 keynote address. Here is an experienced and passionate leader who brings over 30 years of experience helping clients across a wide range of categories, building brands and unlocking growth. His expertise lies in the conversions of media, technology and creativity, equipping clients to navigate change, disruption and transformation and engage their key consumers. A true global citizen, John has worked across international markets and brings a nuanced understanding of different cultures and the unique challenges and opportunities facing established and emerging markets. A true business partner, he has dedicated his career to solving challenges on behalf of the world's leading marketers and new establishment brands. He is the global brand president for Stockholm worldwide. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming John Sheehy, who will talk us through delivering, who will actually talk us on the topic here with us. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope all of you are ready. Please put your hands together. He'll be talking on the great opportunity leveraging human resources, experiences and reinvention in COVID rationary times. Ladies and gentlemen, we have with us Mr. John Sheehy. Hey, everybody. It's great to be able to join you. Who would have thought six months ago we'd be doing this? So thank you, Exchange for Media. It shows that you are adapting and changing your model quickly and this is just a great opportunity. I also want to thank Suparna, who reminded me during her presentation that I have an upcoming anniversary, so we should all support Titan, make sure we do our bit to take care of the ones that make us look good. So really excited to be here. The goal for me today is really personally to take out the learning and insights that are coming out through these presentations, but reality is turning those into business building initiatives. So as I put together my sharepiece today, I wanted to make sure that there is some clarity in terms of things that we can think about, but importantly things that we can do. And I'm going to jump into that in one second here. So let me pull up and share my screen. Technical difficulty, believe it or not. Here we go. Okay, can everybody see that screen? I'm going to ask that we put on the power point. If you can go ahead and do that for me. Just kidding, your head's up when we're able to do that. Why don't we, if you guys can pull up that screen? Let me get started. So everybody, John Shee, I am the global Starcom president. What I'm going to do today is, you know, only six months ago I was in India. And as I mentioned, everything's changed since then. I remember taking a flight back in February. And by the time I was able to land, get acclimated, the US had gone into a shutdown. And ultimately we saw that come out across the world. If you can go to the next page, sorry guys, technical difficulty. But anyways, as a human experience company, one of the things that we're most focused on is answering the question of what should we do next by looking at the consumer. And we do that by looking at what we call desire lines. Desire lines for us is what we come to recognize as consumers being messy, unpredictable, doing things, and saying things that, if you can go to the next page, and desire lines are what we do in terms of, if you go to page two, believe it or not, we rehearse this, folks. Desire lines are what we do is we try and uncover across category and brands what people are actually doing. And we call desire lines an urban planning. They often plan out a park to go down straight past, but we often see our consumers take their own path. And we call these desire lines. And what we're doing across StarCom, for all our categories across all our markets and our brands, are taking a close look at the consumer and looking at where their desire lines are shifting and what behaviors are taking place and what we have to do in order to combat those. So in terms of the focus today, I'm going to talk about desire lines and then the three things that we're doing to make sure that we're looking and following the consumer as we look to make sure that we are delivering. As you can see on the screen now, that's what I'm referring to as desire lines. And we see those across different categories and different brands. If you go to the next page, so I'm going to go off screen guys. So really what I want to talk to you about is I think today is probably we could call it 2020 is the year the greatest disruption. And that's certainly taken an impact. And we've all gone through phase one in COVID where we are both adjusting and getting fit for purpose, whether it's media and messaging. We've gone through a phase two of COVID where we're responding. As we saw in the Titan presentation, we're reacting to the changes of consumer habits, behaviors, rituals. And importantly, we're seeing a third phase of this, which I think is probably the most important one. And that's the recessionary pressure we're all going to get into. Back in 08 and 09 when we saw the recessionary pressure, government spent over a trillion to help put the spend back in the economies to get things turned out in the right way. Now we're seeing already $10 trillion spent in terms of trying to combat the disruption that's taking place. And that's going to have a big knock on effect. So part of what I'm going to share today isn't just about COVID, but it's really about the future in terms of what we should experience and how we're going to win and create the new business models to deal with not just COVID, but the recessionary forces that are upon us already. And so with that, I think we're going to pivot from the greatest disruption that we're likely to see in our careers to certainly the greatest opportunities of 2021 and beyond. And so I'm going to leave you with three things today, three things that we are doing that we're working with clients to do in all markets across all categories and across all brands. If you can go to the next slide. The first thing that we're doing is we are leaning into a fast learning culture. And that's a critical aspect that I think everyone has talked about today. And I'm going to share some thoughts on how we're doing that. Next slide, please. The second thing that we're doing is leaning into digital speed. And we're going to talk about what fuels digital speed. And I would argue that two of the critical things that we're seeing and