 A very good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and a very warm welcome to the first day of the fifth edition of eTechMunch 2021, India's biggest digital marketing conference, a platform that brings together the advertising, marketing, and media fraternity of the country to discuss digital. My name is Khyabi Kawa and I will be your host for the day. eTechMunch is presented by the exchange for media group that was set up in the year 2000 and today is one-stop information solution for all the entire industry news, views, analytical information, in-depth analysis of events or trend forecasting and the heartening part for the team at exchange for media is that our publications have a loyal following. Now eTechMunch focuses on leapfrogging the digital marketing industry through small but defined steps. We want to present a few of top-ranking global influencers, panels of luminaries, knowledge workshops by experts, eTechMunch promises to give you an unmatched perspective into the world of digital marketing. Once again, a very warm welcome to all of you and before we commence the event, we would like to thank all our partners here, a presenting partner, Microsoft, Intelligent Connections, and inMobi, Driving Real Connections. Co-powered by ABP Life, ABP Life ke saath jaan te raho. Digital partner Manoroma Online, home to 36 million Malayalis. And before we commence the event, let's take a look at the audiovisual of our partners. Can we have the AV please? Can we pull up the AVs of our partners? Or media, a name synonymous with the latest news about the advertising industry in India. The Exchange For Media Group, set up in 2000, has the most credible media platforms covering the entire advertising, media, and marketing domain, with its highly acclaimed digital, print, and on-ground assets. The group's flagship news portal, exchangeformedia.com, reaches over 6 lakh subscribers, who are the first to receive breaking news in the industry. The buzzing website not only covers the news but goes beyond the obvious to bring in a fresh point of view. Impact, the weekly news magazine from the group, is the most widely read business magazine in the advertising trade, with in-depth analysis and news-based features providing perspective to key happenings in the industry. The monthly pitch magazine provides a ringside view of events unfolding in the marketing landscape along with media and advertising. Another monthly magazine, Realty Plus, is a market leader in repartage on the real estate industry. Today, Exchange For Media is not only a leading publisher in the domain but owns the IP of more than 50 events spread across Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore, making it a powerhouse of information and knowledge sharing. Exchange For Media has curated and launched some of the most successful IPs across marketing, digital, TV, print, radio, mobile, OOH, and PR. The Impact Person of the Year, Exchange For Media Conclave, Indian Digital Marketing Awards, Tech Munch, Bitch CMO Summit, India Marketing Awards, Primetime Awards, Indian Content Marketing Awards, Golden Mics, Enbar, are some of the group's top-notch events in addition to niche, bespoke events and roundtables curated especially for discerning clients. Exchange For Media events attract stalwarts' speakers along with the loyal audience comprising of leaders, trendsetters, and opinion makers. They are the perfect networking platform for the entire media and advertising industry. No wonder, Exchange For Media group publications and events have high credibility and reach and are the destination of choice for agency, brand, and media professionals across the industry. Exchange For Media BW Business World presents a rich legacy of curated events that enable conversations on policy issues in India. Because of the state of our cities, we have no option but to build smart and resilient cities. Digital India is more for the poor under privilege and deprived. Covering a range of topics, BW Business World events look to create a strong narrative around smart cities, digital media, healthcare, Swachh Bharat, human resource issues, education, banking, and finance, among others. The world is fast-changing. Best practices are available now on the net. Because development in the whole of Rajanithi has become a focus. BW Business World events provide a speaking platform to the voices that matter. It's about the basic communities that we are. You don't have to be a technologist. You need to understand how technology influences the world. Mahatma Gandhi was a great man. He was the leader of the freedom struggle. We believe that e-governance and IoT will play a very, very important role. BW Business World is an excellent exhibition platform that helps you showcase your services to the right audience. To be a part of our legacy, write into us at partner at theraidbusinessworld.in. We asked a number of respondents what was important in terms of how they work with brands. Trust was number one. I've started every presentation and every talk with this is why and how we stand for trust. It's the most critical thing in terms of being able to establish trust and to merit it, to be worth trusting, right? Trust is a number one factor in choosing a brand for consumers. Marketers come to the New York Times because they want to borrow our credibility and trust. There is three types of consumers, I believe, those that will never share their data, those that will share and believe that they have nothing to fear, and those in the middle that need to have a clear value exchange in order for them to get their data. I think the new currency of a true relationship between a brand and its customer is going to be whether they're giving you their data or not. Big data, how do we take advantage of the information that is coming in from different devices and new technologies to understand how do we reach our audiences? Trust is built in droplets and sort of lost in buckets. We think about it as Microsoft as a corporation. How do we engage with our customers across all of our different business units to make sure that we have the right level of transparency control of data so that as a company that the consumers can trust us? And of course you've got to do this with trust. It starts within our mission and our business model. Learn more at microsoftadvertising.ai. Technology has only shaped how we communicate with one another. The wheel, the printing press, the pony express, the telegraph, the telephone, the computer, and mobile devices. Technology changes, yet one truth remains. We want our communications and interactions to be meaningful and have relevance. Today, however, driving real connections are easier said than done, but we help brands do that, to drive real connections. With our platform technology and exclusive mobile data, and Moby helps you understand, identify, engage, and acquire your customers. In Moby, driving real connections. Thank you and once again a very warm welcome to all those who just took us to the first day of the fifth edition of eTech Munch 2021 India's biggest digital marketing conference. Now ladies and gentlemen, before we move forward, I'd like to know from all of you on whichever platform that you're watching us on, tell us what is this one tech that you have adopted in the last two years? So tell us in the comments and tell us which is that technology that you have adopted in your many day to day or professional life and tell us in the comments we'd love to know from all of you as today, we are talking about everything related to technology. So we'd love to know your comments on the same. If you have any questions for our speakers or panelists, you can go ahead and send them as well. So I hope that all of you are ready and excited for the eTech Munch 2021 because we are at Exchange for Media. We've put up a great lineup of speakers for all of you to really dwell on the knowledge sharing that will happen on the platform today. And ladies and gentlemen, if you have any questions like I've mentioned, please put it in the chat box. If you're watching us on the website, you can also put it in the comment box. So don't forget to do so. And yes, we also have our Twitter hashtag, which you can use to comment or share your highlights from the sessions that are coming up. The hashtag is super simple. It is hashtag eTech Munch. So please go ahead and use the hashtag and share your insights, your highlights that you think were, you know, for you, the highlight of the session. Go ahead and share it for a wider audience to also connect with that. And we'd love to hear from all of you. So don't forget to keep engaging with us. And for now, I'm going to repeat our Exchange for Media audio visual just for everybody who's just joined in. So can I request the team to please play the audio visual for media? A name synonymous with the latest news about the advertising industry in India. The Exchange for Media Group set up in 2000 has the most credible media platforms covering the entire advertising, media and marketing domain with its highly acclaimed digital print and on-ground assets. The group's flagship news portal ExchangeForMedia.com reaches over 6 lakh subscribers, who are the first to receive breaking news in the industry. The buzzing website not only covers the news, but goes beyond the obvious to bring in a fresh point of view. Impact, the weekly news magazine from the group is the most widely read business magazine in the advertising trade, within depth analysis and news-based features, providing perspective to key happenings in the industry. The monthly pitch magazine provides a ringside view of events unfolding in the marketing landscape, along with media and advertising. Another monthly magazine, Realty Plus, is a market leader in repartage on the real estate industry. Today, ExchangeForMedia is not only a leading publisher in the domain, but owns the IP of more than 50 events spread across Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore, making it a powerhouse of information and knowledge sharing. ExchangeForMedia has curated and launched some of the most successful IPs across marketing, digital, TV, print, radio, mobile, OOH and PR. The Impact Person of the Year, ExchangeForMedia conclave, Indian Digital Marketing Awards, TechMunch, PitchCMO Summit, India Marketing Awards, Primetime Awards, Indian Content Marketing Awards, Golden Mics, Enbar are some of the group's top-notch events, in addition to niche, bespoke events and roundtables curated especially for discerning clients. ExchangeForMedia events attract stalwarts as speakers, along with the loyal audience comprising of leaders, trendsetters and opinion makers. They are the perfect networking platform for the entire media and advertising industry. No wonder, ExchangeForMedia group publications and events have high credibility and reach and are the destination of choice for agency, brand and media professionals across the industry. ExchangeForMedia BW Business World presents a rich legacy of curated events that enable conversations on policy issues in India. Because of the state of our cities, we have no option but to build smart and resilient cities. Digital India is more for the poor under privilege and deprived. Covering a range of topics, BW Business World events look to create a strong narrative around smart cities, digital India, healthcare, Swach Bharat, human resource issues, education, banking and finance, among others. The world is fast changing. Best practices are available now on the net. Because development has become a focus in the whole of Rajanithi. BW Business World events provide a speaking platform to the voices that matter. The smarts are connected to the basic amenities that we have. You don't have to be a technologist. You need to understand how technology influences the world. Bhatla Gandhi was a great man. He was the leader of the freedom struggle. We believe that e-governance and IoT will play a very, very important role. BW Business World is an excellent exhibition platform that helps you showcase your services to the right audience. To be a part of our legacy, write into us at partner at theraidbusinessworld.in. Once again, a very warm welcome to everybody who's joined in at the fifth edition of E-Tech Month 2021, day one. And now I would like to invite on forum Dr. Anurag Bhatra, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of the Business World and Exchange from Media Group, to deliver the welcome address. Dr. Bhatra, over to you. Thank you so much. Kati, I hope you and your family are doing well. And I hope everyone who's tuned in is doing well. We started TechMunch many, many years back, looking at how the world of advertising marketing media and technology were becoming inseparable. The CMO job started overlapping with the job of a CTO, of a CIO, of a CISO. As e-commerce grows, as social commerce grows, as social media becomes all-pervasive, as technology is no longer just an enabler, but a driver of the business. In fact, the business have become technology businesses. If you're not a technology business, you're not a business. So TechMunch was a product of that realization that technology is not just an enabler. It is actually all of us are in the business of technology. All of us are in the business of using technology as a driving force to what we do. Clearly, in the last 16 months have shown that the lines between content, commerce, the lines between technology and business, the lines between social media and communities have blurred technology and technology investments and technology appreciation has all gone up for all of us. The role of technology in each of our lives has gone up. Hence, brands have embraced technology in a big way. Right from chatbots that you talk to to be able to solve our daily queries if you're interacting with a brand to the interactive voice systems, to the traditional customer service, human interface, I would call it, has grown. Also, more and more technology is being used to make the customer experience even better. So TechMunch is an endeavour to connect technology with brands, technology with market years, technology with the advertising agency ecosystem, with the media planning buying ecosystem. And the role of technology in building brands, in driving brands, because we live in a technology economy, we live in an internet economy. We live in a world where technology every three months, six months is in some way giving us new tools, new ideas, new ways to be able to build relationship with consumers to sell our products and to build brand relationships which are not just transactional, but serve a larger purpose. So TechMunch has become a platform for that. Today you will see a host of stalwarts talking to us about how the businesses have become technology-centric and are using technology to do the core purpose of the business. I'll be talking to a leading business leader who will be telling us how his venerable FNCG company has used technology to be able to reach out to more and more consumers to build the e-commerce business and how technology has kind of got immersed in every part of the value chain. So I'll be talking to Mr Deepak Aayar who's the managing director and CEO of Mondelez in India. We have a set of exciting leaders, MD, CEOs, CMO, transformation coaches talking to you about the role of technology. So the next one and a half, two days, listen to them and I'm sure it will give you some ideas on how to build your businesses. We'll also have an ITMA, which is the Indian Digital Media Awards. Again, the junior of the ITMA is really high-powered, big leaders, credible leaders and the process that is robust and honest. So tomorrow the winners of ITMA will also be announced. So we look forward to celebrating the great work that has happened in the digital domain and the brands and businesses that are on the cusp of really using technology and digital in a much, much bigger way than they ever did are likely to be more successful in the marketplace. So I wish you luck and I look forward to learning from the leaders. Thank you so much. Thank you so much Dr. Bhatra for setting the context of the day one of the fifth edition of E-Tech Munch 2021. Ladies and gentlemen, like I've mentioned, do not forget to tweet to us using the hashtag tech munch your highlights from sessions that are coming up or questions that you'd have for our speakers. And as talking about the speakers, we have our first keynote speaker already on screen. Let me take the opportunity here to introduce him formally to all of you. Most of you know him already. Mr. Deepak Ayer is here. He's the president of Mondelez Indian Women's Privates Limited. He's responsible for leading the business of Mondelez International in this dynamic and emerging market. He's also part of the Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa leadership team of Mondelez International. He has extensive experience in the FMCG space with close to 30 years of management experience, spanning sales, marketing, franchise and general management. He will be speaking today on the topic of building a data and digital enterprise. So ladies and gentlemen, please put your virtual applause and let's welcome formally Mr. Deepak Ayer, president India of Mondelez International. A very warm welcome to you Mr. Ayer. Thank you so much. Thank you. Hello and good evening everybody. It's a pleasure to be talking to all of you. And thank you Anurag and Priyanka for having me here today. Like Kaguya just said, I'll be sharing my thoughts today on building a data and a digital enterprise. A good starting point would be to step back and ask the question why? Why should you even think of building a data and a digital enterprise? If you take a closer look at what's happening around us, what's changing around us, you soon realize that there are tectonic shifts happening in consumer behavior. They are shopping online more and more. The retail landscape is changing. The e-commerce and social commerce emerging quick and fast. And companies are using technology to revolutionize that manufacturing. All these still have serious implications on our business. Today our businesses could have competitive advantages stemming from powerful brands or let's say expensive distribution networks or ability to manufacture complex products at scale or let's say housing the best talent and living an enabling culture. Now I'm not saying any of this will vanish tomorrow. But data and digital could well emerge as a bigger competitive advantage which could sort of reduce the sheen in some of these. And hence it becomes imperative to build a business that is tech, data and digital. Now that brings us to the next question. How possibly a more important one since most of us including me, I'm sure you have struggled to get this way. Or even if you got this going we have struggled to ramp it up fast enough to keep pace with the rapid changes around us. The most experts and the best of reading material in this space will say you need to build a digital culture. I'm sure you'll agree with me that this is what digital culture can be as legulous as it gets. I'm sure there are various ways to do this to build in any organization. But I'll talk about something that's worth for us in one piece. The five things that have worked for us. One is looking for inspiration from outside. Two is it's a stop-down process. So start from fixing a strong core at the top. Think of putting in place a digital council. Start with testing learns. And finally you'll need to reskill your teams, correct? So I think these are the five things. And let me spend a couple of minutes on each of them. So let's say looking for inspiration from outside. But the best way to do this is to go on learning books. But think of learning from industries, companies, consultants who are more advanced in it. But yet not 10 or 20 years ahead of you. So if you choose to connect with any company which is cutting edge or digital or too far ahead, you struggle like you struggle to get meaningful examples of patterns to actually inspire our first steps, our baby steps. We can never be inspired with cutting edge examples. In our case, visits to innovation centers to assist the consultants. Attending conferences organized by experts. And holding tech dates with this throw startups actually helped us immensely. Whichever way, I mean I'm sure you'll find your way to start a learning throw. But just start it, that would be my advice. The second one that I talked about is the process starts stop-down. And a strong core on the top. It is hence imperative to get the leadership's skin in the game. To sign on to this journey and lead it. In our case, my entire country leadership team started with two things. One, going on learning towards the inspiration together. And two, each of us taking one clear objective on data or digital in our roles for you. That is not important how big or small the goal is. But you need to take one. And for God's sake, don't take one that says, you know, I'll automate data. That's possible. We should have done that 10 years ago. But take something meaningful. It could be anything. It could be small. It could be large. The third thing you could do is think of putting in place a digital concept. Not from day one, but at a certain stage in the journey. Especially once the leaders have signed on to this journey. Now ideally it should be constituted with talent. One level below the leadership team. And top talent you have. And surely folks who have an open mind. Create learning agility. And a willingness to collaborate seamlessly between functions. Each of these are very important. So it has to be a hand-picked group of people over weeks and months. This council gives them the kind of visibility and attention that really stands out. That is when it starts becoming aspirational to get a seat from the table in this council. The first time around you may not get the best image. But eventually you will. And in seating, the right thing is very important for the council to work. I'm shifting over to the fourth point I talked about. I talked about starting the test and learn. Small pilots, small projects. Launching MVPs. They are called minimal viable products. Some will work, some will fail, but keep at it. I usually realize that to win, you need to skill your teams with proper training programs. Example, local, local. Example, OMC, OMC is for online marketing certified professionals. These are great training programs. And you don't need to figure out which one right now. But when you will get to the stage, you will get to know. So that was the part on how. And now, let me also sort of pause for a minute to tell you that as you traverse this journey, there will be quite a few pitfalls and a few conundrums. And I'll talk about them, a few of them. But with the caveat, there is not a confidence in this. And let me start with the first one that you would have already debated in your minds or will be debating now or will. Sure, I start with the point in the CDO, achieve data or achieve digital arts. But some companies have succeeded in this. Many have failed. The fallacy here is that digital then becomes the bonus of the CDO and the CDO. The intrinsic assumption is that one is expecting the CDO to do the job of what the CDO and the leadership team can actually do better, which is inspiring the teams and their functions to adopt digital rates. Now, a Maverick CEO can surely do that, but others will fall back on the leadership team to do this. And what worked for us, at least in one case, is a bunch of digital ambassadors. I call them Digital Evangelists. The CEO and the leadership team, these are our digital ambassadors and they may happen. And another pitfall, let me talk about this, this famous question of cost and otherwise associated with digitizing a company. Now, here's my learning. Don't go around looking for ROI too early in the game, because they do not know how to do it. You don't even know what's going to come out of some of these experiments. Just get around to putting something out there at acceptable cost. Look at it as test and learn. You won't need to change the whole organization. Our voice will follow. Sometimes it will be a false multiplier that you have never imagined. The other one is this entire concept of failing fast. So I haven't come across a single value company who start with an agenda to fail. But these words are very often misinterpreted, right? The right way to look at it is failure is okay. But what have you learned to put out something better? Failure is a part of the game. So we won't feel lonely for failure. But get us some success next time. And this is the right way to start looking at failures. And again, the other one that I would bring forward as a pitfall will be finding the best talent with the right skills and capabilities. It's going to be a challenge. Now why? It's very simple because the best talent in data and digital space doesn't think you are the best company to work for. Rightfully so, because you're just starting the journey and in their minds, we are the target, right? So maybe you need to work with consultants to house these capabilities when you start the journey. Maybe the great paternity. And who might be happy freelancing apart of their time, data scientists, get statisticians, et cetera. And there's one more pitfall that I think is very important if you can mind, which is about data governance. So as you start accumulating data, you need to be looking at the organization to organize it such that you