 Very good evening everyone. My name is Sunakshi and I along with my co-host to Gail Amin, senior editor exchange for media, welcome you all to day three for e4m smart tech India Bridge 2020. It's a week long series of virtual events from 23rd to 26th June and for those of you joining today I'd like to tell you that it's a precursor to the main event which is going to happen sometime sometime in September. So the basically the entire motive of this event is to build a network which is robust which is a big robust marketing community with Martek as the main criteria. Today's sessions are based on what's next for in marketing technologies. Our industry leaders joining for the session include Adrian Svinsko, customer service and experience advisor, author, how to wow, Taram Katyal, CEO of Z5 India, Ms. Seed Zawazinski, founder clear code and CEO of the QuickPro, Naval Aguja, co-founder and director exchange for media, Adam Toporek, president, CX advisor, chief client hero, CDS service solutions and Rahul Garg CEO Mogulix. Now before we proceed I'd like to tell you if you have any questions you can put them out on our zoom chat. You can also use our hashtag Martek India on Twitter to pose the same questions. We're also live on Facebook and our website. Now we begin the first session of the day. I'd like to invite Adrian Svinsko who's the keynote speaker. He will be talking about customer service and experience customer service as an experienced author and advisor based on his book how to wow. Adrian helps organizations of all size deliver customer experience and also helps in two ways. First is through being an advisor on specific services, experience engagements or he does that on a project to project basis. He also helps build internal teams and leadership capabilities via mentoring, pod leadership including white papers, keynotes for internal customer and public events and master classes. He is also the best selling author, Forbes contributor, blogger and podcaster and frequent conference speaker, panel participant and chair. Welcome Adrian over to you. Wow what an intro thank you. I'm not sure what to say after that. Thanks so actually that's amazing. Let me kind of like well let me just get started. What I'm going to do is I'm going to share my screen and then we'll run through some kind of some quick slides that I hope that you will find kind of interesting. What I'm going to do is I'm going to put that on full screen. What I will do is I'll stop my video just to start with and keep my mic on and then we'll get stuck into the talk. So first of all I just want to talk to you today about this idea of walking the CX kind of talk. As kind of like said is that you know my role is as an advisor, as a researcher, as a workshop leader, I've been an author, I write on Forbes, I've written three books and I do a lot of conference and sort of speaking. But what I want to do today is to share with you some reflections on kind of what I've been seeing seeing kind of going on in the last few years and also the last kind of few months. So first of all let me kind of just kind of like oh I'm trying to move forward let me give you a bit of context and this is kind of prior to the whole pandemic. I think that what I saw actually before the pandemic and actually in the last kind of few years we've seen a lot of talk about the importance of customer experience. Now don't get me wrong this is absolutely kind of great but a lot of it was talk and this talk is about walking the CX talk and actually going beyond it. It's actually about turning our words into action because actually if you turn around let me show you this slide with you which is I think kind of quite fascinating and it shows you the MarTech space and it's actually it's got bigger it's called the MarTech 5000 I think now it's been up this is from April 2018 but now it's been expanded out to I think it's now currently the MarTech seven and a half thousand. What that shows you is how complicated the picture is when it comes to experience and technology and the decisions that we have to make and the tools that are available to us but there's a lot of kind of like a lot of the talk is getting driven by you know by by technology and but the reality is is that there's lots of research that shows that somewhere north of 70% and above of all major transformation whether it's digital or customer experience or whatever many of these major programs are failing to be to meet their objectives and if this is not bad enough actually I think it was forest or that at the beginning of the year even before we had the kind of the pandemic we're actually claiming because of all of this because of the lack of of results that we're getting delivered they were saying that up to about 20 maybe 25% of all customer experience professionals were possibly in danger of losing their jobs at some point in 2020 I mean so the thing I think that we where we've got to is if we've got to this kind of point where the customer experience in and of itself is in danger of becoming like overly complicated technical benchmark framework measured codified etc etc and the you know the bottom line is that I actually think the industry and the the the the domain the the function as it's become has become almost too obsessed with itself and it's lost sight of kind of who were there to serve because you know the the data is clear is that most things aren't kind of like working there's too much choice too many people things are getting being led by kind of technology and people are in danger of losing their jobs now that wasn't as that that wasn't so bad you know then we can fast forward to now and now we've actually just come through or we are actually going through a pandemic the likes of which we've never seen can be for and what's interesting about that is that multiple multiple multiple things are changing so fast super fast that it's sometimes it's feeling hard to keep up you know but if you actually step back and think about some of the things that we're seeing I mean I'm seeing these sort of things panic fear anxiety confusion uncertainty now maybe panic and fear was some of the things that we're seeing kind of early on but I'm still seeing this residual anxiety and confusion and uncertainty that that is pervading many of the things that would be you know the world around us whether that's cut from a customer's perspective or from an employee's perspective or just generally at a societal level so we have to be cognizant of that we have to pay attention to some of those things that the things that are going on around us and the mindset of people because actually particularly in the experience industry because actually research shows and this is research that's coming out of places like kind of Edelman and other agency global agencies and they're finding out that customers are watching how brands and organizations are responding to this crisis you also know that kind of behavior is changing and particularly customer behavior and a lot of stuff is moving online problem is is we actually are not sure we're trying to respond to that but we're not sure as yet how much of it will stick as we can move back to some degree of normality but I actually think it's really interesting when we reflect on that is because I think the thing that we actually that helps us kind of will help us frame our understanding of this is if we actually think about an old framework that comes from Maslow it's called this hierarchy of needs now I think prior to the pandemic many of us were focused and many brands were focused on some of the top the higher echelons of this of this hierarchy of needs you know the top end of love and belonging and social needs as well as self-esteem and self-actualization and I so that's I think where people were trying to aspire to there was a lot of aspiration looking up the way however what's actually kind of happened what the pandemic has done is gone is basically swipe the top of the pyramid and actually right now we are many of many of us are focused primarily on our you know safety and security and physiological needs you know we we feel like we've come under threat and we're kind of like we're defaulting back to just like very basic sort of like stuff safety and survival now as things are you know are changing I actually think that what we're seeing we're starting to see an emergence into people wanting to reconnect with friends and family and loved ones and things but that's only kind of gradual kind of as there's kind of like fear and anxiety and confusion and certainty still can lingers and I think that's where the thing that the organizations need to keep in mind they need to keep in mind that in terms of where their customers are at if they want to deliver a better experience with them because the real lesson for me is that I've been observing all of this is that we need to focus on making sure that we give our customers what they want not what we think they need and that's absolutely kind of key because you know other research has shown that you know customers are not the number of sales emails that are going out has gone through the gone through the roof but also that the actually engagement with those sales emails has actually kind of fallen through the floor however on the opposite side is that the number of marketing emails has gone up through this kind of period but actually engagement with those kind of marketing emails has actually increased and it's increased conversion and and value you know creation and so on and so forth the lesson the insight I think from there is that that organizations need to this is based on where their customers are is they've got to understand that trying to sell right now is not helpful actually being helpful is the most valuable thing that you can do so don't sell but help think about how you can build and focus on building the relationship and being helpful and valuable and and of worth to your customers because that's the thing that's going to build you know a platform for growth going forward so even though that kind of companies are trying to kind of figure out a way how to get through all of this sometimes we have to kind of go against our better you know our instincts and not think about trying to sell our way out of it maybe we need to think about how we how we help our way out of it so that that for me is a little bit of context so but what I wanted to do was it is next is just to run through quickly 12 things that I think that companies that lead their fields on experience do very very well and I've been augmenting these things over the last kind of few months based on what I think are emerging lessons that are coming out of the end of the pandemic and the first thing I think is that companies that lead their fields do really well is they understand the answer to this question I what is your experience strategy I can't tell you how many times I've actually gone to different organizations and different you know spoke to different leaders and different executives and I've asked them this question and they look at me slightly non-plussed and they're like what do you mean you know customer experience is important to us I'm like yeah and so what what is your experience strategy what is it you're trying to actually deliver and why and they look and then they kind of try and trot out oh it's omni-channel seamless digital etc etc you know buzzword bingo type of stuff and it's it it strikes me that there's there's a lack of clarity here but they the the best in their fields go further than this they go further with their experience strategy because what the also do is they also figure out how does it support the achievement of their business objectives so they're completely tied together they understand what they're doing and what they want to achieve with the experience but they also understand how that kind of like helps the business achieve its own objectives whether that's that helps them acquire more customers whether it helps them generate better you know higher spend or increased loyalty or lower its cost to serve and that results in kind of increased profitability those are the things that really matter those are the things that makes it make was going to make kind of customer experience relevant to the overall business those are the things that are going to deliver and turn that 70 plus percent that I mentioned earlier into you know into a winning number you know so those are things we've got to get we've got to get right that's one