 Good afternoon. I think Sam has covered everything in such detail that my presentation might as well, I could just as well skip it. But a boss of mine in Unilever used to say many years ago that there is something common between butter, budgets and knowledge or dhyan as he called it. He says the lesser you have the more you spread. So with that thing in mind, I think the little that I know about out of home, I will share with you today. Presentations broadly in two parts. The first part I'll cover from an advertising continuum standpoint, I think Sam was making the same point, that it's rarely that people make decisions based on one kind of stimulus or consumption of one type of media. Usually you are continuously getting stimulus from all nature of media from a variety of channels and much of that sinks to the back of your mind. And then when you are in the mode of making a decision, everything starts to come back to mind. And I have noticed, I began life in 1999 with Hindustan Leaver and over the years I have noticed that I think deliberately marketeers as well as agency partners have overdone the rationale and the logical part of it. And I think they have started giving, I would say second hand treatment to the magic and the creativity and the value of building grand ideas on a large canvas. So that's really what I'll attempt to do. Let's see now. Sam was mentioning Japan, meanwhile I'll figure out how to use this clicker. But the only one occasion I had there, if Japan is at 12% as Sam was mentioning, I would not be surprised if it's also the most technologically intensive out of home because if you are in any doubt try and use a flush toilet in a Japanese hotel room, you'll know you need to have a BTEC and comm science to be able to do that. Okay. So the first thing I wanted to say was the oldest form of advertising that we encounter every day that's on all your tables is a flower. Pollinating flowers have been around for 30 million years and bees have been around for 30 million years as well. And the reason why evolution has created a flower is to be able to attract the bees so that they can get nectar and they pollinate. So the very reason there is a vast diversity of colors and of types of petals and of the combinations with which a flower emerges is actually advertising in its most pristine form. Now the question is what happens if a bee goes to a flower and discovers there's not much nectar there whereas they've done the job for pollination. The short answer is the bees will discover this and will stop going again. So no matter how grand and how attractive your advertising is at the end of the day it has to be a reciprocal arrangement and so I think corporate life and human society in general is very similar to a beehive and I think pollinating flowers are the representation of what is attractive in advertising but it's also that when there is an investment there has to be a return and this shortcut in terms of why targeting is important is again like I said we have over rationalized and we have over optimized for what has worked for us in the recent past and we sometimes forget that the grandness of out of home of which I have traditionally been a believer is something that creates magic and it cannot be decoded with logic. When I was a young summer trainee in Hindustan liver I used to have a venerable group born unionized salesman Bhagwan Singh his name was he was an ex-army man which was a rarity and in Bangalore I was working on a project for Kisan at the time they had proliferated a number of brands Tom Chi, Tom Imli and so on and he told me that you know we should put large hoardings across Bangalore and I was a freshly minted MBA and I said you know why why it's an attribution me or whatever I told him something like that he said yes but you see you look up to the brand and it's larger than life and I think after so many years I think back to what he told me and I think there is deep logic in what he was saying once the brand makes you look up to it once there is grandness I think a lot of what follows is just decision science there is a reason why we happily go to a restaurant but we differ when we go to a hand card is because that upfront investment that they have made in putting together an air conditioned hall in hiring a chef and so on and so forth most of the times that I eat off a hand card or street food actually turns out to be a lot tastier than what I get at large hotels but the reason why your decision making is easy when it comes to large investments is because there is a commitment upfront and I see a few young men and women here the same thing works when you are proposing right try to do it with a very small diamond and you will see upfront commitment signals the depth of the relationship and also that you intend to stick to it so there is some logic in the largeness of the medium okay it's going back for some reason I need help with this just so that you think I'm not a neanderthal there is only one arrow and it points backwards so I don't know what to do with it they have abandoned me alright meanwhile let me continue to talk to you about the other part which I wanted to speak about was this which is you know there is in the markets that are intensively contested for by out of home advertising there is a superfluous amount of messaging that's happening at every available nook and cranny so the point is people very often say it may be effective but it is not efficient and here again I have been thinking about this and I have a feeling that we firstly very synonymously use these words conversationally and secondly we tend to rank efficiency above effectiveness