manage literacy, you manage security. And this is where if you miss out enrolling the legal counsel in the leadership learning towards right in the beginning, you struggle later. So that was a pitfall that could come your way. It's not a schedule to start the journey, but I think be conscious and look at these. And then each of them will have a saw, let's not say in a journal. Right? Now a good way to end my speech today would be to get a picture of a let's say a partial picture of a data on a digitally enabled enterprise. Now I'll paint it for an FMCG company knowing its manifestations to be very different for other kinds of businesses. And hence this might not necessarily apply to different industries, right? So in the FMCG, let me give you some use cases for marketing sales and manufacturing. Let me start with a couple of use cases in marketing. I'll say one, personalizing exchange, right? Now most marketers want to send a personal message to their consumers and to millions of consumers. Now how do we do that? Today in the world of digital, or there's a digital marketing, it is possible. A great example would be possibly this ad of Mondays, which you might have seen in Last The World, not just a category ad campaign. This is what we rolled out Last The World. It was that time after COVID wave one and small retailers were desperately needing some business. So our marketing teams and agencies thought of serving a personalized ad to consumers. So if you were, for example, on YouTube and you were selling this ad, we would know through Google's technology, your pin code. And our tech partner would pick up your pin code and customize the ad for you. So you will end up seeing names of four local retailers nearby you, depending on which pin code you're selling for on the ad. And this is a great example of hyper-personalizing ads that scale. Both are important. One is personalizing, and second is not for one dozen consumers, for millions of consumers. This is where technology can take us, personalizing ads at scale. The other one could be using first party data. So for example, General Mills in the US, I'm going to understand, accumulated more than 15 million unique consumer identities and got to know the attributes what we call likes and dislikes. Just help them customize their ads. These consumers which help them significantly improve the media ROI's. There's a great use case for inspiration and this is a great case where you have a proven ROI when you associate it with a cost. And the cost here of accumulating first party data is pretty huge. Well, those are two of the use cases for marketing. Now moving on to a couple of use cases from sales. So let me start with saying big data to expand distribution. How does our salesmen know which village to start distributing our products? We have six light villages in this country, right? But today with Google Maps it's possible to know which village has the material, which has a post office, which has electricity. How many houses in that village? How big does this habitat look on the screen? Now using these key attributes of villages they can open the right villages. Otherwise it can be very confusing. It's almost like finding a million that get stuck within 600,000 villages to see which one has the nature, right? This can be impossible. So that's a great case of this. This is a great use case. Many companies are using this as scale and using big data. Whenever I need big data, big data is any data that is lying outside your optimization. Now let's look at another one. It's again being used by many companies as scale. This is about using analytical engines and machine learning or suggesting the perfect order to the salesman. See one challenge if you're being in sales, most sales managers won't resolve. It's for their front line, their salesman. They sell the perfect order to every store every day. We just tell you on what quantities. And if you had a magical solution that could solve this, this would be the biggest solution in sales. Today using your past data, which you have accumulated your sales to that store, using big data and some advanced analytics, we can get machines to simulate the perfect order. And over time with machine learning the machines can themselves improve on these algorithms, right? And suggest the perfect order for every store every day improved. Now these are two great examples in sales, right? So these are things which can dramatically shift your sales capabilities and your ability to execute in the market. Yeah, and let me finish with a couple of use cases in manufacturing. So let me start with augmented reality. Last year just before COVID, I'll give you an example. You were in the process of shifting a line from one of our factories in China to India. Then COVID struck and our OEM representatives could be there on site. So they went Europe and they can travel to China and not India. We still managed to shift a big complex chocolate line from China to India using advanced mobile platforms and augmented reality. Using high tech camps mounted on the overalls of the shop to our colleagues. The OEM sitting in Europe to guide them on dismantling the line, packing it and shipping it. Then in India guide our operators to unpack and pre-assemble the line. All this flawlessly and believe you me, no delay from the original shipping. Look at where technology is taking us. So this is one example in manufacturing. Look at you, the other example is possibly the most stunning example. Think of IoT, the internet of things, right? And an industrial application is called IOT, right? This is an application of connected devices. So four years ago, we started putting sensors in all our machines in our scarcity factory and started getting key readings of machines like pressure, temperature, vibrations, etc. Now these are baby steps towards what we thought will help us in building an integrated digital factory towards building a smart factory. Now at that time, we didn't know there'll be such a case. But come COVID wave one and the stringent lockdowns along with that, our shift supervisor could not travel to the factory because he was traveling from the industry. Whereas all the operators were able to come. So our supervisor took the call to run the factory from his laptop sitting at his own, right? And he successfully ran the entire shift honestly. Now if you recall a point I had made earlier, don't pass too much of an order wise if it's a small step. Here is a classic case where connecting devices for connecting machines to devices wasn't such a huge investment. And at that time, somebody had asked me what's the other way, I would say I don't know. But today after running that shift, for running three shifts for that one day, this has been a force multiplier and the ROI will be more than a thousand possible. So let me end here. Hoping the session was a bit useful in either initiating you or accelerating you towards building your next big comparative advantage, which is what according to me is a tech data that is to be enabled enterprise. Thank you. Thank you so much Mr. Ayer for that great session. And as we see, we already have Dr. Batra here. Invite both of you for this fireside chat so that our viewers can benefit from your insights even more. Over to you. Thank you so much. It was really a pleasure to hear Deepak talk about the five key rules if I may use the five pointers towards digitally transforming any business. And as he rightly said, it starts from the top. It can be top down. It can be bottom up. But if it starts from the top and it calculates down, then the middle management benefits because really people at the bottom, the millionaires, the younger people are very, very savvy when it comes to digital and they are naturally inclined to doing everything to keep it going. Now let me and Deepak again in the same Ed said, that I hope either it inspires you or gives you a tool. You know, it gives you some information to be able to get on to your digital transformation journey. Let me take up from his talk itself. At the start, he talked about people you talk about the fact that this should be a digital council. You know, people who understand how digital is transforming businesses and how the application of digital in every part of the business can yield superior business processes and business results. So how do you select the members of the digital council? Sorry, I just lost the last few words. This is the question. I said, Deepak you said you should have a digital council. I got all that. What is the last? So how do you select? How do you select who should be the member of the digital council? Yeah, so firstly, I think, you know, undergrad, these people will not know, will not know enough about digital. You actually digitize the company. They'll have to be trained. They'll have to be taught. They'll have to go learning towards. They'll have to do some new skills. They'll do some tests and pilots, right? Well, as like I said, there are three or four governance terms to the selection. Number one, it shouldn't be the leadership team. It should be one level to go. That's when you're getting a whole sort of people in the organization. Two, it has to be cross-functional because any digital, any digital initiative that you touch, you realize, will touch many more functions beyond that because of the connected nature of the solution. What is important is that this should be your talk app. What is important is that they should have learning. What is important is that they should be able to seamlessly collaborate between functions. According to me, these three, four are the cornerstones of selecting a team. What is not required is that they need to be super knowledgeable about digital ways of advanced cutting-edge digital enterprise. I don't think that's important. What's important is learning. Fantastic. So you're saying people who understand businesses and who are curious-minded or open to adopt digital techniques and practices so that they can be implemented. So it can be possibly a mix of senior management and some people who really may be digital evangelists in the company or may have come from an ecosystem where digital's usage or penetration was higher. So now let me go on to some of the other points that you make in your address. You know, you're a traditional FNCG enterprise, right? And I know in your last conversation, you talked about the fact this was about 12 months back and we are 16 months into pandemic. You talked about how e-commerce in the chocolate segment and especially in your company was not a big number and you went on to that journey and it's a number that is steadily growing without getting into the specific numbers. Clearly, e-commerce became part of your own journey. While you talked about digital in the sense of digital transformation of businesses and you said you have to decide whether you need a chief digital officer or you need a chief data officer, right? Both digital and data go hand in hand. Now, tell me, in your organization, what have you done to be able to bring the elements of digital data together and make sure that every business, DCN maker is a chief digital officer and also a chief data officer? In every business, you're dealing with data, whether it's supply chain management, whether it's marketing and acquisition of customers or it is looking at cost management through data that helps you look at where it can be optimized. So give a sense of what have you done in Mondele to be able to, on the supply chain front, on the marketing front, and in terms of the internal operations, really transforming it digitally. And there, I say that transforming Mondele is into a digital enterprise. I mean, it's not a digital enterprise in the classic definition, but really moving on to that journey where you're digitally integrated in every function. Yeah, so I think, I think great question. Let me try and answer this in two parts. All these six examples that I gave you, the six new spaces, two in marketing and personalizing at scale, first party data. The second one was a GM example, but we all started on that journey as well. So it's not yet in any full blown, it's not even a full blown shape, but all the other five, except using first party data, I talked about personalizing at scale, I talked about using big data to expand the situation, using machine learning, the corporate orders, augmented reality, or IoT connecting devices, or shift spoils to run a factory on the scope and on the laptop. All these are our use cases, which we have done. I'll talk about the rest of the first part of the answer. The second part of the answer is, what then are the key elements which have worked for us in digitizing the enterprise? I think that's what we're getting at. So if I look at it, you know, first, digital has to be baked into the business strategy. You can't be sitting in the company. It has to be seen as a driver of competitive advantage. And therefore, successful enterprises have a clear articulation of how digital will transform the business, and not just in terms of projects and technologies, but also in terms of capabilities and ways of working. Now, for example, we are focusing on these three cars, sales, marketing, and supply chain, and they are all being baked in our strategy. Everything has test and learn, everything has milestones, everything has costs, everything has got ROI, ROI is around the perfect. Work is in the ballpark. In some cases, we get huge force multipliers. In some cases, we don't. But I think leaving with the first thought, saying it has to be a part of your strategy, it can't be on the territory. Second is, leaders need to work that out. And this is very difficult because at least in a conventional company, while our leadership team or average age is less than 45, but still, not everybody is a millennium. Now, at least I didn't give up in the second years and millennial sales. So this is not a native skill. It's not my native suit. So this is certain things that are quiet skills. So I appreciate that I'm not going to be the most enjoyed at this. But the fact is, I cannot stare into this. Now, the business leaders need to have a fair minimum, let's say, business level appreciation of its good technologies. We don't need to be in awe of it. Neither need to treat this as a pariah, as a technical thing. I think leaders need to walk the talk. They are constantly learning and balancing outside and inside out ideas, sponsoring initiatives, which bring in small wins. And I think that's very important. Starting with small wins is actually getting the encouragement and energy as leaders to say, it is working. And how do I sort of expand the team? And we have done this very well. So this is a suggested order that I talked to you about, giving the perfect order. It's something that we started. Version 1.0 was, let's just use historical data. What has it sold and what has it bought? And how could you inform the order better? Then we started saying, let's look at a few other sources or similar types. Then we said, let's look for big data outside the organization. So leaders working the talk is important. If you leave it for some, only for the IT department, it won't happen. The other big element of success for us has been, we need to build the culture for this entire team. So, and we need to build the skills. So I talked about capabilities. I talked about local, local. This is what you can write something without knowing how to code it in a software language. The second one I talked about, which is certified around 20 people. This is online marketing. People who are then trained on digital marketing. So this is a lot of things coming together. It would be difficult for me to now go by every function and work. But if you get the thing, I think it has to be part of strategy. Leaders say we need it. We need to build the capabilities we need in the culture. Fantastic. One of the things that I learned when I started my career, I was a software engineer before I went to, is to what we used to call a killer app. I used to work on RDBMS. If there was before Oracle, there was an RDBMS called Ingress. They would say killer app, which means do something which is like a small proof of concept, get it going in the organization and then scale it up across the organization. So like you said, start with something that could be very basic and small, but then use it to implement, showcase the success of that to be able to get it assimilated in the organization. Now, let me tell you, when you benchmark yourself, when I say yourselves, I mean really the, I talk of the organization, Mondalase, Mondalase India, what are some of the organizations that are not in your sector, but you look up to them and you look at what they do and in some way benefit and learn from it and implement that in Mondalase India. Lot of sectors. So even before that, that makes it two of us. I started my career. I'm also a choice engineer. I also started my career doing some source code tricks. In those days, you wouldn't even know there's a chip called 8486 of mobile. Yes. So we used to do some application and some system level software, system level code writing. So makes it two of us, but the question that you ask is great. So how should I apply to this? Which part of that question? Basically, I'm saying you look at companies beyond your domain and learn from the best practices, whether I mean, for example, I look at what Amazon does. It's a company that all of us look at. I may not be anywhere close to the scale there, but there's still some inspiration you get from them. You look at technology companies. Yeah. So if I look at it like this, so that company that we can learn outside of our domain, take for example, folks like, make my trip. If you look at the way they have been able to use data, customize the things the same to you. This is how they understand your traveling needs and requirements, right? And all your vacationing needs and requirements. It's a good inspiration. I'm sure they'll be operating with hundreds of millions of consumer records. So how will you get there in the next three to five years? They're fundamentally need to know the consumers so that they can feed the right travel flight or vacation fights. For us, it could be to feed the right snacking insects or how do we get them snacks at home or how do we snack at home? So there's a lot that we could learn from that industry. So item by item could be different. Now, the other industry that we could surely learn from or we actually need to partner with is let's say a Google. Google Analytics has got huge rapid loss of information, technology and capabilities, right? So it's not that we need to learn from them. I think we use them as our partners. That's a part of the interaction. Likewise, if you look at Facebook, Instagram, what's that? I think they've got a wonderful set of tools that you call killer apps, right? So which of them is one? And how do we partner them on social platforms? It's one of the things. So when you want to learn, you learn from certain companies for inspiration, so you learn in the partner's question. So those are the two big things that come to mind. Absolutely. As you move forward, we're in the mid of 2021. As we move forward into, there will be a festive season, and hopefully, hopefully, I'm hoping there will be no third wave, or at least it will be more responsible in the way we conduct ourselves, as well as the administration would have a better grip. But hopefully this Diwali would be a better Diwali. And Diwali is a good season for the product category that you're in, right? Gifting usage of chocolates for everything. And those months of September, October, November, December are a very big months for your category, right? Now, what would you do differently? I'm not asking you to reveal all your plans, but directionally and philosophically, what would you do differently in these very important market months? Then you did possibly two years back. Yeah. So like it started with that, while we may want to wish it away, a real thing cannot be wished away today, even that these are persisting very socially mature and if we have large congregations and gatherings, they can become super spreaders. In that context, I think one of the things that we are preparing ourselves for is to say, what if the wave strikes during Diwali or just before? That's a big season for us, right? It should mean we need to learn and adapt to running it very, very differently than the way we are run so far. So one thing that would happen then is a huge focus of consumers from the neighborhood stores and or e-cups. So how do I, how do I provide to these, these families, which offer consumers home delivery or contact these hundreds if you want to option? Could be one of the considerations. The second one could be, once again, we've seen this, that in any kind of an outbreak, I think the local district authorities are given a few parts from the district. And hence, we need, we start approaching business in India as not as a country, but as 700 districts. So in which district do we have what level of positivity? So do I put my teams out of the market or the positivity is too high? Do I bring them back and we give them up? What we improvised on was a tele-colonial or a tele-sale side. So preparing ourselves for virtual selling is another thing. Preparing ourselves for running our operations district by district. I can't say this is my strategy for the future, which means I need to skill the people who are owning the districts on, on impacting the government of the district, etc. So accident is run. So the big learning has been that if there is anything that is here to stay, it is the substance. So how do you still manage the substance in this, how do you still manage running in a business with the substance working on the next one? Fantastic. I'll ask you my last question and let you go. I'm sure all of us think about the future while we try to be in the moment, be mindful of what we are doing, give it our best today. And you know, I know the planning cycles in COVID have become a little short-term and while we, in every organization, there are people who are plowing for now and there are people who are plowing for future. Now as a leader who needs such a big and venerable brand and such a large business, what are the mega trends you see happening over the next 12 to 18 months whose green shoots you may have seen now? You talked about in your last answer, looking at districts, looking at home delivery, still while dealing with each other districts or cities or states in a unique way because the scenarios may be different. But what are some of the trends that the viewers on this broadcast, people today who are on this in the audience, can learn from? What are the mega trends that you can spot now, which will become even bigger in the next 6 months, 12 months, 18 months? Yeah, so there are 3-4 things which have got sort of accentuated or accelerated because of the influence. So the first one is nesting at home. There are of course a lot of people who are spending significantly more time nesting at home. Now this could mean this could mean very difficult things to the different companies or the different portfolio. So if you have an out of home consumption portfolio, this is the last one. If you have an in-home portfolio, it's a really fun. So how do you balance your portfolio? Could be one big thing. The second bit is insecurity in those of both, let's say insecurity financial industries becoming a bigger and bigger concern because there's of course lots of sectors which have got hit once and just coming back, they'll back it again. And hence jobs and hence the ones you're in security becoming a big and that has a huge bearing on the portfolio. So we don't sell very expensive products but we still do sell products ranging from 5 rupees to to find a release. And hence we do see gravitate consumers navigating words to smaller facts and new unit prices in product. The third thing that's happening is this entire worry on hygiene and safety and all of these two words. So it's not about health and wellness. Health and wellness is always a trend but I think what's got really accentuated people's minds is hygiene and safety. Now if you look at it, I would call hygiene safety and also immunity in that sense. So because of the little in nature of this business so we did a smart thing in one week. We promoted our firms to immunity firms because they had a great immunity part because almost all the vitamins I am saying all that you need for immunity. And that's really resonated well with the consumers. There seems a very good fraction of the brand. The other big thing that's happened with consumers is they are gravitating to brands with the purpose and that's where they won't have very very milk for example selling for generosity and small acts of thank you and and the generous acts of humanity per se has been a huge help to us. This trend is not going away so it's going to be around for some more time. Now these are the consumer trends. We could talk about many more such consumer trends. The other trends are the digital trends which we just talked about today so that's got accentuated automatically. The other big thing that's that's got accelerated is this in the business is what kind of themes and what kind of culture and what kind of behaviors and what kind of attitudes your team needs to have in mind sets. So those are the ones that have got really accentuated but what more to come about this in leading