applying is both data and technology to move faster in a more agile way and a more transformative way. And I'm going to talk about what we're doing to help with digital speed. And the last area that I'm going to focus on is really how to read the reinvention mindset. How are you going to go from a world that is temporary closed to an opportunity that is right ahead of us? So learn fast culture, digital speed and ready to invent. So let's talk about the learn fast culture first. If we can go to the next slide. Sorry for all the delays. What do I mean by learn fast culture? First of all, and it's been highlighted today, we are seeing unprecedented changes in consumer behavior, habits and rituals that are taking place now and will continue to take place. How many people here have a child in school? We're over the last five months. You've had to manage a career, turn a bedroom into a school situation, manage learning online, and that's starting again as we get deeper into this. Who's had to, whether it's for your family or for yourself, take on board medicine. Whether that's virtually seeing a doctor or trying to get self-help by doing different learnings. Same thing goes for media consumption, the amount of streaming, OTT. We've seen it in the shopping space with commerce. Who know, there wasn't even a word for what's happened now with contactless delivery. And we're seeing unprecedented shifts in every category and every market across all these brands. And so those that are going to win are going to be able to change your business so they can sense and respond in real time and unpacking this and really staying close to these desire lines that are shifting is what's going to make the difference to be able to deliver the experiences that brands need and deliver both the business outcome and the human outcomes we're looking for. So the three things I'm going to share with you are what we're doing with clients. These are not my phrases. These are the actions that we've codified and we're finding tremendous success in that are going to do us well in this current environment and certainly moving ahead to what is going to be a tough economic environment. So learn fast culture. If we go to the next slide, if you could skip two ahead, I've talked about and people have talked with you today about the shopping behaviors, the behaviors that are shifting everywhere. So what are we going to do about it? There's two things that I would focus on. The first and thing number one is what we are calling the ability to look at insights in real time. We went back to the last recession and there was a good question asked in the last recession which was who's going to lead us out of this recession? Fast forward 10 years to 2020 as we were experiencing great economic growth before this and we would say that the millennials had changed every category, had embraced technology to create new paths, new desire lines, and that the brands that were winning were those that could adjust the quickest. The brands that were losing often were those that were well established. They were being challenged in new ways. It took them longer to adapt. But what we're finding now is that the opportunity it's a new playing field. And so what we're doing is for our clients whether it's a weekly cadence, a bi-weekly cadence, or monthly cadence, we're looking at through data, through learning and framing up in what we call five and 30. Five insights and 30 minutes sharing with key stakeholders with our clients and those insights that are coming through are coming at the category level, at the culture level, at the competitive level, at the learning level that's going on across categories. And so that's setting the frame as you saw with Titan about the adjustments that are being made. But that's just the thinking. That's just the insight part. The most important part of the five and 30 process is the separate session which is where we turn those insights into action. And so in five and 30 minutes we're getting together with our senior clients and we're talking about how can we pivot from the insights into actions, whether that's standing up a direct to commerce capability in two weeks, whether that's looking at doing a new creative campaign and concert with other agency partners, client partners, whether that's looking at product innovation, bigger pack sizes as people focus on core or different ways to engage people as I talked about the streaming. So this five and 30 concept I'd share with you so that you can steal with, take my word for it, but it's really a coalition that's bringing clients, agency partners, business partners together to go from thinking to doing and rapid succession. I think every business model that was created prior to COVID can be torn up and reimagined. And I think at the heart of that has to be some way to have speed and insight to action. So that's how we learn fast culture at Starcom and how we do that with our clients. It's simple, it's effective, it's energizing, it promotes better decision making, faster decision making, that's five and 30. Let's go to the second area. As I mentioned, importantly during this time of change, we need to enact digital speed. And as I suggested there's two ways to drive digital speed. The first way as the next chart will suggest is by underpinning and leveraging data in more significant ways. And by this, data has a maturity index across all different markets. We know that, we know that clients within clients, what more and more the greatest advantage that we have is being able to leverage data for us. That's why we acquired Epsilon over a year ago. So that we could, in addition to the walled gardens, in addition to our clients data, in addition to retail data, we had a way to look at the consumer and audiences with more precision against more variables, looking at behavior, looking at attitudes in a more definitive high definition way. And that's what I call identity. So the first part about data, if we want to move fast, is looking at our audiences. For example, one CPG manufacturer, we've been able to identify the number of households that have come into the category. We've broken down those households both in terms of penetration and frequency. And we've identified what's driving the growth. Ironically, in the category that's so old, in this one, it's actually boomers who are driving the growth. Sure, households are kids, which is important for this, is important. But we're