because the marketer has to talk to the finance person he has to talk to the sales person he has to show results and to my mind it is myopic to think about the short term efficiency at the cost of the larger effectiveness which may not work through in numbers let me give you an example efficiency is a matter which can be downloaded onto an excel sheet and in our line of work and I keep some of my team members are here I keep telling them you should try and use effective jargon because the challenge with marketing is our business is done in sunshine and it's spoken in ordinary English so the guy who comes with the excel sheet intimidates everybody in the room saying oh my God he has all the results now and there is no way in which a creative logic imagine trying to contest an ROI which is detailed out to the last penny we spent with a story board it doesn't work that way some creative people have to go to rational people and get their sign off but vice versa happens very rarely have you ever heard a CFO telling a finance person to go and say I like your excel sheet but go to some creative people and bounce it off them and see what they say I think some wacky ideas might help your return it doesn't happen that way it's a one way road and so therefore efficiency has been rated much higher than effectiveness and I think that is an incorrect posture to take why do I say that? because when you are being efficient you are forced to look to the past you are forced to look to a rhythmical model you are looking at rational constructs which logically everybody can solve for so if logic was winning the battle and magic was peripheral then every logical person should build a great brand but we know that doesn't happen it doesn't happen in significant theaters of human activity say you were just to pick up on the example of romance the most efficient way to go on a date is to go to a cheap restaurant to share the cab fare and to talk about work but that will not be a successful date because the effective way is to show commitment by making it a special evening in say if you are in a battlefield and the most efficient way was to use a sniper now you have to be elevated you have to be able to see the enemy instead people rely on artillery bombardment which isn't technically the most effective the most efficient way of going about it but it's effective because a sniper's bullet has to see you square in the eyepiece and hit you in the middle of your eyes whereas a bomb if it's a big bomb and an idea is like a bomb even if it lands two or three hundred meters here or there it will still do the job so I think effectiveness has been compromised by this collusion or this over emphasis on rationalization impact advertising to my mind is a bit like that if you see a lot of grand creative expression it starts to sink to the back of your mind but then it starts to crystallize there and I have worked in Alcobev worked in financial services and in FMCG and all of those cases the time cycles and the decision frameworks may be different but broadly there is a deep evolutionary signature to this when people are unsure they do two things either they continue to do things that they have known of in the past so I had that green liquid and I didn't die green liquids are safe to consume or if on that given day I can't find a green liquid then I look around me and if everybody is having the purple liquid and surviving then it's safe to have the purple liquid so there is a large evolutionary logic to going for things that are larger than life I was presenting recently to our board and I told them that when I get any kind of escalation from consumers they always write I didn't think this could happen with Tata so even though we are Tata Motors and commercial vehicles conversationally they tell each other Tata Ki Gadi and so everything that they think positively about 155 years of leadership with trust country building, integrity, pioneering all of that distills through in every vehicle they are buying and so it's a very important point that let's go away from the microscope and start to look at things through a telescope I got it now I have understood what you need to do now the other thing is signaling and the whole concept of dual audiences it works in two ways one is when I am not concerned I am still an audience member of the audience because it's addressing the universe and the other is when I am the recipient of a message which is most relevant to me and it happens to all of us if you are looking to buy a car all that you will see is car advertising if you are looking to sell your apartment all you are wanting to do is to find brokers or people who are wanting to buy an apartment now the way it ladders up is those people who are not the directly interested audience but are in the universe once they are immersively soaked in the idea that this is a brand worthy of respect that it must be a big deal to them which is why they are putting up hoardings everywhere or it is a big deal to them which is why I see the television ad reflected in print and then I see the print ad in a mutant way up on an outdoor hoarding then that signals to them that you are serious contenders that it is worthy of respect and trust and trust building can happen only with largeness let me give you a parallel example when I got married my grandfather who was a very social person in a feudal mindset in Rajasthan for nine days before I got married every day I had to accompany him to meet some old colonel or journal and he would go and say you know my grandson is getting married and you please come and I said you know if you send them a card or make them