 Moving to the first session of our event here today, which is on the topic key global marketing technology trends. It is time, as we move forward, kicking off the conference, our first keynote panel discussion is coming up. Marketing technology is the single largest area of investment when it comes to marketing resources and programs. According to a recent study, MARTEC remains a top priority in all marketing budgets. The session examines the current and upcoming trends in the MARTEC ecosystem, the feasibility of full automation of marketing efforts with emerging technology, platforms, holistic transformation of marketing in a digital force world and other related aspects. We have a wonderful panel of speakers to discuss on the topic key global marketing technology trends. As we are setting the stage, let's take a few minutes forward more before I call upon the session chair here on the DS. So let's put your hands up in the air as we welcome on stage the session chair Mr. Kashyap Kompila, CEO, RP, A2 AI Research. Mr. Kashyap advises global enterprises on their digital transformation strategies and is a technology advisor to VC, private equity players. Welcome you, have you here on board with us? Can we have a huge round of applause for sir here, please? Thank you so much. Moving forward, let me call upon our following panelists now starting with Mr. Deepak Bhakshi, MD, Essentials, Strategic and Consulting India. Let's welcome sir with a huge round of applause. Mr. Aten Chhabra, Global Vice President, Digital Marketing and Media, Schneider Electric. Ms. Anindita Das Velluri, Director of Marketing, Adobe India. Ms. Thipika, Warrior Chief Marketing Officer, TIE, G.O. India. Let's welcome man with a huge round of applause, please. Mr. Rupunjay Bharariya, CTO, Co-Founder, Sugarbox Networks. Thank you so much sir for coming in here today. Can we have a huge round of applause for sir here as well? Mr. Ankur Katani, VP Growth and Marketing, Web Engage. So let's welcome all of them with a huge round of applause and I would like to personally thank each and every one of you for coming in here today and gracing us with your humble presence. Over to the chair now to take the session forward. Thank you. Thank you so much and before we start, I'm really privileged to have this very distinguished panel. So since we're running behind schedule, we have instructions to, with that we have a hard stop for this session at 11.20, so we have about 30 minutes. So let's get started right away. So I've been looking at the evolution of this industry for the last 10 years or so, the marketing technology industry. So I'll, I have three key messages, which is the big picture view of MaTeC. One is that marketing technology is for both good times and bad times. I'm not saying that because we have the CMO of DiG out here, but in good times, MaTeC helps you accelerate growth. In bad times, it helps you increase customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and is a part of the profitability. The second thing that strikes me is that in an increasingly digital and AI first world, marketing MaTeC is enabling innovation, creating, helping create new business models. For example, previously we had only business to consumer or business to business B2C and B2B, but now you have DTC, which is like a new innovation in marketing. And marketing technology is really what makes DTC, makes or breaks DTC brands. So that, that's one more interesting thing. And when it comes to India, we all know that India is a very value conscious, value conscious country. If you look at what are the popular marketing books in India, they all start with like marketing on a shoestring budget, frugal marketing, zero-money marketing, no-budget marketing, et cetera. So the MaTeC industry itself has several options to, like it's a hugely crowded technology marketplace, but it has options to suit every size, sophistication, and budget. So that's a good part of it, types. There are several options that even small businesses to large global businesses can take care of to suit their plans and strategies. So the last message I have is it's really about, success is really about execution. Most plans are with a stable core, which is like analytics, automation, data, personalization, et cetera, with innovation or agility at the edge, which consists of things like video, new social channels, metaverse, influencer marketing, et cetera. So that's the playbook, et cetera. So with that, let me welcome my panel once again. We'll start with Deepika. Deepika is, Deepika Warrior is the Chief Marketing Officer of Diageo India. They don't need any introduction. So in her very distinguished career, she was with PepsiCo earlier, where she was selling soft drinks, or marketing soft drinks. And now with Diageo, she is helping market hard drinks. So welcome, Deepika. And my first question to the panel is, to you, Israeli, as an experienced B2C marketer, what are the key trends that you're seeing? What are the key challenges? What's going on? Help us paint the picture of what's happening in 2023, 2022 in B2C marketing. And what's the role of technology? Sure. So Diageo, I don't know because Diageo, the name is not known, but I must tell you guys, these are brands like hard drinks, as you called it, Johnny Walker, Smirnov, so. And of course, let's not talk about Diageo here, because it's a highly regulated industry. But if I were to represent the B2C, or in particular the CPG industry, I