of the first things I think the leaders going to do the second thing I think they do is that the leaders that the leaders that really stand out in the field is they really get to know their customers and and that what I don't don't mean by that is that I don't mean that they kind of collect lots of data and they make inferences about their customers is that they go past their data because they realize that customers are not just their data you know the customers you know if I ask you kind of like does old does your personal kind of data kind of like and describe you completely as a human being you turn around to me and tell me no not at all and I'd be like you're absolutely right to me to go past the data to really get to know our customers to really understand our customers to really understand who they are and kind of the context in which they live in and what is they want to try and achieve and to do that I think that what we're actually seeing right now particularly through this pattern you know this pandemic and as a result of the pandemic is that empathy is absolutely key to this to developing a better understanding of our customers we need to try and build and become more empathetic now that's not just an organizational an individual level that's also an organizational level and it's something I've been talking about is that this idea that we need to figure out a way of how do we build our empathetic musculature at an organizational level now that's not going to be easy and you're not going to be able to buy something that necessarily helps you with that because actually scientific studies show that kind of being empathetic and continuing to be empathetic is like building it's hard it's hard to do and it's hard to do and it's hard to do continuously kind of well because our brains are not necessarily wired to always kind of like go that way you know it becomes a habit or a skill that we have to learn over time so that is one of the key kind of challenges in terms of how do we really get to know our customers is how do we become more empathetic how do we build that as I say empathetic musculature to help us kind of reduce the gap between us and our customers so we really kind of build kind of better relationships with them the third thing that I wanted to highlight is that it's linked to the first one is that the best companies they start with the end in mind they understand that actually we have to articulate what our experience is and then we think about what is the data we require and what is the technology that we need to deliver that experience and it has to be done in that order because what I'm seeing is many people in the industry they start buying tech in order to kind of deliver a better experience and I think that's the wrong way around because actually they're not clear as in I said in the first point they're not clear on kind of what is the experience strategy and what they want to deliver and therefore it feels all kind of slightly connected in a slightly Frankenstein sort of you get a slightly Frankenstein sort of experience because they've bought all these kind of like pieces of technology to solve all these kind of problems but they still don't have a clear idea of kind of what they want to do and why so it start with the end in mind start with the experience and then work backwards from there and if you do that you're not going to go far wrong the next thing is where we get down to some of the nitty gritty because it's not all about kind of doing you know sexy and new things actually it's about a lot of the time if you it's about doing the basics brilliantly and doing them kind of like well and doing them consistently well this is sometimes not very sexy work it takes discipline and focus and commitment and time and things but it's figuring out kind of do the understand what the basics are for their customers if that means that they want to get hold of you kind of quickly and they want answers to the questions before they can show up or they want to be able to kind of easy kind of find kind of an easy answer to the questions on your website those are the things that we need to get good at now we've seen people make some massive strides and it's over the last kind of few months you know a friend of mine sent me a message and it was talking about this idea of I can't believe how much punk cx I've seen going on in the last kind of like few months the idea that things that would normally take months if not years are happening in days and weeks rather than actually you know the longer period of time so focus and figure out whether the basics are for your customers and make sure that you're brilliant than them and that includes how you communicate with them because here's the thing that is emerging in the pandemic is that you know communication has been absolutely key particularly when we think about the you know the levels of anxiety and confusion and uncertainty where which is in the minds of our customers is we have to keep them informed and so we have to communicate communicate communicate we have to do it do a lot do it more than you think you need to make sure it's open and honest don't make assumptions that people will always have seen kind of what you've kind of done or you've said or you've kind of you know what you've written about you know you know to eliminate those the likelihood that people will have missed it by keeping communication it's not about just doing it once it's about making sure that people kind of understand where you're at all of the time the next thing they do is they are relentless in their pursuit of removing little irritations in their their customers experience this is a picture I love about a lady that is wrestling in to try and get one of the wrestling public plastic packaging with trying to get into the energy saving kind of light bulb that she's just bought if anybody's kind of like I've had that experience myself that's why I love this kind of picture and the only thing that I remember about buying the one of those light bulbs is the wrestle that I had with the packaging for me that's grit that's like that's not supposed to be the point point of the light bulb is to get it and put it in and make it make sure it works and it's reliable it's like I shouldn't be remembering you know the the wrestle I have with with the packaging so make sure that you build a culture that is always looking for the little improvements because here's the thing solving and removing lots of little irritation or the irritations are bits of grit from your customer's experience if you do that you do that continuously and consistently lots of little things are going to add up to big impact but also realize that there is no kind of end to this you know like people talk about transformation and I think transformation is such a useless word because if we're not transforming anything if anything we're just evolving we're adapting we're changing fast so I like to bring in a kind of a quote from a an old like a punk song that I love from a band called Bad Religion and it's their song it's called No Control and there's a quote in there that says there is no vestige of a beginning no prospect to an end now that's an original quote from a book from the 1780s it was written by a gentleman called James Hutton that wrote the first book first recognized book I think on geology and what he can realize is that like in matters of the earth it's we're never finished and therefore we have to keep going we have to understand that things will always be changing I think we need to can realize that in our own businesses as well because you know it will be the most adaptable and the ones that are the ones that are the most adaptable the most flexible and the most tuned into customers those will be the ones that survive so it's not bad transformation it's about adaptation it's about you know it's about being flexible and and responsive and being willing to kind of you know to change fast and to you know to try things on top of that we also need to kind of know feeling to try and strive for simplicity because simplicity pays you know there's that there's an ongoing piece of research that I would encourage you to check out it's done by a company called Siegel and Gail based out in New York they had this thing called the simplicity index and they have actually an index in there for for India as well and a whole bunch of brands in India that show that since 2009 a stock portfolio comprised of the publicly traded simplest brands in their global top 10 has outperformed the major stock market indices by check this out ladies and gentlemen 679 percent that's that there's mind blowing numbers but that's simplicity both on the outside and also on the inside because consumers like simpler a simpler experience and then put more they're willing to more to pay more for a simpler experience they're you know also employees kind of you know prefer a simpler experiences as well by the way for those do check out the end the Indian top 10 and I'll give you a quick rundown is like number one is Google number two is Amazon number three is Maruti Suzuki number four is Nokia number five is Sony number six is HP number seven is make my trip number eight is Philips number nine is Dell and number 10 is TVS Motor that's but that's not the company's gonna view that's their consumers can view now building on that I mentioned the internal side of things the next one I think is that we need to also make sure that if we're making it's things simpler from for our for our customers we also got to make it kind of we've also got to make it simpler for you know our employees but not just our employees our direct employees but also all those kind of people and whether it's freelancers or agencies or contractors that help us and that are essential to delivering that great experience you know it's not good enough for us to think that oh we just need to focus on the customers actually the employee experience matters just just as much so we need to get that right the next thing I wanted to come and come on to is I want to come on to this idea is that loyalty is absolutely key and to the success of any kind of any business and the longevity of any business and right now with kind of what we're seeing with the effects of this pandemic is loyalty is going to matter more now than ever but ladies and gentlemen let's be clear loyalty is not about a program research shows that 90 percent of all loyalty is earned at or around the point of purchase or when something goes wrong I split that up it's about between 45 and 50 percent of it happens around the point of purchase I how do customers feel about that and that I think psychologically what that means is like make me feel good about my purchase make it easy for me make me feel like I've got I'm making the right decision so that that takes care of all of that now we also know as human beings that things go wrong and what how you respond when things go wrong is absolutely essential now if you think about from a from a human psychology perspective we don't like risk and uncertainty and the the the possibility of failure so if somebody shows up and helps us solve those or takes those problems away or saves us in inverted commas we value them kind of very very kind of like very very highly so those two things both the but that around the buying experience the point of purchase and also what we do when kind of things go wrong explains 90 90 percent of the loyalty of our of our customers and linked to that is the best companies they understand that this can't all necessarily be done by the human touch or by just by technology and what they do is they understand as I've been saying all along they understand the makeup of their customers they understand what the customer is going to like kind of want so they so they're able to strike the right balance of technology in the human touch so people get the connection and the service and the experience that they want and the and the desire at the right kind of point in their you know their journey the next thing is that we've been talking about this for such a long time you know that traditional customer service is normally kind of reactive i when something goes wrong then we respond but that's no longer good enough we've got the data and the analytics and the technology and hopefully the will to allow us to be more proactive in by nature actually we've got we should have also the experience to understand kind of what problems normally show up kind