 And with that, taking all that enthusiasm forward, let's get started with our next speaker session as well. Another very interesting topic. The topic, of course, being what they don't teach you at Howard. Well, if that's a question on your mind, let's find out the answers from our next speaker. We have with us Mr. Avinash Pandey, the COO of ABP News Network. So please put your hands together, ladies and gentlemen. And let's find out what they don't teach you at Howard. Welcome, sir. So I have already managed to put the half of the hall outside. And I know most of you are decaffeinated right now between me and a couple of brilliant speakers. The largest television network is already here. I don't need to talk about ABP News. And Twitter, which is toppling government, making government, creating a lot of news items for news channels in India and abroad. I'm here in between that session to entertain you. This is not a session about knowledge, information, or gyan. Sometime back, I met when I came back from, I last year, I did an MP at Howard. And I met Lara and Sam outside a function. And we spoke for five minutes. Next week, Sam called me up saying that, can you speak about what you just spoke to me in the session here? So I'm going to take you through some of my experience that I had at Howard. And what I draw from it for our business that we do today. First of all, I want to thank my promoters who sent me to Howard, which is something that I was not looking forward to. And they told me that you have to go. It was a life-changing experience, of course. But it was very hard on me. And my colleagues who are sitting here, family, and everybody, it is more harder on me than on them now, since the time that I have come back. Also, thank you, Sam, who is not here, for inviting me to speak. So as I said, this is an entertainment session. What changed in me? And I was talking to Vikram. And Vikram asked that what you thought has changed in you. And I said almost everything. And I'll give you an example. During those two months, the first thing that I learned is gratitude. Aashi's session was the first session since morning that people clapped in between by hearing about some charity. We don't appreciate enough. And that's the first thing that the Howard taught us, that whatever is happening around you, you must appreciate that. And that's why it was completely transformational. The transformational in the sense that what you look at, the Harvard dean asked me when I was leaving that thing that what do you think you changed about yourself? And I said, I no more look at things. I see things. And fundamental change that happened, I'll give you an example. Five days ago, I met a minister. And he said that there's a train from Punjab which reached to Rajasthan for a particular hospital. They call it cancer train. All the passengers in the train are cancer patients. And I said, that's a problem of fertilizer subsidy. The entire land of Punjab, they have used so much of fertilizer that has gone down the soil. And you can't improve upon that soil now anymore. So is it a problem of fertilizer subsidy? It's a problem of pesticide subsidy? Or it's a problem of economy of minimum support price? Looking at things very differently is what transformational things that they changed. It was like drinking from a horse pie. It was with this group that you just see. Change that happened, this is my living group. One of them was a CIA department chief who later also got moved by what we learned at Harvard that he sent me a CIA emblem, which is given to your buddy. There are people from Japan, England, Israel, Argentina, America, and Argentina, and about Norway. These are some of the pictures that I'm taking you through. This was all about watching football, meeting professors, all the professor. Most of it, as you can see, at least about two of them are Indian. And there is one Don here who is the course chair. And the question that everybody raised is that why there are so many Indians in the faculty? There were students only 16 out of 145. And we said in India, when your child is born, the only emphasis all this while when you grow up is about study. And that's why so many of them, you find it here. Thanks to Jawaharlal Nehru, there is nobody to talk about him. But he created IITs and Stephen's College and I.M. so that people like this can be here. We met Jeff Immelt, who had a lecture with us. This professor who taught us about how to look at the country. And the institution itself, it was a fabulous setting to learn things. The Baker Library at HBS, which is an iconic library. And this is, I'm in the class and some of the cases that they taught. This is the dean of Harvard Business School, who is also an Indian amongst the Indian students that we all met. And this was our weekend pastime. We were watching all kind of American games, eating and partying. And every morning, you have to go for your cycling, yoga, and all kind of sessions. Now, at a time of our business school, they said they have not clicked enough picture of us studying. It was only about partying in the evening. And after a lot of partying, this is the, can we play this video, please? We said, let's click a picture of us being in the class. YouTube, please. Two, three, now. Four. Look what, two weeks or three weeks in college, that's two 46-year-old, 43-year-old people. So these are some of the partying picture. And one of the most interesting aspect of Harvard is that it brings the best in the world. So we met Nando Parado. Those of you who don't know, he was a 1971 Uruguay plane, crash survivor in the mountain. And so now I'm coming to the point, Sam, that we did not ask me to make, outside in the dining hall. So what is it for our industry that I learned and I can relate with what happened? Now look