the pandemic we are not, it's not behind us. Absolutely. Deepakayar says we are living the pandemic it's not behind us. We have to work on all scenarios. We have to work on digital transformation. I hope his six case studies or examples that he brought about help you learn how to transform your organization and your function digitally. The fact that he talked about dealing with each district as a unique scenario. I hope we don't need that but clearly in the past few months we have needed that and who knows the future would have given you thinking matrix how to deal with it and clearly he talked about how the chief data officer and the chief digital officer need to collaborate. Sometimes it can be the same person and I would read it or hear it that everyone needs to be chief data officer everyone needs to be chief digital officer. So thank you Mr. Aiyar for joining the tech month 2021 giving us your inputs telling us how you've done it at Mondaliz India and especially the e-commerce business which is a very small business maybe 20 months back is now a sizable part of the business. So clearly a lot of FNCG companies are looking at e-commerce in a big way and especially in the gifting season e-commerce will become even bigger. So my three takeaways are one is former digital counsel of people who are capable of implementing that in their businesses in their sub-businesses in their department and they are not necessarily people who are digital in their function but people who are open to learning and who are open to being better. Second is really start with something small make sure it gets implemented and then scale it up and third is clearly do scenario planning we are still living the pandemic we are not out of it. So sometimes today being better than yesterday lull us to believing that it would be exactly like that tomorrow but not sure. So thank you so much Mr. Aiyar for talking to us we wish you luck and I'm sure we'll continue to do well on your journey of digital transformation God bless you. Thank you. Back to you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much Dr. Batra. And thank you Mr. Aiyar for sharing those insights with all of you was thank you so much for your time. Thank you. With that ladies and gentlemen we are moving on to our next session here I would like to invite Mr. Rohit Dossi director Microsoft Advertising in Mobi. So Dossi is responsible for P and L management revenue growth strategic partnerships for Microsoft advertising business in India prior to in Mobi he has worked with the likes of Google and Rocket Internet in his entrepreneurial journey he co-founded Lata Ho a B2B hyper local logistics startup he's a graduate of IIT Roorkee and love spending his free time with his pet dog. Now Rohit will be unveiling Microsoft Advertisings latest search in India 2021 report and shares of interesting insights on the evolving search trends across verticals and what it means for brands. So I welcome Rohit you here on screen and to our eTechMunch platform and looking forward to the report unveiling. Sure I hope my screen is visible. Yes. Okay perfect perfect. Hi everyone first of all thank you for the warm introduction. I think for everyone who has joined and called hope you're doing well and you and your loved ones are safe. I know that times have been tough but I think it is also important for us to to remain positive and I'm sure we'll come out of this stronger together. I think moving to why we are all here I think I wanted to take this opportunity to unveil our latest report on search trends in India in 2021 on Microsoft Search Advertising. Search still continues to dominate a major share of digital advertising expense and with the ongoing pandemic search advertising continued to be an area of investment for brands in different verticals. In this report I'll be sharing user behavior and insights that we see on Microsoft Search. I think a lot has happened and a lot has changed right and there is no denying that we have seen a lot of digital disruption and development in technology that has happened in the last 12 to 18 months and on Microsoft Search too we saw that there were certainly like a lot of categories newer categories, newer niche verticals which saw quite a boost in the number of users searching for brands in different categories. Diving into specific insights that we have seen on Microsoft Search now we have seen a humongous increase in location specific search queries which is specific to things in vicinity around people and the requirements and the services they use. We have also seen a lot of increase in queries for content translation to local languages. I think the latter one is really interesting because this in some way right also indicates that there are a lot of new users or users from tier 2, tier 3 and small towns now coming online and searching for a lot of things. Jumping now into the vertical specific trends that we are seeing on Microsoft Search there has been a huge spike in focus on hyperlocal services since last year. I think when we first went into lockdown search queries had a lot of I mean the term near me right present in them as users were looking for several things around them with lockdown and pandemic whether it could be grocery shops doctors stationary shops hardware shops etc. What we're now seeing is that this vertical continues to grow show signs of strong growth right and as user search volumes continue to grow it shows an upward trend. What we've seen is also that the search for grocery and everyday supplies have become very very location specific. Also searches such as food delivery, cake delivery etc. continue to grow with more and more people ordering food at home and online right and more and more celebrations now happening at home only. So I think this is one of the major trends that has that has you know shown signs of stronger growth. Also branded searches for most of the brands out there right in the market such as BigBasket Nature's Basket, D-Mart, Grofus etc. All of them are seeing the phenomenal growth which is also being leveraged by these brands as they improve their brand presence and grow their penetration in the market. I think on the personal health and well-being front these queries are seeing a huge spike with more and more people now becoming aware of their health. There is also I think a need among people to work towards improving both their physical and mental well-being. People are increasingly opting for online consultations and are seeking nutritional guidance. Immunity and diet related searches have seen almost 125% increase over the year. Also as gym fitness centers remain shut we are seeing an increase in search queries for people inquiring and opting for virtual sessions to stay fit at home. There are also increasing investments that people are making in gym equipment and setting gym at home. So these are pretty interesting friends and continue to show strong trajectory. Also I think since people are now staying at home in isolation as they deal with crisis and personal losses as well right. A lot of people are also facing mental health issues like stress, anxiety, depression, anger, fear right. And we're seeing there is a huge increase in queries for support resources and seeking help online. Talking about the entertainment and music vertical we have seen generic searches across the vertical hit and all time high. Top queries or user searches that have stood out like anything are searches like popular Netflix series, new TV premier, cricket live scores etc. And this is again a vertical that is going show a science of significant growth in future as well. I think on the subscription related searches there is almost a 24x jump in terms of searches for almost all platforms such as Netflix, Savan, Ghana, Prime Video, Hotstar etc. So I think people are opting for a lot of online content streaming services at home. Gaming has emerged as a very very strong vertical during the last 12 to 18 months. Online games are on the rise and as internet devices and users keep increasing this is another vertical that is going to show significant upside as we move into the future quarters. We've also seen a great spike in automobile as a vertical due to lockdown restrictions. Consumers are avoiding visiting vehicle dealership showrooms and which has also increased affinity towards online channels when they research about their next purchase in the automobile sector. Preferences towards personal vehicles have increased as people have chosen to stay away from public transport for safety purposes. So we've seen a spike in all types of searches for vehicles whether it's four wheelers or two wheelers everything has gone up. Vehicle insurance related services searches have almost shot up by 10 times from the time even when lockdown was lifted. So this is again another interesting vertical that is showing signs of a significant online user growth. There is a lot of traction that we are seeing in terms of users exploring personal finance and investments. A lot of people are now prioritizing health insurance to protect themselves and their loved ones. Health insurance queries have almost seen 300x rise on Microsoft search. Also we are seeing a change in investment choices by users and this is a pretty interesting one right. The trend also indicates that a lot of users have had a change in investment preference from owning a physical asset to financial instruments. Top searches in this vertical are queries such as mutual funds such as mutual funds, asset management, stock trading etc. There are also a lot of factors such as industry wide adoption of online KYC, cheaper and faster transactions, liquidity, greater control and elimination of middlemen etc. Which has helped fasten this shift in behavior and then digital payments continue to grow. Online learning has seen a huge rise in user searches. Online learning and education as a category has seen a huge boost overall with learning in education centers, schools, colleges being shut. A number of audiences got used to e-learning methods and this continues to be one of the most sought out categories by the users. We have seen searches for preschools, K-12 education centers etc. gain a significant traction on Microsoft search. People are also now future proofing their careers by learning new skills that would either help them transition to a new career or also progress in the existing one. So education and e-learning is another category where there is a lot of investment happening in by the users online. And then another interesting vertical where we have seen a lot of traction is home improvement. This is another category that has seen massive growth during this period and is coming out very strongly for 2021. We have seen major growth across bedroom and living room categories. Searches such as bedroom furniture, living room furniture so far matrices have almost seen a 500% growth which clearly highlights the way in which people are also looking and redecorating their houses as this is also their place of comfort and safety. While people are focusing on improving their homes they are also investing in home appliances and we have seen almost 40% of the consumers now preferring to buy online even after the lockdown restrictions were over which also shows that the comfort level of making online purchases even for high ticket items such as consumer durables has increased significantly during this period. So what does this actually mean for brands and different verticals, right? Users are spending a lot more time online. Brands from different verticals are finding new and innovative ways of interacting with their users. Also I think the lines between brand marketing and performance marketing now is blurring for marketeers and brands, right? Brands are leveraging search advertising for also now driving awareness. And we've seen that a lot happening on Microsoft search advertising as well. We've seen verticals gain massive traction and I think brands can fully leverage this jump by finding new and innovative approaches as they reach out to their users. I think there is a huge opportunity for brands to capture the users online and the interesting part would be to see how brands can rise to this challenge. So I think I would with that thought leave you all thank you all for joining and feel free to reach out to the marketing team at Innovi for any questions that you might have. Thank you. Thank you so much Rohit for telling us about the report and the insights behind it. Thank you so much once again for your time. Thank you. With that ladies and gentlemen, let me remind all of you that you can tweet to us using the hashtag techmunch. Tell us what tweet you enjoy in the session so far. Are there any key highlights that you'd like to share with the wider audience? Then go ahead and do that right away using the hashtag techmunch. Also you can use the chat box or the comment box on whichever platform you're watching us on and tell us your key highlights or also if you have any questions for our speakers. So moving forward, we are going towards our next session. Our next session is a panel discussion. This is going to be an interesting discussion on reinventing marketing ROI, blending, branding and performance. Now I would like all of you to join me as I welcome and introduce us speakers on the panel to all of you. I'd like to invite our session chair, Ms. Rina Mishra, Senior Partner of Microsoft Advertising. Our panelist, Ms. Rabina Singh, CEO Eye Prospect. Ms. Elizabeth Venkataraman, Joint President, Consumer, Commercial and Wealth Marketing, Kootak Mahindra Bank. Mr. Pravel Singh, Vice President, Marketing, Zohu. Sreeyansh Modi, Head of Performance Marketing, Flipkart. And last but not the least, Mr. Prasad Srijadi, Founder and CEO of LogicServe. So very warm welcome to all our panelists on screen and thank you for joining us today. And I'd like Rina to please take over the proceedings for the panel discussion. Thank you, Cathy. Welcome all. I feel extremely delighted to host the panel of thought leaders of this industry today. So welcome to all the panel members. Of course Rohit has already kind of given a little introduction on the search. I would highly suggest that you could go and refer it at some point of time. It's extremely insightful. And just starting the discussion. So we all know that leadership plays a very important role in today's time because we look at a leader because their role is to drive innovation. They kind of recognize and they create lot are and we kind of look at them when we are kind of looking for some kind of a perspective on the world. We know that the dynamics of the market are ever changing. And this calls once in a while for us to re-evaluate our goals and see are we still relevant. So with that thought I will jump into the discussion which is re-inventing marketing, ROI, blending, branding and performance and let's hear from this August panel. So my first question is to Rubina. Hi Rubina. Eye Prospect has established itself as an expert digital first end to end agency which is known in the market for their expertise in the financial sector. And my question to you is that do you think the line between branding and performance is blurring for brands from marketing perspective? Absolutely. I think we are at a stage today where both branding as well as performance are really coming together. They are really intersecting. I think that ecosystem where branding and performance could be bought separately in siloed and work has gone long past because let's really look at it. We need to think of the consumer in the center and then plan our media and connect the media around that. And what we need to do is use all the capabilities that we have from understanding brand to be able to do strategic planning to be able to do marketing activation as well as performance optimization. And I think where the magic really happens is where you're able to understand the ever-changing human behavior and human truths and find those pivotal intersects between culture, content, data and technology. And that's where you need to use your experience and bring it all together and bring it to life. And once you're able to do that, I think that's where you can truly help brands accelerate. So what I really think is that you've got to align yourself towards the business goals, marketing goals, keeping the consumer in the center and of course get rid of these silos of branding and performance. Yeah, thanks Sudeena. I do believe that like I said, think of the consumer first is totally relevant. I mean, we can never lose focus of that. And I like that whole thing about spoke about the magic, which is the amalgamation of your culture, content, data and that. So thanks a lot for that. My question is to Elisabeth. So Quotec Mahindra Bank is building tools to enable villages and connecting them on the digital platform. So it means that there'll be more customers that will be kind of coming on platform. So from the BFSA sector, I wanted to ask you, how does it look for the brands in that sector? Is the line according to you beginning to blur within the branding and performance metrics? I think that one of the big initiatives which are being announced now is National Agricultural Market Enam. So it's a good example to discuss it with. So what happens there is it's an online trading platform for to trade in agricultural commodities. And this will actually bring all stakeholders together, whether it's a farmer, whether it's a trader and other organizations like the APMC, the Agri Mundis and all of it, to digitize transactions. What it really means is the farmer will be able to trade on the platform. I mean, sell his produce or her produce on the platform and get money into his or her bank account. And that's really, the vision is really to digitize, to do real-time price discovery, to build a very transparent robust system where they all come into formal financial services. So it can be significant that these kind of initiatives can be significant to connect with or to do some of these initiatives in tier three to tier five towns. And just coming back to those towns and challenges in marketing there, it would be, one, we'll have to go and see and we'll have to evaluate what are the changes that have happened in those towns in these times in the last 15 months because the country overall has leapfrogged digitally. But how have these towns specifically been impacted? Now the first round of the pandemic didn't really impact these cities. They held themselves well, but round two has impacted them. And we love to really understand, I think for a marketer and the challenge would be to understand these segments. And we have multiple products and offerings in these segments. We are committed to the vision. However, for a marketer to be challenged to understand what they have, how they have changed, how they have adapted during the pandemic, what are the new media which they've begun to use because there is increasing levels of internet penetration, et cetera. And then develop the campaign. So it will be a little more, it will be differentiated, a different approach based on what kind of media they're using. But early science do show this. I mean, you'll see it with even more domestic help. It is the WhatsApp usage or chat usage has gone up. It was earlier, more SMS and calls, but data proliferation, et cetera, has also changed some of the habits. Thank you. In fact, the wave and what COVID has done to us, it is not lost on any of us, how much they have really suffered. So I think the timing is just right. And I think it's great that we are cutting so many agents in between. So I think it sounds like an absolutely aggressive, and a very immediate step that Kotak-Mendrabal is taking. Thank you for that. So now you've heard from the both sides from the BFSA sector, now let's move on to understand something from the e-commerce. So Suryansh, this question is for you. Flipkart is one of the biggest brands that we know in the e-commerce space. What is the differentiation between branding and performance camping parameters in the e-commerce space? Sure. Hi, everyone. Thanks for the question. This is like an evergreen question. I think wherever I go, I get this question for sure. So branding is in a nutshell. It is very, very important for any brand. And it depends on what life stage your brand is. Today, when we look at any of the larger brands, those brands are brands because they have spent huge amount of money on to branding. And it is not about right away starting with performance. So for us as well, we do understand that branding is critical and performance is also very critical. And we try and keep both separate because we don't want to really merge both of these together and kind of dissolve the overall output of this matrix. So for a performance campaign when I run, today a performance campaign would get measured on to what kind of ROI do I get. ROI could be defined into visits, visitors, customers, new acquisition, repeat acquisition, anything. Whereas when we run a branding campaign, you would want to really focus more towards how many customers are you able to reach out to. Are you able to create that kind of impact that a customer thinks of your brand when he needs a particular product. Your branding message would not typically say that we have this product come and purchase at this price. But to your performance product, performance ad would really look like this. So it's very important to measure the right metric. So each frequency of course is a right metric for your brand campaigns. And when you run performance campaigns, you can probably decide like do you want to really go deeper the funnel or you want to be on the middle of the funnel where you want to stop at say measuring only visits or you want to see add to cards or you want to finally go to a purchase and then attribute. Yeah, so what I'm hearing is that it's pretty much like kind of stays, it doesn't really come in a pros and roll. It's pretty much a differentiation is like there and it's kind of clear for you to measure. So of course it's reach and frequency for the brand campaign. Thanks, Riyal. My next question is to Praval. So with 60 million users worldwide and you being present in 180 plus countries, Zoho has been a very strong player in the software, B2B software and technology space. The focus for Zoho has always been as very strong product and user experience. How does product management and the marketing align together in defining the marketing goals within your organization? Thank you, Reena and hi everyone else. That's a good question and often keeps coming up to us because where we are today with over 50 products and 10,000 employees and growing and primarily serving the B2B market with a very clear well-defined objective of helping businesses of all sizes to do better at what they're doing across all functions HR sales marketing front office, back office, all of that. So what happens is when you are running such a big ship, one thing is that's key is alignment. Both at the product level when you have 50 plus products the independent teams working on those products competing in independent markets with some overlap here and there. So there is alignment between the product teams and at the brand level at the Zoho level I would say which is the key. And I think all of that starts with the purpose which like I said is in our case helping businesses of all sizes grow and be more efficient and productive. That's the premise all the software that people is built on. Now if you come back to how product marketing managers and product managers work together or product marketing as a function and product management as a function work together. Essentially they're both striving towards delivering more value to customers and that is why you have a customer that is how you retain a customer. And sure one is definitely more customer facing than the other. Multiples generally have more output facing roles than product managers but again they team tag together to sort of deliver the best value. And if I was to further segment into how their roles play together at Zoho and I would like to believe as well in this industry you know it's about product manager and team you know work on creating that value by all the way from defining the product roadmap what with the product strategy how would the lifecycle look like how would the releases look like all of that in terms of creating value. Marketing teams and product marketing managers you know they they focus on how that value can be communicated that in terms of how we position it package it price it kind of content we create how do we target how do we segment an audience how do we go to market with this thing that we are trying to sell. That's how creation of value and communication of value sits between PM and PMNs and then there's of course delivery you know delivery is based on different channels so you know could be branding business development field marketing social media there's so many of these channels that you know eventually other teams plug into product marketing teams and deliver right. So that's sort of the rough structure of how we operate the whole machinery and of course this is replicated at product levels across different products but it also sort of ties up the brand level in terms of how we position ourselves and that's that's sort of again steps back to who we are and what we are trying to solve for right with a flavor of lot of context in terms of our own values beat