of over time for customers and so we we need to we need to respond we need to be proactive by nature we need to solve problems for customers when they and before they show up or as they show up so they don't need to come to us to come looking for the solutions research supports that if they do that then it drives you know greater perception of experience greater loyalty greater satisfaction increased spend all of this to get all of this good things but not enough organizations are doing this as a matter of course but the best that do do it and get it right are the ones that stand out now the couple of kind of things i want to share with you the the 11th thing that people the leaders i see kind of do is they realize there's a big talk around personalization i mean to create kind of more a personalized experience the problem is that tends to get kind of dominated by marketing that like but i actually think we need to personalize everything everything about our experience and it's not just about marketing we need to kind of think about personalize it in terms of how do we how do we implement intelligent routing how do we implement the recommendations around next best actions how do we implement kind of like proactive kind of like service that's tailored to some of these experience how do we implement you know personalized kind of recommendations how do we improvise personalized kind of customer success success based on kind of what a particular account can in needs so we have to it's not just about marketing we have to personalize kind of everything and i think the best the real kind of like the real leaders these are the things that they're striving for and then the last thing that i wanted to share and this is something that has emerged out of the pandemic given particularly given that many kind of brands and organizations have had to move to a remote or distributed kind of way of working wherever possible and i think what's actually kind of like commercial from that is that we are it's requiring us to really consider how we can lead and manage and supervise kind of teams and organizations it's requiring a different type of kind of leadership you know and i think here's a quote that has come from um from a colleague of mine a contact of mine guy called Nate Brown which i think absolutely nails it in terms of what is required he says the days of butts in seats excuse my language as both a physical reality and a management style over successful contact center leaders will be those with the capability to engage a remote workforce creating both an exceptional agent and customer experience with a decentralized team now i only captures the nature of it because it's we and it's a challenge for leaders is how can i get the best out of my kind of people if they happen to be working kind of remotely because i think there is there is a real likelihood that a lot of remote working is going to be here to stay and we're never going to go back to completely back to normal and inverted columns but we'll probably end up kind of implementing like a more of a hybrid approach to how we work where there will be some remote working and some onsite and those two populations may kind of overlap and intermingle kind of over over time i just think that the dynamics has changed over over the last few months and we've seen kind of what is what is possible for organizations and that is asking some serious questions around the sort of leadership and management that is required to sustain that type of kind of work kind of system so in some here's a i know this is a busy slide but this is a list of all 12 of the things i was talking and talking about just in summary i hope those things have given you some some pointers some um some you know some insights i hope they've also been a bit challenging as well because this is where it's all about we've got sometimes we have to be open to learn the lessons or to see what you know what things need to kind of be done and where we're falling sure so these 12 things are like a checklist and maybe that's the thing that you do is you score yourself against those you know those 12 things see and ask yourself truly and honestly and openly how are we doing and could we do better so i just want to say thank you to you all my name is Adrian Francisco these are my details you know if you've got any questions about all of that sort of stuff then kind of let me know i am more than happy to answer any questions you have and that is ladies and gentlemen the end thank you everyone wonderful points made you summed up well in those 12 points that we still have two minutes so i'll take two quick questions one is one question is many times customers want something which they are not sure if they need it should their need be not understood before they are given what they want um so i guess my question would be to that is to first of all kind of to first of all ask if you're uncertain then you should go back and ask for clarity and get the customer to kind of like to you know to explain kind of what they need and why they you know why they need it it's a difficult kind of it's very general kind of question but i think that there are are i think our our instinct is not just it shouldn't just be to um if we think of the customers or the customer is possibly wrong or mistaken or it may not be then like i said before we've got to really get to know our customers and that requires us to maybe step into it and go please help me understand why you think you need this please tell me kind of like and why you're going to because doing that that might not feel comfortable right but that's the way that we're going to get to know our customers kind of better we have to be willing to step into these conversations and take the time to do it perfect thanks i think we don't have much time left the other panelists are here and thank you very much for joining us and i would like to hand it over to Mr. Nawal Ahuja co-founder and director of exchange for media over to you thank you thank you idrian and thank you rohail for moderating the session very insightful i hope we still have your attention and i'm now going to take up the next session with the two leading experts in the ott and martek domain let me introduce introduce the panelists i have today i have with me tarun kathial whom i'm sure a lot of you in the indian media advertising ecosystem know he's a media veteran of over two decades tarun kathial is the ceo of c5 in his current role tarun is responsible as you know for searing c5 steering z5 india's largest and most comprehensive digital entertainment platform for language content towards gaining industry leadership position as you also know tarun has a varied and diverse background across india's leading media companies he was last at big fm where he was the founder ceo and ceo during his duration he also set up twink big the content incubator and the big tv channels magic and ganga tarun began began his career with advertising agencies but now as you see he's he's a content advertising tech expert he also worked with the star network where he rose to head the content and communications across the network in india he also became instrumental in the record of a complete accomplishment through successful shows like kbc apart from that he was you know he was famous for launching indian practice and a lot of other shows in india welcome tarun on board glad you are here doing this with us and as i mentioned tarun is now a part of z5 which is india's leading otd network i was just going through some of the sub stuff z5 has been doing and from what i understand in the last three four months their consumption is shot up by almost 80 80 percent during the lockdown period they made aggressive investments in z5 ads at tech they also have partnership with airtel and geofiber fiber and they are also launching very soon hyper shorts which is india's first ever fully homegrown short video platform so all the best to you on in addition to tarun what we also thought was to invite eating a martech expert from from europe machi zawadinsky is with us hi everyone good to see you machi is an expert thanks for having me and advertising technology and a founder of several several successful companies machi is also currently devoting his knowledge and skills developing a pvc pro a privacy focused analytics platform and the perfect alternate as this lead to google analytics he's also in the past led clear code to its profession as a world leading software specializing in customer customer advertising and marketing technology thank you for joining us machi all the way from poland so thank you gentlemen for being part of this session we have people tuned in already and as has been announced already the topic of what we are discussing today is around the collapsing web banner and third party data while shifting ad budgets to ott before i get into you know the detailed thought points about what's going to happen let me ask you a very elementary question we've seen over the last many years google facebook have had a you know kind of duopoly when it comes to customer attention as well as advertising money why don't you tell our both of you tell our viewers what are the three big reasons why do you think over the next 12 18 months this money the advertising money as well as consumer attention is likely to shift from that duopoly to also the third pillar which is gaining currency very fast in india and outside india which is the ott ecosystem turn why don't we start with you so thank you never for a long introduction i was almost embarrassed at the end of it thank you machi for joining us from poland it's really good to have you around and and i hope it isn't too early in the morning for you so it's a good question right whereas digital advertising going what is going to happen to independent publishers what's going to happen to the big large networks of facebook and google for anybody to say that facebook and google are going to go away would be kind of very foolish right will they reduce their influence on on digital advertising maybe will other publishers come in uh and come in with scale i think definitely yes and why is that uh i think for many years the capability of segmented and targeted advertising uh the capability capability of doing a good big data having great ad servers digital ad servers being able to do a great consumer profiling 360 through a good cdp light or was only a domain of the big tech right which was google and facebook and a little bit of amazon when they started their advertising program about a couple of years ago but i think the democratization of technology uh and the democratization of of platforms and their ability to attract users and users at scale is allowing for this paradigm to change for this picture to shift um platforms like ours and and me even others like hotstar or many others are now over you know closing to 100 million or over 100 million users uh with some significant amount of video consumption around some very quality content with the high amount of loyalty and i think the picture started to change about two to three years ago when uh most broadcasters in india and across the world realized that they couldn't let the otd game be secondary and be played by either syndicating content to platforms like uh netflix or or amazon or or putting their content on a revenue share on platforms like youtube but they had to control their own digital destinies they started building their own platforms but once they build their platforms and they started to see some very scaled up consumption they realized that they hadn't invested enough behind analytics and ad tech and i think the last uh 12 and the next 12 to 18 months will see some significant investments and building up of independent networks on the base on the back of you know partners like others in in actually getting what they deserve and owning the end to end ad tech pipeline for themselves right ache you work very uh you know deeply in this entire audience measurement or rather the audience journey measurement and the you know martech space what is your sense globally also a lot of media traditional legacy media companies are investing a lot in the otd space business just you know pulled out all their content from netflix and has launched their own platform what's your sense of what the future looks like sure i mean uh i think uh i i totally agree with what tyron said i want to add one point before i i answer this question is that the very big advantage