coverage TV and cinema offer advertisers 100% coverage but not all digital video unfortunately offers us that a study conducted as recently as August 2002 shows that as screen coverage increases attention goes up disproportionately if only half the screen is available to an ad you get less than half the attention so screen coverage according to research is a very important element of how well or how poorly an ad works again on clutter TV tends to score since at least when the ad is playing the screen is clutter free unlike in many formats of digital ads especially when you are scrolling your news fields a larger issue to my mind is the lack standards followed by digital publishers for digital video if a video ad is seen on the screen with 50% of pixels for at least 2 continuous seconds the mighty media council for video viewability standards says it can be counted as a view for the advertiser now I am sure all of us feel that 2 continuous seconds is just too low many studies I think even by digital publishers have shown the sales impact begins to increase dramatically when the exposure increases beyond 5 seconds up to 5 seconds is very poor Piyush Pandey a creativity guru and the man behind impactful ads of Cadbury predilayatation paints and many more who would say it should be a minimum of 60 seconds and unfortunately each of our digital publishers follow their own definition and standards on viewability which unfortunately we are forced to accept Facebook counts a view if an ad is seen in stream or in stories for 3 seconds pin interest and twitter count a view if the ad is seen for 2 continuous seconds mercifully YouTube's true view gives us a full view but facebook's through play counts a view if 97% is seen or at least 15 seconds are seen standards for key attention influencers like full screen ads capable video auto play and audio automatically on very dramatically by publishers on the other hand we all know that PV measurement is far more robust technical committee of BARC is headed not by a television person but by an agency person who is sitting here there is a common rating system that is used for all channels established by industry practitioners established by the entire industry its advertisers media owners and media agencies who decide what is a view how those views are to be measured and how they are to be reported and by God do the media owners create a ruckus and do the advertisers create a ruckus if there is an attempt to change the viewability standards now with so much variation amongst digital publishers and the standard used by TV I should think one would need to establish for oneself some equivalence metrics to make comparison digital publishers and TV channels to arrive at a metric for a multimedia plan whilst I am sure no two experts will agree on the common equivalence standard many large advertisers have developed their own may be rough and ready based on some limited research belief systems in this area to my mind it is very necessary to establish this equivalence metric specially for YouTube's capable and non-skippable Facebook's through play and TV with TV being the gold standard you will see on this slide one such attempt by my agency by new means it's the last word on the subject but it's an attempt to enable comparison on a common platform for a multimedia plan viewability equalization with television at 100 is I believe is I believe very necessary in today's media most quoted I may say is an ubiquity study with measures media channel efficiency and which puts online video at 22% compared to TV's 100% so the key learnings I take out for myself are number one we are becoming an attention deficit society and as media planners or marketers we have to be keenly aware of this we need to move from just reach to reach adjusted for attention metrics viewability we have to recognize is a basic attention metric and given the multitude of definitions across digital publishers on what constitutes a view arriving at a viewability equalization is very necessary however and there is a big however you cannot deny the fact that we live today and in India in a digital world dramatic dramatic I underscore changes have taken place in media consumption habits which has made digital video a necessary element in most brands plans now I am aware that I am speaking in a TV first conference but I believe our commitment should be not necessarily to a medium but our commitment should be to increasing the advertisers sales and I think it is as I see it in the long term interest of every media owner also never mind whether he is a TV medium owner or a digital owner or a cinema owner or whatever and his interest will stand protected only if the advertiser achieves his long term objective of increasing his sales or increasing his market share for a long time when media owners want to push these of the media properties to astronomical levels I have been of the view of course a minority view that this may not even be in their interest now why do I say so because for a long time I have held in my mind the theory called an upward spiral and a downward spiral and I have seen at my agency the impact of this now what do I mean by this let me explain when an advertiser comes to Madison and spends money through us if we are able to achieve his objective if we are able to increase his market share he comes back to us next year and the year after and the year after with larger budgets this is what I have seen consistently over the last 34 years of Madison when an advertiser comes to Madison and we are not able to deliver to him what he is seeking or what we collectively sought out to achieve he may at the most come back the next year with a higher budget but he is not going to come back in year 3, 4, 5 and that is what I call the downward spiral so it is in our collective interest to make sure that all sudden done the most important thing is to make the output grow if the output grows and advertising input will automatically grow now we all know that connected TV is emerging quite fast currently while there are no exact estimates available we believe 10 to 15% of the 210 million TV households 20 million TV sets are sold almost annually of smart TVs that is 90% of all TVs in the next 3 years some estimates say that 50% of TV households could be connected TVs unfortunately we have to recognize this and you cannot ignore the fact that linear TVs viewership is coming down connected TV is emerging fast and connected TV more importantly to my mind offers us a unique benefit the targetability of digital and the viewability of television another emerging chink in TV drama is that we now know that TV viewership is not equal even among every person in a defined target audience about a third of that audience are really like TV viewers who are underserved by any TV campaign and thanks to Bach this figures are now readily available to us in this example I have here if a TV plan delivered 540 GRPs heavy TV viewers would get 913 GRPs and light TV viewers would get only 242 GRPs and they would be seriously underserved and Google very clearly now gives us the option of choosing to target those light TV viewers so you can meet the gap in your TV plan by adding digital video to reach the light viewers of television so in my view digital videos growing usage along with its targetability option makes up for lower viewability and should be used intelligently and selectively to make up the gaps in a TV plan letting costs go through the roof another advantage offered by digital is behavioral targeting while this may not make sense for large mass brands but for brands that want to appeal to narrow audiences or want to top up their mass campaigns need to take a serious look at this as we do for say to read just married or those who have just become parents or those who are planning to get married as we do for Tanishk or those interested in home decoration as we do for Asian parents digital as I said gives us the opportunity to reinforce a mass based TV plans with this very powerful capability and also it offers us as we all know tremendous creative possibilities so to my mind the reality is media mix decisions have today become very complex and seldom can you use only one medium alone as we used to do in the past also the era of one size fits all is long gone to my mind as the world becomes more and more complex including our media planning world I believe the success of the media planner of today and tomorrow is going to be not how well or how well he can deal with this complexity and for himself reduce this complexity draw simple from all the complex data that is available and not move away from the simple conclusions he or she makes in her mind it reminds me of a man who I learned to respect a lot during my association with him and I recall Virubhai Ambani and his overall view of life in business as you all know he was no big technocrat he was no big technology expert he started as a patrol pump attendant in Eden and from there to where but he had a sharp but simple mind I believe his major strength was his ability to reduce complexity into simple actionable strategic points for himself in his mind first when he started he was only a what was called a Dalal or an agent to sell yarn he realized that he was making only one paisa per kilo of yarn so he said why don't I go back and make or sell whatever yarn is made of and that is how he kept going back back back till when he was already a big industrialist he went into petrochemicals when his son wanted to go into telecom the new triangle thing then I think in the 80s or 90s he told his son that you will succeed in telecom if you can make call make offer to consumers a call at five paisa per call that was a time when Vodafone I think it was called max touch or something like that then was selling calls at 16 rupees a minute for both outgoing and annoying why five paisa per call because that was the cost of the postcard and that was the most common communication means used in India so guys to my mind a task is to draw some simple conclusions and act on them in this complex world having said that I think I must end by say TV till today in India continues to be the staple medium for large mass brands you can't be TV for its brand building capability you can't be TV for its low CPRP lowest cost for additional reach points mass breach high attention value amongst those who watch TV but using TV alone in your media plan very often for many brands is a risk because media habits are rapidly changing thank you very much thank you so much so we just request you please step in the centre ladies and gentlemen first could we have a big round of applause for the man before on the industry could I get my volume on the mic thank you if I could now have the calling upon Mr. Balsar the senior strategy officer to kindly Mr. do we have Mr. Sinha with us right now for the felicitation I believe sir is not in the room right now do we have Mr. Sinha can do it later would we have Mr. Sinha is here so if you could have the opportunity of calling you on the stage to felicitate Mr. San Balsar ladies and gentlemen Mr. Balsar just for the perfect photo op moment thank you so while the stage is being set I'll quickly introduce so that we can start with the panel I know we are a little short of time really much of first step we're talking about our next panel discussion which is through team could we get Mr. Balsar's mic off thank you gentlemen the next panel is the I'm going to introduce Mr. Balsar I'm going to be speaking about the I'll just I'll just I'll just I'll just I'll just I'll just I'll just I'll just I'll just It's not a problem round of applause for the signing of people. If I could know who you are and who you are, please call me in the application screen at the school. This is the first time I've seen you shinger running. The chat for the person that calls me to call the problem. We do sales, marketing, and costel sales, start on the types of passenger vehicles. Regions are now, let's give them a big big round of applause for the start of Regions Regions. And to communicate and conduct this entire conversation for a minute, we're related to the session chair, the city of the chief strategy officer, Sahadeh Shalwa Ghanat, Cheonan BD, H, NDR, Pre-Dutch Sena, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Ghan, Mr. Ghanakas. The panel is going to start of course about moving on to the part of the screen. Can