a phone call they'll still come but he said no no it tells them that we are delighted it's an important social occasion and it is for social reciprocation they came home when their children were getting married it behoves upon me to go when you are getting married and in this context I was thinking about it yesterday you know you don't go and get married at everybody's house my grandfather didn't say you have come to your house let's do it here and then we'll go to the next place you get married at one place you call everybody there and that is the addressing of the universal set and this is pretty similar to what advertising at scale is trying to achieve and you know while I am an equal adorer of digital advertising I find that this measurement before creative is like putting the card before the horse in my opinion and this is by the way not true only of advertising money any resource that is scarce inside a company if a brand matters to you you will put the best people on it you know if there is a scarcity of money you will prioritize and ring fence that budget if you find creative you know which can do humor rarely and if you are you know if you are intending to do a very humorous line of advertising it signals to people it matters to them and that's what I think out of home achieves another thing that I wanted to and soon I will come to the out of home part which will then get done very quickly like I said Sam has told you everything about it you see in our line of work as a marketer I am saying this and it's true for advertising just as much unlike economics or physics or many other lines where there are universal laws in marketing there are no universal laws in fact very often in sciences they say it works in theory let's experiment and see if it works in practice in marketing in my experience very often it turns out that what was not intended works out in practice and then you say how the hell does this work in theory let me figure it out and if you are doing that you are on to something good you are on to something which others are not doing and you must put that under a microscope now imagery like I said all imagery all stimulus gets consciously absorbed but subconsciously triggered in fact after 24 years in this business my belief is that consumers are by and large subconsciously driven and our active mind is like a lawyer we are trying to post fact to rationalize why we took those decisions and if you look back in your life if you are changing a geyser you will talk to people who recently bought you might talk to your building superintendent so on and so forth but in decisions of which line of work to choose which company to join which person to marry which holiday to take many of these things are purely subconsciously suggested to you which you then all your life consciously rationalize then I did this because of these reasons the reasons are being suggested to you after the impulse has arrived now let me pick up at random these examples let's take life boy life boy through the 20th century more people in India had access to life boy which was a leaky red colored metabolic soap then had access to tap water or electricity or toilets and frankly it went from being a problem solution brand a body order brand to being a germicidal soap to being a mission brand which is saving lives any soap that you wash your hands with will broadly do the same job but it is because of the power of associations for decades they ran life boy which is now preserved as a musical note at the end of their advertising and it became an iconic brand and it remains an iconic brand let's take the case of Nespresso can I get a bottle of water please Nespresso which I discovered in some of my journeys abroad first if you take the coffee powder that Nespresso uses and if it was sold like a Nestle jar I would certainly die of a heart attack given the kind of price it would be but a Nespresso machine costs you 10 to 15,000 rupees and that pod last that I checked costs you about 80 to 100 rupees so if you're having five cups of coffee over five years the average price would be in the ballpark of 70 to 80 rupees a pod now your mental framework is comparing it to Starbucks or an expensive barista and then you feel like wow you know this is something which is great because the quality is not compromised and I'm actually ending up saving a hell of a lot of money take the case of Red Bull if as a marketer I was given a brief that we need to quickly take share from Coke or Pepsi what would we have done if I made syndicates in this room and said I'll come back after half an hour let's deliberate on how to take aggressive share gain from a Coke or Pepsi I can bet you the sequencing may be different but broadly the answers would be make an excellent formulation that tastes better than Coke and Pepsi give it at a price which is cheaper than Coke and Pepsi and give it in a serving size which is higher than Coke and Pepsi the rational mind will tell you deliver greater value and deliver better quality but Dietrich Matashitz who was a middle-aged Austrian tourist roaming around in Thailand tasted what is hyper caffeinated some people find it obnoxious and he said wow I will license this product he goes back to western Europe gives it in a can roughly half the size of Coke at a price roughly double the price of Coke or Pepsi and since 1987 he has sold 100 billion cans last year they sold 12 billion cans they own a formula one team they made a man jump from space to earth if this was being done with logic you know it wouldn't get done and a lot of this advertising rationalization works in exactly the same way and I am not opposed