of ott is creating these brand experiences like there is no ad blog banner blindness and they like you know ways that uh will be distracted from uh from seeing the the brand message um so this is a big advantage where i see this advantage and where what why there is so much investment into this space is that um uh the advertising on web or in mobile apps has been with us for decades uh now and uh maybe for mobile apps not decades but for web definitely decades and the technology is very advanced today uh there is a lot of attribution platform segmentation and so on will come to that probably uh why some of these platforms will no longer work with the demise of cookies but they are very advanced compared to what's in ott and there is a big investment into the this creating these ecosystems where there is end to end uh ad buying uh data uh analytics attribution uh for the ott channel uh because basically we are building in a in a matter of the last few years everything that has been created uh on the web for over a decade so i see uh there is a big need uh because there is a big uh a big uh opportunity and a great inventory grand grand great experience but uh we need to catch up with the technology uh and some of the players like z5 is already doing or in the process of doing that uh but there's a lot of legacy players even in the us that are uh years behind uh and they are starting to to build this technology for the ott so good you are proud of this point about you know third party cookies extension of the third party cookies so what happens you know how do you see the future of uh audience buying and advertising on digital changing and how does the ott system uh gain out of that give us some granularity you know what do you think will happen say in the next 12 months how does the balance of power kind of shift especially also given the fact that privacy laws are becoming very strict yeah that's one point so i think there are two uh things that influence that one is the regulatory space and not only what happened in europe with gdpr but also what's uh happening in brazil what's happening in india in other countries where the privacy laws gets tricker and there is a limitation in what we can do in context of sharing the data between brandon that's why you i see that there will be a big reliance on first party data and some of the big publishers on web like even new york times announced that they would like no longer do the third party audience uh selling or buy or inventory selling it will be all based on the first party data um and uh the ott has a big advantage uh as by design we know everything like we the users identified they login with their like username or their telecom into the ott platform so they are identified it's not like with web where we can lose the cookie when the user uh blocks it or changes the browser so i think that this is like by design a huge advantage of ott that will we are dealing with primarily identified audiences and that's what all other channels are going shifting to uh primarily on web where the cookies are used and and they will no longer be relevant what i see also is that uh there is more interest in the first party data uh technology so cdps in particular uh building the customer data platforms to aggregate data across different sources that these organizations have and i think again ott has a big advantage that they can do great partnerships uh with uh various players whether there are telecoms or whether there are other like internet providers or there are um there are other partners that have data and having identified audience helps you to match this data with the partner and and reach your uh and and reach your audience uh data and that that is a matter of like selling the uh ott inventory at the high premium price versus selling it uh i unidentified users at the low price right so let me stay on this point about data and hop hop across to tarun tarun uh these are interrelated things you know if you look at the large uh uh publishers non ott publishers the google's and the facebook books of the world they inherently require registration and hence their ability to you know mine that data because they know who exactly is using a gmail and who's using the facebook account they've managed to build huge you know programmatic plays on top of this layer of data that they are primarily collecting directly from the user ott players on the other hand uh have a mixed bag so in cases where you have subscriber data obviously people are paying and you know they are they are kind of holding accounts but there's a large number of users who are who are consuming ott content without really you know registering and giving you access to that kind of data so how do you think ott players over the next 12 months can overcome this uh you know primary data deficit that currently they have because that also kind of means more more earnings the more the advertiser can map the data the primary data the more uh is confidence in uh investing in the platform goes up so you're right uh novel i think ott made a mistake when they launched that they allowed a lot more guest users onto their platform without registering uh you know directly with the ott platform so i'll tell you two or three things that ott platforms did or shouldn't have done one we all allowed guest users to keep consuming video because we thought it was early stage uh without having compulsory or mandatory registration uh two while doing the mandatory registration we didn't take enough fields like age and gender and so on and so forth third we allowed a lot more social logins on our platform which uh didn't give us enough data uh pipeline from the social platforms like google and facebook and all of this is something that we corrected over a period of time i think you'll live to learn and learn to live um so to to help you understand a platform like ours now if you watch uh over five videos without being registered uh you have to go back and register so it's mandatory registration uh at one level at the second level uh even if you were to come in and register through social which is uh because of convenience we still allow kitchens facebook and google we you have to enrich your profile in terms of age and gender and and it's even more important for us because increasingly uh government laws and regulation around uh content and around age and guard and guardrails around that make it very important for us to get that data both data both as well as gender for us uh then lastly i think uh we've also all built a network of relationships uh on data partnerships to be able to enrich this first party data with other partners partners who have similar logins and we work with other loyalty programs we also work with other telcos uh who are able to actually bring alive our data management platforms and much like uh much as we're saying we now have a fairly big investment in building a consumer data platform which where not only our first party data and registered verified users flowing but a lot more uh data partners who flow in their data uh basis are their understanding and their consumption of the same users and we've been able to multiply that that those attributes and that profile in a fairly rich manner and that investment continues to grow and grow so much uh as you know india is a unique country uh to convert users into subscribers is far more tougher as compared to some other parts of the world and hence as taroon said a lot of the OTT usage started as a sampling service to you know lower users in and keep the barrier of entry as low as possible not even ask them for basic details so what do you think like taroon was explaining what do you think are the ways that you know uh now that there is a substantial chunk of user base and advertisers are looking at the platforms very seriously to invest in what are the ways in which you can we can sort of short circuit the process and jump over because you can't have now suddenly millions of people you know registering and sharing their data overnight mm-hmm so i think like uh what taroon mentioned about gated content and uh forcing the users after they experienced the the service to sign in is the the way that like it's a global trend even for non-oTT content um and uh that's that's basically you know how you gain the identified users the moment you have identified users you can do much more in context of the data at what's most important you can collect bits of data over time and you don't lose it in the cookie world like the moment that the browser clears the cookies you are losing all the history and here like the moment we don't have to collect all the data at once we can do it very slowly we can also build it based on the content consumption uh over time how it changes you can do a lot of analytics based on that that will help us later to uh classify the users into audiences that will be very valuable for the advertisers and you know sorry never can i comment and i think the big advantage that OTT players bring it into the country is that advertisers are used to buying on some of their key market shows on uh broadcast right but advertisers didn't know what the psychographics and what the other attributes of these users were the same users and a fair amount of them migrate from watching on tv to watching on OTT you now know them one at an n equal to one level that's right and two uh you now know them far more than what you knew before which you knew them through a panel and you knew them through a panel into age and gender and so on and so forth but as more data flows in and as you grow to know them more and more and your ability to get those many signals into the same set of users that you were doing through broadcast now on OTT is far richer a platform like ours which is becoming 360 degree in terms of being a super app we now have hyper shots coming in hyper shots becomes almost quasi social right where uh where you have far more many signals uh because user generated content and people like and share and and display affinity to certain kind of users or certain kind of story or certain kind of uh you know even products and all of those signals keep enriching your first party data which is all uh verified through a signal identifier tell me that's very interesting the hyper locals point tell me something why don't you tell us a little more about it especially how do you plan to dovetail user generated content into the existing content and the platform how will it work the synchronization it doesn't really synchronize in that sense it's a separate section within the app so it's much like a super app where you have a different uh yeah different areas uh but what we thought was really that you know for several years the influencer game built this social uh platforms right and who are these influencers these influencers were all these tv stars who who are really on our shows for so many years right so all the 40 channels of the z network and all the characters and actors within that actually built the entire influencer list in the country and a part of it not all of it and then there is bollywood and there is sports and and there are newscasts and we thought that we had we had access to so many of these their fans wanted to connect with them directly and the fans anyway came to consume their characters on our platform on a daily basis yeah and we could extend that experience of fandom onto a hyper shorts platform also uh you know all our reality shows allowed regular users to become superstars or uh you know at least celebrities of their own and this hyper shorts platform will also funnel that talent into our you know our various reality shows and so on and so forth so really there were three uh vectors that we were working on one was fandom one was fun and we thought that there's a lot out there that you can play and play with music play with dialogues and all that and the last was factual and we think that there is a lot of DIY content uh in short form that is waiting to be done and and all of it had a great overlap with our existing audiences and we thought that you know while audiences in India find it difficult to have too many apps on their phone largely because of low memory low real estate and on the phones one super app could do it all for them fantastic let me just pick up an audience question now uh there's somebody who wants to know what OTT overtake television or cinema in the next five years I think that answer that question has been answered in many