you share your message and how to take it forward? Can I get volume on a smile? Just allow us a moment. Can you hear me? Yeah. I would have to know how I'm doing. Yeah, I know it's been a busy and back-to-back session for everybody and you are hungry. So I think we finished the panel discussion just outside the room while we were waiting for the panel to happen. But today we're discussing the role of TV, right? And obviously all the noise for last five, seven, eight years has been around digital. And it is interesting that we've come back and we're discussing TV today. And on the panel, there are very many experts who spent their lifetime building D2C brands through digital. So it's going to be an interesting conversation definitely. Today we'll try and discuss the role of TV. Overall, why TV is still important? We'll look at how TV works in conjunction with other media, right? Because part of a funnel and not a standalone itself. We'll see if we can discuss a bit about connected TV and I think that's the most that we'll be able to do. Maybe role of IPL, et cetera. So that's really the agenda. We'll see how much we can kind of cover. So the first question really I want to ask the panel is that, you know, despite the fact that this is so big, you know, 900 million people on YouTube, 250 million doing UPI, half of that doing e-commerce and so on and so forth, that digital number in India is fantastic. But so is TV data, right? Almost over 180 billion of us spends on television, right? And personally, I think at Leo Burnett, we've had the joy of building large brands such as Amazon, Spotify, PhonePay, all through TV work, right? So digital native brands being built on TV in India. So I want to ask the panel the first question, which is what about TV still makes it, you know, the best ROI, the most popular medium for building narrative, for most popular media for building even D2C brands in a country like India. So somebody started with you and your views on, on why do you think TV still works and what about it still works? I think this works. So I think television is still the key media to get trust and impact for a brand. What I mean by trust is it's just human conditioning. When you see an ad for a brand on television, you start thinking, this brand has enough money, must have enough consumers, it's big enough for me to trust it and that's where the trust comes from. And impact is all about reaching a large audience at the same time. I mean, don't get me wrong. I come from a background of D2C and digital marketing. There is a possibility of reaching a large audience on digital as well, but not as quickly and as efficiently as you can do on television. We trust efficiency and speed as well, right? Rajan, coming to you, right? I mean, you sell cars under a very trusted name, Tata, right? How do you use TV and what is the role for TV you feel, especially in today's times? I think one of the things that I've been often forget, the TV is a very social media in the sense that the whole family watches and we are in a category where families take decisions. It's all not always individuals, right? So the whole family, in my previous experiences in jewelry and tonnage as well, again, jewelry buying is a family experience, right? So the fact that this is that only medium, I feel, digital is not a social medium in that sense. For brands like us, which are high value purchase brands, it's a considered decision. It's a family decision that kids are influencing, the grandmother's influencing it. The TV makes a lot of sense and adding further to what somebody just said, the fact that it's got the most widespread of penetration in that sense. And I think that it allows us to tell stories, the largest thing allows us to tell stories in a family setting in a much more inclusive way than digital does. And that certainly helps brands like us, certainly with the Tata name, which is very well penetrated across households. And for high value categories like us, I think it's an absolute must that we are on television as one of the platforms. Amazing. So you're saying what works for mobile, which is individual consumption, right? TV stands as a medium for completely opposite, social and together and narrative building, right? Girish, coming to you, right? How in your line of work have you used TV? And is it any different from what Sambit and Rajan have spoken about as a role of TV, especially in today's times? So for sure. If you really analyze the various media available today, television by far is perhaps the most powerful and effectively building equity and awareness. The most efficient way to reach it, as the panel said, digital may not help you get there effectively. To my mind, of course, as a brand, BlueStar has been built on television over the last two decades or so. We were not advertising and you'd be surprised that the first one decade, we were just in the way to be business. We weren't even in the consumer business, but we still kept investing on television because as I mentioned earlier, that brand equity cannot be built in private. It has to be reaching out to as many consumers as you can, even if you're a B2B brand. Of course, efficiencies will come into play, but having said that, the audio-visual experience that television gives you, without you having the option of skipping the ads and other things, et cetera, there's nothing to beat television. Digital, I mean, print, outdoor, radio will be reminder medium. In a way, they're more, when you've already built your awareness and you wanna convert that into conversions or into sales, then it helps a lot. But having said that, there is nothing as powerful to my mind to build your brand other than television, even till today. Yeah. Gaurav, you have us taken the game, right? You're part of our TV network. So how do you see what is the role, why is TV still holding on, and what's the unique proposition TV brings that nobody else does? So thank you very much to have us here on the panel. Firstly, see what TV does is, very beautifully, it helps you address key behavior points. If you want to impact behavior of any particular market, you will see that TV actually works beautifully. And an example that I can talk about is what happened during COVID. A lot of people wanted to have access to best medical care, daily news updates of what are the policies of travel and other guidelines. In fact, Prime Minister Modi came on television more than 12 times in that year. Almost every month there was an event where he was coming and addressing the country through the medium of TV. So clearly it shows that TV has a far bigger impact. You trust that TV works very easily. There's a lot of credibility that comes with it. And more importantly, TV, even today, is the highest reach medium in India. 70% of India is connected to television in one way or the other. So that kind of reach cannot be ignored by a marketer. And even after that, there is a headroom. There could be one part of the market that may never get TV connected. They may not be able to afford it, you are whichever way you look at the topic. But you can still take TV up to another 80% to 50%. That's a large part of the 1.4 billion market. TV today has what, close to 890 or 900 million connections in India. That's a large canvas. So looking at the might of TV, looking at the credibility in it, trust that it awards, and I think my key aspect is that it helps same behaviors. So when you want people to become more healthy, you do something with it. You want people to become, you know, riser on investments. Again, TV comes in the center of that. So you talk about it, but yeah, TV has been that strong medium of influence and impact. Behavior change and scale, that's what you're talking about. You get a little bit more nuanced on this conversation, right? Because it's obviously not either or it's not one size fits all. We'll discuss a bit on how does TV work in relation to other mediums, right? So for example, if you're a young startup, right? Tassar, you can, you know, do all the initial numbers to performance and you don't really need to get on TV. And we've had experience on brands which have done very well on performance early. And then as you continue to performance marketing, it becomes very expensive, right? And then you bring TV cover, you bring an air cover and you realize that performance becomes, you know, more affordable and easier and so on and so forth. So that's one aspect of looking at TV as a part of the funnel of bottom funnel as well. The other is increasingly we see, for example, coin base at Super Bowl, right? It just played a QR code for 15 seconds. So TV, even in terms of content is interacting with other mediums, right? The TV ad is connected to a QR code, it's connected to Twitter. So how are we seeing and how, or how should we see TV as a part of other mediums and other format, some of your thoughts on that, especially from the HONASA experience? Yeah, I think we can do a panel discussion just on this one question. There are so many angles to it. I mean, to start from the way, I remember when I started off my career with I was working for Nestle and we just launched Nestle, I.C.T. One of the first things to do on awareness was put it on television in summers. That's it. Put it on television, mask cover, everyone gets to know about it. The other way is how a lot of new age startups deal with the same problem. When you start off a company, what do you do in the beginning? You can't afford to put it on television. So you start going for the smallest niche which you can find maybe on digital. You can go more targeted. If once you go a little bigger and you still want to tell a story like these guys were saying and larger audio visual format tells a story much better. So they go to connected television or they go to HDTV. And they just go, I mean, they just go bigger and bigger from a very small niche and this will allow them to go niche. But finally, when they have to go mass impact trust, it has to end up at television. So I think that's the way to look at it. Both have their own roles. And in a media plan, I mean, you use it as per the stage of your business. The second aspect of it is also how, and I think, I mean, BBH would be a great story to tell of how stories are being told in the different mediums and how both mediums are learning from each other. Suddenly television is attributable. There are questions being asked. I mean, the biggest success of digital used to be that it's attributable. Now, television, there are companies like Policy Bazaar even at Mama used to do it where television spots on a particular time spot you get to know after a week and you try to map it with how much traffic, how many installs on the app you've got and you try to do a correlation and you figure out attribution. On the other hand, the television media has influence digital as well. The audio visual content on digital is not just 15 second performance ads. It's also storytelling. It's also content pieces. It's long format, two minute brand stories, et cetera. And one of the best creative for me from Mama days was when we told our purpose, which was a two and a half minute video, which was pretty much what television used to be during the Durarshan days. So there's so much that's happening in relation both in media mix planning and also in kind of creatives learning from each other. Very interesting something. You're saying that the television as a medium is also changing. It's not just about long-term brand building. It is also about attribution and immediate kind of impact. Rajan, how would you react to that? I mean, you're also in the category where I'm told a 60 to 70% journey is getting completed online. So how are you seeing online and other medium and television in conjunction? I think the TV piece is definitely important for us. There's no getting away from it, especially when it's such a high revenue, high unit value category. So especially when you're launching new brands, it's definitely very, very relevant. That's our baseline. In fact, we've used IPL very, very successfully. Since 2018, we've been partners with them. And on the digital side, we largely use the performance marketing perspective from a reminder perspective for the bigger campaign or even form relationships where we can do activities that possibly create in-person drive consumers to a store. I mean, fundamentally, that's the primary aim of all of, I