think, Kashyap, some things don't change. So as you get into a new year, and as we're ending the year, given the hyper-inflationary environment that's going on, I think the role of marketing continues to be a growth driver. And even more so where I think growth is going to be, demand is going to be relatively hard to come by, particularly in some consumer segments. So I think how do you drive, how do you find growth, pockets of growth faster than the industry or your competition, and therefore, growth share continues to be the biggest, I would say, the ask for B2C marketing. I guess the second is profitability. So productivity, which of course, from a marketing point of view, will come from needing to drive ROI. And of course, also play into consumer trends. In India, pretty much like everywhere else in the world, you're seeing the twin trends of this premiumization that's going on. So consumers are upgrading, looking for more and more experiences. And on the other hand, there's a whole sachetization going on with consumers at the bottom, and are looking for smaller, smaller pocket sizes because their disposable incomes are challenged, again, because of inflation. So I think the whole piece of value creation doesn't change, and that's the role in my mind of marketing, right? You're the chief growth officer. As a CMO, I see myself as a chief growth officer, chief value creator, a profitable value creator for my company. So what's the role of technology? I think pull back, it's again, if you think about consumers, increasingly, technology comes in, and you know, my tech comes in, the entire value chain, right? So one is at the back end. And I think we spend a lot of time, even when we were sitting in the lounge and talking about it, we spend a lot of time in the front end in terms of how to engage consumers, provide them experiences. But I think it starts with the back end. So for us, for example, we've got, you know, we've really invested globally in a fabulous analytics tool which helps us then predict profitable sales and correlates that with our NP spending. So it starts with that. But increasingly, I think what we need to do is to get far more agile in the way we use that tool. So agility becomes a key thing. And then going forward, obviously, I think, you know, we're seeing the twin trends of hyper-personalization. In our category in particular, I think, you know, how do you drive immersive experiences because consumers have come out of COVID and they're starved for experiences. So, you know, I think, I think, how do you provide that? And we're an experience-starved country to begin with. You know, so how do you do that? And therefore, ensure that your brands are available and visible in that right context, you know, that experience-starved consumer, obviously is going to be a big challenge. And of course, the standard and the longer term, you're also kind of working, you're trying to work through, which I think everyone specializes here to say that we know the cookies are going to go away. Targeting is going to get more and more difficult. We need to get more and more responsible as marketers. So really, it's to start to create your own platforms, you know, and leverage first-party data. So for example, we at Diageo have started our beta testing of a platform that we call inthebar.com. We're trying to create a space. It's a social hangout space. And again, to try to engage and of course start collecting first-party data responsibly. So said a lot, but I think the core goals don't change, but I think what you need to do is adapt more and more to the fact that post-COVID, the economy is digitizing like nobody's business and the consumers also become, you know, I mean, spending all their time in their minds and on their tools. Absolutely, thank you for that. And I think one thing that I picked up is this premiumization. I think that's very specific to some certain categories. You know about sensitization, personalization, but now premiumization. Thank you for that. And the core job of the marketer doesn't change. How many of you are here from B2C? So probably about 30% B2B. So we have a lot of B2B folks as well. So now let's shift our attention, ask the same question of what's happening in the B2B sector. So for that, we have Athin Chabra, who is the VP of growth and digital marketing at Schneider Electric. And he's part of the global digital and global marketing leadership at Schneider Electric. So good to have you, Athin here and take it away. Thanks so much, guys. Fabulous to be here at a physical event again. Doesn't matter whether we start later, at least we are here all together. So look, let's take a step back, right? Let's also look at the business context as to what's happening, right? I think there are three big fundamental shifts which are happening in the B2B so-called organizations per se, right? Okay, one is that there is this extremely, extremely strong drive towards green and sustainable, right? It's no longer buzzwords, at least with the B2B companies, right? So right from products, from supply chain, that's something which is there on the CEO's agenda, okay? So that's definitely there. The second big thing is happening is that, I think B2B companies are not realizing more and more thanks to our sisters and brothers in B2B tech that product-led manufacturing businesses, the future is at record, right? So how do you get into record revenue, okay? And with more data coming in, with more IoT, we're looking at