 With this, it is time for me to invite Mr. Vanit Karnik, the head of Esports and Entertainment Group M South Asia for a presentation and unveiling of E4M Group M ESP report on Indian online gaming landscape. Well with this, I'd like to humbly invite on the stage and stream Mr. Vanit Karnik. Thank you so much for your valuable time. We're looking forward to interacting with you and of course hearing from you. Over to you. Hey Bawna. Hi. Hi. Thank you. Thank you. And welcome you all. I think I was listening to the first session and it was absolutely fantastic to know these views and I think the discussion between Mr. Survivor was also very interesting. I think that gives a fantastic pivot to the entire effort from E4M's standpoint and I would like to congratulate you guys for the second edition of it and would like to welcome our audience and the people who are interested in the gaming ecosystem for the second edition. So on that note, I would like to give a quick perspective so I mean obviously we all know that we are about to launch one of its kind first E4M Group M ESP's report on Indian online gaming ecosystem. So before we do that, we just thought that we will give a quick context in terms of what is this about. So I just wanted one question. Do you want me to upload the presentation or is someone from the team doing it? Allow me a moment Mr. Kanek on that. Could the team confirm the backend team? If we do have a search presentation, let's just get that uploaded. Just allow me a moment Mr. Kanek. So do you update? So you can see the slide. It says E4M Group M report on Indian online gaming landscape. Fantastic. So super. So great. So very quick heads up. So before we get into the next phase of this conference, there's some numbers on the screen. So let me put these numbers into context. So I mean we all have been speaking about a lot of excitement around gaming, where the market would look at. So we've been looking at multiple different reports from various different parties right from India or abroad. So by and large what we see is that people are pegging the entire domestic, Indian domestic online gaming market by 2023 to be approximately 15,000 crores. Now that's massive. So at the beginning of this I would want to set certain ground rules. Now 15,000 crores as a number looks very, very large and it is large. And I have no doubts that we will achieve it or no, I'm sure we will maybe surpass this number. But what is important to understand is where is this number coming from. There are three elements to this number. Okay. The first element is the entire real money gaming kind of an ecosystem. The second is about the fantasy is sports ecosystem. And the third is about online gaming. So for the purpose of this conference this discussion, we are going to be focusing only on the online gaming domestic market because at the end of it this this conference, this ecosystem, we want the market years to benefit from the conversation that we're having and evangelize the gaming and e-sports ecosystem going forward. So we just thought that it's very important in the beginning to call this out that we are talking only about online gaming and e-sports not about real money gaming and fantasy. On the right hand side of your screen you see a number of 400 million. Now 400 million gamers are there in the country. Now the question that comes to my mind is how many people play any sport that you know 400 million. So I'm not too sure if as Indians we have got 400 million people playing any sport whether it's cricket, football, hockey, cup of tea, I don't know. So that's a very, very large number. Now think about it. Okay. I mean, I think someone in the previous session I heard talking about people loving to watch gamers playing on streaming YouTube alone talks about 998, almost about 1000 million subscribers who have subscribed to gaming genre. Now that actually is a massive number. Now if you look at another number on the screen which is 1.6 million, that is about number of gaming content being uploaded on YouTube. Now interestingly if you put this into perspective, for 400 million gamers in India, 998 million gaming community subscribed into various different gaming content. There is 1.6 million pieces of videos being uploaded on YouTube till now. I mean that's massive. These numbers are really, really huge for all of us to take this very, very seriously and evangelize this space and possibly help the entire ecosystem to make some sense of these numbers because what happens is numbers without putting into perspective may not have any meaning. So what I will speak about in my subsequent slides is about how are we going to be making sense of these numbers and how can marketeers, how can brands, how can advertisers use this entire business. So just to put things in perspective again, gaming and esports can help brands connect with hard to reach audience. We all know that 50% of Indians are youth, I think average age of about 25 to 28. Now these are the tough nuts to crack in terms of how do you reach out to them, what are they doing? We are already in a very, very fragmented content ecosystem anyways which with multiple television channels with multiple screens with multiple digital channels. Advertisers need to know how to play this game right and this is where we need to possibly help the entire ecosystem to possibly see how can we evangelize this space. How can we help each other to utilize this huge new kid on the block to possibly leverage from a consumer lens from an audience lens. So therefore, on your screen currently are key takeouts that we have from whatever we have researched from whatever we have understood and we will try to give most of it in our report by end of this. So the first key takeout that we have figured is gaming surged during the pandemic and it's a no brain, no brainer, no prizes to guess. Pandemic only catapulted the entire gaming ecosystem we always knew that there's a significant amount of audience in this space but we sort of maybe we sort of practiced it ourselves and maybe the proof of concept came in from there. That actually links it to point two. So gaming audience are becoming older and more females are getting adopted to the entire gaming ecosystem. So maybe what gaming was to a younger audience pre-pandemic, the older generation also started dabbling into it and that's when the belieability came in. So today if we think that only the youth of this country or youth across the world is looking at gaming as a platform, that's not true. We have significant amount of older audiences maybe in the range of 35 year old or 40 year old and of course many, many women who are coming and wanting to possibly participate in the gaming ecosystem. The third takeaway that we have is it is easier than ever to advertise on these platforms, whether it could be an influencer marketing