mean, anybody on these panels out there's marketing campaigns to get people to come to the stores. And for us, that's the most, the integration of both is extremely important. I think television with the advent of high-impact properties, whether it's IPL, whether it's Big Boss, whether it's even the Shark Tank. I mean, the biggest irony is that if you watch the American Shark Tank, even the brands who don't get funding sell out because they're on television. I mean, that's the beauty and power of television. I think television has increasingly found properties which are unique to them, which are sustainable only on them. I thought, for example, that coffee with Curran, which was done this time on Hot Star only. It was such a damn script because there's a family who used to enjoy it together irrespective of the quality. We won't discuss quality of them, go grab. But it just took the mojo out of the whole thing. So the integration for any brand today in a very costly market, we have to choose our audiences very carefully and therefore, the programs that we tie up with also, it also depends on the product lifecycle of the brand. Where are you in the product lifecycle of the brand? Certainly, for startups, it could be unviable to go on television, but if they were to go on television, that's your instant 15 seconds of fame, right? And then what happens next is anybody's guess, depending on how well you're geared up to handle it and what kind of quality of product you have. So I think both, there's no getting away from either of the two. Television, because of its reach and connotation, is still going to be a very, very relevant medium, but we have to use the integration with digital and social media very, very wisely. And you're saying digital is more a follow-up and a more a closing mechanism for you. Girish, how have you, I mean, you said that you've used television for long-term brand building, right? How do you use television in conjunction with other medium? How do you see it interact with other medium? Is it changing itself? How do you see it as a part of the mix? I think for sure, television is learning from the other mediums as well. From a perspective of what other mediums like, let's say digital, and digital has really grown a lot on influencer marketing and television branded content is becoming more and more popular going forward. So obviously, advertising is a concern that if consumers don't see their TV commercials, how do you still integrate your brand with content on television? So I think that's what television is learning from other mediums, that if you really want to get toward TG without them going through a TV commercial, then this is the way to do it. Again, having said that, television has a very important objective, like I equate it to mass bombarding, whereas digital is more surgical strike, so micro-surgical strikes. So that's a big difference between them. It all depends on your objective. You want to do mass bombarding, build your brand, television is nothing bigger than I mentioned earlier, but digital will just help you reach to a particular target group for our more efficient. So obviously both are learning from each other as I see it, like the panelist rightly mentioned that you now run an ad on IPL during television and then you see how many searches happen on that particular brand that evening and obviously digital and television are kind of collaborating with each other in terms of data exchange to get an idea for a marketer. And most media planners actually give a combo of A plus B and then see the effectiveness is far higher. So from that perspective, I think both will, like he rightly mentioned, will coexist and both will have a role to play and it's exciting ways or days ahead for marketing. Mass bombarding versus surgical strike. Interesting framing. Gaurav, what's your view on this? Because also there are a lot of media houses now who are doing the whole package, right? They're saying, we can give you TV, we can give you digital, we can give you all of it together. How are you seeing TV interact with other media and how are you seeing it as part of the mix? So what happens is TV becomes the, in many of your marketing plans, TV becomes the central part where they use it to create content. And then they use different formats to distribute the content including TV, digital and other measures. So creation of content is still pretty much a domain of TV. The stories are well told, like people were talking about it earlier. Storytelling is something which is becoming very important for brands today. And some of TV managed to convey their story in a credible and a very, very effective way. It's not really a choice between TV or digital. Both people exist. Like we talked earlier, there'll be certain, you know, digital brings certain sharp-shooting to the work there. And television will bring a certain grandeur and impact that demolishes the whole building for example. That's the message that goes back to the enemy council. That kind of mass bombing is what TV will do. And digital will do that sharp-shooting. So both are important, not neither one or the other. But largely marketers have today figured out that to create a need, to impact the behavior, to create a very large, sustainable change, they are using TV, then to fulfill that change and need. A lot of them are using digital that they can get the transaction part of it. For example, you look at, say, a policy bazaar, right? They are one of the largest advertisers on TV. They create the need for you to go and pick up a policy online or at least that need to plant it in your mind, that you are under-insured or you need to really address that. Then the fulfillment will happen at another platform. So they use best of both. And many brands, you know, if you look at the top 10 brands on TV in the last two years, I think five of them built it from the e-commerce or the new commerce side. So it clearly shows that that's where they also, they want to build their brand quickly. They want to reach 70% of India quickly, right? Because their next round of investment is dependent on that. So they use TV for its benefit. And from the TV side, we also use digital to further our call. We want to bring out faster stories so that stories break on the TV. It's a fact, right? So we use that to harness our content. In fact, we do something very interesting at times. I think it's almost like a folk formula. Many people have cried, they have not been able to replicate it. We throw up, you know, a dozen stories in the morning. We around 10, 11, we throw 10, 12 stories out on various social platforms. And we see what is it that India is cracking. So you know, during the lunch time, during the time that you're traveling to offer a platform, you may have liked something, you may have commented on something. And suddenly by the evening six o'clock, we know three stories that have outperformed the other seven or eight stories. Those three stories become the central part of our debate in the evening. It's like almost a daily poll that we do. So 10 stories, we see which are the stories that people want to talk about and then they become part of our content. So we are actually harnessing the power of digital to further improve the TV content. It's far more connected as an ecosystem than just this or that. There can't be a conversation on TV without IPL, right? So, I mean, there's TV and there's IPL. I mean, IPL is an event by itself. The fundals are different. The way to succeed on IPL is different. I mean, we've personally taken many brands on IPL and I mean, in fact, we just did a spotty for an IPL last year. And when we came out of IPL, we've had a huge hockey stick growth, right? So it is expensive. I mean, it's not easy to be an IPL, but when you are on IPL and you crack the formula correct, there's huge amount of success that comes to us. How to understand and how to ask and discuss is, A, is IPL kind of event reenergizing TVA? And B, are the rules of the game on something like IPL different because it is 22nd, it's fast, you know? It's very high investment as well. Your thoughts on this? Yeah, I've never been part of a brand that has been able to afford IPL. So all my viewpoints will be more theoretical in nature. No, I mean, in all honesty, IPL or any other impact property, let's say Bigg Boss, or any other impact property, dance India dance, all of these give, one of the first things I mentioned about what TV has as an advantage versus digital is, impact in reach happening all very quickly. That's what IPL, Bigg Boss, any of these impact properties give. If I have to reach 100 million people on digital, it's not that I can't, it's just that it's gonna take me a long time to do so. And it's, especially if I want to do it efficiently for my campaign to build up, it's gonna take at least a month. It's gonna take some time, right? Whereas if I put money on IPL, I'm able to reach out to that 100 million very quickly within the first spot or so. That's the big advantage. But on top of that comes the question of, what frequency do you put your ad spots on? Just putting one, I don't know. I mean, others on the panel who've used IPL can probably mention, but at least from my experience with Bigg Boss and other impact properties, putting one on one episode makes no difference. It has to be there throughout so that there is top of mind and salience. And also additionally, on top of the spots, if you can do some kind of integrations or additional kind of banners or something like that, it just makes things much more memorable because objective at the end of the day is to get top of mind and salience, not just have a spot out there. Raja, where are you on this? I mean, do you believe that if you have to do TV, might as well do IPL or do you believe it's a complete waste of money? I think we can afford IPL. The question is, I think, wrongly targeted because I'm already in the game, right? We've been investing in IPL since 2018 as partners, not just as advertisers. And invariably, IPL has always happened at a time which has been two or three months after the launch of one of our biggest records. It was Altois, it was Nexon, it was Harrier, it was Safari, it was Punch. It's invariably happened a couple of months after that and we've seen some tremendous boost arising because the whole package, you have the car placed on the grounds, you have the mentions in the commentators, speech and so on and so forth. But having said that, I think that every brand needs to be very, very careful about that kind of investment. It is a massive investment. And it's a one-time investment which can blow you out of the water and as a marketer, you're on the line. So I think it's a very, very considered call. It's as big as, not as big but equivalent in my mind when you're searching for answers and something says brand investment. So if you're a brand looking to make a big impact and if you've got something new to offer and you can afford it, it certainly makes sense because you will get that image. But if it's sustenance or if it's a routine product like coffee, tea, maybe, I don't think it's going to be. It depends on what you want out of the game. Girish, where are you on the IPL piece? I mean... So I was a part of an IPL panel earlier so at the cost of not sounding repetitive. We've been on, you know, Blue Star has been on IPL ever since first season. I've been on every season of IPL barring just a year or two. Otherwise the last 14 seasons we've been there. We are not a big brand in terms of deep pockets. We have very limited money available but we choose to use it wisely. Of course, IPL has a great timing advantage for us because it's the start of the summer season. Most of our campaigns are launched on IPL. But what we've learned from IPL is very different from other television advertising. Our one thing for IPL is that you have to acknowledge the fact that your break TVRs would be the lowest, which means people would want to obviously wait for the next over. So they're not really going anywhere, right? So that advantage of engagement is there with IPL be a lower ACDs work much better. So at 10 or 15 seconds because again, you can't splurge 30 seconds on an IPL. 10, 15 seconder, you've got to really do some kick ass advertising or clutter breaking advertising to stand apart. If you can manage that, that you can really be successful on IPL with even lower budgets. So these are the