research reports but I'm not going to but I'm not going to put my privately a television company which has been so far a television company and the anonymous attendee let me also tell you I can't see the name on the screen let's say anonymous attendee why don't you tell us what is pitch pitch Madison report saying well I mean my sense is that in India you know like it's happened with mobile telephony it's happened so many times in media things move on parallel tracks so it's not like one thing takes over the other OTT will grow at its own pace television penetration is still growing you know a lot of companies have been very fast to pronounce the death of print but look at regional print you know it continues to grow at a healthy rate year after year so I think a lot of learning that we have from western markets might not be exactly replicable in India at least for the next five years television will continue to grow obviously the pace of growth will be different because OTT's base is low I was reading another report which said over the next five years OTT ecosystem is expected to grow 24% compound annual rate of growth which is significant given the fact that the advertising market in the last four five years that has grown at what a CAGR of 11-12% give or take so at 2x and obviously one of the components that will fuel the growth is also subscription monies which for television has also started coming in if you see in the last five six years which was a very small pie you know before digitization and television started so the simple answer is I don't think anybody can really predict whether it'll overtake cinema or television but one thing is for sure OTT will become a very very large pie of the entire digital ecosystem which will be large enough maybe it'll be equal to TV in five years that is certainly a possibility this year from what I understand digital itself would have reached 17-18,000 crores in India which is from some 1.5 billion dollars but maybe because of covid the growth will be lesser but in five years yeah one of the segments that will grow even this year they say even after all of this possibly digital and digital video will possibly grow the fastest that's right so let me come back to you so you answered this much better than me oh you I've learned from you Darul let me hop back across to to matche you know one of the things that we keep talking about matche is data you know privacy of data I think that's globally a massive issue countries like India how the data is going to be used I was reading today actually that I think it's Germany that is a disallowed facebook a German supreme court has disallowed facebook to mine user data for selling to third parties right and yeah why don't you tell us a little more you you have an idea about what's going on there sure so I mean I think we're a facebook is very interesting case because etc so they have locations almost everything that we do there is a significant amount of time there so the supreme court banned them from selling to third parties but what they say they don't sell the data because they sell advertising targeted by the data and the data does not leave the ecosystem so there is still like I think some dispute over like whether they are using it spec in my opinion they are using it for advertising not for the purpose of like serving the user the content and using the service so they are using it for advertising purposes and user has to agree to that but in their opinion they are not sending they are selling advertising and they are not exporting the data outside of their their ecosystem talking a bit more broadly about privacy yes it gets much stricter and I think like the this is the good thing like the at tech and marketing technology space just got out of control and we like the whole industry earns that that they are now forced to adapt and there will be a lot of changes regarding that but it's not that you know we won't be able to to track the users we have to do it with the certain either consent or certain anonymization so that we cannot target an individual rather than audience but but it's not that it's end of the world for at tech companies now like we see like even clearly the company I founded sees the growth in the at tech projects mainly because they have to adopt or there are new channels there's a lot of investment into the first party space compared to the third party data that it's it used to be for the last decade so yeah I mean not sure if you want me to elaborate on anything else in in particular here right so there's a specific question for you this is what kind of tools do you offer to the marketers to empower them to use your channel or your shows so what we're developing now while we have four at ad products which is advault amplify and we also have a big dmp call informics which we allow marketers to set up their campaigns and and set up their audience segments and so on and so forth what we now work with clear code is to build out an entire cells of platform which will allow and empower marketers to be able to do almost everything themselves forget setting up audiences and campaigns but also do biddable advertising buy biddable advertising and to hold so also to be able to do optimization waterfall analytics and basically end-to-end optimization on their campaign so our entire vision is that are that the advertiser or the advertising agency will be fully empowered in every in every way to be able to advertise on our platform and it will have very low managed services or human intervention right fantastic we don't have time left so I'll ask one last question which is also very relevant to the Indian market to both of you gentlemen measurement in digital has been kind of a bone of contention for the last many years unlike the legacy media which has you know third-party measurement tools run by companies like nilson in india you have a bar for tv you have a mruc which does irs the readership studies digital does not have any third-party measurement tools do you think the time has come turn to have third-party independent measurement tools it will allow the industry to go at a much faster rate so digital having said that digital is far more transparent in terms of data as compared to legacy media but do you think if we have third-party measurement at this point of time it'll help us jump the curve in faster so there is so to let me correct you gentlemen but there is no single currency that measures everybody together but there is measurement of individual platforms which is third party right okay so on our platform we have oracles mode which measures view through rates so how much of the advertising did anybody see we also have nilson star which gives advertisers an ability to see who saw an advertise who are so on advertising which is what age what genders and whatever filters we decide to sell and they decide to measure so those two parameters already exist on most good quality platforms but i think there is a need for all platforms to come together and build a single currency and i think that even you know at imai i'm trying to work with almost all platforms to see if you know we can come to a consensus there is a obviously word that is work that is happening at bark and e-camp there is work that is happening at nilson individually so yes there are platforms there is kondiba which is also trying to do something on the smart tv side collectively so there are lots of options and opportunities that that are coming together and i can tell you with all my experience in this space it's not more than 18 to 24 months away we will find a solution to something in this right and people like marches are doing a lot of this kind of work through public so let him tell us a little bit actually why don't you tell us globally how is the third party independent data measurement uh being tackled we know that the google facebook are not on third party platforms they do yeah so i mean there are ecosystems like google and facebook does not let independent measurement and there is a lot of controversy and even losses because of that what i see is what i want to point out is maybe something different so when it comes to independent measurement on a web for example when it comes to audiences this space will get disrupted by the demise of cookies that we that we covered earlier as well as by privacy laws because by tracking these users you share their information and there needs to be some new mechanisms developed and similarly to ot t we have to develop some new currency and new systems uh how to do it uh in a privacy friendly way and at the same time so that we can compare apples to apples rather than have uh like right now like even with some leading platforms you have significant differences in kinds of measurement and that has been always the case like with every time we go into integrating for example real-time bidding platforms we see these discrepancies we get them down quite a lot but they are always there and that's because like different vendors uh have a different let's say currency of how how certain things are being measured so to sum up there are still challenges ahead to to make it independent of the channel but we'll get there i i'm sure that we'll get there globally as well brilliant uh we are we are out of time and as you know we are this is a you know larger martech event and we have the next speaker already waiting so thank you to both of you gentlemen it's exciting i'm sure to be in the otd space it's a sunrise sector uh while league legacy media is looking at many confronting many many issues especially during the lockdown otd is a sector which is likely to continue to grow at a very fast pace but with the challenges of having technology and having more competition one of the reports i read said india alone has 95 otd platforms now and growing because you know every month one or two new otd platforms so with that thank you to both of you for spending your valuable time and we'll try and take some of the conversation offline thank you tarun thank you thank you thank you everyone for joining us thank you now we move on to our next special segment which is an expert talk with adam toporek he is the president cx advisor chief client hero cts service solution since we are in different time zones we recorded this session earlier in the morning today and up next is mr toporek with his special keynote on customer experience can we have it on screen welcome to exchange for media martech india bridge one series we have with us mr adam toporek president customer experience advisor chief client hero cts service solution uh he's going to talk about how customer experience is changing as we enter a very challenging phase in terms of marketing brands and before we begin i want to just talk about that adam is an internationally recognized customer experience expert a keynote speaker and customer experience trainer he's also the author of the very popular customer customer that stick block and the co-host of the crack the customer code podcast and welcome adam to this to this session that we have i just want to begin with tell me how are you spending this time i mean everybody is talking about pandemic how is it how is it to this phase for you so for me it's you know it's interesting because i worked at home before because i was either on a plane doing trainings or speaking doing keynote speeches or for the most part i worked out of my house so uh i'm pretty used to that part of it like that wasn't a big change for me so i was very fortunate in that way for me you know reassessing how we approach the business i'm reassessing how we scale and approach things that i'm sure we're going to talk about how other companies are reassessing right now right and you know just also working on some personal projects now taking some time to focus on a few other things right so i mean the entire business model has moved online and remote is the next big word that we are that we are hearing from everyone tell me uh coming from a world 90 days back a very different world to a world where remote distance socially distance you know zero touch is the norm is it difficult for brands to create experience the kind of engaging customer experience is there a shift is there a change is there a challenge a hundred percent and uh you know one of the things we've seen in the past few months is that organizations that were already in the midst of digital transformation that were already embracing some of these ideas they had a head start they