at this figure that this is the level of profitability in between year 2000, 2014 on return on investment. If you look at the return on investment airlines, lowest level, radio stations, motor vehicle, and the highest profitability on return on investments are cigarettes, perfumes, another material. In fact, all the sectors which are service sectors have very low profitability from in the 14 years of data that the Harvard had gathered and showed it to me. Maximum is about 10.7%. I am reasonably certain that most of us work in media industry. Our level of profitability does not cross even in the best of the time, more than 15%. I looked at a data of Fox News, which is average price per 30-second commercial during the day, which we consider dumb time for most of the advertising category, is about $3,000 to $4,000. Even at purchasing power parity, our news channels in India which reach to the top and maximum amount of audience, and as your data showed that the news actually is number two as a category in terms of revenue share, does not get even one fourth of that. And so where is the problem? So who and what is arresting our growth in the industry and what do we do to correct it? So are we taking the right steps and I would like to show you an ad which you can't see otherwise on television. Until about 10 p.m. in the night. Yes, please. The next one, please. I must declare that the first ad that I showed you, I took the permission from the advertiser. The second one I did not. Now, the reason that I showed this to you, that the first ad is now banned to be shown between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. and the second one, I did not. Now, the reason that I showed this to you, that the first ad is now banned to be shown between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. to 10 p.m., something like that, throughout the day. Now, if what the first ad is doing, and I am here asking a question from the audience, if anybody is awake, they can answer, is that what is more dangerous in the society? If you think that a teenager kid can learn from an ad and can get motivated to do certain things, is it more dangerous for a teenager child to have a desire for sex or to walk on a rope between the two buildings? But somehow, some wise people decided that this is not right thing to do. I'm not justifying any of this. Neither I'm endorsing it nor I'm saying this is bad. I'm saying that what is wrong and what is right, it is exactly like thinking that I often give the example to my editorial team that, you know, when British were ruling India, they thought that the peasants and the artisans don't understand what's happening in the country. And hence, we can continue to rule them. But when you go through the literatures and the songs that they used to sing in the wild farming, they understood they had a rebel towards the British Empire. So what people actually thinking seeing these ads and what we as a community think is different. So the biggest self-destruction that we can do to ourselves for the industry is like looking at categories what people should eat, what people should not eat, what is good for the child, what is bad for the child, and start policing them. Let the industry body evolve a method in which there should be a consensus on driving the value that if you have a right to manufacture a product, you should have a right to advertise. And that is only when these categories will start growing. Second thing is I'm going to talk about is the biggest bottleneck in our growth is about switching costs. And this is about, Sam, it's all about agencies, way of doing business. If you look at last year, approximately about, this is my rough estimate, I may be wrong, over 5,000 crore of account went on pitch. And what is the pitch? After the pitch, the call comes to us. Lower the rate. When you expect advertising industry to go up, how is that going to happen? In any industry, if the switching cost, and the switching cost is so low that a client moves from one agency to another agency, and your team, which is servicing that client, also moves from one agency to another agency. I don't know what the change the client gets. The only thing that the client gets probably is the promise that they will buy a particular news channel at a lower rate than what they bought last year. And this way it will bring the whole table down. Third thing I'm talking about is that what is, what is going to hamper further the growth of our industry is the restrictive government policies. And I am saying restrictive. I'm not saying they are imposing a ban or something, but as an industry body, we need to evolve and educate policy-making body that this is not right thing to do. If you look at India is the only country probably in the democratic world where a political party can actually put a symbol and advertising only when the election is announced. And why so? They are in a business of communication. They are also communicating to millions of people every day. And what damage that is doing to advertising industry is that instead of spending money on advertising, political parties' largest budget is to manage Twitter account or to do PR with the news channels. So Mr. XYZ politician, when he's trying to speak, all news channels will go with their camera live, television ads are dropped, they go live, they do their publicity, they go out. And we all, as a media owner and as an ad agency or as a community, we should think about why these categories are not allowed to advertise. Second restrictive policy that the government has adopted is this one, sorry, is all over the world, even prescription drugs are allowed to advertise and that makes to my point number one, that let people decide what is right or wrong for them. It's a typical behavior of governance