advantages that, you know, and of course in terms of a property, a lot of people and research tells us that if a brand is on IPL, they suddenly put it as a very respectable brand, right? It's like one of the brands that they would look up to in terms of aspiration, in terms of permanence, which just goes out if you're on IPL. So these are the other advantages that one has of a large property like IPL. And therefore, I think we've never looked back. But having said that, yes, it is a huge investment. I'd agree. It would be a large chunk of our money as well. But if you do it wisely, our frequency is higher. You create different edits of the same ACD. You know, communicate your message over four, 10 seconders, better than what you would do in 130 seconder. You might really be able to stand out even despite the fact. Gaurav, being a TV guy, I mean, if I was to polarize a question for you that sort of do TV just to impact and don't do anything else, how would you react to that? Actually, that's not a bad idea. In fact, there are many brands who have built themselves up. Like Erich mentioned, Blue Star, in the same categories as a brand like NTAVO, you will not see them on anything except news and cricket. Even Girish to that extent is largely exploiting the benefits of sports and cricket. And they're spending maybe 70%, 80% of their investment in that. And they buy the highest quality product. They'll buy IPL, they'll buy the nine o'clock time-time debate, because they want that impact. And brands are very happy to do it. So it works for brands. In fact, we believe that IPL is more. IPL is a high-intensity activity in a small form and making it look like a scientific formula, but that's what it is. It's not an action done in 60 days. We have to create our own IPLs, for example, in news. You have elections, you have budget. Those are one-day events like IPL that several people come on to a particular platform or a channel, watch content, and go back. So those are our own high-intensity events where brands like Tata, Brands like Newstar, they come on board and they want to talk to their audience for that day. So it works. Sometimes less is more. So just focus and get out. Our shift gives a better look into the future a bit, right? And talk about connected TVs, right? So huge growth, right? Because smart TVs are going to happen a big way. Internet is going to happen in the bank. It's already happening in a big way. Chances, I mean, connected TVs grew 74% in the last quarter, 2022, right? And the nature of that medium is changing. So YouTube just launched YouTube shots, taking the vertical mobile first medium to a connected TV experience. Globally, you know, there are experiences that you're watching something and you could buy. You know, you could take a product and social commerce and entertainment commerce. You could buy the moment you're watching the piece of content. So those are some bits of changes that are already on the anvil in the board, developed markets, and as India leapfrocks to smart TVs, connected TVs, is that going to change the nature of television completely, you know? Summit, any future-gazing thoughts on that? Yeah, I think connected TV is an interesting one. It doesn't lie completely in TV, but it doesn't lie completely in digital either. It's attributable. It's part of, I mean, it can be part of the Google ecosystem if you want to measure it. And yet you're getting the audio-visual experience of a television. Possibly you're also getting shared, like social watching with your entire family. So it's kind of the mix of both. The latest number I saw, it was, I think, 20 million households in India that's already quite a large size. I remember when I started advertising that it was less than seven or eight million, and yet it used to be big enough to be part of my digital marketing mix. I would still put it as part of the digital media mix, just because it can be measured along with Google and not really along with the TVRs. But yeah, you get all the benefits of the television advertising as well. So I mean, it's kind of in the middle. I think over time as the other benefit of connected television is it's automatically reaching out to a premium audience or an audience that is more digitally enabled, which is more probably a slightly higher household income. And therefore you're already self-selecting the right kind of customers. That's another big advantage of it. As that volume increases, I think it's going to be very interesting for both new age players, like startups, which are D2C startups, and also maybe the incumbent ones, the larger organizations today. How do we process the idea of connected TVs, right? Do we see it as having the best of both worlds? You can do social watching does all that the TV does, yet very sharp attributability and being able to buy it. For example, you look at the new generation, right? For the Gen Z, right? TV is not colors and stars. The TV is Netflix and Amazon Prime and so on and so forth. The fact is that TV really allows us. That's it. So you have a direct relation to, I pointed out to, but that's about it, right? It's only for new households, that's my opinion. Point out to you guys, when you talk about internet penetration, it's about mobile devices. It's not about how it's built on this. So the growth of smart TV is going to play for the concept of modern time and till such time and for some time, I think TV is going to be still the mainstream medium. And this is going to be a very niche medium which can be smartly used by certain products and product categories, but not for mass brands like, yes, more of Tesla was to come to the market, certainly with the news. And they will use it, they're not going to go on the solution. You've reached your thoughts on that and also from your perspective, if you've done IPL over the years, have you also done Hotstar and what's been your correct TV experience or impact on that? No, so again, coming back to connected TV, I think 5G will really explode the consumption of connected TV. It's likely to, but I completely agree with Rajan, but it's just 20 million households. We have 150 million households still watching on a cathode ratio. So that change is going to take years because the market is just about 10 million to 12 million every year of television sets, right? And of course, 80% is smart television. So from that perspective, it's going to take years to happen. Of course, the other answer, Hotstar versus live television, there are very different ways to kind of look at it. If your idea and anybody's idea to be on IPL would be to create large awareness, mass bombarding, then television turns out to be cheaper than digital. From an efficiency perspective, I think TV will be cheaper. Like I keep saying digital is more performance marketing, digital is more microsurgical strikes. The idea of IPL is a little different for me from that perspective. But yes, connected TV is going to change the way India watches. I would still put connected TV in the category of television because even on OTT you're watching the same content that you would watch on television. And even on mobile phones, you would watch that. You know, you would watch that. So I'm also believed that television spends and OTT spends should be clubbed together and should be put under television spends and not counted as digital spend because they're doing the same job of creating awareness. There's digital is most surgical strikes, more performance marketing, more ROI based, you know, in the SBC. Gaurav, how are you guys processing the idea of connected TV? I mean, how are you processing the idea of connected TV, right? As a broadcast player, see connected TV, while it's like some of my fellow panelists said that it looks very small as we speak because not too many people into it, but with passage of time and improved data speed, it will catch up. Right now it looks like it is in the sushi category. Not good to have it sometimes, but can't have it as a daily meal. Someday it will become part of your daily meal. But what this has certainly done is it has taken content creators back to their drawing board because such content has reduced the attention span of viewers. Like even you as a creative person today are making smaller creatives. Seven seconds, 10 seconds, 12 seconds. So that has a bearing on content creators. So today, for example, on one of our channels, Zoom, we have started reducing the size of the music video. We play now 45 seconds to one minute kind of videos rather than three minute videos. Our news stories have been cut short in size. We now play headlines more than regular stories. We play headlines three times an hour. Each headline is of two minutes to three minutes where you put in 10 stories because the viewers' attention span is reducing. So that's the impact that it is having. Otherwise, it's not really impacted any other way. Sure. So I think that's what we have time for. I just want to go around once with the last comments on what's the one thing that we should keep in mind while using TV? By using any media, it's the objective that you have. I mean, from the last answer, I find it interesting that for a company, 20 million can be large audience. For another company, it can be really small. And I get that. So objective, of course, matters for whichever brand or company it is. And accordingly, the usage for television. Whether to use it and if yes, how to use it. I think it's important to understand the buying behavior of the consumers and then make that back to the media that you use as a mention of your TV and social media. So it works for high-ranging categories which are of family purchase. So in that context, you understand who your consumers are obviously but also understand how the purchasing behavior happens as a unit or as a family and then make the decisions accordingly. So for example, an IPL. It works well when you go on a category which is going to be bought once in five days. It really works well then because you make that rating back if you want to spend that big amount of money. It won't necessarily make the impact for daily usage, you know, kind of items. Or for example, what we learned was that there are certain teams which are favorites. So you start marketing, I mean advertising only on those matches and not throughout the idea. So I think there's some other things that you need to pick up as you go along and use it. Gideja, I would strongly believe that as a marketer, you should effectively leverage the opportunities available in each medium. Television, digital, print, outdoor. Every medium has some of the other advantages. So don't rule out anything. Just focus on, you know, the media multiplier. Try to kind of not dilute yourself to think, but to think, but focus on, you know, what each channel or what each medium can bring to you. And, you know, that's the secret to succeed. So from my point of view, I would say that if a marketer wants to tell impactful stories and he wants to reach maximum people, if these two objectives form part of your overall metrics, then TV should play an important role while people choose the combination of TV and digital and social and all other options. It is a great thing to do, but TV will continue to lead that purpose. And if you have to become a thought leader in that, TV is gonna really come handy. Fantastic. It's been a great learning experience for me as well, right? I mean, the fact that it's a much more nuanced topic is not just TV or digital. How all the mediums are interacting with each other. They have their own role and depends a lot on what life cycle your brand and your business is. And the fact that TV in itself is changing a lot by itself, this form and content. Thank you, everybody. Thanks a lot. Thank you guys for listening to us and holding back from lunch. Have a great day. Thank you so much. Ladies and gentlemen, let the applause continue. What an excellent session. May I request the Chief Creative Officer, Dangal, to Anuj Kapoor to kindly join us and help us in the felicitations. Thank you, Mr. Kapoor, for joining us on the same and could we have the team to present the mementos? A big thank you to you, Dheeraj, for being a part of our conversation. Thank you, Rajan. First up, Sambit, of course, thank you so much. Thank you, Girish. Thank you, Gaurav. Could we have the entire panel to please step forward for a group photograph? Ladies and gentlemen, they've given us their valuable time. The least we can do is applaud for them. Thank you so much. On that note, we're breaking in for lunch. Our sessions are going to be resuming at 3 p.m. IST. We request you to have a hearty lunch and join us back. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm not the only one who's honored. I'm not the only one who's honored. I'm the class of all of you here. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So ladies and gentlemen, firstly, could we have a big, big round of applause for all our partners today? Let's applaud them with a big, big round of applause, everyone. So looking at the energy in the room, I think it's only apt if I do an engagement, not in a literal sense, but I need to have the audience back in the energy and enthusiasm we're talking about. All right, so when I say one, you just got to say, hey. Can I get some, you know? Are you with me? Can you hear that? Okay. One. Okay. When I say two, you got to say, hey, hey. Very simple. Okay. Two. Getting there. Getting there, Mumbai, you're doing really good. When I say three, you just got to clap once. All right? Three. And when I say four, you've got to clap twice. Simple. Okay. Let's just mix it up. Trying to find out if everyone's aware. Two. Okay. Three. Welcome to the party. Finally. Two. All right. Five is just five claps. That's about it. Okay. We'll just send it on five claps. I'm trying to make it easier for Mr. Ayur who's going to be joining us. All right? When I say five, Mumbai just five claps. All right? At the count of three, two, one. Five. Can we be a little more loud and better? Five. Perfect. So ladies and gentlemen, on that note, firstly, welcome back. And we're going to be starting now without any further ado. So let's start back. Thank you all for joining us. It was very integral for all of us to be in that energetic zone because I feel that that gives us the due respect to our upcoming speaker. And of course, our mind is more aware. Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Bhavnam Hathi. Again, an honor to represent E4M brand on this lovely conference. We're talking about the future of 30 Seconders. The person joining us has been in advertising forever. Okay. Not forever, but for about 22 years. Can we count that as forever? In certain definition, yes, we can. If somebody has creatively impacted multiple brands in the country, we range from startups to large multinational companies and everything in between. He believes in transformation using creativity that stands in the core product backed by a clear proposition and a strong brand point of view. His biggest joy comes from when the creativity can form the fortunes of the brand he works with. Ladies and gentlemen, it's my honor to now call upon the founder of Spring Marketing Capital, Mr. Arun Ayur. I think this is that. Which one? This one? Yeah. Okay. Do you want this? I'm okay. Yeah, awesome. Hello, hello, hello. Is that my audible? Okay. She did a great job of waking you all up. I'll make sure you all go back to sleep. So I need some help. How do I change the slides? Is this it? Yeah. Okay. So when I was asked to actually... Hello. Yeah, it's better. So much light here. Yeah. So what I'm going to do today is I'm just going to share a few slides. I think there is a lot of conversation that I keep hearing just a little bit about myself before I started Spring in 2019. I spent about 16 years at Lintas. I last served as the chairman and chief creative officer of Lintas was fortunate enough to have worked with brands from Unilever to Google to Flipkart to launching Hotstar in India. So it's just been very, very fortunate my journey. And I've seen this debate play out for many, many years. And this whole thing of with the advent of digital, this constant chatter about, okay, is this relevant? Is this going away? Is this what's going to happen to television advertising? So I'm just going to present a point of view which kind of factors in some practical stuff. So I think everybody talks about the future of 20, 30 secondals. In my view, it's actually 20 seconds. And I don't know how many of, and which parts of the media business y'all stem from, but all the conversation in the room now, especially if you're talking about advertising on television is all about saying, okay, listen, 30 secondals have gotten too extensive. We have to find a way to get to 20, 15s. And then of course, the Facebooks of the world come and say 15, six secondals is what works. And then they put out seven minute items for themselves, which is quite fun to be free. So I think it is 20 secondals, but the bigger, the real question for me, that this is not about duration. We keep discussing duration. For me, it's about the relevance, the relevance of, does the 20 second or 30 second of matter in a digital person? Actually, this is the question which at least I keep introspecting on. And a lot of times I have realized that, yes, it is relevant. We are in a digital first world, but it's not like the 20 second or 30 second has left the room. It's not like it's completely relevant because so many people spending so many dollars, it can't be without effect. So I wanna just walk y'all through this, through my learnings, through this brand called Big Fit. I don't know how many of y'all are aware of this brand. It's a Bangalore-based startup, which we've been working with for the last four years. And it was a small company when we began working with them. This was back in Jan 2019. We had just opened our doors. Awakening was one of the first brands that we interacted with. There was just two founders. They had been through multiple startups and then they had, and some of them failed. And then they began this small little company where they came and told us that, listen, we just need some mattresses and then we sell them online. And then when we kind of started spending time with them and there is this great brand in the UK, it's called Casper. They've modeled themselves on Casper. And it's fascinating. I don't know how, does anybody use any Big Fit product at home? One, two, and three. And how many people aware of the brand? That's a sizable amount. Now, that is very reassuring because it's only about four or five months since the company has spent any money on television. Everything that the company has done has only been on the digital platform. And given the room, it is very reassuring to know that. So actually, when we started working with them, one of the biggest things we did was we realized that they're not just a mattress company, but they're actually a sleep solutions company. And the purpose of the company became, how can we bring sleep into the consciousness and conversations of people? Now, there is context to this. We are obviously living in a world where Netflix comes in and says, sleep is my enemy. Our honorable Prime Minister, actually in interviews has said that how little he sleeps. And obviously the country is very inspired by him. And obviously we think that sleeping is overrated. But there is a brand that is selling mattresses, takes a higher ground and decides to bring sleep into the consciousness and conversations of people. Because on one hand, he says too much sleep is not good. On the other hand, we've had enough instances of people, very healthy people who have lost their lives. And a lot of times the reason given is that there wasn't enough sleep in their lives. This is the dichotomy that existed. And the brand decided to bring sleep into the consciousness and conversations of people. And this is a brand, like I said, in its four and a half years of existence, it's been the last five months when it's gone on television. Everything else has been through content. And managed to generate word of mouth, educate, build knowledge, always on content, right? There have been created about 600 pieces of content for this brand alone. And I'm gonna take you all through some of it. But before that, I think what's important in this digital world, according to us, is that you don't just simply create content. Brands have to behave like content creators. There is a, every content creator kind of has an understanding of her or his style, what connects with people and then generates content from there. It's not very different for brands. Brands have to do the same thing. And this is the first piece of content that we put out. This is called sleep intention. It's on its third season now. The amount of money, media money that's gone behind this in three years has been a little over a crore. That's how much money has been spent behind this. But it's generated crazy amount of word of mouth for the brand. And that's the tradition. Right? So it's a long wish video, but y'all get the drift, right? Basically every year call for entries. People send in entries, then they send in videos of why they qualify to be sleep interns. This year we got entries from about 37 countries. It's been covered in the press in television media across the world. In fact, there was a local television channel in the US which covered it and said that there is this mattress company from Indiana. They didn't even realize that it's a company based in India. They thought it's based in Indiana and that kind of coverage it got. And we're on the third season, like I said, this year has been about 6.5 lakh entries from 37 countries. So that's the power of content there. You can go Google it and then all this shows up. So there are the numbers and then it leads to further content, user-generated content that gets created. So degree, civil services, wake, fit, sleep, internship. I've got people who are very famous who have a lot of money in their life have actually asked me saying, can we also apply because it's just about sleeping, which we anyway have got to do. So that's the kind of power it has. We also as a brand over the last four years, we leveraged moments. And I think that's super critical. One of the things is as this was happening, I don't know how many of you all saw Bartan Dholie, which was again something that went seriously viral. Ikea launched. We welcomed them with a Swedish ad in the newspaper. So this is very relevant at that point in time. I'm just running through. I have a timer in front of me. So I think one of the important things to think about is that you have to find ways to engage people where they are. And I think that's one thing. And not to take away, I'll come back to the point on television. I know this is about the future of 30 seconders, but this I'm just talking about how you can build a digital first brand. There was a spreadcast on Spotify. So we tied up and the brand, we said, okay, we need, we need a celebrity now. So we said, okay, who's a sleep fluencer. So we actually, we created Kumbhakaran, the sleep specialist. And Kumbhakaran actually has a LinkedIn page, which has a lot of followers. He's called the cheap sleep officer at Wake Fit. Because so now passion. So this did run on TV as well. So we own sleep by putting people to sleep, right? So the point that I really want to make is that this is another initiative which happened just when COVID got over and the world was opening up. And a lot of us had gotten used to sleeping after lunch, like it's very visible here. So a lot of us had gotten used to it. So we actually created this movement called Dose Dhai Sone De Bhai, which was, which really traveled a lot. It, everybody's, it got covered in the economic times, two times in the front page saying, this is what companies are doing these days. So that's the kind of noise it created. Yet, I think all of this created awareness, but that alone didn't move the needle. I think we must acknowledge the country we live in. It is a very, very large country. Digital is making its inroads everywhere. But knowing about a brand and buying a brand are two completely different things. We can't take away from the fact that when you go on television, there is huge amount of credibility. There is huge amount of trust that does get generated. And the brand got a lot of awareness. And that was it's evident in the room about 40 people in the room knew the brand, three people have bought it. And that's the point I'm trying to make is that knowing something because of its digital presence and actually acting on what you know about because of television, that's the reality of the country that we live in. And at some point in time, once we had kind of exhausted the digital audience, the brand