services, software, right? That's also a big shift which is happening. I think the third thing which is happening which is there on every CEO's agenda is digital transformation, right? You're talking about legacy companies who've been there operating at a very, very distributed channel strategy. Digitalization is not only happening from a point of view of IT systems but supply chain and even marketing, right? So if you look at these three big business priorities for any CEO, let's come to the CMO's priorities, okay? First is how does the CMO build a purpose-driven brand, okay? Because I think that's become now the core for B2B to drive brand loyalty moreover that brand pull, right? Okay, that's one thing. Second, there is this huge shift of CMOs of B2B brand also being officers of customer experience, okay? So the digital customer experience becomes so important in B2B, right? You're talking about a nine-month sales cycle. You're talking about various touch points, okay? How do you keep on engaging that? And post-COVID, this has become crazy. I think B2B guys were a steroid, events on steroids, okay, webinars on steroids. So if you talk about digital fatigue, thanks to us and we're sorry about it, right? But that's a reality, right? That's how we are engaging, right? And that comes to the third point, right? Which is that it is becoming now more and more important. And that's where technology is coming in very important. Martek, and I think Shaleel talked about it in the opening. In 2019 is when the whole word of Martek, 2018, start, et cetera, the acceleration, which at least I've seen in this space and I've been doing 18 years of now digital marketing has been phenomenal, right? Because I think this technology is what's helping at least B2B try to understand customer engagement better is driving that end-to-end customer experience where you can understand how you're connected with all these touch points and is also driving standardization. Because in B2B, unlike B2C, the complexity of a business, you're talking about 13 customer types. You're talking about different channels. You're talking about SKUs, which are right from a small electrical switch like for us, to a solution which can change the whole building management system, okay? How do you drive that kind of standardization, okay? I think that's where technology is coming. The second player where technology is becoming a big, big driver of B2B is data. Okay, we haven't reached there, okay? Nobody's reached there, okay? But the fact that we know that we have data to harness, okay, maybe customer data, your CRM data, your marketing automation data, your analytics, but also your device data. The IoT data, which is now coming in streams and streams, okay, can actually help start making it very easy for the sales guy, where the CEO wants to become digital sellers no longer on the field sales to make those informed decisions which can just help close this nine-month sales cycle to a much smaller one and then shift a lot to recurring revenue, okay? So I think that's at a very high level what's happening. I think that that's very fascinating. The last point you make about different organizations being in different stages of data maturity. We'll come back to that, that's an interesting point. Now let me shift focus and go to Deepak Bakshi, who is the MD of Accenture Strategy and Consulting here. Deepak is a very seasoned digital commerce and data-driven marketing helped a lot of businesses drive growth, et cetera. So Deepak, I mean, you have, from your vantage, you have a cross-industry perspective. So please paint a picture of what's happening in different industries. And also can you talk about, there are a lot of changes that are happening on the marketing side. Like there is cookies are being depreciated, there is new regulation, Apple is sort of doing something on the mobile identifiers, lots of different things. So can you paint us the picture on that? Sure, no, absolutely a pleasure to share my experience and learnings and what we see actually happening across industry. We talked about B2C, talked about B2B. Now, within these also, if you look across industries, different categories, the use cases for Martek are actually evolving. And this is a field, especially post-COVID, where in all industry across multiple categories, how you engage on the front end and how you enable that at the back end on the back of marketing technology, I think those use cases are continuously evolving. We see examples where companies have first-party data, they've had access to first-party data all throughout and Martek has now become a very, very strong enabler to drive those experiences, drive those engagement conversations and eventually, of course, conversion from a business perspective. There are organizations which do not have first-party data and they are now on the journey that has started. With consumers and customers like B2C, B2B, engaging with the businesses on digital channels, the amount of data that is getting generated, organizations are now focused on capturing that data, in many cases, enriching, enhancing that data so that can be put to use. And then there are several other use cases, right? A number of companies which have seen maturity on the digital marketing and Martek landscape are now looking at omni-channel setups, right? And connecting on-to-off and off-to-on journeys for their customers and consumers, which require additional set of technology interventions