 Ladies and gentlemen, we are moving on to the next session. This is the fireside chat between Julia Rust, Global Solutions and Innovation Manager, Zaxis, and Stas Tushinsky, CEO, co-founder, Instrumatic. They are going to be talking about voice advertising Go's mainstream. I'll hand it over to these two. Hello, everybody. It's great to be here. Thanks for having us. Hi, everyone. Hi, Stas. How are you doing today? Julia, I'm doing well. How are you? Yeah, good. Very excited to be here. And I guess we're talking about voice advertising today, right? So shall we quickly kick off and start by explaining what voice advertising really is? Yeah. Up until now, all previous advertising formats have talked at consumers, right? And this has been the case for decades. But now, technology has created a whole new opportunity. You can listen. And the voice era opens a new chapter in marketing. Brands can listen and speak with consumers, just like we are speaking right now. So how does it work? What is voice advertising? So imagine you're listening to your favorite music app. Let's say it's Ghana. And instead of getting a 30-second regular audio ad, you would hear something like this. Hey, Starbucks is here. Would you want to skip the line in the morning and have a hot cup of coffee waiting for you? And you can respond by saying, yeah, I'd love that. All right, just get our app and we'll get a hot cup of coffee waiting for you. Or you can say, no, I don't like coffee. Sorry. All right, sorry about that. We'll try harder next time. And voice and interactivity creates a very rich relationship between a brand and a consumer because now, well, first of all, people feel heard by participating in a conversation. And also in the process, marketers can learn something about them. And at the same time, people get control over their ad experience. So if ad is relevant or not interested, interesting, they can skip it. But if it's relevant, then people can unpack, learn more, and it makes advertising really entertaining journey because now you can actually navigate through a certain path and uncover interesting surprises. And as we all know, the best ads always tell a story. And voice ads make the user an active participant in the story. Ads can actually become episodic, which means that we can connect multiple ads in a single narrative. And we can do that based on previous response history, which makes it really powerful marketing tool. And all the campaigns that we have run and that we saw delivered really high engagement rates and great results. And I think there is no one better than Julia to tell us more about their experience with voice. Yeah, exactly. And I think you hit the hill on the head, right? I mean, there is no denying in the rapid evolution of voice tech. And if anything was proven last year, we've seen how resilient tech is and how it could really amplify people's lives. And more and more people start to use their voice as a tool to drive their devices. And it makes sense, right? Because our life becomes increasingly busy and we're handling multiple tasks at the same time. And therefore, voice is very a convenient tool to use our devices. And within that consumer changing behavior, brands are in the middle of it. And brands need to adapt to that change. But what isn't changing is that ever-growing, incredible amount of choice people have every day. And I guess today's always on consumer really demands convenient access to information when it comes to buying product, but also when they're exploring services. And voice advertising really offers marketers to your point a flexible mix of creative storytelling, but also data-driven application at scale. And combining those two can really elevate personal messaging and subsequently lead to higher return on investment. And I think this is absolutely crucial for brands, right? Because no matter how accurate or how well our media execution may be, creative content is still a massive influencer of our campaign success. And what does campaign success really mean? I think we really have to rethink what success means because before we really used a click as a proxy and really told everyone, like, if someone clicks on an ad, it means they're interested. While we all now know that, you know, if someone clicks accidentally on an ad, it doesn't mean they're interested. There could be tons of reasons why they're not interested. And the opposite is true as well. You know, if someone doesn't click in your ad, they may be interested as well. And over time, we found new meaningful ways to add more insights into our digital media tactics. And, you know, we've applied artificial intelligence. We are layering multiple data sources to identify purchase patents. And it all become more granular and more insightful. But what is lacking still today is that qualitative layer of why people are interested. And within that fast moving and trans sensitive landscape, consumer preferences also constantly change. There isn't really a traditional consumer profile anymore and therefore ads are subject to change. And I think, you know, using voice advertising can really help brands adding that qualitative layer to their media mix strategy. And I guess I'll kick off with some examples too, if you don't mind, obviously. I think voice advertising can be really infused into multiple ways into our media tactics. But one of my favorites really is, you touched on it or earlier, is applying voice AI to audio ads. So we did a case study last year and we used your tag of Instramatic and we, you know, we activated on Ghana supply here in India for Pizza Hut. And basically what we did in that campaign is, Pizza Hut wanted to gain awareness for their buy one get one free campaign. And they really wanted to drive awareness but simultaneously add more engagement into that layer and subsequently drive more scale. So we decided to implement voice activated comments in the audio ads. And we asked people whether or not they were interested in the offering. And it was a very simple execution. We asked if they were interested and if they were, they were directed to a landing page. And what we found in this campaign is that the engagement rate was eight times higher than a normal audio campaign. And 4% of the users actually was interested in ordering the buy one get one for free pizza. And when we followed up after that with a retargeting campaign, we saw that 3% of the people who had a negative attitude before changed their mind and had a positive attitude towards the campaign and the brand. So we're not for that