didn't have a choice but to go on television. And when you're going on television, while this is the avatar of the brand in the digital medium, you have to have a compelling argument for why somebody should buy you. And that's where you enter with 20 seconds. We signed up a brand ambassador and we must admit we are a country that's obsessed with cricket and film stars. We can't take away from that the kind of reach that these two mediums, I wouldn't even call film a medium, but the kind of love that cricket and films generate in this country is unparalleled. And finally, when you want to build consideration and deep consideration within a large part of India, we believe that television is your place. And that's when we went with Rashmika, we created these two spots. So this kind of, it's in Telugu because it first ran in the Andhra market and then went on to run nationally. But we had to have a compelling argument because finally, and I'm sure all of you all have done this at some point in time, we all go into a mattress shop, we sit on the mattress, behave like experts for 20 seconds of bouncing on it, and then say, yes, this is the one for me. We said that's not the way to buy a mattress. You actually take it home, try it for 100 days and return it if you want to. And that's the cash-on delivery equivalent of Flipkart back in the day. So it kind of builds trust in people that you can and it's a fabulous mattress whoever hasn't bought it should buy it. But that's the final point that I wanted to make that J&D buy, sorry. The learning is the world may be digital first, but that doesn't make the 20-second or second. I think long live the 20-seconder. If you want to create reach, if you want to go deep into this country, as of today, it still is the medium. It's just how you play out the brand on different mediums, the kind of arguments you create, the kind of creatives that you create, they differ. But it's not like one is replacing the other. That's the larger point that I wanted to make. I am over time by one minute, 29 seconds. So I assume there are no questions. And you all have thoroughly enjoyed this session. No questions. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Arun, if you may request to please stay on the stage, as I would have the honor of calling upon the Chief Revenue Officer of Times Network, Mr. Gaurav Dhawan, to finally join us. Thank you, Mr. Dhawan. Ladies and gentlemen, a warm round of applause for both our dignitaries on stage. Could we have the felicitation back? Meanwhile, Arun, I would like to highly appreciate the fact that I always keep saying that time is of the biggest asset. And the way you wound up your entire presentation in the time given, I think that calls for a bigger round of applause as well. Because a man who can appreciate his own time, definitely the world respects his time as well. That's where I have the thought of saying thank you once again. Thank you. God bless. I think they won the cheers moment and the hashtag eForumTV first. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Dhawan as well for joining us on that. So ladies and gentlemen, as the stage is being set, I'll quickly introduce our session, which is going to be the final session in our conference today. Post that, of course, we've got the primetime awards, the much-awaited awards. Ladies and gentlemen, for our session, which is TV Plus Digital and Advertisers Point of View, rather, we've got with us our eminent speakers. First up, if with a huge round of applause, I can have the honor of calling upon the Vice President, Marketing E.M.F.I. Puneet Dharamasi to kindly join us. Puneet, thank you so much. Also, the Head of Marketing and Communications, Samsonite, Pradhania Pupadi to kindly join us. Pradhania, thank you so much. Next up, the VP and Head of Brand Marketing, PolicyBazaar.com, Samir Sethi. Next up, the E.M.P. and Head of Marketing, HTFC Ergo General Insurance, Shilpa Desai. Do we have Shilpa with us? I believe we'll just get the team to coordinate on the same. All right. Yes, Shilpa, right there. Thank you so much. Let's give it a big, big round of applause. It's my honor to re-invite the Chief Creative Officer, Dangal Tu Anuj Kapoor. And of course, for the session chair, a very energetic entrepreneurial and an enterprising gentleman joining us. He is a gentleman. He's been in the marketing field. He's won many accolades, the recent being 2019. The world's President India and Southeast Asia media smart, Nikhil Kumar. Nikhil, an honor to have you. And with that, the stage is all yours. Thank you kind words. I hope everybody had good lunch. If not, there is always tea and more snacks to go. But thank you for hosting us for this panel. I think we have a very interesting topic just to give quick context so everybody can hear me and just a nice way we are sitting. Perfect. So we all live in a multi-screen world which consumers switch between TV, mobile, DOH, laptops and many more screens. That becomes very, very important for marketers to understand. Can they integrate these consumer journeys across their screens and achieve these brand objectives in short term or long term? While TV, whether linear or connected TV, continues to play a key role. Where does mobile, DOH and these newer screens that suddenly advertise are focusing in fit in? And what about these existing channels? How do we connect these disconnected worlds of TV and digital? So with that, I think we have a very diverse panel. We have some very exciting brands and some very exciting people on this panel. And probably I'll just dig into the question straight up because this panel is called TV plus digital. So how do we answer the question usually when it comes to brands for each one of you? TV pe ad dikhaya hua kya? And how do you do that in your set of advertising memos? Let's start with you, Sameer. Thanks, Nikhil. TV pe ad jhalaya hua kya? TV pe ad jhalaya to immediately website visits haane sath hoge. This is the reality of the world we're living in. I think what happens very commonly with us and people around us is that whenever we're watching TV, it is no longer undivided attention that we're giving to television. We're constantly fiddling with our phones. We're WhatsApping our friends and colleagues. We're answering work emails. We're looking at Instagram reviews and a bunch of other things. So we always distracted with phones. On the positive side, the phone is completely unengaged because your primary medium of entertainment at that point in time is the big screen, the television. So if, let's say, for example, you're a digital brand, which we are, and a consumer likes your proposition through advertising, they don't really have to wait for their next store visit to respond to your communication. They might just pick up their phone and log on to your website and download your app, which is exactly what we see. We actually plot the spot data of our TV campaigns along with our website traffic data to figure out what's happening after we're running ads like you asked, but also to dig deeper and figure out what components of the media plans are working better than the others. For example, what channels are working better, what time bands are working better, what days of the week are working better, and also what creatives are working better. So yeah, to summarize, I think when we advertise on television, we also, apart from the long-term brand-building benefits, which is believed to be the strong suit of television, we also get immediate ROI. So it also acts as a good performance medium, apart from being a long-term brand-building medium. Fantastic. I'll just sort of dig in before I move to the next panelist. I think policies are at the end of the, started with dot com, right? I mean, you're an app-first ecosystem. You're a digital native company. And when you look at balancing your media budgets between digital and TV, obviously TV, you cannot isolate. You're still a digital first brand, but TV is where impact is. We firmly believe that. Are you seeing that consistently changing over the years? Because I think for all of us, there's always going to be a pre-COVID and post-COVID way of looking at data and analysis, right? And I think two years is a fairly long time to regimentalize certain habits of consumers. Has there been a shift in the way you're looking at media planning from your perspective, Sumi? To some extent, yes, but largely it has been fairly similar. See, this is saying right if it ain't broke, why fix it? So TV has been very consistently delivering for us to give you some sense of how active we are on television. We do at least one, maybe two campaigns every month. We are active on television 200 plus days a year. We also happen to spend 90% of more than 90% of our brand budgets on television. This, I think, is proof enough that we believe in the power of the medium. And when I talk about the power of the medium, I am not isolating linear TV in this example. I'm talking about the power of big screen. Going forward, maybe we'll also touch upon linear versus CTV, et cetera, but I genuinely believe that advertising on big screen cannot be compared to, let's say, advertising on much smaller screens like mobile or tabs, et cetera, at least in terms of the immediate ROI. So to answer your question, it hasn't changed entirely, but what we have started doing is we have started cutting out some of our non-performing components of the linear media plan and plowing that money on connected TVs. So that we've been doing very consistently for the last one and a half years. So I think a lot of times people debate about connected TVs versus linear television. I don't think it's a binary. I think both of them will coexist at least in the next few years to come and they will complement each other. Whatever is the less performing flab in a linear TV media plan will get cut and that money, I see that being plowed first into connected TVs and then maybe to other mediums. Superb. Thanks, Amir. I think let's move to a very interesting category, Pradhania, for you. Samsonite, Kremla Krem of travel accessory and obviously your very visible brand on television or offline. How are you looking this digital world plus the linear world of TV evolving for your particular brand? Yeah, so see let's look at the overall penetration of today, the connected TV and it would be just around 4%. Okay, for Samsonite audience it would be around 30-35%. But overall it is 4% and TV is 90% in our one microse. Yeah, so but how beautifully because of the way the government is building that infrastructure and we as advertisers also building the infrastructure post-COVID understanding the importance of digital, I see that it's surely becoming like 40-50% in maybe around 7-8 years. But what we have recently saw the success of connected TV, what I would like to say is we reached out to almost 25% of Samsonite affluent audience through FIFA, KPC, Sony, leave, you know, advertisement through connected TV because our audience is mainly those who are having 40,000 plus devices, you know, and that's how we could map the data, connected TV is giving that particular data. So power of what you said on a big screen, whichever screen it is today you can see whether it is a small tap or a 40-inch TV or a 65-inch TV. And we've looked at the data that 65-inch TV person, whether he's come on my website and tried buying anything, you know, that is the amazing journey which connected TV is giving you. Okay, what we did on an airport advertisement, we had given a scan to watch a film, I'm sure like very few watched it by scanning it. But those who scan, we mapped their personal because those who are at the airport are using their personal Wi-Fi. So when they are at home, they are also using their personal Wi-Fi sometimes, sometimes or the Wi-Fi being at off G or somebody else. Okay, so we mapped this data and we are re-targeting them through connected TV. Okay, so I think there's a humongous slicing of the data one can do, especially for our category where we are into the affluent segment. Even for American tourists also, we are trying to do this. But TV versus connected TV, I think TV would be a lot of reach and connected would be reach along with the engagement and the richer data. No, fantastic. I think you touched upon a very interesting point. Sometimes it's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog and for connected TV, probably what you need to understand is