around privacy or beat around buildings everything from ground up the whole tech stack and investing in R&D those are some of the core principles that we live for and with so that's sort of how the whole product and brand machinery ties in together with brand marketing product marketing field marketing all that put together. Thanks for also in fact I mean I I don't know it's pretty much you have delivering you're delivering value to the customer and I think you know and this is such a important thing that in today's time you have to kind of really put so much of work in R&D and privacy because these are also relevant because these are actually kind of you know what eventually becomes a value to the customer so thanks a lot for that moving on my next question is to Prasad Hi Prasad with number of people actually getting connected in tier two and tier three towns we are hearing a lot of chatter about voice and vernacular you know it's like you know the next big thing are you seeing a very scalable model of voice and vernacular that is being a pitch to the client or being shared with the client? Very interesting question there are four or five important I think words that I will pick it up and probably try to answer that one is tier one tier two okay location related one to talk about voice and vernacular and the fifth important one is the scalability and a lot of friends have been we have been talking about and I think Rohit spoke you know Rohit gave that search in India 2021 trends and many of those report yes okay and many of those points have already been sort of covered but you know what what I would how would I take it up is that as a market year you know as a digital marketer I would say we have we have been predicting all these changes for quite some time now right okay and yeah I mean a lot of a lot of times we have talked about it but the way Elizabeth talked about it the pandemic has really really accentuated those predictions much much much faster right okay and the consumer change okay the change the way you know we consume information the way we work the way we shop the way we learn the way we entertain you know everything has changed okay and of course digital became the center of many of these assets as you know aspects in digital our digitalized okay man you know I and I actually tried to interesting study that I was reading sometime back and if I really want to draw these changes in this you know what they call is a longitudinal consumer pulse okay many of these habits okay which sort of be acquired in the first two three months in you know every May June okay they you know many of those are going to be step change you know go up and you know it's going to be there or some of them are really going to split up okay that way okay now let me let me go back you know around a year back during this time if you see how the brands change you know because you know all of us saw that the the the everything sort of came down but you know what were brand doing okay they were in this day this entire day a lot of talk about safety and empathy okay and that become the focal point of messaging and is being continued for a long time back right so the important thing which happened is that basically the the conversation with consumer you know sort of become very very very important okay and again if you remember I'm going to you know connect all these points later on so what's happening is that I it's very interesting thing that I see that brands have to be sort of start thinking like a publisher now okay because you know they are giving that information to be to to their consumer consumers in on a personal and lots of stuff right so if I add that okay then what's are happening okay so there are a few numbers which are coming voice search queries in India are currently sort of going at 270 percent per year even Rohit talk about that you know a huge amount of people are converting and translating things okay so as I understand around 17 billion there is some report that I was reading sometime back 17 billion times in last year there's a translation of of web pages happening in big languages okay so we're seeing all those changes happening so rapidly a very interesting question I actually went and sort of I wanted to find out what actually happened so we went to a monthly well-sized company okay and ask them a question you know how what do you see so very interesting one so if you see here too may English websites grew during lockdown for example pre-COVID if it was X okay then during the first lockdown it became 1.3X and later on I mean so X to 1.3X so what I wanted to do is that what happened to Hindi languages right so if pre-COVID it was X X number of people who are visiting Hindi language sites during the first lockdown it became 2.52X and post lockdown instead of coming to X it came up but came down to 2.43X okay didn't come down back right then I wanted to know more so you know what happened to tier 3 okay so it moved from X to 2.63X four times and post lockdown it didn't actually come down it became 4.84X right then I wanted to know what's happening who's reading it is it only young population so between 18 to 35 okay we have that data okay we actually went and gulled those data 18 to 35 okay we saw X to 1.87X and 2.84 okay so it moved that way but for 35 plus it moved from X to 1.73X to 1.99X so if you see the way all that movement that we have seen from 400 million to around 700 million internet users in this country okay that growth is coming from this tier 2, tier 3 across the group and across the age group as well as in big more now if you remember I talked about that you know the conversation one if that group is going to talk about or they want to know more about it they converse what they are comfortable with is the voice okay because you know brands want to really behave like a publisher and communicate with the consumer okay if I put this okay then it's a story you ask me the fifth word that uses scale scale is if you see this much of a growth I mean there's absolutely no a question about scale we're seeing a you know scale a lot how the brands are going to use it is the question I mean is the question are there enough people or is the question are there enough people reached okay it falls in the purview of brand then I would say there's a huge amount of scale it's just that you know brands you to sort of go after that okay so from that 400 million to 700 million in tier 2 and tier 3 you know converting there in Indic language conversing in you know want to converse then in voice so that's what I probably saw yeah you know thank you I just have quick follow up on that so what are the technologies the solutions that your clients are looking to invest how are you hearing something from the clients yeah yeah multiple of those okay the first few months about very simple one is how quickly I translate and all that okay so which happened it's like it's earlier one but you know what if I go ahead and if I taking those all now 9, 10, 11 months have happened a lot of people who are really talking and this is some of the implementation we are also doing is that all that conversational voice technologies AI based okay which is definitely people are experiment experimenting with and then a very interesting one okay there are a lot of dialect based also you know how you are bought yeah what we'll understand the dialects okay that's something which I definitely looking for I mean I'm experiencing a lot on that apart from that I think I definitely from tier 2, tier 3 and the technology perspective many different channels which are coming up formats are something we've been very very much being discussed on a lot of conversational formats of ads okay because this is the these are the people okay who got exposed directly that they leap frog from one to another that the formats we were looking earlier they're going to change so a lot of technologies are coming around that audience is something which will happen a lot and especially with I know I'm going to talk about third party cookies today but you know how all that plays around with audiences and formats and you know voice and AI and you know what if I really wear the academic cap we are in mid is off so many parameters changing and it's a very fluxy situation that way but a lot of technologies are getting discussed and probably getting implemented it's going to be very interesting in next three to six months yeah it's going to be very exciting thanks a lot for that insight I think amazing numbers it does look like that marketeers have to kind of really kind of come together and kind of make sure that they are not using this audience just to kind of give a little insight I think even Microsoft side of text that I'm hearing a lot of conversation whether enterprise building a lot of B2B solutions for our clients based on voice and vernacular so moving on I have a question of the same thing to Elizabeth considering the inroads that is being made and what we have heard right now to connect with small towns and villages how is the banking industry looking at incorporating voice and vernacular in their marketing strategies right I think first we'll approach it from where the customer is so you see that customers are increasingly sending voice notes you get it even from your Nareal Paniwala you get it even from your maid or you get it even from your driver so that's the first sign right they are comfortable using it so that's a good sign you're also you know the fact that literacy may or may or may not be prevalent will therefore be very very important voice will be very very important for these towns because you know it will not depend on whether you can really write or even read or you know little bit of that can be you know overcome with this technology so I think it's a very very important from the tier you know tier three to tier five where some of these challenges may be there and to bring them back into formal financial services it will have to be calibrated very well because our journey right now English and Hindi journey is you know pretty well on its way I think the entire language sweet that we will need for these cities or towns will have to be accelerated because you may you will have to connect with the customer in the way she wants to connect with you and the second part is that it's definitely over for broadcast I think Prasad covered that it's you can't just broadcast things to the customer it has to be two way and that's what is going to be very very important so our voice bots we have a voice bot you know Kaya the Kotak voice bot and she handles queries and where a specialist is required there's a you know handover to the you know to the customer service representative but you know as you use the voice bot we all know that she gets better at it so the technology will have to mature will have to go through its you know it'll have to run its course and then we will have to develop you know language capabilities in multiple languages to be able to actually talk to everyone so it's going to have all of these things are going to have a play the other aspects of voice really is that it also is unique to you like your retina or your fingerprint it is unique to you so it can actually serve as a biometric method as well so that will that will see some traction the thing is that with financial services it's always it's your money so it's the it's it really has to it's it's a little different the consumer mindset is a little different from just buying something you know or doing something like that so there will be certain level of of extended inertia or barrier or concern which we will need to address from a financial services perspective so I think increasingly trust in in our sector is going to be important because you can't see a person and you can't see a branch then I need to trust you so the role of a brand custodian is going and very important for marketers will need to be will will become very very different and will play a very very important role in the years going ahead I think we're up for exciting times you know you're you're you're going to see IoT I think Prasad already touched on AI and as devices talk to devices and people will talk to devices you know all with with voice as well and that's going to play a very large role in the way things shape up in in the next few years so yes I think VFSI is is making tremendous progress but in the area of you know connecting with the tier 3 to tier 5 using voice and vernacular is going to now unfold at a fairly accelerated pace and I think everybody's looking at it and everybody's evaluating it and you know it's all for us to see absolutely I think it's going to be a huge game changer I think we all saw it coming and you know I think it's just kind of really because of all what has happened it's just kind of really it has sped up the whole thing and I think that language sweet that you spoke about that will really be another layer you know because it really kind of gets so many people interested in it and the one of the most interesting things I see is that people have now become very comfortable talking to chat about which was like a very reluctance earlier but now people are okay to do that you know because the times are such so you have to overall kind of you know get there and I think it's a very critical job a banking sector does because as you said it's all really about trust and it's their money you know so the times are amazing insights on that moving on my question is to Praval what are your thoughts on redefining marketing impact amidst this crisis Zohu has made significant changes to the marketing strategies during the pandemic so how is marketing been evolving for you in the past year I mean specifically in the light of what has happened during COVID sure Vira in fact this reminds me of the time when I believe first peak of March when we were starting to see the the waves coming into India and the pandemic and we were about 8,000 885 people then as a company and a company that has never worked remotely you know or in this distributed manner for that for any definition of remote work that it is most people were in a single office even though we had offices elsewhere so back then I think it was a brave move to call everybody to sort of make sure that they work from home from tomorrow or within three days and that was I think a few weeks where we were like figuring things out and taking it one day one week and then one month at a time and how things play out like most of us I would say but then we went to work from home more a couple of weeks before the country went into a lockdown and we were sort of trying to ease into it and of course it impacted every department every function every individual including marketing I would say and the first thing that we sort of decided and committed to was we would go with this whole method of survive and serve which is to what what airlines tell you to wear your own masks first before you help others so we decided that we'll focus on surviving and then serving and that led to cutting down of our budgets on ads and things like that and then sort of realigning ourselves and then focusing a lot more on content and education and that kind of thing and that came in from the whole idea of spending more judiciously for now until things start to look better the good news for us was things didn't hit us as bad as we thought it would they may you know and so we started opening up our investments again slowly and gradually but but in a very cautious manner where we said let's sort of focus on message the content education that we can create how we can get value for our prospects and customers and and less on running ads and that also led to a few other things for example we ended up redoing all of our messages and flows on how do we make sure that there is enough empathy in our communication that and we are mindful of what the world is is going through and not be tone deaf and and push something you know towards a prospect or customer so there's a lot of review around empathy in communication and then we came up with some programs and initiatives to help small businesses that were facing all the heat you know there were countries specific region specific programs for example in India we did something called Sudeshi Sankal to help small businesses NGOs and government institutions and then we did some some other stuff in some other country and so on and so forth so that was sort of how we sort of held ourselves together and focused on content education and and let that lead marketing as a function also there's a lot of learning I would say you know one thing was over these months and now more than a year you know we've learned that virtue is going to stay you know in fact it's leaning leaning towards going hybrid if at all not off virtue completely and not just in terms of how we work as a team as a marketing team or or as a company but also how we engage with our prospects with our customers across sales marketing community building all that a lot of that we were doing was also happening offline and and all that changed to virtual and we now seeing some of it moving towards hybrid and and and that would change a lot of things that could potentially bring down business travel that could potentially redefine how you engage with the prospect prospective customer in a different part of the world so on and so forth right so that was one learning and we are trying to sort of align ourselves with that the other is which we also saw how content consumption patterns evolve and change right all the way from voice based based networks like Twitter Spaces and Clubhouse and so on so forth and how people start spending time on them you know and and all the way to OTTs and videos and all that right now as a marketer and as a market as marketing teams you know or of course it's our national nation towards understanding these newer networks and and what's the intent of people when they're there how can we engage with them how can we be useful so these are some newer areas I would say you're still tapping on but these are all led I would say by the pandemic you know in terms of how we are re-earning ourselves and yeah that's that's that's how I would say we have sort of dealt with the last 12, 15, 18 months thank you Bravo in fact you are the support initiative that you guys have drawn for this Sadeshi Sankal for this small business I think it was a very it was a very valuable but I think it it made a lot of noise around this and you know it's like a great nation here amazing people have given word on that one and I what I hear is that I think when you change the language of the people because there's a lot of empathy and you know these are very small things but I do think there's so much of difference people are not really in that mindset and you know if you change the tone of the whole communication it's really really kind of begin to connect to them so I think those are very like good learnings and of course even the hybrid piece we all know it's a reality and I think lot of companies are already begin to kind of get there you know because of course like it's going to stay so thanks a lot for those inside moving on my next question is to Prasad so with the situation this is again about the whole pandemic and so with the situation over the past two to three months what were some of the unique strategies the logics of as an agency had to implement for their client amidst the crisis and I'm talking about mostly for the second way because of course there are a lot of learning which also came in the first way but was it same or did it change what happened yeah definitely interesting question I will cover that but one thing what Elizabeth talked about it really triggered my thought process okay because the voice one that you talk about voice notes okay with collaboration is not you know this two phases is not happening so I see okay because written words doesn't have tone so a simple yes the way I said it can make a lot of different so I see now okay trust me you call because you said there are tier three and tier four and you know people who are not educated using voice notes I started I have started using voice notes a lot it is a longer thing to talk about you just press it and say that yeah I say don't do it you should be doing it I think so tack instead of because you know tone I just just it's a very interesting one because when you are saying it I was reflecting it why do I do it right okay just I thought of saying it because you know the whole tone as a concept is so critical critical when you are interacting and especially the people who have just got onto our internet that tier two, tier three, tier four, tier five whatever we're talking about in their language with that tone when they have to you know they are again you know the good part is that trusting this medium is very critical the tone is one of the most important voice attribute which is okay but coming back to your question you know what to be very frank the same way is very different very different the many parameters I still you know there are so many parameters that I am trying to sort of understand and all but I think what under underlying and of course at the same time there are a lot of changes happening in the technology space also you know all of us are aware you know in few months down the line third party cookies are not going to be there your frequency your audiences your you know measurements everything is going to get affected but there are four it's you know at the end of first sort of wave and opening which had happened a very distinctive cheese happened at the thing happened is about data so you know there are whole amalgamation and integration between media creative data insights you know and technology is being talked about okay and that is becoming enhanced a lot okay so how do I get a lot of different things together and make a campaign okay and understand data from it and do something else okay that's something I see a lot for example there is a very simple campaign okay but a lot of audience based one so you know for one of the large a brand what we did is that combination of digital out of home plus you know programmatic plus airlines data right so if you're sitting at a at a at a gate number two which is flight is going to Delhi okay at the DOH can you show something different to those audiences right so the whole story of audiences intelligence mapping archetypes you know all the streets are coming okay it's not going to be very cut saying that you know this channel that stuff this KPI a combination of integration is happening having said so second wave is very different okay I still have not figured out how how it will be things are coming back a bit as a person I think I realize you know all of us have changed a lot in this last you know the second wave what are these and multiple things but I hope I answered it is little bit in whatever I could it was not a full answer because I'm still trying to figure out but it's a it's an integrated way of things which and in a combination of two or three things could be a major thing stuck there yeah yeah no I agree because you know it's fine because think about it this way you know all people you know even if you're managing in some company or you know you are still a human at the end of the day so you know we are all equally impacted we have seen so much of you know death and tragedy happening you do start to kind of you know some of this does seep into your work as well so yes I mean that's okay I mean you know as we kind of you know the final answer based in we'll probably get to hear from you little bit more about it later thanks what Prasad moving on my next question is to Raveena how has the definition of ROI changed in the recent times across industry verticals you are across lot of clients so you know it could be a different kind of learning what according to you is the best way to align ROI rules with partner marketing channels so Reena this is always an interesting question because see at the end of the day the digital industry is still very new and you know what really delighted marketers and what attracted them through the digital industry in the first place was the fact that you know there are so many metrics that you can track but I think also the biggest pitfall is not knowing which is the right metric to track and that's the biggest pitfall that marketers can fall into right initially when we started off as an industry everybody knows you know people went for those superficial metrics vanity ones which had very little substance I think but as time has evolved marketers have also involved and they're looking at more business intelligent metrics what these business intelligent metrics are is they they tell you you know so basically the idea is really to focus on metrics which tell you what to do next with them so if you look at a metric and you're not sure you know how you can use it to make a well informed decision then I would just say ditch that metric it doesn't really matter you know the metrics today have to be far more intelligent and actionable so how do you decide whether the metric is actionable or not I use basically a very simple way of deciding that saying that you know these are the three questions if the metric answers any one of those three then you know that's a metric I want to chase the first one is that does it help me build you know understand whether I'm building or losing my revenue does it help me