to method purity I am not opposed to return on investment in fact my life depends on it but I am saying between the short and the medium term and between the large term between the immediate impact and the larger impact we must own this dialogue and as marketers we must go to our management committees to our boards and aggressively ask for doing the right thing last but not the least everybody knows this case you know a copywriter and an art director at DDB got a brief for a small awkward looking ugly car which had a Nazi pedigree in post-war America and this was a time when big was beautiful in America you know they used to sell the Lincoln Continental the Cadillac and the Ford Thunderbird and Helmut Krone came up with think small so they completely changed the dialogue on the category code and sometimes when you are doing disruptive things when you are doing things which are going against received wisdom you need a canvas that can justify that splash or that impact and I think Out of Home provides that so now let me stick to my business what are the problems in the commercial vehicles industry it's a very large industry in India it's a bedrock of the economy every part you know the LPG cylinders that you get at home this water came to this hotel the construction material that built this hotel carpeting everything here arrived on the back of a commercial vehicle commercial vehicle businesses are highly rational the consumers are business people but our category has made a presumption that the consumer is only and only value driven so they only think of specifications, comparisons they are only seeking return which is not true so soon after I came to this business I told one of my senior colleagues I said I have never seen in India somebody decorating their car no matter how expensive that car is with full pati and with writing slogans on it but you see any small commercial vehicle or a large commercial vehicle in India after buying it they will take it to a secondary market where they sell specialty stickers or there are artisans at work to decorate that vehicle if they didn't have a deep emotional connect why would they be doing that why would they be embellishing it so the first category issue that we had is that over a period in time the creative codes became a bit like tofu it's colorless, odorless, tasteless everybody's tofu is the same as anybody else's tofu so how do you break away how do you pivot away from this and make a larger impact happen secondly in commercial vehicles there are all modalities business to consumer so small commercial vehicles are brought very similarly to passenger vehicles or to two wheelers then there is business to business which is as you go up to larger fleets and then there is business to business to consumers take the case of vans or buses so all three modalities are alive but there is no singular way in which to advertise and appeal to them so naturally you have to talk about the mother brand so the reason why for me out of home works is when you have displayed creatives with a difference you break away from the category code which is quite precious we are a large company at last count we were about 60 to 70,000 crore or rupees top line but within the business there are several companies so each one small commercial vehicles intermediate commercial vehicles heavy commercial vehicles passenger business services, spare parts and the digital businesses all are housed within what is called say Tata Motors and then we have large numbers of managers who are in specific professional streams engineering people think like engineers design people think like designers sales people think like sales people but there is the need for a brand wrap around so whose responsibility is that and how do we elevate all of this as a bundle how do we elevate this to a magnificent brand there again I think advertising in particularly out of home advertising helps and the best way in which to discover it the best way in which to discover it is to go across one of the issues with consumer research and a lot of the post facto attribution research that Sam was referring to also is while you can compute the whether you got your dollars worth what consumers tell you and I am a voracious consumer of research so I believe in it both call and quant but the fact is how do you know what consumers tell each other so we were in a positioning exercise for the last year and a half and what we were increasingly paying attention to was what they tell each other and what they tell each other is safe secure statements like you can't go wrong with this and there are people who are standing at a NACA or at a union stand 30-40 of them they have a majority presence of one brand in our business a brand unlike a sachet of shampoo or a bowl of soup doesn't come in and get added to the repertoire and drop off again it stays for 5, 7, 10 years so if a fleet owner buys two trucks of another brand he will buy spare parts from that brand he will go to their service center he will have an annual maintenance contract his drivers will be trained on that brand and so on and so forth so the stickiness of share is a very big deal so we need to keep investing in the brand we need to keep growing the top line which is where I'll skip the segmentation part but it's important again from an out-of-home point of view we talk about north market or east market or where have we lost share to whom but the fact is only the proportions vary there are people who are adorers of your brand or adopters of your brand or available to your brand in every geography just the proportions are different and marketing has over-invested