were already further down the road and they're able to pivot better than organizations who didn't have that those components and it's super tough so you just look at something like channel volume right so you you think uh let's do an airline if we talk about an airline and they've got all these people coming in the airport and then all of a sudden within a week almost no one's in the airport and all the representatives they have in the airport that handle all these situations all that volume is moved to chat and email and phone right and now they're how do they shift their resources how do they scale and take uh you know this volume that was over here and move it over here rapidly to make sure the customers start right so you've got the channels are shifting then you've got the business model shifting so if you're a restaurant now you know you you your entire business was set up or you know the majority of your business was set up to serve people in the restaurant and you may be back to that or you may not but if you're back to it it's still a smaller part of your business now you're doing pickup and curbside and handling you know I don't know five times the orders on the phone that you did before so you so there's this challenge of simply allocating resources and the shift in the model and then the final I mean to me the big challenge and then we're going to talk about this of the day is that the emotional state the expectations of the customer have shifted and not only adapting to all these operational and logistical challenges about delivering experience but adapting to that at the same time is super challenging right you know there's also you know the kind of volume volume people are handling in terms of say you gave an example of airport or the restaurants you know readjustment for example a quick readjustment is not possible not from the infrastructure point of view not from the training point to point of view you know it's impossible to be readjusting such a short span but do you think still businesses have done good you know in terms of at least adjusting to it so fast very agile well we have an expression here that's a necessity is the mother of invention I'm not sure if you heard it but you know people start to figure out things really quickly when they have to that said yeah the performance has been all over the map but I think some organizations have done fantastic with it I think some organizations have struggled and part of that is as I said before some people were further down that road already right right so if you take something like Amazon yeah we think okay Amazon this is the the ultimate digital still heart soft goods business right but you know they were already digitally transformed their business is digital right but they had to shift to wait our volume just tripled 10 times wait are we going to make sure that we send so we can't handle the volume are we going to have to start delaying even these people that pay us for prime that pay a bunch of money a year to get their items in two days are we going to have to tell those customers hey we're not sending sweaters out that fast it may take two weeks because here's the medical necessities here are you know food and staples and all these medicines right that they prioritize so right so even they had to shift right and so it's yeah I think it's super tough it's been challenging for some organizations to find that balance and but on the other hand the ones that have pivoted have the word I like to use is they've accelerated there they took what they were already the path they're already heading down but now they're just 5x right 10x they're accelerating how they go down that path you know the as you mentioned earlier also there is this longing for a human connection you know I mean no matter how much we deliver online and keep them engaged but this human connector that factor is always missing on the scene how can that how can brands kind of offer something which is fulfilling this vacuum of human disconnect that we witness right now what is your advice to brands to market yours in the situation all right well thank you for that question because that's something I was talking about before COVID happened so I actually came up with a term years ago called signal stripping and what that means is we're wired for each other just evolutionary biology we are wired out is why I could read facial expressions we can read tone of voice we can read a smile versus a frown we have all this wiring to sort of know if somebody came out of the forest 10,000 years ago whether they were a threat or not but we're wired for them and here's what happens when we go down the channel chain these human signals that help us understand doesn't mean we can't have misunderstandings face to face it happens all time but it's a lot less likely than in an email or in a chat because we don't have I can't tell if you're smiling you know if I forget the emoji so when we strip away these signals the emotional connection is more distant it's harder to maintain right and one of the things organizations have to look at is okay how do we to your question how do we bridge that gap so with that set up there's a few ways we can do that the one is making sure that we are trying to create an emotional experience okay and a positively emotional resident experience so there was actually a study I think you'll like this rail there's actually a study of sorry cuspers that have had a positive emotional connection experience versus a negative one and the ones that had a positive emotional experience for 15 times more likely to recommend 15 times that's nps eight times more likely to trust six times more likely to forgive that's the power of emotional connection so what the first thing I would advise companies to do is this start with the word you said or a little bit ago training right they've got to have empathy we have to understand that if somebody's calling about their mortgage in the middle of covid if you're a bank right that that you know some of those calls were already scared and negative before now a lot of them are going to be they're worried about their job their spouse's job they're worried about the economy they're worried about they you know they lost their job and having the team that's on the other end of that phone when that they get that call trained to understand empathy to understand the person and where they're coming from is one of the best ways to create that emotional connection right I know I agree you know online is there but there's there's a limitation of communication for example it's a non-verbal communication when you're in present when you see read the expressions you know the aura around I think that cannot be repeated online or do you think we can reach a tech stage where this can happen just want to add since you know so much about this uh you mean like way in the future like augmented reality virtual yeah I mean I think if augmented reality gets really cool probably it can be pretty I mean it'll get pretty close probably I don't know there's still like a energy when you're with somebody you know that I don't know if that'll be replaced but what we do know is the mind is really good at being fooled so the virtual reality gets really good it'll be good right now this is one of the best ways is what you and I are doing like this would be an entirely different feel if we didn't have the video absolutely it adds a lot of layers so there's a lot of operational challenges to video bandwidth challenges also whether the customer is set up for video but to the extent that you can add video to replace not replace but to augment chat and email and phone it's powerful right absolutely absolutely absolutely you know there's brands are facing another challenge which is that one they're going through a dip in sales you know overall so they have to deal with that part of it and at the same time they have to focus on their customers so they are torn between two ends at the same time how to deal how can brands deal with the situation better and focus on the customer while they have also the business challenge because of low sales and you know the growth is the business is low at the moment what is your advice to brands in such a situation so I would say this you know it's they're all one thing yet it's it's easy to separate them but they're sort of all one thing because if if you're dealing with resource good to me I wanted a few people that you're in cx that'll say this the great majority of customer experience challenges are resource challenges if I had an unlimited budget and unlimited staff do you know how good my customer experience would be you know in the end it's a it's a question of where do you put resources how do you allocate resources so one of the things I look at if you're in a situation where you know your business is shrinking your industry got hit on my industry got hit training and keynote speaking I'm not on stages right now right one of the things is do what's called an 80 20 right and that's I don't know if you know that principle it's the idea that okay yeah the 20% for the listeners 20% of your inputs create 80% of your results 20% of your customers create 80% of your sales 20% of your customers create 80% of your headaches etc right focus on the 20 figure out the the vital few inputs that really matter the most even if that if you can't staff all your channels so which ones are the most important right which hours are the most important right if you have to which customers are the most important right which touch points are the most important when you when you're constrained you've got to maximize the impact of what you can do and approaching that way touch whether it's channels touch points staffing training budget whatever it is trying to figure out where you're going to get the most bang for your investment for your focus in the experience is the best way to approach when you have limited more we always had limited resources so when you have more limited resources than before that's my best advice perfect perfect there's another issue which is happening that in this we are in well over 90 days into the situation and habits have been formed you know there's a certain mindset that is getting set for market years for brands for customers and everybody else tell me this phase which is going to last for some more time as people say till we find the vaccine what how would it impact the long-term engagement with customers would it create its own impression on the way we deal with the customers you know the brands deal with customers or the customers deal with brands how do you see that impact being created well I'd say a hundred percent that's true now it is going to differ by industry different industries have been affected different ways right for Amazon it's sort of a short-term challenge and they've grabbed more market share than they probably planned on yeah I always joke Amazon's executing their 10-year plan in three years right now right just owning more of the the pie but if you are a restaurant right you are car rental if you are hotels like all these things there's going to be a lot of shifts and some of those in some cases buying patterns have permanently changed I would say right so what here's an example somebody was talking to a customer about this it's a like a big home improvement store and they could never really get like a curbside pickup as a thing like nobody there's this is never any buy-in for it right now huge focus huge focus big shift right something that couldn't get off the ground so you're going to see that internally in organizations you know if you look at like a restaurant all right let's do that they're going to go back to full capacity maybe not until you know one of the biggest restaurant tours in New York Danny Myers said he may not open till there's a vaccine because he doesn't know if he can run his businesses half full he doesn't know if the margins are going to be there to cover the expenses and one of the big things and just I'll just keep with the restaurant is because it's a good example because it's one that's really changed you know for a lot of restaurants particularly ones in like nice areas of Manhattan things their profit is at the bar like there is like the food keeps pays the bills and then the profits at the bar well the bar what's the bar look like right now right so I think you're going to see a lot of adaptation absolutely there's going to be major changes but it's going to depend on