interaction and adding voice technology to the audio campaign. People may have not changed their minds. So it really demonstrates how powerful voice can be and how important it is for a brand to have that connection at scale with consumers. And another example, for instance, is how voice advertising can really help driving customer engagement and ultimately leading to consumer loyalty. And I think that touches on what you said before, Stas. The importance of, I'm not interested, there's such a wealth of information behind that answer. And any conversational format, basically what it does is it mimics a conversation and it basically allows a brand to start having a two-way interaction with a brand rather than a one-way interaction. You're not pushing a message, but you're actually asking for information and that information can be infused into your only channel strategy. It can really ensure that your entire digital media strategy can be enhanced and subsequently also your business outcomes. And a great example of an industry that is really benefiting from that is the auto industry because globally governments have set targets to reduce carbon footprints, right? And the automotive industry is really engaged and they have to because they're a big contributor to carbon, the carbon footprint. And if they don't start engaging with their audience right now with their new electric cars, they might risk losing them because the thing is with electric cars and selling them, it's differently, the customer journey is different because there is less information out there on electric cars and therefore consumers have little references and they have to explore more before they can base their decision and choose for rent. Before with fossil fuel cars, people could, maybe they had their parents or their friends that drove a type of brands or they had a driving lesson and they have really fond memories of that driving lesser so they really wanna go for that brand. Research actually shows for people who are in the market for electric cars, they're not necessarily buying a car that they are familiar with but they're going for a brand that offers them the information that they're looking for at that time. So for brands that really means they need to start communicating with their clients at scale and by doing so they can start adding engagement layers but also working on brand trust and ultimately that leads to consumer loyalty. Brands who are not adding that element of personalization into their digital media mix really risk losing consumers on the longer term. Yeah. There is a question from the audience. So the question is, would there be a recording button like a CTA in the Ghana app when the voice ad appears in Ghana? That's a very good question. So the way we roll out voice ads is through allowing people to opt in. So our clients and our publishers, they tell their users like, hey, if you want to enable voice interactivity and replace one way audio ad experience with a two-way dialogue, then you have to opt in, you have to give us permission to enable mic when it's appropriate. And so people, users don't actually have to do anything. The moment they get a voice ad, the voice ad itself ends with a question or with something like, hey, let us know if you want to learn more and then we open mic for four seconds to get a response and people say something and based on the response, we continue the advertising journey. And speaking of platforms and the adoption and the scale, we, I mean, Instrumatic and GroupM, we've been at the forefront of this innovation and we can see that right now, voice advertising really enters mainstream market. So a couple of publishers that already using Instrumatic voice technology and growing their supply. So they are Ghana, the largest music app in India. It's Pandora, the largest music app in the US. It's many, many radio groups. We have several big, big publishers coming online this year and follow the announcements. And what's really great is that we've been also working hard to expand the offering into the programmatic ecosystem. So just recently, again, with GroupM, we ran the first programmatic execution of a voice. So it's getting there. Like you won't notice it, but very soon, you won't be able to imagine the media plan without a voice ad line item there. Yeah, and I think really the direction of traveling for voice advertising is there are already so many strategies out there that brands can leverage and start reaping the benefits of voice advertising. And especially with a channel such as Audio, enriching it with voice advertising really offers clients to engage with people on scale and really add more impact to their media campaigns. And we really see this as a great opportunity to be smart about our digital media tactics and engaging people by asking questions and maybe even circumventing the limits of cookies. I know it's not a topic today, but it's really definitely an option that a conversational technology can do. And it also allows us to capture true intent and really infuse it into our media channels and only channel strategies. And it makes the entire digital media activation more valuable and impactful for our clients. Not sure, I know we only have 15 minutes. I'm not sure how we are in times does, but what do you think are the next steps for voice advertising? I think that voice advertising is gonna be part of every ad supported medium. So Audio Vertical is a very natural place for it to start to thrive, but eventually we'll see voice sets in the video vertical, in the gaming vertical, navigation and any other ad supported apps and services. So I think that every marketer should think of voice as mobile ads 10 years ago. It's just the beginning, but it's gonna be really big and it's gonna affect every, again every vertical that we have today. And what do you think, Julia? I totally agree. I think brands, it would be wise for brands to start exploring it now from small to large. I think there is an opportunity for all of them. And yeah, what we've seen, I mean, numbers aren't lying. More and more people are starting to use their voice to again drive their devices and brands can really add that layer of quality to their campaigns by using voice technology. And I guess on that note, I hope this conversation gave everyone food for thought. And I think we're gonna hand over to Revin again. Thank you. Thank you so much, Julia. Thank you, Stas. And of course, it was a wonderful session and we really had a great time listening to you. Thank you. Thank you. Enjoy the rest of today.