understand whether I'm gaining or losing customers or does it help drive people to me you know as a marketer and then on these actionable metrics then you know you've got to put in smart KPIs now how do you decide KPIs for each of the channels etc again depends organization to organization it's very hard to say there's one way of doing it in some organizations which are far more integrated you know you can have business goals as the KPIs while in larger organizations where they're structured differently with different teams handling different part of the business then I think you have to look at KPIs depending on each of the channels that you are using and to do that you know we apply something which we call the race framework and in that what we do is we know we look at the we structure the objectives by the customer lifestyle life cycle stage you know so and then we start looking at it in a very the KPIs as well as the customer centric data in a very granular way you know through the marketing strategy and through that whole journey of reach at convert and engage and obviously through this journey you know different objectives will have different KPIs obviously you know prospecting will have a different KPI data meeting will have a different KPI etc etc so I think that's really the trick currently that we use with our customers thanks to me now it looks like almost that you gave up with the secret sauce because you know it's just like you know that that three question is like really like a great way to look at it you know if it's going to work for you or not this is really fantastic thanks for that insight moving on to Shreyaan's let's see something from the e-commerce industry now so e-commerce has witnessed a significant change and growth curve in the past years I'm again talking about with the whole COVID situation what kind of fundamental impact did that have a flipkart focus on marketing performance and goals did that change for you guys was it same what happened sure thanks for the question so this pandemic right it has taught a lot to each of our market years right so this is a complex world and it's always crowded with so many market years coming in bidding for a single impression right and think of a world where there's no one who is ready to pay any money for advertising everything is available and it is available at a cost which you want and this is the advertisers dream situation where you can advertise but you don't really want to advertise because of multiple reasons right like a simple example which I would give on our campaigns right we would have structured our campaigns into a pan India campaign and you would run a pan India campaign or certain transactions right now in a regular situation it really works fine and it kind of gives us the ROI where we are able to shift our monies from a converting high converting to low converting to a high converting geography automatically based on algorithms and stuff right now think of a situation where this is changing and it is pretty dynamic in nature right your top converting city is in lockdown and you cannot advertise right and your algorithm has gone crazy right now because this is not working anymore now what do you do like either you look at the complete restructuring of your account and then you go back and see okay this is what how it is figuring out then that's of course very very manual right so for us I think the goals kept changing because of this and as in when cities were going into lockdown and as in as in cities were coming out of lockdown right we had to be very very dynamic and swift in sort of advertising the right products to the right customer and holding on to your advertising is also very very difficult because when we rely a lot on our first party data right for to go out and advertise on the performance marketing side of things and the problem with first party data is that you would not want to overuse it but you would want to use it to a extent where you you can just sharpen your advertising campaigns further so the fundamental change which came in right was on how we are buying media what kind of media are we buying right today if you look at search right there's no definition which says that you should buy search only for performance right you can buy search for branding as well and people are out there doing that where search is being used for branding right so it is a bit of a tricky situation where you'll have to figure out what what is working for you and how your goals are also changing and you also sort of evolve immediately with the changing ecosystem out there thank you because thank you for speaking about the search for branding part that is something we have also been really pushing because that's almost like trying to change the behavior of the media buyer typically search kind of always qualifies in the lower funnel but this is a narrative that we have also been trying to kind of work on and yeah you know we have all kind of you know seen how e-commerce has kind of performed and the learning that I wanted to kind of get was that you know I mean it does look like all good from out but you know there are so many things that a brand kind of goes through you have to realign so many things internally to kind of deliver same kind of a result so with that I think we have come to the end of the panel discussion I do have one question and I would love to ask that and this question is that I can go like one by one so which is that one book that you feel is a must read for your audience out there and this book does not have to be a business book or whatever but just a book that you really thought changed you so Shans I could start with you let me know what do you think is the book that really you thought it's like a really a must read Men are from Mars and women are from Venus that's like a very very interesting book I think anyone should if you get time you should definitely get that on to your first reading awesome thanks a lot Shans I can ask Rubina do you want to tell us about the book you would want people to read yeah unfortunately it's not published yet I'm very proud of my daughter's writing it so I'm going to promote it yes that's what I'm going to encourage everybody my eight-year-old daughter is writing a book on her lockdown experience I'm going to definitely ask everybody to read but on a more serious note I think if you haven't read The Secret I think it's a great book gives you a lot of positivity in your life especially in these tough times so I would encourage those who haven't read it to grab a copy and read thank you Rubina I love it do you want to tell us about a book do you want to suggest a book you all should be reading yeah I think that for all women around you you know whether it is especially young younger one younger women I think becoming is what I've been gifting to all my Gen Z all my daughter as well I gifted it to her and I've gifted it to many Gen Z women I think it's a beautiful story and it's inspiring and I think I should read it absolutely thanks a lot I'm just I'm going to read it to you and this sounds great thanks a lot for sharing that Praval do you want to tell us about the book you would want to recommend us to read yeah one of the early ones I remember an analysis still sort of stuck to me is a book named Siddharth by Harman Hesse and it's it's a very simple book and essentially sort of sits on the principle that when you're up when you're trying to climb up a mountain no matter which path you take when you're up there the view is pretty much the same regardless of where you came from right that's the sort of very close you know sort of sticks in your mind and head for for years at least it stuck to mine a friend of mine recommended that that's a beautiful read so that's that's something that I I really remember a lot about yeah I'll be sharing that Prasad do you want to tell us I will ask for another good so yeah I think interesting and it's very difficult because I know you know you know you're a Russian leader you know every year I read sort of more than your book okay in multiple genres of stuff but I think one book that I think everyone I will ask to read is the Anti-Prajile okay so I think things that gain from all a disorder okay so it's it's the book by Nanaseem Talib okay the whole thing is that the opposite of Prajile okay is not strong okay something which gains strength on disorder is Anti-Prajile very interesting concept and actually you know very close to my heart and actually some of this concept I really use during the COVID times okay what are the things that we should build okay when there is a shock okay the outcome is not I survived the outcome is that I became strong awesome what is the name of the book you said Anti-Prajile okay by okay Anti-Prajile by I mean it's a it's a things that gain from disorder it's a book by Talib okay the same guy who who talked about Black Swan concepts right good good good one really good one but very interesting thank you so I think that we have come to the end of this panel question yes and you know this has been lovely talking to you guys and once again thank you from my side it's a totally thank you so much Rina for steering this very interesting conversation and thank you to all our panelists we did run a little over time but thank you we had such great recommendations and insights from all of you so thank you so much for your time and being here on this platform thank you so much thank you very much thank you so much thank you ladies and gentlemen with that we'll be moving on to our second keynote address which we'll be talking on designed for disruption so please put your virtual hands together as I welcome Mr. Rahul Velde EVP digital transformation and digital business Unilever Mr. Velde has been with Unilever for 30 years started in India at HUL and moved across various roles in Singapore currently he's based in the UK in the global Unilever headquarters he has expertise and leadership in digital in media and in transformation he has been speaker at many international events and even at Howard Business School and we're delighted to have him here on eTechMunch so very warm welcome to you Mr. Rahul Velde the question to please switch on your camera and mic and join us on screen very warm welcome thank you very much thanks Kathy thanks for the warm introduction and thanks for having me on this platform it's a pleasure to speak with you and I think it's a very broad theme right designed for disruption and pretty much this is one of those themes in which we can talk about several different subjects the way I thought of sharing with you some insights and perspectives what is along three anchors what's happening in the consumer world and what's the impact of that disruption on businesses as a what's happening in the channel's world and really how the channels are getting disrupted whether the communication channels whether their commerce channels or indeed any other form of dialogue and lastly the impact of all of this into what I call as the commercials and we look at all of this from the lens of technology and the way to sort of frame it for me is quite simple that technology has been on an acceleration curve for the last several years and it is in the last two three years that specifically after the pandemic that it's had a virtual takeoff on many different aspects so I think the first and most profound impact on consumers lives it's fair to say that in the last few years has been really technology and what it's done to consumers lives is just amazing in balance it's been a fantastic progress as a consequence of both the technology change you know the change in the entire ecosystem the landscape what has happened is that consumers are spoiled for choice now this has always remained true perhaps you could argue that it was true that consumers were demanding five years back ten years back and sequentially it's always been the demanding consumer but what technology has enabled through a multitude of different interventions is to really be able to service and cater to almost hyper segmented needs so we talked of segmentation in the previous world but today if you really think about it you know whether it's the concept of a high level of personalization or expectations of consumers they go all in the space of hyper segmentation or a great deal of segmentation connected with this idea of segmentation is also that we see more and more that the consumer world keeps getting polarized and getting stretched between different sort of vectors and as it happens then you know to be able to service and to serve the needs of consumers which have varying needs in as often very very diverse is a big opportunity as well as a challenge and lastly I think the interface and the interaction which the consumer landscape has had with technology and with channels and when we think of channels really let's you know if you were to button it down it's really down to two fundamental things the way consumers are interacting and spending their time on media and very broadly the way consumers are engaging with commerce and transactions and if you look at what's happening in the entire space of disruption when it comes to channels of communication channels of dialogue no doubt that those have transformed very dramatically in the last few years and indeed continue to transform even now as we go forward I think many very often we think of disruption as something which happens an event and which completely changes things and the way it's actually been working out is what I consider as more transformational which is it's going fast along a particular line and occasionally there are some very disruptive forces which come into play but really speaking it's technology which is transforming the way we communicate the way we consume content more specifically if you think of the entire landscape of the amount of time that is now spent on social media and if you really think of mass media the shift which is taking place to OTT or over the top platforms for sure you know one of the biggest impacts on consumers lives has been this area of communication and area of content consumption and as a consequence of which all of us are consuming by and large much more content than we've ever had much more is available to all of us and therefore from a business standpoint from a marketing standpoint to be able to actually tap into that vast reservoir of content bringing it to life producing is again a very important challenge and opportunity and the second point about channels is about the channels of transaction and I'm going to loosely call it channels of transaction because it's not only about e-commerce or commerce as we know it in the consumer good space but it is transactions and commerce everywhere so the channels through which we were engaging with consumers and having the transactions that change very very dramatically the most obvious one is of course e-commerce and as it is popularly said that what happened in the last 10 years in e-commerce pretty much happened in a period of 10 weeks during the pandemic and every across pretty much all the countries we've seen that e-commerce has been accelerating very fast but it's not only about e-commerce in the consumer good sense or in the apparel sense or in the physical good sense it's also commerce and transactions in the digital sense of whether it is digital banking and fintech whether it is educational technology or any other form of transaction interface has been disrupted in a very very significant way by technology this event itself is a great example actually it's almost the pandemic disrupted the wonderful event that the group used to have live and where a few hundred people would attend and suddenly when you take it on the virtual platform like this it has now moved on to several few thousand people two three times more than what would have attended the physical event and in a very different way across geographies without the need to travel so the channels of exchange of value whether it is a commercial transaction where people are buying goods or services or whether they're consuming content either paid or unpaid whichever way you look at it is very very big impact and there isn't actually any industry which we could say has not been impacted positively or in a different way because of this entire transformation that's taking place in the channel landscape now both the combination of what's happening in the consumer landscape the channel ecosystem has huge implications for all businesses on the commercials and the entire commercial model of all businesses in many ways is actually therefore undergoing a change in most cases if not all technology is enabling similar things to happen at a much cheaper cost you know so definitely cost and the value equation is changing in the favor where technology is impacting costs in a favorable way and whether it is when we talk of disruption what's important is for us to recognize that this is not only in the marketing landscape as we popularly talk about it or in the communication landscape that disruption is there in supply chain is in research and development it's in HR in the way we manage employees just as an example if you think of what's happening with the gig economy and the emergence of a number of platforms whether it is Uber whether it is Ola whether it is Swiggy whether it's Romato a large number of people have now been employed in the gig economy as it's popularly called thanks to technology and the interventions that technology has actually been able to make in what otherwise was a very different ecosystem so if you sort of where to take a step back and look at this picture you really have on one side consumer and the consumer world is being disrupted for pretty much every day the channel landscape is changing very dramatically whether it is transactions and commerce or whether it is consumption of media and then you've got the entire commercial model whether it is the cost whether it is the finances the margins the price you pay changing very very dramatically I mean just to illustrate sort of this point on the commercials you look at the commercial model of free content which is consumed by a large number of people a platform like YouTube on one hand and you look at the subscription led platform like Netflix on the other and both of these not only coexisting but both of these growing very dramatically and their revenues you know their entire time the people are spending on these platforms is going very very high and think about them conceptually these are fundamentally very different commercial models both think of the top line YouTube generating large parts of it through advertising and Netflix generating almost entirely through the area of subscription and the cost models are being very different so these three things really means that businesses have an imperative to understand all these dimensions very well and then to be able to create responsive systems responsive changes which is what very loosely we could call it about is a design for disruption and in the designing of the new systems we have to continually think of what is it that we can do to actually serve the consumers and customers better by all means you know that has to be the number one sort of objective where consumers centricity or customer centricity is absolutely the number one sort of thing to think about and therefore to creatively service customers to creatively serve their needs to make sure that we create brilliant products and services which serve them become very important data and information plays a very important role in this kind of designing the new business systems simply because there is a vast row of data which is available to all of us now to actually leverage and to make sure that we find pretty much that one a great idea which we can actually help to serve the underserved here what is important is that you know data is definitely something that is a science and to that extent it is a core capability that all organizations have to start building or indeed have started building over the last few years and if we were to project in the future whether it is a number of jobs a number of people who do analytics data and you know in those spaces is going to be dramatically higher than what it is today so if you were to think of a superpower which companies need to have and you know if any company were to be asked what is the new superpower or the superpower that they envisage for sure you know data and the entire space of data is a superpower which has super critical to have in the context of designing for disruption the second part which relates to the idea of communication channels content channels or indeed commerce channels is the space of creativity and especially as it relates to content creativity has to be absolutely put right at the front and center of the thinking one of the ways big ships are taking place in the world is from the one to many kind of communication that used to be there there will be brilliant news channels or brilliant entertainment channels producing great content whether it was movies or shows and then showing it to the large world and shifting that to what you can call as a participation economy where people are increasingly producing vast rows of content and therefore being able to actually surface them up whether it is through platforms like Instagram or platforms like TikTok or indeed many of the user generated sort of content which is becoming way way more popular and we live in a world where there is a paradox almost where on one hand we have these brilliant commercials shows and movies which are made with high definition cameras we watch it on a big screen or a big theater and on the other hand consume hours and hours of content on a mobile phone which is short form which is quickly which has pretty much been done actually short on a mobile phone perhaps and becomes very popular so creativity and managing this in the context of the pop culture managing this paradox making sure that we are actually able to creatively surface break the clutter becomes very important and much much the same way designing for the new channels of commerce for the new channels of transactions is absolutely a new skill and that has to be developed by all organizations so if you think of it in the context of education for example there's a big difference between a live lecture and a recorded lecture or a virtual sort of a lecture if you think of it in the context of fashion apparel it has a completely different meaning because now a lot of commerce is actually generated through whether you call it a virtual try on or different interfaces very different from the sort of changing rooms or trial rooms that would be there in physical stores so how do you get this idea of everything that used to have physically which provided value to consumers but bring them into the technology in the virtual world and leverage it for the new channels of commerce across sectors I mean the obvious one is of course e-commerce where we all now order goods from whether it's Flipkart or Amazon or whatever the platform is very very dramatic change and then for business leaders but when I say leaders over here I don't necessarily mean only people who are at the top of the organization but through the organization one of the biggest things that one has to address is how do we actually address the value chain dynamics so that the value exchange and costs are managed in a fashion where they still drive growth they still drive profitable growth and fundamentally we start looking at aspects of the line on the PNL to see how they deliver great value there was a nugget I picked up in the conversation previously which was around this idea of performance and making sure that the performance is great being able to measure it I think there was a mention of vanity metrics and how the metrics of performance are changing very dramatically and because there is a high level of measurability and data science that can be applied to pretty much actually across the lines of the PNL it becomes really important to think of the value exchange and what cost value equations work through the entire PNL so when we think of this idea of designing for disruption the very obvious one to look at is across these three dimensions but more specifically for a lot of conversations certainly the previous panel talked a lot about aspects related to marketing I think one of the big changes that's taking place is the impact of technology and marketing whether it is creativity and how content is created whether it is how that creative content is distributed whether it is then the distribution of that content what effect and what results it gives to the business all these aspects are now impacted by marketing technology in a very big way which was initially incidentally the topic which is very close to I'm sure a large number of people in the audience and there we have thousands of options today pretty much if you think of the lumascape of what is the ecosystem if somebody were to ask it is almost impossible to answer that question and define because any diagram that you draw has hundreds of boxes and arrows and circles and therefore an extremely complex system and therefore what becomes important is that in order to sort of consider this complexity of the changing consumer landscape the changing channel landscape dramatically changing commercial dimensions is to really put science behind all of this in terms of the evaluation and