at least for a category like yours. I mean, you've got a very small audience base as compared to TV, but it packs a very potent punch. Basically, you know the people that you're targeting who are probably the guys who understand the usage of internet across their mobile. They know how to put a Wi-Fi password on their TV screen. You know which TV screen that you want to target. You understand this might be a 65-inch TV screen user living in a certain locality has subscription across or not subscription across certain OTTs kind of content that he watches and suddenly, here you go. I mean, you're not solving for the diversity of channels that you have to try your mix on. You already have it in front of you and you know exactly probably these are the Kremla Krem customers that you probably want to target. Yeah, we just ran the campaign only for the Pedder Road and Malabar Hill kind of audience through connected TV. Well, people in Malabar Hill, it was just so you know. So let's move on to the man who has one of the most visible presence on linear or probably any connected TV as well in recent times, mutual funds. I think I can vouch if there is somebody in this audience that can raise their hand and hasn't heard of this campaign. I'll be very surprised. But how are you bridging the gap and how are you actually not bridging the gap probably building newer bridges towards your digital plus TV reach thought process because you obviously appeal to a very large part of the audience that you want mutual funds to be a part of everyone's life in the country. So like our campaign is to create awareness for mutual funds so we reach out to. Can you hear me better? Yeah. So for us the whole objective is to create awareness of the category. So we use each and every medium that is available to us to send out our message. For us TV gives the reach, digital for life for everyone not just for us TV. TV gives us the reach and then digital gives us TV gives us reach and trust I would say because we are in the business of money, of taking your money, managing it and hoping to give you more returns. So TV helps us create that reach and trust and digital helps us to create that reminder medium, recall, engagement and then get into their consideration set. So you know like you asked TV to add, after that what? After that you showed him thousands of ads, he said come here, look here, this is the website, come here and understand in your language. And then you hope that he will go to some mutual fund and you know start his SIP. So for us it's a long journey like for any other brand but for us it is all the more difficult and when we use each medium you know to their strength and try to convert that into consideration for us, for our category. Very thoughtful, I think you know when people obviously look at TV and being an X marketer, I think usually I always believe that it's almost like a post-mortem. You spend on media, now you have to do a post-mortem, the body is there, whether it resulted in good or bad it's still a post-mortem, right, eventually. But even if you look at connected TV with so many OEMs, OTTs, everybody stepping into that space, eventually if you're not still connecting the journey. Usually we are very happy looking at BLIs and saying hey good job done, you know the BLI has scored well over 200 respondents that have said they have a high recall but I think today technologies exist which can actually connect mutual funds, link it to the consumer journey, make sure that he clicks, doesn't click, follow up to your ad, eventually lead him to the website, even track from the website whether he ended up registering himself buying something and I think which is where there's a clear differentiation but I think very interesting point, very interesting point. Let's move to Shilpa. Traditional the category is growing super important, I think India is learning about the importance of that category. What's your take and how as a brand or as a category I would say are you looking at these two worlds existing especially for a country like ours which is developing, which is growing at a phenomenal pace in terms of digital penetration. Most people don't know we are the second highest app downloading country in the world. It comes as a surprise to most people but we also got population on our side just so you know those numbers are also on our side but we are a fairly well penetrated internet country and when you look at us we also have the cheapest sort of data plans across the world, we are probably the top 10. When you look at your media planning or your marketing planning, how do you try to collate the worlds together? I think couple of interesting perspectives one must be aware of, one is I represent a category which is most under penetrated in the country. 1% of GDP is the amount of insurance that gets sold so look at it from the other side 99% of the population is not yet entered, great upside. Now let's look at the role of media and the role a brand can play in the context of the category. As we understand television and for people who have been in media planning and advertisers have for a very long time understood TV is a laid back medium, digital is a hyperactive medium. Connected television is a sweet support between the two and as marketers you need to be nuanced about what is the role of each of these devices in your overall life and hence the opportunity for advertisers to create some kind of impact. I used to work for a large banking brand where we used to ensure that whenever we did TV print outdoor we used to have the outdoors very close to the chairman's home so that we would ensure him that don't worry when we've advertised we've been there and we've got the money for the returns for the money there but what digital has allowed us to do is put a lot of accountability in the way we spend and I think connected televisions gives you that sweet spot. For anybody in the audience who's used Facebook dashboard for marketers which is a planning tool the kind of normity of attributes available which allows you to get a size of your audience their segments micro segments make cohorts understand lifestyle all of that beauty never existed in the traditional TV world. Now if you combine the nuances that digital allows you to leverage along with the medium like television which is one to many you have a great opportunity to create very compelling advertising provided you understand what's the play for it. It's like many years ago we are in the 5G world today when 3G was being launched I remember being on a panel where one of my co-panelists was a BSNL guy and people were asking why do we need 3G as an advertiser why do we need to be there. The gentleman smiled and said it's availability ours to have. We're not going around telling people what you can do if you feel relevance of that medium go ahead and leverage it but the point is for people like us who are so attention deficient if there's an opportunity to use a large screen medium knowingfully well it's one to many in a hyper connected world the kind of challenges it puts to advertisers and marketers are very different from what we saw 10 years ago. So the way you profile your audience is the role that that medium plays and your opportunity to create compelling content to cater to that need of the audience will be the biggest game changer otherwise you're one among so many who advertise. So I think as a brand today we are very largely metro and city centric but as part of our growth plans we want to go more interiors. If you look at the penetration of CTV and interior markets may not be as good but maybe it becomes a sweet spot in giving us opportunity to talk to the affluent segment within those geographies using this medium. Now if you understand this demographic and psychographic interplay maybe this is the medium for you from an expansion standpoint. Everywhere else you will always have a TV plus digital and interconnected devices as your top of the line plan but unless you understand what each medium's role is in your overall marketing plan you may not get the bank for the buck. One last point is TV for all you know has always been maximized impact digital has always been minimized loss or wastage. These are two ends of the spectrum if you're able to very clearly articulate what the role for CTV is I think we're in a good place. Oh I think very interesting insight Shilpa I think on that the hoarding outside chairman's house I think we've all been there so I resonate it's fine we've all been there but I think good absolute takeaway is one size fits all I think doesn't work in today's world at all actually you know a lot of traditional brands fundamentally also believe that they understand their consumers really really well but sometimes I question them yes you do you spend disproportionate amount of money and understanding your consumer but are you understanding your consumer from an offline lens how we traditionally used to evaluate consumers and are you connecting the dots and saying that digital journeys might be the same actually that's not the case at all I mean on your an average Indian user or female user probably has close to 26 apps on a mobile they'll be very surprised Facebook Instagram YouTube or probably five or six of them there are so many other apps that they're going through India has an ecosystem actually not just India most of the country is developing and develop the gaming ecosystem they have the same amount of female users as compared to male or even fashion has that kind of even fashion a 70 30 split male female but this has got 50 50 so I think our inhibitions of how we look at consumer journeys on digital screens are ways different from how we understand offline so with that I think I want to move to a very interesting gentleman sitting on the fag end of this table and I think he brings a lot of knowledge in terms of content and content creation he has been the pioneer for creating some of the most popular TV source that we have seen across the years Anuj you're now with Dangle and you're creating content which is exciting it's free to air right now but you clearly I'm sure are watching how OTTs are clearly just going mad each large television ecosystem has produced an OTT a very successful one most CROs are saying probably the future of revenues could also be OTTs versus the channel distribution or advertising revenue from channel distribution what are your views from a content standpoint and do you find that space a little bit more liberal and probably more easy accessible and hence largely growing um you're referring to the CTV syndrome well a lot of times people do get confused when I have an OTT I don't need to spend on CTV actually it's not true CTV OTT can be a subset of CTV but yeah CTV is a TV but what are you looking at okay okay so first some some basic facts you know one is of course that if you look at us today okay there's 110 million households that have the CTV there's been a 50% increase in advertising revenue to almost 13 billion dollar in 2021 compared to 20 so one thing is is very definite and I think of course we are a little behind in terms of that percentage but it is something that we are headed towards and therefore it's a reality that even as content creators you have to be very sensitive towards so I think you see so far as the regular television is concerned we all know the rules of the game both from an advertisers perspective as content creators you know in our market largely soaps and comedy are in the GC genre popular and mass brands you know of course advertise on on television where I see an opportunity of course over and above whatever the traditional medium over and above whatever television is already offering in the CTV space is manifold you know one of course is that you get to know as Shilpa nicely said a combination of psychographic and demographic in terms of the audiences you can do target bombing you know very selective sharp audiences they are connected on devices so you know exactly who's watching you know and all of that also I think there is a lot of opportunity for small businesses because sometimes you know here in CTV you can approach only a local market you know Bhagwan Katri center suddenly has an opportunity to create a business model you know which is cost effective and yet can reach very specific targeted you know audiences and doesn't have to advertise on national television right the same thing