and to some extent evolution on their side as well. That's also very critical because consumers and customers alike are looking for relevant communication, relevant engagement from businesses, and that takes us to a very natural segue into the cookies. And so far, when organizations have been able to track all of us through cookies and understand what we may be interested in, very near future in a cookie-less world and how organizations are also looking at privacy, this still remains a challenge to be solved. There are multiple ways, talk about Apple, talk about Google, talk about many other technology firms which are looking at ways to still make it relevant and contextual for customers and consumers, and those solutions would surely come up. But the whole point is it has to be enabled at the back end through Martek. And how Martek then integrates with multiple existing technologies in the landscape of a business is key, right? And that's where the experiences and the engagement one needs to drive up front, needs to have a very strong linkage of how that is getting enabled and captured over a period of time. So this is going to be a journey. I think across industries, there are different use cases and there is a maturity scale on which different organizations and different industries are behaving. One thing is the consistent, a constant that is Martek is the need. What elements, what constituents or components in marketing or Martek really would work for one industry versus other is essentially dependent upon how you are looking to engage with your customers and how mature you are in that. Absolutely, I think one takeaway for me is that how Martek just doesn't need to integrate within other Martek components but also with the rest of the enterprise tech stack and the role of data in enabling Omnichannel journey. So now let's stick with the cross industry perspective and come to you Anindita. So Anindita is the director of marketing at Adobe India. Previously, she has experienced both in sales and marketing, which is very unique. She has had more than 23 years of experience most recently with IBM, a decade in IBM in various leadership and marketing leadership roles. So my question, Anindita, is what are you seeing in the market? What are the challenges that customers are grappling with when they are trying to improve the maturity of their marketplaces, that has come in both Athens and Deepak stock like maturity customers. And also, if you can talk about given Adobe's reputation, how do you use technology to improve customer experience? Yeah, good morning and thanks, Kashyap. And you know, before I actually start on what Kashyap said, so when Deepika was talking about the backend systems, you know, and I think was talking about the digital fatigue Deepak, you talked about Martek. We are the ones who actually glue all of them together right from the backend to the front and then to the integrated. So I think, yeah, to the fatigue, to the fatigue, we are the enablers, we are the enablers. But really if you ask me, I think the short answer, Kashyap, to what you really asked, is what we're seeing is the extension of a unified integrated platform. And the reason I'm using these words very cautiously is one is I think the going forward towards a platform approach. The second is a unified approach. And I think we heard from the B2B and the B2C segments because at the end of it, there are three components. If I really dumb it down, there are three components to this entire unified approach. One is data and I think we all know there's enough of data and there's no lack of data. You know, it is, and data comes with two angles. One is how do you utilize that data? What sources of data? We talk omni-channel, we talk, you know, multiple areas of data, how deep do you really get? But the angle that I really think is a challenge is how trust-worthyly are we using that data? Because at the end of it, for us, trust is a very big factor. We, as people who are enabling platforms, have the responsibility as a community to be able to utilize this data because consumers are giving us this dividend because every click that they do is a data dividend and a trust dividend that they're enabling us with. And it's important for us to be able to look at that. So I think one of the challenges is how do we leverage this data from a trustworthy, transparent, and a responsible manner? The second component of that is how does data travel from a journey of becoming content? And that's when to break it content. Is the intelligence, is the insights, is the analytics that you were talking about, Deepika, how do you really transform that journey because at the end of it, how do I create value and to what extent does that value become personal and purposeful? And the third component really is how do I deliver that? And it all boils down to that experience and we were talking about immersive experiences. How do I really boil that data and that experience down into delivering something? And when you were talking about asking examples, we have Tata Klake as a client of ours who's actually leveraging all this, this entire integrative platform of capturing the data from a first party perspective, integrating it into insight-led, driven metrics of actionable insights and then actually delivering it in a seamlessly automated manner to scale. You talk about maybe a BMW who's actually providing you insights becoming a car doctor, user analysis, analytics being done