bringing in new skills new ways of working new ways of thinking into the business so look in summary really and I'm conscious that the previous session and overall we're running out of time and there could be potentially a number of questions with the audience may have but I wanted to summarize it by really saying that if we were to think of designing for disruption there are many lenses to look at it from what is important over here is again managing a paradox where on one hand in order to design for disruption and because the change in the world is so fast all of us have to be extremely agile nimble, fast, fleet-footed goes without saying that we have to be absolutely on top of the game by being fast but even as we are being fast we have to manage the paradox of also being thoughtful also being taking planning and understanding and applying the science to a very different level both are looking at sort of not just where the puck is but where the puck is going what's the view of the future and how do we design actually for that future that we envisage and therefore sort of being able to make the short sprints in direction of that long-term journey most businesses we know today certainly we always think of speed as absolutely the new currency I think it applies to just about every business on the planet and equally doing it in a manner which is planned, thoughtful and resting on the fundamentals of evidence and science become very important in all of this if I were to sort of put a circle around it is the culture that we build in companies culture that the organizations have and there are many dimensions of culture which are stand out certainly innovation, creativity we talked about a few of those themes but one of the most important aspects which is coming to life in the last few years and will perhaps gain more and more prominence as we go ahead is what is summed up by many great leaders as a learning culture and the ability of both the individual the organization to learn and to continuously therefore iterate out of that learning and improve to be able to continuously pivot by far is the most sort of important aspect of culture which we are seeing in all new age great organizations and promoting that learning culture in the context of technology in the context of disruption is absolutely the number one sort of dimension by the way again there is no such thing as there needs to be only one aspect about culture that is prominent but if I were to think about what's happening really right now in the last few years because of technology and disruption and what is likely to play an important role in the future I think this aspect of learning continuously and bringing the learning culture would be very important so to summarize really there are multiple dimensions of disruption that are taking place whether it is consumers whether it is channels or the business models and in order to ensure that we are able to actually be on top of this game and design and run businesses in the change them transform them in this sort of world which is changing very dramatically all the time it becomes important to apply the culture and the talent dimension more specifically start sort of building a learning culture within an organization learning both from experiences but learning from data and ensuring therefore that each of those elements are more responsive to changing customer and consumer needs so Kathi in summary really therefore that's what I wanted to share with the audience I'd be very happy if there are any questions or any other discussion points that I want to amplify earlier I was speaking with Priyanka and I said look you know I want to make sure that there is a dialogue rather than just me doing the keynote because you know as I speak there would be things which come up and therefore I'm curious actually to learn through the questions as well and what's on your mind what's on the audience mind and what people have to ask or say yeah so back to you thank you thank you so much Mr. Velde it was a great session firstly and I do have Mr. Ruhail Amin Senior Editor of Exchange for Media and BW you are here to ask those questions which are coming from the audience and from us so Ruhail thank you so much thank you so much Khyati and thank you Mr. Velde for this insightful keynote there are quick questions that I've got the first one is has COVID-19 made big tech even bigger has digital disruption taken on a new meaning in these pandemic times oh that's oh for sure so the short answer is yes I think definitely the pandemic has brought to life digital in a much more accelerated way across all the dimensions we spoke about I mean this event is a great example of how we would have done it differently but for the pandemic right but if you take anything any aspect of our lives it has been changed very dramatically by technology imagine the pandemic without technology and how scary that thought sounds right that we would just it would be impossible to connect and learn from each other have any dialogue do any business so definitely that's been very important I think the first part of your question which was about big tech and whether that is so I you know definitely that's popular news we read about it all the time we watch it on CNBC or any other platform which is on business news here's what's happening right so for sure big tech has been gaining in prominence and has benefited in many ways from the pandemic and the digital disruption that's taking place but the story of tech is much much bigger just to illustrate you know so think of a platform like Shopify right and that's a nearly about 160 170 billion 180 perhaps billion dollar company which is completely resting on this change and transformation that's taking place in disruption just to contextualize it that 180 billion dollars makes Shopify a big as big or a bigger company than IBM right think of Salesforce company which is you know what a few years old 200 billion dollars in market cap think of Adobe couple of hundred billion dollars in market cap so you just add these and these are not like big tech right we don't take when we say big tech we're talking about you know the massively big tech companies trillions of dollars in market cap but it is a story of technology in totality it is not just a story of big tech or small tech I think technology enables democratization of businesses where a large number of platforms have actually taken off some of them have practically speaking a vertical takeoff and therefore I think it's an amazing time actually you know to be in the tech space and this platform of course is all about technology and what's disruptions are and you could I could go on I mean I can think of so many names which are and by the way we I only talked of things which are in the marketing and the this sort of commerce space but you you could apply that in pharma you could apply that in automobiles everywhere guess what is the number one game and town and that's something do with technology absolutely absolutely there's one more question that how can organizations look at to create new business capabilities with data software and the power of cloud ecosystem and redefine and strengthen their relationship with technology yeah I think that's a great question you know so the cloud has definitely been a very important transformation in the last few years both in terms of the vast troves of data that is stored but equally in terms of the enormous amount of computing power that can be put into processing that data to great effect for everybody's benefit including businesses what becomes important is I spoke about earlier the idea of data being like a superpower right you know so if you said what's the superpower it has to be data how many people are attending this event right now who are they you know what do they really like what do they don't like and actually sort of almost being able to take a real time a daily view of what's going around in your business on one hand but also having mining insights out of that into what you can call is a slightly longer term horizon so it's not everything is about real time optimization and real time data there are some large secular trends that we can pick up through data very loosely I would call the power of data in three areas one is in the area of insights and very simply asking us is the question that through the power of data how can we make business better right and therefore what tools capabilities systems people do we need to do to answer this question of how do I actually make my business better what insights do I have which are unique or profound the second big bucket is innovation and how can I use data therefore to innovate better how can I use this computing horsepower that I spoke about the vast amount of data and everything that technology has to offer to innovate and to create better innovative products with surf consumers and customers better so that's the sort of second big piece and the third big piece is the combination of insights and innovation how do I measure the effectiveness of what I do in business better so that I have a continuous learning loop which on a day to day basis improves practically speaking the business so whether it is customer acquisition for a B2B business or brand acquisition consumers in the context of any any which dimension you know learning sort of loop on a daily basis learning on a monthly basis and feeding that so that that cycle is actually powered by tech and data and this is pretty much actually the cornerstone of a successful business is going to be using data for insights data for innovation and measuring that data what's coming out continuously to create this virtual sort of loop so I think lot to offer I could go on for hours about this subject of data and what it has to offer thank you so much Mr. Velde for taking on these questions and for the keynote and we are done with our slot thank you so much and over to you yeah please thank you thank you so much Rohail and Mr. Velde we really enjoyed this session thank you so much for your time Mr. Velde and sharing these insights and case studies with us thank you so much thank you appreciate having me and good luck with the rest of the event thanks thank you so much sir all right now ladies and gentlemen before we move forward to our next session we would like to take a break here and thank our partners once again because without the partners no event is possible not even a virtual one so I'd like to thank a partner presenting partner Microsoft Intelligent Connections and inMobi Driving Real Connections co-powered by ABP Live ABP Live Kisaad Jaan Terao Digital Partner Manoroma Online home to 36 million Malayalis can we have the audio visual of our partners please we asked a number of respondents what was important in terms of how they work with brands trust was number one I've started every presentation and every tool which is why and how we stand for trust it's the most critical thing in terms of being able to establish trust and to marry it to be worth trusting right trust is a number one factor in choosing a brand for consumers marketers come to the New York Times because they want to borrow our credibility and trust there is three types of consumers I believe those that will never share their data those that will share and believe that they have nothing to fear and those in the middle that need to have a clear value exchange in order for them to get their data I think the new currency of a true relationship between a brand and its customer is going to be whether they're giving you their data or not Big data how do we take advantage of the information that is coming in from different devices and new technologies to understand how do we reach our audiences trust is built in droplets and sort of lost in buckets we think about as Microsoft is a corporation how do we engage with our customers across all of our different business units to make sure that we have the right level of transparency control of data so that as a company that the consumers can trust us and of course you got to do this with trust it starts within our mission and our business model learn more at Microsoftadvertising.ai technology has always shaped how we communicate with one another the wheel the printing press the pony express the telegraph the telephone the computer and mobile devices technology changes yet one truth remains we want our communications and interactions to be meaningful and have relevance today however driving real connections are easier said than done but we help brands do that to drive real connections with our platform technology and exclusive mobile data in Moby helps you understand identify engage and acquire your customers in Moby driving real connections with our platform technology and exclusive mobile data in Moby helps you understand identify engage and acquire your customers in Moby helps you understand identify and acquire your customers in Moby helps you understand identify identify identify identify identify identify identify so once again welcome back ladies and gentlemen to the day one of TechMunch 2021 India's biggest digital marketing conference ladies and gentlemen moving forward before we do that I'd like to request all of you once again to not forget to tweak to us using the hashtag techmunch and give us your key highlights from the session so far and as we are moving forward to our next keynote session for the day which will be discussing and talking upon driving true partnerships between marketeers and technologists for business growth by Mr. David Kagnoski now David David responsible for the overall technology agenda at WaveMaker including the technology investments by the agency and leading the WaveMaker technology consulting unit he has also held positions at Ernst & Young and Pricewaterhouse Coopers spanning a broad range of consulting services but always with the focus on leveraging technology to deliver value and manage risk so ladies and gentlemen please put your hands together even the virtual ones for Mr. David Kagnoski global chief technology officer WaveMaker very warm welcome to you thank you very much thank you very much I'm going to share my slides and I guess I will say first and foremost thank you for inviting me and for having me at this event it's very exciting to me on a personal level I'm a big fan of India and I love coming to India and I wish I was there with you in person in fact my very last trip on an airplane was February 28th 2020 coming back from a week in Mumbai so hopefully my first trip internationally will be back to visit your lovely country I also want to note that I know that on an individual basis on as a country I hope everyone's in good health and continues to battle this terrible pandemic and hopefully we'll all be on the other side of it very soon so yes let's talk about a technology and the technology landscape and hopefully my slides are visible yes David wonderful I think we've heard it we've heard it many many times in fact I'm really actually quite pleased that following Rahul's presentation or speech because he talked about the complexity of technology the technology ecosystem that is in front of us how we identify customers how we target consumers is changing what's happening in the browser what's happening in the app world it's transformational we're in the midst of that transformation right now we talk about the last milers like Instacard or Nookbasket they're changing the way that delivery is done and even how consumers are looking for product I just read the other day that Instacard is expecting a one billion dollar business in 2021 just out of their retail media side meaning showing advertisements to consumers as they search their their application so it's it's really just an amazing thing that's happening and of course on the tech front alone how many of you have DMPs may have invested in a DMP and are now probably thinking about a CDP and are thinking about artificial intelligence and are thinking about automation needless to say marketers are not bored with everything that is happening right now and that's really what what our rule had talked about quite extensively and and really brought it to life from his perspective so let me tell you a little bit about how some of these things probably come together from a consumer perspective as as I was inspired in a conversation with one of my children the other day my my daughter Naomi who's 16 years old and you know we talked about how the ecosystem in which she operates in the physical the virtual the social how they all come together in her world and all of that is powered by technology we know it's powered by technology but then the question is going to be well how do we take advantage of this and I definitely will hit on those points as we get through this this conversation imagine Naomi and her friends going to an amazing mall and as they enter the mall in her social feed because the mall is geofenced she receives a notification and an invitation to download the augmented reality app that one of her brands has created and of course she takes the opportunity she downloads this and as she is walking through the mall this AR app this augmented reality application actually creates a world in which it guides her towards a store where her brand the brand's a merchandise is sold perhaps prodding her along the way perhaps games perhaps even offering for her try on in a virtual way try on some of their product or somehow experience their product in that virtual world not just on her own but with her companions with her friends in a social way as she arrives at the store Naomi of course receives a coupon as a reward for actually arriving at that store and maybe even an offer to increase the value of that coupon simply by using a particular hashtag you know this AR has brought her to the store and it's done so not just because they're giving her some generic content but because they're able to provide content that is meaningful and interesting to Naomi because they have some ethically collected privacy compliant data first party data about her about who she is as an individual as a human being not just demographic information and she gets to the store she tries on the outfits she's in the dressing rooms they're taking pictures together they're posting them on social media and of course she ends up making a purchase using the coupon but not only is she making a purchase but one of her friends who's not in the store sees the social posts they also make a purchase and now we're able to share that experience together and how cool is something like that I mean I think it's really cool in fact because it is a human level interaction it is not technology driving the human it's the human leveraging technology in a very natural way in a way that feels natural to everybody who's engaged and by the way this is in fantasy of course we all know this is all real all of the stuff can happen today it's just a question of creating those experiences we see that we've got a number of different platforms at play we've got augmented reality to guide her into that physical location to let her interact with content and to interact with the brand's products we've got that rich set of first party data to help engage Naomi on that personal level and because we use headless commerce we can support that purchasing experience regardless of whether it's done in the store in a physical location online on a social app anywhere where that experience occurs maybe let's dig a little bit deeper into each one of these so augmented reality is that intersection between the physical and the virtual world it gives us the ability to see and interact in new ways more than just with our eyes and of course this is this is different this is different than virtual reality where virtual reality aims to take you out of your physical world and put you in a purely digital world augmented reality is more akin to adding yet another dimension to your physical world it allows you to enhance your world through digital means and through your senses you can do it visually you can do it through audio you can do it through haptic feedback the you know different haptics that occur within the device even smell and the only one I don't think that we I've seen tackled yet is taste but I'm assuming that somebody's working on that right now and it actually comes to life in something that I was able to experience earlier this year I know that TikTok is not necessarily available for you in India but earlier this year they released a really interesting augmented reality filter that took advantage of some of my phone's capabilities essentially it was a rising New Year's Eve ball for switch from 2020 to 2021 and as that virtual ball would rise it would explode upon reaching the end of the content contact a countdown as this this the explosion happens the virtual confetti falls all over the viewing area on people on surfaces everywhere but what makes it really interesting is that all of that confetti and there's a lot of pieces of confetti all of it is able to interact with that physical world meaning if I would brush the confetti off my shoulder it actually would fall off in a very natural way if I would bend a little bit that confetti would fall off just like it would be in a natural way and in this case it was all leveraging lidar which is capability in an iPhone 12 now you know I imagine Naomi in my example in my little mall example she would be using the same augmented reality capability to try on a piece of clothing when she's with her friends now that this isn't just putting a two-dimensional piece of clothing on top of a human being but actually allowing her to wear it and for the fabrics to move as she moves for the fabrics to flow as she does and for it to really become a very real experience about what that piece of clothing would look like on her not just in a static way but as she's active as she interacts with it that's possible today and the fact of the matter is is that augmented reality capability is coming into all mobile phones and I'm going to venture to say that within five years all of it's going to be available we have to start planning for that today in fact I don't think while we don't have critical mass in mobile devices around the world with this capability I don't think we can wait for critical mass we've got to start getting ready for that and which means starting the technology planning in order to get to the point where where our capabilities are ready and can ready to be to interact with the consumer we'll talk about a plan more than once today now first-party data hopefully you're hearing this word over and over and over again it's becoming one of the most critical topics in our industry we know that you know data helps a brand understand the consumer and truly connect with them on a human level not not just in in terms of what their demographics are but actually to get to know the consumer in a in a in a holistic way in a 360 degree way based on who they are based on where they are purchase data certainly some demographic data and then really a fusion with any other data that's available whether it's panel or syndicated data because you see I don't think we need to necessarily know everything it isn't about hoovering up a tremendous collection of data but it's about collecting enough and having enough that you can make smart inferences into the types of behavior and the types of experiences that will be the consumer will be receptive to so I and of course I want to keep saying this and keep emphasizing it it's important that we do so in a privacy compliant way in a way that that doesn't turn off consumers but actually demonstrates to them the value of that data exchange for for the experiences for the content and for the for the capabilities that they would like to be able to see but of course it all begins with starting to build that first party first party data collection so build it build it build it if you don't have an initiative around that it really has to be core and critical and then finally is this idea of headless commerce as I mentioned you know you want to be able to have a purchasing experience that is consistent across all of the different places in which a purchase can occur as I said in a physical store virtually in a social setting meaning within a social network and all of those have to be have to be seamless and have to be integrated and headless commerce is really this idea it's an architectural idea more than anything else of separating the front end to the end the back end of of your of your purchasing technology so that you can have multiple shop fronts that have been decoupled from a consistent single back end and that way you can provide the experience that is is seamless in the place in which the consumer actually exists you see a traditional website it can it can give you you know gives you some content and you can move some content around within within the framing however you're still going to be limited to to the the parameters into the templates that you have set up in a headless world you're truly optimizing to the platform in which the individual consumer is operating in and I think one of the best benefits of that is that you don't necessarily then have to conform to those existing templates that you can really create an optimized experience for the consumer and that brings us back to then what I really love which is technology and and how technology enables all of this stuff because you see it's it's no longer