marketing generically in the top right where my brand aware intenders are also category intenders that top right box is where all the energy is for people who are category intenders but not brand aware or for people who are brand aware but not really thinking of the category we don't have stimulus that works them up that key doesn't exist because all our plans are based on rational analysis of the top right so we try to do where does this sit in the funnel and in the funnel I believe it sits right on the top which is do I know you are you big enough are you constantly beeping on my radar am I being able to look up to you the same way as 100,000 other people are because conversationally brands they are democratic constructs you know and I'll just take a leaf out of I think what Anurag was saying elections are approaching I think politicians by and large are very acute marketers all marketing can learn from how politicians change their narrative and so while they are invested in digital while they are doing a lot of you know attribution rich and return specific media there are still these rallies happening there are still the outdoor hoardings happening and they are absolutely grounded in terms of having that consumer contact on a regular basis now I don't have time left so what I'll do is I'll show you one creative and then skip through we have been patiently trying to apply out of home married to the core creative so we first take a creative thought we make advertising which is a more recent phenomenon we are trying to adhere to new category codes so in the case of our large pickup Yodha which competes with Mahindra's Bolero it's a distant number two at this point in time we have changed the category code to make it more macho to make it more aggressive to showcase its terrain credentials because nobody gets into brochure wear and spec to spec comparison so first you make the advertising then you take it to a large canvas let me play this ad for you sorry my bad this this is the Yodha that was the Intra in the interest of time let me play this one cement? how will it reach the school? if it can reach the school then why not cement for the school Yodha is there so we are trying to show terrain we are trying to show gradability we are trying to show load carrying capacity in this business every drop of fuel matters every centimeter of deck length matters every hundred rupees that increases in terms of EMI payment matters but at the end of the day they want to be proud of the vehicle that they drive they want to have aspirational values attached to that vehicle once we do that we take this messaging across whether it is hoardings, whether it is digital advertising, whether it is attribution rich, form filled media we just try and place this at relevant points and we are doing that programmatically I'll skip through this each facet and feature has to be presented like one facet on a diamond we are talking about two things at the same time the vehicle does not get addressed as one lump sum people are interested but you can't showcase all of that in one outdoor hoarding or in one ad so we try and break it patiently as far as we can and I don't think we are quite to Sam's prescription in terms of having five words that's a training I got as well very early on this business is different but with its own devices we would end up having a share prospectus here so we are much better than what we intended to be but we are still on the journey of making it sharper let me show you one interesting campaign that we did some of my colleagues who are in the room today have done this there are safety features there are technical features which people don't understand so we decided let the brand get promoted out of home and print and we sold through storytelling so let me show you this ad now even if one life is saved on the road that's a very worthy thing to advertise but it's also actually a very effective means and there are a host of technical inputs to vehicles which cause less fatigue which take you safer which can track and trace greater number of trips the reason I am showing you advertising in an OOH forum is I don't see them as divorced I see them as together so the messaging has to be led by one and elaborated in a myriad number of ways through other means OOH being primary for us now state specific campaigns we must take care of context because what works in Andhra is very different from what works in Assam so far as possible we have tried to superscript it we have tried to go across a variety of languages same is true for category dynamics between passenger, CV passenger vehicles cargo vehicles mining tippers one is not the same as other and these are very highly involved purchases a top-end truck would cost you 50-60 lakh rupees the advertising will only bring it to the front of the mind it's not going to do the deal by itself so a lot of that negotiation happens across the table and at that time when my dealer sales executive or the territory sales manager is sitting and negotiating on a deal with a fleet owner or a tender with a state road transport corporation this positivity must exist in their mind now one of the other reasons I prefer out of home advertising is because people keep worrying about what's changing in consumer lives marketers must be interested in what is not changing because if you build on that you're on good foundation so now I'll skip through the rest of this portion very quickly yes we are doing data and logic we are doing it programmatically we want to build the right context, the right framework we want to understand the customer touchpoints because my business is different