also seeing subcohorts that are also driving that. And with greater precision and audience understanding, we now know who we're going after, better insights. The second thing with data is we have the ability to design these experience with greater fidelity and greater nuance and greater scale. And again, data allows us to do that across whether it's traditional and digital all the way through, which we know now is commerce, which has become a very critical part about delivering on that consumer desire line. And lastly, and the great thing now is that we can launch and learn. We don't have to, I think as some people say, crawl, walk and run. We are now able to measure with more agility and more fast-paced twitch muscles, as what I call it, to be able not only optimize media, but also messaging. It's a promise that we have to embrace. And over the last six months, we've seen the acceleration in this space exponential, despite challenges of privacy and everything else. And we know in a world of uncertainty that if you want to go fast, underpin it with better data and use that data to greater effort. Nextly, digital speed is also, I think, fueled by tech. And while the last example was talking about how we're building brands and categories, I'm going to share within the pubesist group what we've done to accelerate our tech platform to democratize our thinking and our agility on behalf of our clients. That's our global platform called Marcel. Marcel is connected on the onset of COVID to about 5,000 people. He's now connected to over 60,000 people within pubesist soon to be connected to 80,000 people. And by connected, I don't mean that we just are all on the same platform. We're connected in terms of being able to take briefs across markets, leverage expertise in a more scaled way to deliver business solutions for our clients, and even our agency. In fact, in India, the creative team from Leo Burnett used a Marcel gig, as we call it, to go ahead and provide an idea that was later delivered across Europe, using technology to go faster and find different ways to find value through people, and through engagement of people and greater connectivity has been a tremendous unlock for us, something that we would still be doing now at a slow pace. But now we've unlocked it quickly, and we're unlocking the benefits for our clients and our people at the pace at which we now find to be that new digital speed. So again, first thing, let's develop five and 30 thinking and doing. Secondly, let's make sure that's underpinned by data and technology to move fast. And then thirdly, and I want to spend a little bit of time here, I think it's been tremendous, you know, we see how exchange for media has put together this conference in a virtual world who would have thought we've seen examples from all the clients now. But a lot of the language and a lot of the focus has been about COVID. And what I'd like to do as part of reimagining that business model is underpin that last one beyond COVID. And let's talk a little bit about recession readiness, and what we're doing again across markets, across clients, across brands and categories, is there's a tremendous amount of learning from the last recession, but we know that's not going to be the same for this one. There's underpinning principles that apply. But the audience, the technology, the spaces, the competition, culture, global, local economies, they've all changed. So what are we going to do to put ourselves in a greater position for 2021 and beyond? Because we know that the recession lasts longer than we anticipate. But in that is a tremendous opportunity for brands. So if we can go ahead to the next page, we've put together through learning and partnerships with an agency, with clients and some of the other industry leaders, a recession readiness scorecard that really looks across three variables, agility, disruption, and brand equity. Agility is how easy is it for your brand to pivot based on its current situation. I think Titan was a great example of looking at the emotional needs, not sticking to its old model, finding new moments that mattered, being able to use agile delivery to get the message out there, being able to deliver that in different ways. Not everyone can be that agile, but we have to have an honest assessment for all our clients and brands. And that's what the first space is all about. How agile, how ready are you in this space? Secondly, it's about disruption. How prone to disruption or how disrupted is your brand? Again, we might have been on the back foot with some of our clients and we might have been disrupting, but the environment today and the environment tomorrow with our scale and differences and ability to pivot would suggest that we can be the disruptors and we're seeing that happen. We also know that other competition is going to come in direct and indirect and also try and do that. So the question is, on a scale, how disrupt or how vulnerable are you? And the last one is brand equity. Studies show that brands that go in strong come out stronger if they react first, if they react with decisive and big bets. So it's looking at your brand equity, strong, weak and different and really trying to make sure that we know our starting point and from this moment forward getting all three of these things aligned. So what we're doing is we've created a workshop on the following page that really drills down and spends some time, if nothing else, helping people think through what are the right questions to ask? How are we bringing together different parts of the organization in different ways? Examples of this would be how we've integrated e-commerce, shopper right into the brand, brand planning system, a lot of brands, a lot of clients are siloed from an agency standpoint. How are we pulling together different parts of our group offering to making more dynamic teams? Is our proposition today strong enough for tomorrow? Have we planned for scenarios, taken an account, what we expect to see shifts? Are we going to make the category penetration gains permanent? You know, I wish I had a dollar for every question which is, you know, what's going to stay and what's going to go? The answer is in a world of uncertainty, there's going to be some bets we're going to have to place. How do we get smart about what those bets look like? And lastly, be fast. What does it take to be more real time with data analytics? Who do we have to bring together? What