that something that you can't control, ban it. So because you can't control that people will go and buy a prescription drug which they are anyway doing. Without a prescription, you ban the advertising of the prescription drug, which is not so. It's a huge category. And where this money is going from this category, this is going in peer and sending doctors to conferences. And the last one which, when I discussed with my NBA board, they said boss, on these issues, they'll be right in the country. That you can't say that alcohol should be allowed to advertise. There was, Sam, we have seen this time where, Vikram, if you remember, we were in a committee to approve ads, we were running those ads on the channel at a particular time after 8 p.m. These are the biggest spending category which spend money on peer, sports, ground tournament where the ad agency or the media owners are not involved. And my fourth point is the huge rivalry amongst our current existing player which is in the genre that I operate in and the ad agency. In any business, when the rivalry is so huge and that happens, when a business goes up in the cycle, the rivalry happens among the existing player. But if the rivalry is so huge it is only about price all the time. Everybody loses. And why it is so? Somebody should look at from the authority that despite demonetization, GST, all of us are balance sheet is looking bleak, but yet there are news channels and news channels owners who have no tension of money. Who is funding them? Why agencies after agencies we go to the client and offer them a lower rate? How it is going to help us? So if the rivalry among the existing competition and rivalry is so intense we all know about it. I don't want to talk much. You offer a rate, somebody else will offer the lower rate amongst the news channel itself for the same property or for the same event and so is in the agency as commission. And the last point that I want to talk about is the changing technology. And here I would like to show you a fact that what some speakers also spoke about. Today advertising is taking care of only on cable and satellite. There is a large chunk of viewer which are watching channels on the online. We had about 78 million minutes watched in a single day, but there is no way we have evolved a method in which we can sell advertising and buy advertising space on these mediums. And whichever it is right now it is under a huge cloud. This is just one example that I have put before that PNG has already put globally. We need to correct ourselves and the last point that I want to make for the industry is this gentleman who is standing with me here. He is a musician and what I can learn from him for this industry. Now when I, one day at Harvard University we were told that there is a class which is outside in a hall. The hall was almost five times of this size. There was a 170 member orchestra sitting and each of us were supposed to sit next to one of the member players. I do not have the music but he played that music and it was life-changing experience listening to music, sitting amongst musicians. He stopped the music and he asked us, what did you hear? Like a typical news channel guy and a guest in your function, I was sitting in the front. I said, I heard these notes, these notes, that note. He asked the corner guy, what did you hear? He said, I only heard him what is happening in our industry. You talked about Patanjali a lot in the last time that we met in the last session even today Patanjali was there. Who went to Patanjali? It is news channels, seven years ago and offered them the value of advertising. What he is thinking about media, what he is thinking about media space, we are not listening and we need to improve upon that and this is a, I can share the site name of this the gentleman, you can go and see this thing. So what should industry essentially be doing that aligning all stakeholders is extremely important for our growth? There has to be good creative output and what my friend Piyush Pandit told in last week that a good creative does not require good money and I would like to show you an ad on that. Can I play that please? This is an apple. Some people might try to tell you that it is a banana. You might scream banana, banana, banana over and over and over again. They might put banana in all caps. You might even start to believe that this is a banana. But it's not. This is an apple. In current time when everybody is opinionated, it is important. Third point somebody spoke in the speaking circle today that why everything is free, why we are not able to raise this issue that there is a huge money that has to be made why channels are free to air and putting all the burden on the advertising category and why price should be the only criteria for the account shifting. Let's make our industry more robust in terms of and last point I think all of us carry a huge ego in our business and this industry is supposed to bring that down unless we don't want to grow and that's the biggest learning that I had at Harvard that if you want to learn something grow the first thing that you need to shake off is ego and I would leave this with this gentleman you must have read his book, Clayton Christensen, he was our professor out there and the only thing he said that be gentle to people around you to your team members to your clients to your agency and everybody that you know including Mr. Vikram Sakooja. Thank you very much for calling me here Sam. Thank you very much indeed for opening up a Pandora's box of perspectives for all of us as well. I'm not going to invite Mr. Vikram Sakooja who is a group CEO with Madison and OH with Madison world as well to please come on the stage to present a token of gratitude to our speaker here Mr. Vinash Pandey. Thank you once again sir.