where do truck drivers congregate they're at NACAs at boat nuggers at union stands at places where they play octroy they're at road barriers where do they drive they drive night and day so what we see conventionally as out of home advertising is a very different world where the truck driver is concerned and we are addressing truck drivers but we are also addressing fleet owners financiers shippers or shipment providers and also the logistics universe because a large number of trucks are being sold as captive trucks to corporate owners say an Amazon or a Flipkart would buy thousands of mini trucks we want to be able to tell them at the right places and remind them at the right places as well we are doing audience insights through a variety of ways but I think the largely the four or five filters in the last years and we did a pitch as well so the criteria was do people apply the right filters on a heat map to say where is the fuel station where is the octroy booth where is the large cnfa hub where does warehousing happen where are the arterial roads where are the sub roads you know every time I go back I live in parel when I go back from the airport unmindful of google maps the driver always asks me am I from Dharavi or from dadar this is like one of the toughest questions for humanity to answer it seems every third day he asks me this because in his mind taking a side route is actually more effective because it might actually take a longer time or longer distance but he does not have to exert the effort of waiting or navigating through thick traffic so the consumer rationale for navigating traffic or traveling a longer distance is very different from a programmatic rationale for deciding google wants you to reach in the shortest time but my driver wants to go with ease and comfort so there is a critical difference I think we will we will already be fairly educated about the data layers I think what is important for me is the planned campaign has to rest on identified target group movement where do people come together and where do they branch out from yesterday I was in Bangalore and from Whitefield my driver took me to a state road on the he called it the Hoskot road and I saw two of our large hoardings and I was very happy because that's the road which all the cargo movements happening before they get on to the main highway one going to Kolar and the other going back to Bangalore and going onwards to Hosur that's the kind of placement that's important to us Mondies, Toal Nakas the kind of places you have never been to that's where my business gets done we have been doing this heat mapping for customer connections the more the density the greater the placement logic but also the flow so it is a combination of where they are and how they move both not only one we are using tech in villages we have a program called Neve in three states in the south in Telangana in Karnataka and in AP we have moved both trying to place things digitally but also wall wraps where the Neve the foundation rural sales promoter has an opportunity to showcase our product and immediately do solicitation so the form fill sits very close to the stimulus being absorbed because in villages it's not very contested and I think Sam my view is that rural is another great opportunity because now with road connectivity the way it is I think transit will be much thicker traffic movement will be much thicker and this hub and spoke arrangement between approximate rural geographies and big cities will increase I grew up in Rajasthan there was a concept of a village or a small mofassil location and then sheher now it's kind of seamless between the small village and of course digital has reached everywhere so I think that's another area that we must pay close attention to so in ending why do we as in Tata Motors commercial vehicles do outdoors but also in my individual capacity why do I believe in it one is like I said it's a role in creating impact and increasing brand awareness and I don't think brand should be subjected only to the stencil of an excel sheet brands have to create magic it has to then work via logic not the other way around if you started building brands purely on logic we would all need a PhD in computational theory to arrive at great brands and some of the greatest brands in this world have got built in the period between the two wars when there was no digital and I think outdoor and print were the oldest and heaviest used media back then as well I'm not a Luddite and I'm not so old that I should have nostalgia for a period between the wars but what I point I'm trying to make is let's not try and put immediacy in front of importance but I made a mistake across brands the second thing is we can marry data and insights with creative but this big data piece has to lead to big insights when the titanic sank there were 10,000 data points which were being monitored from boiler pressure to number of people who have eaten their food etc etc the only one data point that was critical was that in the dark night there is an iceberg ahead and that's the data point that they missed and the rest is history so I have great respect for data but I think we must also be mindful of how to lift the brand to greater and greater heights and in that there has to be a conspiracy a collaboration I would say a conspiracy between the right brain and the left brain between the creatives and the analysts between the digital voters and the traditional media voters if we do that we'll be in a better place in industry as a universe of brands and certainly out of home will grow by leaps and bounds in this country thank you very much for your time