partnership ecosystems? So again, all technical difficulties aside, I'm going to sum up follow the consumer. We know they're unpredictable and messy. However, we have the capability to understand where their desire lines are going. And with that tension between what consumer wants and brand needs, better fill the void and do that better than our competition. Secondly, in order to succeed, we got to rip up the business model of the past and reinvent the new one. I would humbly suggest there's three things we need to do, learn fast culture, understand what digital speed really is and get there before our competition does, make the big bets. And lastly, right now is the biggest opportunity we'll have in our careers and disruption is always a catalyst for winners to do something different for those that can pivot faster, first, best, and so get ready for the recession. Great quote to end this. As we charge towards the first global disease driven recession of the modern era, the brands that survive will be those that reinvent their business models for this uncertain future. So my apologies for the technical difficulties up front. I think I've practiced that four times. It would have happened. That said, some very fundamental things that we're putting in action now that are paying off already for ourselves at StarCom, the human experience company, and our clients, which are doing this on a global scale, market by market, category by category, brand by brand. Thank you for Exchange for Media for the opportunity to be inspired to learn and then also to take away and come up with business building initiatives. This is a great forum. It's start to my day, but the end of day one. So I'm here to take any questions you may have over to the audience. Thank you, John. That was a wonderful presentation. And we do have some questions that have come in. And in fact, I'm just going to take few of them because of the paucity of time. But the question here says, you touched on a lot of new consumer behaviors. How much of those behaviors do you think are here to stay versus just indicative of our COVID moment? Right. So like I said, if I had a dollar for that question, I'd be a rich man not in six months. So I do want to add before I answer questions, I did try and get that sonic ID. So if you want to borrow that one, Tequila, that's fine by me. The question is a great question. I think we're going to answer that category or category brand by brand and market by market. We are seeing consumer desire lines form habits form. Some look like they're going to be around for a long time. The answer lies in using the best data we can to look at and then to monitor those. That's why we're going to week to week insights. We learned last time in millennial generation, we weren't sharp enough in our insights. We weren't persistent in following the change. We didn't react fast enough. And that's why categories were disrupted, not by the big brands offer, but by those brands that came up. And so the playing field's leveled now. And so what I would suggest is those that are looking at their category culture, competitive ideas from outside their world and bringing those on and ongoing are going to be the ones that identify those sticky new habits, capitalize on the fleeting habits, and then ultimately create the new habits. And I don't care what category is, that's the opportunity. So don't just think about it, get out there and do. We get stuck in doing things how we did them in the past. And as this is a digital tech conference, really it's about and world. I remember when I started 10 years ago in the media world, 90% of the money was going through traditional pipes. Only five years ago, we were at 30, 40%. And India was lower than that. And then if I look at where we're going now, we have data, we have dynamic content, and we have commerce. We have to put all those pieces together. It's not a binary world. It's an and world. So don't just see those things coming react to it so that you can create, retain those users that have come in your category. That's wonderful. I'm sure a lot of people have taken great insights from your presentation and with this answer. John, we have another question, which is about the topic that you touched upon, the digital speed. So it's a two-part question, which says, what are some of the mistakes that organizations make when trying to build digital speed? And what are some of the data and tech fundamentals that brands need to enable digital speed? Right. Hopefully, we're making a lot of mistakes. Because if we are, that means we're trying things and doing things. The biggest mistake is not being focused. Again, I think we have to divine a new business roadmap. We got to put some big bets down. Those big bets should be directly related to your brand, to your category, to your capabilities. So I would say let's just be purposeful because we want to make mistakes. It's the only way in this world that we're going to get ahead. What are people doing to answer the second part is I think it goes to that mentality that they're bringing together different parts of their organization, different parts of their ecosystem to solve these new problems. We're seeing it in the advertising business, whether it's people bringing, clients bringing things in-house. That's fine. We can be there as a consult to do that. We can be there as you start to grow and do that. We can see that we're bringing what in to do data, data maturity indexes across all the markets, commerce maturity indexes across all the markets, digital maturity indexes. So what we're being asked for is help us understand our starting point and then with your experience and our experience about what does the roadmap look like? Again, market by market, whether it's a global or local agenda, category by category, brand by brand. So make mistakes, but make sure you're not only thinking hard, but you're doing. Absolutely. So more doing than thinking. I think that's the mantra I take from your presentation, John. Thank you so much for sharing this space with us, sharing your time and insightful presentation with us. Thank you so very much. Awesome, guys. I'll leave you with the digital sonic idea if I can. Give me one second. I know you guys are going to go enjoy some tequila. Here we go. All right, guys. Have a great day. Thank you, John. Thank you for keeping the presentation and the start and end of it so upbeat as well. Thank you once again.