holds true for the content creators in terms of multiplying his number of advertisers because if along with the regular big guys all these small guys come on board for your CTV offering you know obviously you know one second I also see a very great opportunity in the digital space in terms of you know curating specific content to block competition I'll tell you what I mean by that for example if you have created a bunch of very interesting television sitcoms right and that entire series you have named as Harghar kuch kaita so you have blocked all other paint brands you know by curating that specifically for Asian paints so and because it stays in the library and you're watching it again and again and again it kinds of stays embedded in your mind as a brand you know those are unique opportunities that space kind of throws up for you we at dangle also feel that we have a very unique platform for advertisers because we are we have a dangle play yeah a new app and we have original content being curated for the fd audience and we are the market leaders in that in soaps and all we are kicking off in comedy so if you look at dangle play as a combination you know you have the ott viewers who will come in there you'll have the fd audiences who will come in there so it's a very very unique platform even from that perspective hopefully we'll have a ott play on your channel soon of course of course let's make that weightage a little bit more serious trai data nine million wired subscribers added in the last two years nine million wired subscribers added in the last two years we were all in cobit and if you were all working if you didn't have wifi i don't know how you're working so that's called regimentalization so the number of wifi is increased in the ecosystem hence the usage of connected tv mean broadband speeds this is ukla increased by 25 20.5 percent 5g revolution is on the cards everybody's talking about it growth of smart tv sales increased by 93 percent uh the total number of tv sold in quarter three 2022 was all smart tv's close to 93 percent of them are smart tv's i don't know what were the other seven i don't know when was the last time we also a box tv probably you know ad somewhere but devices that are accessible to make your tv into a smart tv are less than 3000 rupees you can also just click a button on flipkart amazon any of these sites get your tv installed the next day and these are probably all these factors and there are close to 45 plus ott channels today that means the availability of content you know that you want to probably watch and at a price point that you want to watch is quite accessible hence marketers need to take notice like i said it's small but it surely packs a punch uh we have limited time and i think a couple of questions that i would like to ask at least this marketing panel is what do you think when you think of creating and measuring impact just a broad question and when you look at combining the force of offline and digital where do you really feel and i think we live in an era today where some of the brands are digital first they never went on tv at all and they are fairly large recognizable brands because the consumer india has got 700 million internet users so probably we have a very high internet penetration and i think smartphone is not really a tier one tier two phenomena everybody has a smartphone you know if you go to the smallest list they have a smartphone the success of tiktok was obviously in india was a big testament of that they did 210 million monthly active users in one year what probably a lot of brands could not and this is pure smartphone penetration how are you guys looking at your media plans and shilpa you can go first i i wanted to share a quick anecdote just as an illustrative example i have a father who's 88 uh what he looks forward to in an average week is going to the bank because for him it's a day away from home and it's a day to meet a lot of people because he doesn't get to do that otherwise he loves to the to go to the bank and get his passport updated or get a request for a checkbook i've been a banker all my life and whenever there was this huge temptation to digitize everything was always guided by this principle for people of that age group going to the bank is something to look forward to that part of the ecosystem must continue to remain the way it is there is no reason to change that there is the other end of the spectrum who wants everything in the digital format so i have a son who's 19 who tells me why should we have to choose between this or that can it not be this and that that's true for advertisers too why do i need to choose between this or that why are they trade-offs depending on who i'm servicing or who i'm serving if i'm serving an 80-year-old maybe the choice may still be traditional television if i'm talking to an audience of today who is so hard-pressed for time and time is a function of priority i may choose more new age mediums to be able to make some some semblance of what they want so i think it's a good mix of what works keeping in mind who we want to serve if a significant chunk of your primary audience is glued to one format that will necessarily mean higher weightage in your media plan the long tail may still continue but in my mind both will happily coexist. Anyone else? Puneet, Sameer, Pandya? Yeah i mean it's the audience we go for and not a particular medium and each medium has its own limitations like why 80 percent of the audience if i'm looking at is only the you know the domestic or the international travels we have a huge presence in at airport but just being at the airport never gave us the kind of sales which we saw now because of our holistic campaign like we achieved 25 percent of our yearly business sale in just one month you know so because we had a holistic presence on tv connected to airports in a manner everything so and each medium like a cinema can give you like a huge impact while digital can give you like really the eye view of detailing and tv can give you the reach or airport can give you engagement impact and reach so each medium has its own advantage and one should use it from the customer or audience point of view and take that call. Yeah what is relevant for my consumer basically at the end of the day what is it that my consumer is consuming and if i want to reach that what is the optimal way of doing it. Sameer Puneet any POVs measuring impact and achieving scale? So see not not so much about impact but definitely about scale i think the last two minutes you know the panel has spoken about it's mostly about the audience that you go for etc. I come from a brand where the consumer the average buyer tends to be slightly older versus let's say the average age of buyers for a lot of digital first brands so if let's say for example you're targeting 16 to 25 year olds you're targeting the so-called youth or now Gen Z it is maybe all right and adequate for you to stick to digital alone at least tell a certain amount of scale but if you're already you're also catering to a lot of mature audiences in the mix you have to go on television it is still the single largest reach medium in the country and you know i'd make a last point about we've spoken about you know the growth of connected TV etc it is bound to grow we we cannot stop it it is on a growth trajectory and it will continue to grow the numbers may be debated upon okay we'll reach this milestone in a year in two years etc but it's growing and it's an established fact and at some point in time where i can't put a number of years to that but it will possibly be close to as big as television also in India but i think in terms of advertiser interest i see fundamentally two ways you know advertiser interest on ctv growing a like i initially pointed out a lot of slab in the linear TV media plan is being cut will get cut and that money will be flowed to ctv and be also i think earlier when people used to plan digital video campaigns they used to start with planning for mobile first deploying money is there and then whatever is left over they might just add some bit of connected tv is key actually you know token to be honest but yeah it used to have a token presence in the digital video media media plan i think that's changing and what we have been doing and i see going forward a lot of people will also start doing that is that particularly in the digital video space as an advertiser we start deploying monies on connected tv's first and then whatever is left in the kitty we then think of what we can do on the mobile device because we know that even within the digital space while the audience may or may not be somewhat the same they react very differently to a message coming from a big screen it is a sound that fills the entire room and there's a lot of co-viewing happening also right and when you are sitting with other people of your family let's say having dinner and watching something you do have conversations about it the recall is far higher on mobile it is very easy for you to sort of switch off mentally but it it's not extremely very easy it's the sound is filling up the entire room so yeah i see within the digital space also it connected tv competing increasingly with the mobile device also for the share of monies we're running out of time so i think i'll just wrap it up i think we have one last thing that i wanted to do and it's called the rapid fire round obviously i'm not going to do it as good as the man who does it really well and i don't think a4m is having those fancy hamper but you'll have to just live with it i'm going to go with you and these questions are out of syllabus so i'll probably put you in a spot future of your network's revenues five years down the line offline advertising revenues or online very robust sorry very robust okay shilpa where did you see india versus uh news land where shubhman gill scored 200 on an ctv or the star sports channel always interesting answers people will make notes when he chat gpt replacing marketing creativity or it's just a fad which we just should ignore right now too early to comment but i would say should be supportive okay radhya all mediums will coexist all platforms will coexist you said mobile first it is still very much important you know so you can't have ctv money going to mobile first or mobile first money going to the ctv each has a different objective so all will coexist it'll become an advertiser it's really very difficult fantastic very rapid last samir you can't skip it you're a part of the panel so everybody is talking about global recession are they seeing going to be marketing budget cuts this year for policy bizarre it's gonna be the usual um so especially for the period that we are in this is q4 of the financial year this is the time a lot of people buy insurance we've been very very aggressive with the marketing and we are seeing very very positive consumer response also thankfully these are positive signs also for the economy so let's hope this continues oh people are taking notes man to connect after this meeting that's us i think we are up by five minutes but thank you if anyone has any questions please feel free to reach out after the panel or thank you thank you so much after that great conversation ladies and gentlemen it has to be a warm around of applause for all our panelists thank you so much nikhil thank you so much for moderating on that note if i may have the honor of re-inviting the chief revenue officer of time's network mr gaurav davan to kindly join us and help us in the felicitations could we have the felicitations done please mr davan with every conversation rekindling our knowledge sharing their expertise it's all happening at the e4m tv first conference right here at mumbai thank you once again to all our panelists punit pradneya samir shilpa anuj nikhil if i may request all our esteemed panelists to step forward yes please let the conversations continue but just to step forward for a group photograph making it easier for photographers to get that perfect moment our final panel discussion for the day of the e4m tv first conference right here in mumbai thank you so much and once again a big big thank you so ladies and gentlemen on that note firstly my humble gratitude to all of you you've been a fabulous audience with that we request you to please uh read so it's going to be time for the prime time 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