to not just provide insights to the user of how the car and how he's driving, but it's actually also providing insights to the OEM in terms of, can I do cross-cell upsell in terms of accessories, okay? So you know the kind of use cases that we are seeing are absolutely far and wide and limitless. From a trained perspective, very clearly I think three things that I'd like to call out. One is how are we managing our content supply chain because that is going to be the core of any experience that we provide. The second very clearly is how are we being trustworthy and custodians of that, okay? And the third is how immersive and intelligent are we going to get. And I think these, if we really get this entire thing and if you have platforms that your organizations are looking at and how integrated they are, how scalable they are and how available they are to be able to provide customers that I think you have a really, really great start. I think that's fascinating. One thing that I'll pick up from that is this notion of the content supply chain that you introduced and that's the nice segue to Rupanjay. So he is the CTO, he's a seasoned technologist and the CTO of a company called Sugarbox, which does a lot of interesting things in content delivery and content infrastructure. So my question to you is what is the role of content in delivering user experiences, compelling user experiences and how do you do that? And also an interesting thing that I noticed about Sugarbox is you say you're helping reach customers who are otherwise hard to reach for customers in rural areas or other places. So please talk about that. Correct, so at Sugarbox what we are trying to do is to utilize our platform which is a hyperlocal edge cloud platform which we deploy at under connected, connected, absolutely unconnected deployments and we have all the users who can actually connect to this environment and get access to content. Now for us content could be as simple as an OTT getting to watch our daily soaps, getting to watch the TV content and all. On top of it we are able to go out and deliver everything that ultimately content is all about. So it could be education, it could be entertainment, it could be standard e-commerce transactions and all. Now because we are right there engaging with the end user and we are basically covering up the last mile of the end user's journey. Engaging with that customer for us becomes much easier and it is much more in depth. We know a lot more about the customer because we simply are in that actual physical location where the customer is asking and accessing that piece of content. So understanding what the customer wants, what the customer is looking forward for, what they are getting into, what is their ultimate demand ultimately is something that we provide. And we become that bridge which will carry the requirements, the whole analytics piece of it, to the ultimate marketers. And this is where we go out and bridge everything together. Because we are going out and deploying all of these equipment and this hardware in under connected situations also, so for a typical marketer to go out and reach an absolute under connected, maybe like a village kind of a scenario. It becomes easier for them that there is a platform available. There is a simple pipeline available and they can upload their content, they are advertising their user acquisition models and we will go out and deliver it to the end user to be able to consume it. Thank you, I think that's a very interesting application of technology we haven't heard before. So now let me ask Ankur. You, Ankur is like a VP of growth at Web Engage which is like one of the very interesting companies out of India in the whole market space. So my question is what does Web Engage do and how like from what I've seen, you're trying to make marketing more outcome driven and more data driven marketing. So please talk about that. So I think among the panelists and the audience here, we'd probably be the least known company around. We're not that young but we're on the action ground for the last three, four years being aggressively growing. Incidentally two of the people on the panel happened to be collaborators or customers so that's a great discovery. So Web Engage is a business is in a similar space as a part of what Adobe does in that sense and it's a question of enabling a brand owner which is in the consumer space to unify all of their data, to translate this unified data into a bunch of insights, segmentation abilities, a lot of actionable place coming from there and then to translate that into engagement mechanism across marketing channels. So whether you want to communicate across WhatsApp, email, SMS, whatever channels that makes sense for your business, you could do that. And the third part of the puzzle is about personalizing that piece of communication. You know what I would love to do is give you a small example, it's become my favorite story which will demonstrate what capabilities come in and how content personalization and how experience personalization can make a difference. So there's a company in our client network, a company called Beko and I like their story a lot. So they have this lady, Dya Mirza as a brand ambassador and now I'm sure most of you would have seen that Cadbury campaign where Ashav Khan or Ritik Roshan was doing a one-to-one personalized video for anybody who would go and do that, right? So what these guys at Beko tried to do was whenever