you can no longer be in a world in which we simply buy or acquire bits of technology we've got to come up with a plan a plan that is not only not only comprehensive but plan that is constantly evolving you know many many years ago I did some expert witness work for a lawsuit and which is why we've got you see Legos on the screen in front of you I did some expert witness work where a very large enterprise software company was being sued by a very unsatisfied customer and these were big big companies the lawsuit was something around 750 million dollars and a lot of money was on the line and essentially the customer was unhappy that the software company referred to their product as being out of the box but instead the software company ended up taking them on what they described as a long and unsuccessful implementation process so to defend the software company we came up with a simple but I think a fairly clever analogy which is that software is like buying a box of Legos you get the pieces but you still have to put it together properly if you want to see that thing that's on the front of the box whether it's a pirate ship or a castle whatever it is that's on the front you still have to put those pieces together and configuration of software is that putting pieces together and customizations when you start actually cutting those pieces and super gluing them together and that's a very different thing so out of the box doesn't mean ready it means it's ready for you to do the hard work behind it the planning and the execution behind how do you put those pieces together and that's a very important thing to consider when it's out of the box so I don't think it's it's not enough it's no longer appropriate to simply buy tech when the need arises or when sort of a hot new thing appears and it may not be a very nice thing for me to say or maybe it's a little bit critical but I've seen a lot of decisions on technology purchases made by marketers based on what's hot what's a trend but also in lacking a real understanding of the context within which that technology will sit and that comes from the perspective not just of the tech itself but the integrations that are going to be needed the business case the long-term costs even when they're told that that product that they're buying is is quote unquote out of the box you've got to start considering what that that tech that you're buying what is it and how does it sit within that broader context how does it within the context of people process and the technology itself so and you'll hear me say those three words people process and technology a few more times you know it was it was only recently that I saw a lot of DMP purchases for example occurred without a plan and unfortunately it's unfortunate for me to say this but a lot of money was wasted buying tech that ultimately did not fulfill the promise or certainly didn't return the investment there was no ROI on that investment because the technology was purchased without that context and of course it's not uncommon for a project to not deliver when this sort of thing occurs I actually saw a study recently by the project management institute that said that 14 percent of it projects fail and at first I thought well that's not so bad I thought the number would be higher but then when you scratch away at it you realize that that number only represents sort of the total and complete failures and of the projects that don't fail you still have 31 percent that didn't meet their goals 43 percent that exceeded their initial budget and 49 percent that were late and this is these are IT projects meaning these are projects by people who have who have been part of an industry that is for 50 60 years has been deploying technology if you're a marketer you're really you've got some challenge ahead and you've got to be able to identify how are you going to avoid failure as much as possible even though we know that it's just going to be a part of what you're going to do so what I propose and what I think is so simple and it's so obvious but it's hard for me to believe that it's just not done university and that is to have a plan when you consider your retirement when you think about where you're going to go post retirement you've got to think about well how much money am I going to need where am I going to live how many weddings am I going to have to pay for you've got to think about all these questions and as part of that you create your understanding of your destination and that's your financial plan and of course that plan exists not just to be static but to change because as your situation changes as your income goes up maybe the income goes down in each of those cases you can then adjust your plan for that new situation the same thing the same thing happens with technology you've got to have a plan that considers the capabilities that you need to achieve and how you will achieve them from the perspective of people process and technology so there we are we know that we've got a complex world we know that we have an opportunity to create a unique valuable experiences for consumers we know that we need the right mix of technology people in process so what tactics should you consider and I'd like to propose two different tactics for consideration and for implementation within your organizations the first one and by the way they all seem so simple when you say it but they don't happen often enough so that's why I bring them up and the first one is to to build relationship with tech partners a long time ago I was actually a consultant at PwC as was mentioned in my introduction and actually for about seven years I only had one client which is GE General Electric was at that point absolutely at the top of their of the corporate world it was a half a trillion dollar company in so many different businesses it was it was really just an amazing it was an amazing organization for me to work with but what they realized at that time is that they had a real gap between how IT and finance executives communicated and as a result they asked me to write a course called IT for Finance which not only did I write but I got a chance to deliver it to over 400 professionals 400 of their finance executives and we didn't cover you know this is a laptop and this is a server and this is a this is a PBX that wasn't the point of the class the point of the class was to help finance executives understand their role in the success of the of the technology agenda their role in the success of software development in process architecture in security and in go live planning it helped bridge a gap in the language spoken by IT and finance so that those CFOs could be more effective at partnering with IT to bring about success and today I think in our world I see the same gap between the CMO and the CIO where there's a gap in communications and and I would say in some ways maybe the gap between the CIO and CMO is even larger than with the CFO because that those lines between digital IT tech you know all those lines are blurred and everyone's a little bit in in you know in in those same worlds but I really believe that the partnering with those internal IT technology professionals those counterparts is absolutely critical it's these are productive partnerships and and I sometimes I see some resistance to them and I think that the resistance typically comes from an experience where perhaps there's a perception that IT may not move as fast but I think that's largely because IT is design processes in order to manage risk in order to manage risk but also enable delivery and enable delivery to be as fast as possible while you manage that risk and I think that these partners these internal partners have to be taken advantage of look and I also think that you've got to take advantage of your external partners I think your media agencies for example and of course I say this coming from a media agency I think the media agency sit at that crossroads of advertising and they can be quite good partners you've already established good relationships with them where you can where it's possible turn to those partners those external partners for advice for assistance and utilize them because they're already committed and should be committed to your long-term success I think that those relationships will really help you evaluate understand how to build your plan how to change that plan as needed and to make sure that you're looking over the horizon not just in the world in front of you the second the second tactic that I would propose is developing a reference architecture and let me explain what that means if the term doesn't is not familiar to you we talked about again people process and technology what we did at WaveMaker is we developed a framework for making decisions around where are we from a tech perspective and where do we need to go and that's what we called our reference architecture but there's no magic in creating that everyone can have one and everyone should have one because what this does unlike a Lumascape unlike a Lumascape which does show you the complexity of the of the world of the vendor world of the technology world in front of you a reference architecture identifies it gives you the categories the placeholders of what are the possible things the stuff that you may need to have in order to be able to achieve your goals and that will then allows you to audit yourself to say what do we have today and again not only what stuff do we have capabilities we have where are we making investments how good are those capabilities how good are those investments it gives you a common language a common language that can use across the entire organization for identifying what you have but even more important than that it allows you to evaluate that current state against a future state so you can paint that picture of where am I today where do I need to be and how am I going to get there which how are you going to get there is just a series of projects and you do that on a rolling basis I would recommend constantly having a plan of projects that is you know probably 18 to 24 months in length I think any more than that then it becomes highly strategic directional but probably unlikely to be realistic but having that roadmap built on the basis of a reference architecture of a common language a Roseva stone for the entire organization to use allows you to have that communication in a very very consistent way across your organization so that brings us to the conclusion which is we've talked about how complex of this world is I think it's very exciting I think it's exciting as I talked to my daughter Naomi about this scenario she agreed this is the world she lives in and this is the world she wants to live in my recommendation is make decisions rationally and with consultations find your partners I recommend you build a framework for decision making and that you always have a frame of reference that's a very critical grounding that to have and after you've finished all of that after all of that is done then you can worry about other things like how do we ethically use data and AI but maybe that's a topic I can cover on my next keynote thank you very much thank you so much David it was really insightful the entire session I do have a couple of questions for you if you can please address that for our audience absolutely so we have a question which says as technology made marketing complex in any way what do you say so has it made I would change the I would not answer the question directly I would say that it has enabled so much richness in marketing that we have to take advantage of and so complexity comes is a good thing right the human body is complex and as a result we have this wonderful physical existence and so as long as you have a way you manage that complexity then I think it can go a long way our next question here from the audiences what would be a suggestion to marketers to become more tech savvy read read read read you know you don't have to be an engineer to become tech savvy what you have to be is aware of the possibilities earlier today on the panel discussion there was a question was asked about what books would be recommended so I did the same thing I looked it over at my library right here and I said well good gosh which book would I recommend I read one a few years it goes it's a little bit dated but it's called the big nine and it talks about the big nine tech companies and what's happening in the AI space and how they are how they're really progressing artificial intelligence I think you find those kinds of topics read as much as you can read every day and and you can you can be educated when I talked about that IT for finance concept in my talk you know it's creating that dialogue and make sure you talk to your colleagues that are tech savvy in order to understand what do they care about and where do they focus their energy right so it just reminds me of this quote by Mr. Goldsmith who was here at one of our events he mentioned that you don't have to be a technologist you have to understand how technology influences the world and people around you so I am guessing that's exactly what you are also pinning pointing here 100% it's a brilliant comment thank you thank you so much David it was a wonderful session thank you for your time and sharing your insights here with us with all our viewers thank you everyone have a good one thank you bye bye bye bye thank you so ladies and gentlemen moving further without any delay we are moving towards our next fireside chat which is with Mr. Ramalingam Subramanyam chief marketing officer coin DCS and Ms. Chanpreet Arora business head boot AVOD may request our speakers to please join us very warm welcome hi hello Ms. Arora hi it's a pleasure to be here very warm welcome to both of you and lovely to have you here we are looking forward to the chat thank you thank you so much hi it's a pleasure to finally be here together yeah thank you so much so you know one of the most exciting things like before we before we talk about coin DCS and your role there or my role it would be I just want to talk about how excited I am to talk about cryptocurrencies it's actually I spent a whole week reading up more about cryptocurrencies before we have this conversation about how we build a brand and one of the most striking things that you know in the previous session we had this entire conversation about technology and I'm I've actually taken some screenshots from the previous presentation we're talking about headless headless marketing now that takes it to a next level for me and this session is going to be more focused about the brass tags and the building blocks of how we build brands with people through different platforms so one of the most striking things Ram that I read today was the global cryptocurrency market capitalization is more than 1.5 trillion dollars however the awareness and adoption of cryptocurrency in India still at a very nascent stage and players such as Coindy CX and the industry at large has an uphill task to build awareness and trust in the industry and not just for their own brand so without much further ado I'm just going to launch into my first question about how do you build trust and and build awareness in a volatile environment for an industry which in itself is lacking trust right so yeah thank you so much for having me here first of all see trust right where does it come from how do you believe in a brand or how do you believe in a a particular industry it's about trying to build the right kind of understanding of a product or understanding of a brand what India lacks is not I wouldn't say it's a challenge of trust but it's more a challenge of misinformation or a lack of understanding and at various levels it's not just it's not that the larger consumer does not understand but it's in the various spaces it is either misunderstood or people or the way it was portrayed at the first time perhaps people have certain notions about it how do you go about building that trust so this is what we believe we felt that it's a three-step process I need to build education I need to build comfort when I say comfort build products that are simple and safe for people and lastly work in an environment which is comfortable for everyone to put their money in right see it's not an it's unlike other products out there in the market this is an investment asset people have like it earned that money hard and they want to now invest into something which they are first of all very confused about so we need to build that conducive environment and it's up to us as the players in the industry to do that so as we said read these three steps our focus was on building education we launched a complete education portal called DCX Learn that was the first step that we took last year when we went big in trying to focus on the entire adoption piece in India we launched this entire tri-crypto campaign last year with the focus that we need to reach out to 15 million Indians now for that the first step we took was not run an advertising campaign but to build an education portal then we we went ahead creating that comfort so building signal products building so mechanisms by which for example what are the asset classes in which people should invest in right now it's not an exchanges job to tell you should do this or do that however in an environment where people are just about to enter and explore there is some amount of responsibility that exchanges have to give them a guided path I'm not we are not recommending a particular thing but when you talk about 8000 plus assets out there and when people are struggling to understand one it was we felt that it is we need to come up with an unbiased method to introduce them to a certain category of tokens or assets which are safe to begin with it's not that they cannot go into other assets we have a different product available for people who want to invest into say different tokens want to do do some amount of advanced trading we have a product for that but for when when it comes to mass consumption for the first time user we decided we decided to limit that and lastly build a product that was that was easy for everyone to use right and then came the entire advertising so that was the structure that we had and like like in the words of Howard Schultz who led Starbucks if you if people believe with the with the values of a company they start becoming loyal to it and that's what we have started experiencing because people understood and appreciated the way we went ahead in the entire adoption curve and I believe these would be the right steps to build trust along with acquiring more and more customers that's right okay thank you so much so you know there's a very interesting point that you brought up which is trust trust in the player and trust in the people and even now in India and I know a lot of people market me personally when I say I'm totally dependent on my financial planner so the first thing I did personally was pick up the phone and asked him should I be investing in crypto currencies and he said I have no clue so is there you know this there are a lot of people in the B2B segment that are involved in enabling investments in India so my one question is are you taking steps in educating the intermediaries as well is that kind of a system that's working for you because while you're a B2C solution you also have this B2B category to cater to yeah so when we started DCX Learn so DCX Learn is a portal where you can go and learn learn about crypto blockchain about how to trade and so on and so forth but DCX Learn as an initiative was also heavily driven via the community approach so we regularly do seminars we regularly do training programs for as you pointed out intermediaries financial planners we have done work with the big force training their people and so on and so forth so yes this is an important aspect but we also believe so this is also something around about blockchain it's an interesting part which talks about decentralization we generally as you pointed out that that's how it is we go to our financial planner we have to believe in someone we have to trust someone the whole concept of blockchain in bitcoin talks about a trustless system where people can actually come up and take their own decisions without depending on someone like you can obviously consult someone but you don't need to depend on someone to take a decision so it's a balance we have to use the traditional approach educate the educate the masses and including the educate the financial planner out there but the goal of the entire blockchain and the financial revolution has been to bring that power back that power back to the people and build an ecosystem it might sound utopian right now but build a decentralized ecosystem okay so I'm going to segue into this ecosystem approach you know when an ecosystem is being built on one side there is the government which is evolving in its thinking process and on what the ecosystem should be and then there are players that come in right and a lot of times you see that players are making mistakes as we all are aware how do you how are you dealing with that while there may be some players or there may be regulation and which both are impacting the trust of the trust for the industry at large what role do you think coin DCX is playing or should be playing in this entire scenario to build trust at an industrial level right so there are we are such a small industry today that obviously we know each everyone in the industry we know all our colleagues we have been we have been at dinners and these are the regular stuff that happens and this is always a common belief that we have that is keeping us all together the beliefs that this ecosystem needs to be built yes people will make mistakes here and there objective of a leader in the pack is to ensure that we are all aligned to a certain goal right and we are all aligned to a particular objective and this is a constant dialogue that keeps on happening within the industry itself when it comes to the government side as well see government is what it's it's it's the biggest example of decentralization it's democracy today the powers lie with the people and it is off the people and if the people are not aware I don't think the off the people will also be as much aware right and it's not their fault the technology is evolving so fast there is there are new avenues that have opened up and I'm very happy that the government is taking steps towards it right so even the latest announcements made from their park they are taking steps to understand what this is all about and come up with a system by which they can create a a facilitative framework to to regulate this this environment and so that see the intention from all parties here be it industry be it the regulators is is all about protecting the investor at the end of the day the person who's taking that taking that risk in investing should should have some kind of a protection and that's the interest across and that is something that we definitely definitely welcome definitely recommend that the government should work on and we are happy the way in which the way in which the communication is happening at the government level within the industry the way we all the all the players are talking about it yes there are reports that keep on springing up here and there but in general the the overall sentiment today is definitely one of hope and one of positivity so if we have to simplify this for an average user right like just assuming even from a brand building perspective the only comparable that I could come up with was that gold at some level would have had a correct status is not that gold is used for industry it's not that gold is particularly used for anything except there is a certain perceived value of gold which at one point in time will cause currency that I feel like it's come all it's the it's come a full circle and now we have a Bitcoin Ethereum except for USDT I don't know if there are any others but then there are lots of currencies and I can't really we can't really define what is the base value or the inherent value of the currency how do you approach that question it's part technology and part pure understanding like what is the comparison and if you can talk in reference to how you see gold having evolved sure so this is this is definitely a question that is asked a lot people ask what's the intrinsic value of Bitcoin where does it get its value from why is it priced at a particular point and the simple argument to that is why is gold priced at something so jewelry is very small use case but beyond that the biggest use case today for gold is store of value and where does that value come from it's it generally stems from what we call is a network effect people believe in its value people believe that that is if I store my reserves in gold it has certain value and I can I can go ahead and the same happens with say bond the bonds market with with currency in itself the idea about Bitcoin is is very similar and there are different other assets that are there but Bitcoin is very similar to a gold gold as an asset class how you you can buy a portion of gold you can invest in that you can store it for say the future same way you can do it with Bitcoin is there a volatility in the market yes it as as it is there with gold as it is there with Bitcoin it's there with all other asset class when it is a tradable commodity there is volatility as a feature is there with Bitcoin and various other assets that are