the industry and it's going to depend on what happens next right do we have a vaccine in three months do we have one in a year and a half what does the vaccine mean how effective is it so it's a lot of a lot of change but some of it will be permanent and organizations need to start anticipating and trying to understand what the future looks like in their industry particularly right I'll come to my last question but I have one quick question you know a lot of brands and marketers are waiting for the vaccine to be you know discovered you know a solution to be discovered to this problem tell me is that the right strategy to wait for it or should you let your business strategy be agile and get into a new kind of you know open up and look for some solutions quickly even though the vaccine is not there what is the best approach that you think at the moment marketers and brand owners can take I would say that's a complicated question so I will say number one I am not a medical doctor I'm a customer experience expert so I'll just add that in and but you know with the vaccine there's there's not a lot of certainty what that looks like right I mean right now we have flu vaccines but we never know what strain of fluid is right every year right so we don't know what the vaccine is going to really mean even when we have one that said you know I mentioned Danny Meyer what he had the comment he had made I think that to me you should be looking for what you can do you can't just you can't just wait on a lightning bolt out of the sky now if you can't think anything maybe you are waiting but you shouldn't be waiting because you think that's the way that you know I'm waiting for things to go back you should be adapting now because you don't know if it's going to go back you should be figuring out what you can do a lot of restaurants are doing that right they're doing curbside pickup they don't have in in in restaurant dining now they're they've pivoted that way now they probably aren't at full staff it's not good it's not as good but they're keeping the doors open and they're they're creating revenue creating profit so I to me I don't I believe in taking control of your destiny whether you're a person or a company to the extent the extent that you can and I don't think you should just wait around right right you should be looking if you don't find anything that's one thing but at least you looked you tried perfect well said my final question is about as an expert customer experience expert what are the broad trends that you foresee emerging from here on as we move a few number one the thing we just talked about at the individual level I think that is one of the biggest ones is uncertainty we have you organizations have to adapt to the idea that the there are no three-year plans right now they're gone they don't exist there's no such thing I mean maybe depending on like your industry if you're in manufacturing a big picture for a lot of industries there is no three-year plan you're lucky if you have a three-month plan right so you've got to have a short I mean you've got to have a short cycle that's based on flexibility that's based on okay you know before a lot of organizations said oh my god who could have seen this coming okay fair enough but what about now now we know okay it may come back it may do this it may do this there's sort of these path you know different pathways it could go do you have a plan for each of those right so planning for uncertainty embracing that as part of your strategic planning is huge next thing is we've been talking about this already is greater digital integration and transformation all right I use the word integration to talk about that that connection between the human and the digital so it's important to me to talk about it as integrated as opposed to transformed but it doesn't matter it's the same thing in the end and that part of it figuring out how you're going to transform how you're going to use digital to make up whatever way that is for your industry and your business model how you can use that yeah for example if you uh you had online ordering before or something like that right or yet online shopping well now do you have it in a way that integrates with a with the new uh in-store method okay you're using the app to communicate with customers about uh whatever how far distant they have to be all the cleaning things you're doing all the safety protocols that they have to wear a mask whatever it may be in your situation are you using the technology to keep up with the times right right and then finally I think one of the last thing I'd say is really trying to understand that the the psyche of your customer has changed we and we alluded to this earlier I think you know the the customer has changed now the customer is more scared more concerned more uncertain and if you can be if you as a company as an organization can be a rock for them could be something they can rely on something they can have faith on something that they know is there for them you talked about that emotional connection well part of that emotional connection is I can rely on you you're not going to take advantage of me because I lost my job we're not going to take advantage of me because you have the last supply of Clorox you know whatever it is that it's there's a huge opportunity to right now it's a it's a it's bad how we got there but there's a huge opportunity for organizations to prove how much they care about their customers at this time right right thank you so much lovely great insights it's been an insightful discussion and hopefully next time when the world opens up again and we hope to see you in India talking to us one on one I would love to do this session offline you know someday thank you so much for talking to us and to exchange for media I look forward to seeing you again very soon well thank you real I really enjoyed it thank you thank you Adam fantastic sessions both of you we now move on to the last session for the day we have with us Rahul Garth CEO of Mogulix and he will be presenting a success story on entrepreneurship and leadership in the times of covid just to give a little brief about Rahul Rahul has extensive experience in strategy product management and operations in the technology space prior to founding Mogulix in April 2015 Rahul headed advertising strategy for google asia very built a two billion dollar business from scratch he started his career with itium systems a banglutru based startup very led the wireless land satellite receiver algorithm steam and developed a knack for building world class products he has also serviced as chairperson of the marketing and attack committee at iab singapore companies like cogniz since systems and pre-scale semiconductors also form a significant part of his journey in the technology industry Rahul is also an investor having invested more than seven startup ventures he has also made a global presence and holds about 16 u.s patents in the form of product management and technology and has contributed to five publications of the united states patent and trademark office us pto rahul we're very happy that you're here today over to you thank you sunakshi uh i think i am not uh good evening everyone uh fantastic uh to be present in the new normal with all of you my uh i would say the marketing fraternity i refer typically as my fraternity because having spent five years at google i pretty much was part of the marketing and advertising revolution and going from offline marketing to online as a primary channel of marketing in those days so very excited to be back and share my experiences in a different context of building a company building a brand over the last five years and this is still early days of our journey so we continue to build our company which is disrupting b2b commerce in india so let me try to get the screen projection okay sunakshi just confirming that people will be able to see my slide yes they can okay fantastic so um the topic i was given today was talk about my experiences in building mogulics and then also speak up a little bit about how the covet has impacted broadly the startup ecosystem as well as what mogulics is doing in these times which are unprecedented and fairly chaotic for all of us globally so if you look at the step one which is about starting uh mogulics we started with a very simple goal and having worked with many of the consumer commerce companies consumer brands you talk about cpg brands being built you talk about travel e-commerce brands being built in the consumer segment one of the areas intrigued me was how does this play out when you start to look at uh business to business transactions happening in a country like india where you can guess from this picture that is being projected this is the distribution ecosystem of india this is a picture live picture from a place called charnichok uh in deli the old deli the old part of deli which continues to act as the go-to destination for all wholesale product buying in india and this acts as the feeder to all the subsequent dealers retailers in the offline world or to the manufacturing sector of the country pre mogulics and i think this was astonishing for me to see that having gone through independence and 50 60 plus years of those we are still uh and in the world where we are getting uh companies like flipkart companies like ola companies like swiggy delivering fantastic consumer experiences as a consumer using asking for products or for services or food the businesses continue to buy from this old school distribution world which does not have an effective storefront or an online storefront so to say uh does not have effective supply chain or ways to get the products from their shop to the manufacturing industry or does not have an efficient financial system to support how will they uh work with manufacturing organization and support the working capital needs that are inherent to any b2b transaction and that is what we set out to disrupt uh back in 2015 and this is all pre gst times where india was a federation of multiple states having their own taxation structure which made it even more complex than what we see today so with this simple goal how do we take this old school experience into a digital journey that was a challenge in front of us how do we make the manufacturing companies whether they are automotive companies like hero honda companies like maruti their ancillaries or companies like tata steel or companies like unilever which have gone through a fair bit of digital journey in their marketing and sales departments how do they start to think of this in their procurement and supply chain also on the supply side if you look at it you have to convince them to come online to start cataloging their products to start to make the entire pricing as a more transparent versus something which happens on a one-to-one basis as a uh non-transparent pricing mechanism so these are the things you had to change for a company like mogulix to be successful and those were behaviors changing on the buyer side on the supplier side also building the entire infrastructure of transportation warehousing because the old school distribution pretty much relied on something like a rickshaw something like a what they call as the chota hathi where you have the tata ace kind of products and sometimes a guy is traveling on bus delivering products i mean all kinds of crazy ways in which the products were getting delivered pre mogulix and we said this sounds like a pretty interesting problem interesting large and broken and we will bring technology into this world we will work tirelessly on educating many of these guys just like back in 2010 i was educating many of the advertisers to start taking online advertising seriously i said this is the next opportunity for me to start educating buyers and suppliers into this direction and today where we stand i mean five years into it uh we have more than 500 000 plus skus across 45 categories that we supply these are categories across safety products across electrical products across bearings many of the industrial categories some of you may or may not be familiar with but this is a very large assortment of products that we deliver today we work with suppliers and customers across multiple brands that you must be familiar with whether it is on the supply side i can think of companies like havels i can think of companies in the like seamans skf all of these companies working with us and on the customer side you name any industry whether