somebody would come to their website and add a product to the cart and actually not end up completing the transaction, in a matter of a few minutes, there'll be a video delivered on that person's WhatsApp which is Dya Mirza saying, you know, one-to-one personalized communication that hey Kashyap or hey Deepak or hey Deepakar, we thought you wanted to buy this but for some reason you did not complete your transaction. If there's absolutely anything we can do to help you, just come back to us here, right? So from the whole data flow to the AI-generated video flow to actually making this happen in real-time, it's all running on web-engage. The other example perhaps if you guys use Make My Trip, when you land at the Delhi airport, for instance, and your flight is supposed to land at 9.45 in the morning, at 9.46, likely you'll get a WhatsApp message on your phone saying that there's this BlueSmart cab station outside to show them there's OTP and it'll work for you. So while it sounds pretty simple to pull off, but the backing to make all of this happen, to know that this person is flying at this time and this flight is gonna land at this time, to actually make all of this happen, need some amount of work at the back end. So the fact for a marketer today is it's no more pure marketing that will be useful for you to understand. You will have to dig deep into the technology and the data process side of things. And that's the increasing trend we're noticing. Thanks to the Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, the consumer today is used to a certain level of personalized experience. He might not ask for it, he might not claim that he wants it, but that's what he's used to. So if you don't offer it, then you're gonna be in for a loss. And that's the business we're in to enable you because I don't think most of you would have the tech teams the size of Amazon and the Facebooks. So yeah, that's what we're into. Perfect, thank you. So everything we were just getting warmed up, but we have about less than two minutes to wrap this panel up. So here is what I'm going to do. We're going to start with Deepak and say what is the one key trend, the market trend that you're going to be focused on in the coming years? The key trend I see the, and this is again across industries, is how do you link value outcomes to your digital marketing and market investments? A lot of companies are going towards it and the choice is going to be the business value outcomes. Linking value to marketing outcomes, yes. You, Athin. Yeah, so I think one of the key trends is just to simplify the complexity, right? I say this, I don't say I read it, it's spine over stack. I think it's high time we make a marketing spine, which is core technologies, which is helping us with proper use cases, living out of IO. Okay, so that's one trend. The other key trend at least for B2E, which is happening is this whole customer data platform, right? And I look forward to the talk today, right? CDPCF. So while they've talked about some of the things that maybe we would have talked about, but I think from my perspective is one of the trends that I see going forward and I see clients engaging on is how they become global by being local, you know? And I think that entire engagement and that scale at which they can be able to do it is something that is going to be very, very interesting. Let's get global scale while being local. Deepika. I had something else planned, but I'm going to say something else coming out of this conversation earlier. I think we need to bridge the divide. We were talking about it before and I think there's the mavens and there's the traditionals and there's even in an organization, the gap is huge between the brand market here and the digital market here. It's all, so I think just bridging the divide and that calls for huge transformation in the larger market ecosystem and within organizations. I think just bridging the divide. Perfect, couldn't agree more. And I think that is where we come in and help. So it's getting the under connected crowd and there is a huge crowd there. Like it's a huge, really, really huge crowd there. Getting the under connected or the absolutely unconnected crowd, being able to bridge that from the guy at this end and the school team and all my colleagues here. And to them to be able to go out and access everything. That's exactly where we're coming from. Sure, so my statements have kind of been already taken. So there's simplification and there is the change in transformation that has to happen. So I don't know if some of you noticed the brand tagline that we currently work with is called retention simplified. The intent is that there is a lot of, let's say, education that needs to happen so that this whole, you know, big martech puzzle doesn't remain overwhelming. You know, these are really smart marketers who've done great work for the last 20 years, but if they're not digital natives and they find it overwhelming to think about this whole subject, we need to break it down and we need to simplify it for them. So from our perspective, that's the journey we'll be on. Yeah, I'll go with how martech, the whole toolkit of martech is an empowering marketers. It's really about empowering marketers. So please give a big round of applause to this panel. I mean, you could have like a 40 minute session with just each one of them. But unfortunately, we're out of time and I really appreciate your insights here. Thank you so much.