there within crypto space but it is just another form of an investment which will which is driven by a network effect similar to the network effect of gold so as a as a final wrap up question I'm thank you for you know humoring our basic questions but if as a marketer for any other marketer who's dealing with an industry which is so evolving is still self regulated regulation is you know where is financial industries any financial asset under SEBI and SEBSE is heavily regulated what would it take for any marketer like over a period of five years or 10 years maybe even in the coming decade what are the top three pegs that you would focus on to help get Bitcoin to the same mainstream gold status that we have today so um see the three pieces that I highlighted earlier education making it come making people comfortable about it and then coming up with a solution that is compliant with existing laws we believe these are the steps to go ahead one thing that as a marketer we should remember is having discipline right in an unregulated environment it's it's we are like one of those newborn kids out there right we can do whatever we wanted people will say hey, let the child go right we are in that space how do I evolve into someone who is respected who has that kind of a trust is once I take that understanding of being disciplined across whatever I do and holding ourselves accountable to our own value system right market while I I can have a business pressure to acquire acquire customers get a X amount of revenue drive profits it really ends up on how I stay close to the value system that we we actually started the business on and how do we stick to it as we start scaling there will be many questions that will come in as we go forward in the years to come and I'm looking forward to regulations coming in they might change the dynamics of the industry in itself but are they close to the value system that we started with and those campaigns those activities as marketers that that kind of comms that we use is something that I feel will help us grow the the stature of cryptos as an asset class on DCX as a brand working in this space and for all the industries in India because one thing that I truly believe which has come from our founders also is that there has been multiple revolutions within the tech space there is one where India as a country wasn't a big part when the first revolution came in the second revolution most likely was built by Indians but the capital was not put in by the by Indians right but this is a state where the capital is Indian this technology Indians are building building it up and this is the right time for us to help and contribute towards this this overall dream of nation building that everyone shares here right so this is a point that we can achieve we don't want to miss out on it that's that's the that's the whole bottom line all right thank you so much it's been a pleasure to hear your perspectives thank you so much thank you Ms. Arora and thank you Mr. Subramanian what a beautiful note to end this conversation also on that this is the right time for us to build the nation in whichever field we are so thank you so much both of you for your time for you know this insights that you brought to the table thank you once again thank you so much for having me thank you thank you ladies and gentlemen with that we are moving on to our special address on humanizing your brand through sports marketing in the age of social media and artificial intelligence a sports marketer and business strategist Michelle has spent her entire career in sports she oversees a portfolio of 14 sponsorships that span across 12 cities and four continents prior to joining TCS Michelle served as director of sponsorships for New York Road Runners and was a sports specialist at the ESPN wide world of sports at Walt Disney World in Orlando Michelle has a master's degree in sports management from the University of Massachusetts is a passionate fitness enthusiast and is based in New York and we are delighted to have her here in TechMunch first day please everybody put your hands together even the virtual one while I welcome our speaker Ms. Michelle Doty Taylor head sports sponsorship at Tata Consultancy Services a very warm welcome to you Michelle thank you so much I am so excited to be joining everybody today and to be part of this conversation around the next normal of digital so I am thrilled to be part of the conversation again today and I appreciate you having me and for everybody tuning in thank you Michelle shall I get started and share my screen absolutely there we go wow again thank you for that warm introduction and really want to talk about humanizing your brand I mean a lot of people looking services where I'm working right now overseeing their global sports sponsorship portfolio needs really no introduction to this audience so I just wanted to you know acknowledge that as a tech company we are always looking for ways to transform companies and communities where we work and live and obviously serving as part of the larger Tata group but really here today to talk about the challenge right what is this challenge and how do we humanize our brands in this increasingly digital world that we're in and it's a big challenge to compete with everything that's going on all the noise around us and I will say a particular challenge even for a company as large as Tata Consultancy Services as a business to business company right and a company that doesn't necessarily have a tangible product or services company so how do you humanize your brand and this has been a huge challenge for us as it is with many of you out there in your company so how do we do this right how do we we're going to climb this mountain and achieve this goal well we start with what we know right and what we know is that people connect on a very personal level right and what's been working out there across the digital marketing landscape are you know some of those more personal touches right we've seen so much success and I think we've read about a lot of success with the happy birthday emails right that that companies have started sending out again based on data gathering data of what you know about people and just recognizing a special moment in time for folks and using that as leverage to perhaps promote a product or introduce something new and those birthday emails that when companies are engaging in that type of connection are hugely successful we see them with higher transaction rates higher revenue rates and higher click-through rates so we know we need to get on a personal level but where to start right where do we start well we start thinking about what people care about right what drives passion with people and I can think a very few things beyond sport create that emotion right and the love and whether you're a fan or spectator sport is incredibly engaging right it gives people a sense of team a sense of purpose and belonging so really when you start to align your brand with sport sponsorship you're able to build off that equity of all that emotion and passion that comes around sport so this is a great space to start looking at right in terms of humanizing your brand and and trying to to again create that connection um but there's so many different sports there's there's so much out there how do you start to narrow down on what what's right right and you start by finding something that's part of who you are as a company and part of what you believe in as a company right certainly you want to bring data and analytics into the mix too right in terms of looking at what what sports align with my key demographics right um and and and do all your due diligence on that on that front but to really make it authentic connection you want to find what is going to really align with your core values and and and what do you believe in as a company and how do you bring that to life through sport but our confluence with services they came to us through the running platform right and it all starts with a story right as any as any good human element does it's all about that story and the storytelling and for for Tata again that it started with a journey of one of our executives right who needed was was directed to get healthier and fitter by his position and that executive went home and immediately started a walking routine and that walking through to running and as as as he saw the benefits that this physical activity brought to his life in terms of the health benefits the mental clarity right my goodness if this is doing so much good for me imagine what it can do for the rest of our employees right and this was at the time that this is our chairman right so this is significant and and TCS created an internal program called fit for life to really gamify movement and give employees incentive and in challenge to start adding movement to their lives again as a tech company and most most other companies most of you out there as well we spend a lot of time each day in front of our computers so encouraging movement is critical so again there was a lot of success with the fit for life program in the first year alone 40,000 people engaged and now we're up to over 200,000 people that engage in this program every year but that wasn't enough because as TCS looked at it he started saying well it's doing tremendous things encouraging movement and healthy activities doing tremendous things for employees but what about our clients what about our communities where we're working live and that's again how we found this very true connection to running and sponsoring marathons but because it really gave us a platform for talking about who we are but connecting to our core values so when you find what it is that speaks to your company and connects in a meaningful way it's not about just signing a sponsorship deal and putting your logo on a stadium or massive signs you really want to make it meaningful you need to be able to leverage the different components of the sponsorship to tell your story and to share what it is that connects your company to this sport or event or program so how do you start to make it meaningful lots of different ways and again finding those personal connections is how you start to bring this stuff to life as an example in the running platform TCS concentrates on a few different areas obviously we use running sponsorships as a way to drive our brand engagement and in those instances putting a logo on a sign is certainly a good start to building more brand awareness but we also use these opportunities to engage our clients and employees and there's very few things as personal as going through a journey an experience with someone together and when our clients are able to engage with us in the training of a marathon and for anyone who's ever participated in a marathon or any endurance event training is part it's like a nine months journey right of getting out there every day and it really opens up this incredibly personal and very human conversation between our clients and employees around how's your training going and it gives them another level of conversation in addition to whatever business dialogue may be having and for anyone out there that is a runner you'll know this first hand and if anybody lives with a runner or is friends with any runners you know that runners love to talk about their training they love to talk about their latest run and how they're feeling and any kind of little issues so again this is such a great source in terms of leveraging the passion people have around this activity to create conversations and build relationships the other things we do with our sponsorships are really try to improve the event experience through technology right so how are we gonna make this authentic how are we going to really enhance the experience in some meaningful way for the participants for the spectators and and for TCS obviously for us technology is our mechanism for communicating who we are right in the same way that we transform organizations and the clients that we work with through technology we're transforming the sporting experience and the marathon experience and I'll share a few examples of that just to help bring that to life and then lastly CSR and community engagement is a huge piece of these sponsorships as well giving back to the communities and doing it again in a way that really has a very meaningful and purposeful manner to it and I can't tell you how many stories we have of the times where we bring our employees out to events to volunteer whether it's handing out water or some other support along the way and they themselves get so inspired that they start training and running and again then this conversation starts around the water pools of everybody talking about their training journey so it's pretty amazing stuff so in in terms of bringing this sponsorships to life and again I just share these as examples of ways that TCS has integrated technology into the sponsorships creating creating these very human elements and moments right and I that one of my favorite moments of any marathon and for anyone who's ever washed a marathon um it is full of emotion right the the runners themselves and everything that they need to do just to even get to the starting line let alone start running and then as they're running by everybody's watching saying this is amazing it's like an a seed of humanity running by and every runner has their own story to tell so it's it's hard to even be around this space without being inspired but one of our hero activations has been creating the mobile app to support many of our biggest race sponsorships and what that really does in a very authentic and genuine way is showcase how technology is able to enhance the experience and solve problems for people and again it's leveraging data which is really the the key here a lot of what we're talking about right in terms of the next normal digital it's it's using this data in a way that adds value so one of the classic challenges of the marathon experience is that you've got a course that's 26.2 miles long and you've got spectators lining that course and if you're trying to cheer on your loved one if you want to give them that support to help get them across the finish line you're generally standing somewhere along that course waiting for that one moment they're going to pass you by right um and in the past it's been very likely that you're going to stand there for for quite a bit of time and ultimately potentially miss your runner right because it's hard to figure out where they are you don't know if perhaps they're having a good day they might be a little running a little faster than you expected or perhaps something happened and they're running a little slower than expected and what our app was able to do was connect up to the timing system of the races and basically allow spectators to track their runners right through through various different technologies that we used in these races and it allows the spectators to know basically every few blocks where their runner is so they know where to stand when to be there and how to find your runner and what it's enabled is hundreds and hundreds of these incredibly wonderful I like I call them sweaty hug moments right the moment where the spectators standing looking for their runner they're looking at the app trying to figure out where they are looking up to find their runner they see them they scream the runner screams there's this amazing hug right the sweaty hug moment and it's it's our technology that's made that happen right and so when we can tell that story through video or however else we capture those moments it really helps humanize our brand it's it's one of the most powerful examples of this we've also done other things in terms of again leveraging data and that we have to to really give people an offer that is of value to them right so for for folks that may not know for some of these big races that we sponsor it is difficult to get a race entry oftentimes these races are oversubscribed and it and it takes quite a bit of luck sometimes to just score an entry so particularly for the TCS New York City Marathon thousands and tens of thousands of people enter a lottery and only about less than 50% get in so TCS saw this as an opportunity right we wanted to connect who we are and what we believe in in terms of technology and what we believe in what we're doing in the community with STEM education with our running platform and so we leverage the data that was available and we saw that there is many teachers right that the kind of the champions in our community who are who are our STEM educators right who applied for the marathon but didn't get in and we were able to send them a personal message saying hey we know you applied we want to support you on your journey and not just in running but in the classroom too so we're going to offer 50 teachers access to the TCS New York City Marathon and these teachers were so thankful to be able to get their entry right and they were so inspired and we continued this relationship by providing them STEM resources and tools for their classrooms we created lesson plans around running that they were able to use with their students but some of the most magical moments were when we went into some of these schools and did surprise announcements to the teachers to let them know that they were in that they got in a race entry and and it again leveraging this data of knowing that they wanted to run but they didn't get in and us knowing that and and wanting to tap into this particular audience of people where we have this alignment on the importance of education really helped create these amazing moments that we would go into school assemblies right and we would go up and basically make an announcement and say hey is is Mr. So-and-So here in the auditorium we've got something special for you we're here to welcome you to the class of 2022 TCS New York City Marathon and the teacher would start screaming the students would start screaming and it was just this incredibly emotional moment so we're really excited to continue with that program but also to share you know how how again finding the right data and tapping into that with the right offer for the right person is incredibly magical one other thing I'll call out again just just using technology and I know that David had mentioned this earlier right the power of augmented reality and virtual reality to create different experiences we created really cool experience a few years ago with the runner's bib it's something that every runner got and when you scan the bib with the app that we had created professional athlete would essentially through augmented reality pop out of the bib and give the runner a special message and that was that was really fun so we do all kinds of different activations to really help again bring technology show people the power of technology sorry and what's possible through these sponsored things I want to share quickly a little bit more about how we're adapting and to this new digital world right and I don't think there was a better catalyst for this than 2020 and for as much challenge as 2020 gave us that it also created some opportunity right in terms of when live events weren't possible TCS was able to work quickly with our sponsored races and race partners around the world to say how do we how do we still create meaningful right and a time where people need more than ever to keep moving to keep being active for your own physical and mental health right at a time where people still need to feel connected when we weren't able to leave our houses and some of us still can't right how can we still keep people motivated and connected so we worked with our partners to really to create these virtual marathon experiences bringing the fights and sounds of these global massive races to runners in their own homes right in their own no hometowns and and recreating the experience to the best we could right so we leveraged augmented reality so when these virtual runners completed their run they still were able to get a medal around their neck and take that winning photo right we created online communities for runners to talk because again runners want to talk about this is this is something they're incredibly passionate about so they wanted these online communities to talk and inspire each other we still engaged with our teachers because we knew that teachers were being challenged in new and different ways last year and they still needed support from us as well so we created newsletters again to just try to keep this community connected in this time where people were we're feeling a little bit more isolated our one of the the biggest successes was turning the the London marathon the Virgin Money London marathon completely virtual for the first time ever we had over 37,000 participants in that race which was really excited for a one day race right so that and people from all over the world I think the other thing that that virtual racing and has created is this environment that is more inclusive than ever right in the past if you wanted to participate in in any of these big races you had to get an entry obviously but then travel right and then that has some um significant costs to it at times but in this world of virtual racing that we were able to help our partners create you can do it from anywhere so suddenly the barriers to entry were lower and the inclusiveness was was greater than ever and that was really really exciting to see and that really concludes sorry most of what I wanted to share here with everybody today I just would want to finish by saying you know one of the best ways to humanize your brand is to really start by figuring out what you believe in and then build on that belief I'd like to conclude with a short video and then can take any questions I can try playing the video from here and see if that works but I'm not sure Michelle we can't hear the sound though we can see the video thank you Michelle that was a wonderful session I think we all would agree that when it is a personal story that you put forward in any endeavor I think it becomes a great achievement like this has become for TCS and thank you once again for sharing this case study with us sharing your insights and stories with us thank you so much for your time Michelle you're welcome thank you for having me thank you ladies and gentlemen that brings us to the end of first day of eTech Munch conference once again I would like to thank all our speakers for sharing their valuable inputs on building a data and digital enterprise insights on search marketing reinventing marketing ROI, blending, branding and performance designed for disruption driving true partnerships between marketers and technologists for business growth building a brand in an environment and industry with a serious trust deficit and humanizing your brand through sports marketing in the age of social media and artificial intelligence I'm sure all of you have taken a lot of takeaways from the session so far if you'd like to share that with a wider audience don't forget to tweak using our hashtag tech munch now before I go away and say goodbye for the day I would like to invite all of you we are hopeful to have a really great day tomorrow as well with Hemant Malik the original chef chief executive food business ITC who will be sharing his inputs on marketing redefine John Cook global CEO V.M.L.Y. and R sharing his inputs on reintroducing brands in 2021 Richa Arora managing partner and CEO ESG stewardship services e-cube investment advisors sharing her inputs on new frontiers how in-housing is changing digital marketing we also have Anand Bhatkankar CEO Denso ages network sharing his inputs on changing marketing mix in accelerated digital adoption we also have Bobby Paul general manager marketing manorama online sharing his inputs on monetizing news and winning the localization challenge for brands also we will have some very interesting panel discussions on the new age of personalized marketing data analytics customer insights and decoding marketing strategies free and post covid so as you can see we have a packed day tomorrow as well with a lot of amazing sessions and lineup of speakers so do join us tomorrow for the day two of e-tech month 2021 till then I'm Khyati Kavayur who's signing off have a very good evening everybody stay safe stay healthy covering the entire advertising media and marketing 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raidbusinessworld.in we asked a number of respondents what was important in terms of how they work with brands trust was number one I've started every presentation and every tool with this is why and how we stand for trust it's the most critical thing in terms of being able to establish trust and to merit it to be worth trusting right trust is a number one factor in choosing a brand for consumers marketers come to the New York Times because they want to borrow our credibility and trust there is three types of consumers I believe those that will never share their data those that will share it and believe that they have nothing to fear and those in the middle that need to have a clear value exchange in order for them to get their data I think the new currency of a true relationship between a brand and its customer is going to be whether they're giving you their data or not big data how do we take advantage of the information that is coming in from different devices and new technologies 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