it is a fmcg company like unilever gsk or companies in electrical domain or companies in pharmaceutical some of the interesting pharmaceutical companies which are also working on covid vaccines and medicines during this time all of these companies are now getting powered by mogulix in one way or the other and therefore it becomes a very very interesting journey of taking through for a completely non-digital experience to a digital organized experience that we have been building we are present in now 20 plus cities across the country from where we cover pretty much most pin codes across the country which are relevant more than 25 000 pin codes we cover on a monthly basis through these locations and with 700 plus people working with 1000 plus manufacturing organizations delivering a consistent experience on a daily basis what has been the disruption due to covid if you look at whatever i talked about so far i mean there are multiple elements to it so the first element of the supply base and many of you would realize that during the lockdown and even in the unlock era that we are today many of the physical markets would literally went offline they were not operating shutters were down and the entire distribution ecosystem was disrupted the second thing that happened was many of the manufacturing plants were shut down or started to operate with a lot of safety precaution and if they were allowed to operate third i mean you had to figure out how do you operate your warehouses when the entire country is in lockdown because you have and this this is a picture live from one of our warehouses back in april when we had to figure out how do we maintain social distance and continue to operate our warehouses in a effective manner and last given the space that we are in pretty much in the essential services because we are dealing in safety products some of the medical supplies so on so forth there is some things we can do work from home but there are some things which would require us to come to office otherwise we would not be effective or efficient and how do you design protocols of working effective both on the work from home and work from office in an effective manner and i would be proud to say that we have almost every single of our offices today working and even Mumbai which is which is one of the most sort of impacted areas i mean this week some of our brave people at mogulix have started to come on and off to office as well while the warehouse has been working all through and so is the case in delhi and so on so forth and that is how the india keeps running because if we stop i mean there will be another massive set of supply chain disruptions just like what you see in food and medical if those companies or those supply chains stopped working during lockdown now it meant also the change of products that we were dealing with i mean suddenly from selling a lot of electrical and bearings we were getting into product categories which were becoming more and more prominent and one had to come up with innovations in all of these products so you would find there are hundreds of products that we have worked with during this time and continue to sort of innovate on how do we make them more effective one of those innovations is how do you get a reusable washable mask which is still protective enough and it's not like a cloth stuff that you literally get and which provides you semi-protection not the entire protection but how do you design for that and how do you get the materials and how do you get the right manufacturing done those are kind of the innovations that we have been partnering on the in this time we also have had very interesting case studies where one of the largest FMCG company globally a 50 billion dollar plus FMCG company they had a unique challenge where they needed many of the personal protection products across the world and they looked up to us and said can you support this supply chain across the world for us and we were able to export from India more than 20 countries and today i i feel proud to certain extent that we have impacted more than 10 million people directly or indirectly by supporting medical supplies for them globally second i mean one day matram mission we have been integral part of supporting our pilots aerostasis on getting them personal protection equipment in times this is not today when probably it is a lot easier to solve for this problem but back in april and may when this was even harder to get some of these reliable products delivered to them we have been part and parcel of making that happen there is also a very important people dimension that happens during this time and many of you would face it how do you keep your organization which is an essential services continue to operate effectively because yes people are suffering from certain amount of fear they have to also step up we have to do the right thing which is spanning across multiple stakeholders whether it is employees customers investors the entire ecosystem of manufacturing companies that you work with how do you continue to be active and making sure that you are taking decisions as a leader covering what needs to be done across multiple of these stakeholders and interacting on a very high frequency with each one of these in a manner which is unprecedented virtually through them across the world also we we have continued to i mean we have always been about how do we disrupt and change the manufacturing and supply chain for the country but this time also introduced a new paradigm for us how do we play a role in one of the greatest challenge the society has faced over the last century and can we be an effective partner whether it is to the government to the health workers to the people in police people in government and making sure that we are able to supply many of these products and get our supply chain to reach the last level of person who may need some of these products in an effective manner and last i think to summarize i think we continue to believe in a mission where we would change the supply chain and the way the manufacturing ecosystem of the country looks like over the next coming years in a significant manner but this covid scenario has also given us an opportunity to play a role in a broader society objective of how do we come together and make sure that the right supply chain is built to get the health products out to the last leg of the country where these would be required the most and doing this we continue to keep all the key stakeholders including every single moghli who is working with us customers suppliers and the broader ecosystem as part of this journey i will pause here i think there is a slot i believe for q and a so over to you sunakshi yeah hi hi rahul this is rohail here sunakshi's co-moderator so wonderful listening to this session there are some questions that i would like to ask you that we have got from the audience first question is what does your martek martek stack look like what does my martek stack look like uh actually so it is interesting because i was heading advertising exchange for a while and also early days of dbm in white media many of these stack products so so today we are working heavily on analytics we use i don't know whether it's appropriate to share the brand names but i i think there are two two companies which are strongest in analytics so we work with we have worked with both of them and now we have a preference towards one of them so that is one one element of the key product that we continuously focus on we focus on a lot of advertising stack products i'm taking it broader to just not just limiting to marketing but also the advertising stack we use so we also broad base and work across the likes of optimization platforms across google and the facebook and social media whether it is all the way from online reputation management on social media all the way to performance marketing on a google kind of platforms we also effectively have started to go more and more deeper into audience based and marketing approaches which are prominent more so i would say in our mobile stack where it's a big focus mobile app and as all of us know india while consumers were always on mobile app but we start to see businesses moving to mobile app as well quite significant for the last one year so there are a lot of tools that we are engaged in that direction and continue to use them effectively right right right there's another question by Sanjay Sinha how do you market yourself in terms of your brand and acquire new customers so we work with typically large manufacturing houses so we do follow sales structures as well as you would do in enterprise sales organization so a lot of our therefore the marketing and go-to-market is tailored towards enterprise marketing approach where we would use quite a few classical approaches of email marketing and efficient tools around it we would use inside sales we would use lead generation platforms combined with an effective enterprise sales strategies that are part of most organization okay so in your presentation you made an interesting point about you know empathy in marketing and especially during this time you know what we have seen in the last 90 days i think brands are finding it difficult to sell directly there has to be a factor this empathy has to be the tone of the marketing communication tell me how what is your advice to people to in inbuilt it in their market stack you know mark tech stack this how can they enable this so i would say and i'm a big believer in brand building and articulating what you stand for so i feel marcom is an extension of what you really believe truly as a brand today people can see through it you can't sort of fake it so at least for us what we found is we've pretty much fell right in the middle of essential services with the PPE and safety right and we said what do we want to do as an organization and which in today's time is a combination of what we want to do for our employees the society and the ecosystem once you decide that i think it becomes far easier because then all you are doing is you are making sure if you want to drive a higher impact that the same message reaches to the right audience so when we are distributing masks to all hospitals on the mogulics balance sheet across police and health workers i mean we had to use for example twitter as a marketing approach and we said maybe that's the most efficient channel to get that message out because it's not something that we had to really advertising we want to be organic about it because this is something that we believe in and what we should be doing because by april first one had realized that there were a lot of policemen and doctors who didn't had masks and we were like we will make sure that quite a few of them at least get the first supply of masks subsidized by us pretty much given for free and that's what we want to stand for as a brand so i think if you believe and if you have actions backing it you have to use the right media channel to amplify the action don't force it a message if you're not going to follow it through the action because people take it i mean it it actually works reverse in these times if you don't take action but you're just sort of playing to empathy for the sake of it okay royal is there another question no that's it thank you so much we are it was a wonderful keynote i mean a lot of learnings from here and we expect you know to hear more from you as in the coming time as well so i will request on akshi to come and announce we have the fourth day tomorrow which has an exciting lineup as well and she's going to give a brief about tomorrow's session that we have from three to five p.m so people can join us and watch the experts talk about market over to you sannakshi thank you rahul fantastic session highly technical we need to be the most smarter to understand certain things in this aspect but i'm sure we get there one day uh we're ending the session for today and i thank all my audience for being extremely supportive and thank you for being there till the end and i'm sure you enjoyed it as much as we did tomorrow's session is the last which is day four of martin india brit series we concluded with having scott drinker as one of our keynotes so please do stay tuned he is the godfather of martin and we could not end on a better note so i will see you all tomorrow thank you once again all those speakers for today and look forward to a fantastic series tomorrow as well thank you and good night bye thank you