taking gamers as your influencers or whether it is in gaming integrations that you want to have some of the innovations that you may want to do with gamers and games. There are very, very easily possible because agencies like us and you know, content creators like the gamers are absolutely well adverse for the last two to one half years to how to handle this thing, how to give value back to advertisers. So it's not a very difficult beast to crack, it's relatively become easier. The fourth takeaway in our mind is eSports will eventually have a major opportunity to offer to advertisers and marketers because as we get back to the open world, we will see a lot of eSport events being held and with a lot of fan following. More importantly, you have the Asian Games this year coming on and I mean we will have a very, very strong competitive Indian contingent from a gaming perspective who will compete at the Asian Games and hopefully will get us a lot of glory. And that possibly could be the pivot and we've been talking about it, I think I spoke about it in the last edition of Game On, where we said that 2022 perhaps could be the inflection point for this sector, because even if we do well and with a major edition, certainly it becomes a massive talking point. And fifth and not and very important point that we would want to make is gaming is changing the rules of brand loyalty. So what it necessarily means is what's popular today may not be popular tomorrow. So therefore, the brand loyalty from a gamer's perspective is not there. So for advertiser needs to look at this space very, very carefully. And it's not that I've participated in this game I've done something with this game, and therefore I've done everything. I think brand loyalty keeps changing so a new game keeps coming, maybe every month every second month so therefore we need the landscape needs to be changing and therefore our strategy from advertising perspective needs to evolve based on the changes in the marketplace and in the gaming ecosystem. So these in our mind was our key takeaways. Moving on, we're going to be talking about three key stakeholders in the entire ecosystem who will possibly help us make some sense of this from a business of gaming and eSports perspective. So, so advertiser becoming a very, very important piece in the whole thing, followed by agencies and of course game publishers. So what necessarily this chart says is that from advertiser's perspective, gaming can help brands to reach and engage audience audiences tricky to access via other media. So the audiences which are normally not on obvious mediums like like television print and some of the digital ecosystem are this gaming audiences who are absolutely queued on to that and we have seen the passion points in multiple different forums, multiple different ways. And most of us would agree that that audience is so passionate that they're only at that basically helps reach out to a audience which is not engaged anywhere but only do this so that's focus that brings to this business. Gamers are more amiable to ads and many suppose, as long as brands do not interrupt their experiences so unlike the television media and to some extent digital media where, where the ads are served to audiences as one size fit all. Gamers don't pretty much enjoy interruption in their, in their experiences so therefore we need to be very innovative, we need to be very, very careful about how I'll be engaging with them. So interactivity is a word which I would want to bring on to this point, we need to be more interactive with this community, rather than interrupting their experiences. So very, very carefully curate our experiences with them from a messaging standpoint is the point we're trying to make on this. Marketeers must define their brand safety tolerance before investing in gaming. Again, so I mean being a part of the group and ecosystem, we understand the brand space very, very well. Most global brands and most big brands in India would have brand safety guidelines in terms of what they can do and what they can't do in terms of engaging with their audience. What typically we have seen is in India, most popular games are games with a lot of violence. So we need to be very, very careful about what are we trying to do with who because our brand messaging. So somewhere we in sync with the games construct, right? Supposing I'm talking about a very, very loveable brand, very, very happy brand and it being a part of a very, very violent kind of a game may not suit the audience and the brand personality there. So I think a couple of watch outs there before we indulge. So that's the work that advertiser needs to be doing for this. Agencies like us will have to do a serious amount of work on this and actually we've got a lot of time during the lockdown and the entire two years period to do some serious stuff here because it is easier to plan and buy advertising around the game than ever before from a programmatic standpoint. Because it's quite straightforward. I mean there's a streaming of game happening, you put advertising there, there are guidelines that have been defined by the digital ecosystem. So programmatic trading model is something which is a simpler model. However, there is a lot of work that should be done in the measurement space because if this business has to scale up, some kind of a standard around measurement needs to come in because if in a lack of standard, people will only experiment but they will always think about investing big dollars because everybody eventually likes to look at the return of investment to some extent. While we all understand it's a sunrise industry, it's an industry which we need to shape up but without a mechanism of measurement. This is going to be challenging so a job to be done for us and the game publishers together, a very, very important point. Agencies can learn much from the mobile gaming apps which have become experts in performance advertising. Now, while there is no standard mechanism for measurement, the point is can we lean on some of the best practices in this and see if we can create a tool which possibly can give some insights on measurability, accountability, which will eventually define the ROI for advertisers. From a game publisher standpoint, games publishers must make it as easy as possible for advertisers to monitor and analyze their campaigns. So somewhere we want the publisher community who is possibly watching this presentation to make a note of this that they need to work with agencies like us. They need to work with advertisers to possibly make it more palatable, more dependable, more accountable for them because only once we work together in tandem is when the trust will build and therefore experiments can happen and experiments will lead to success stories, case studies and therefore we will then embark a journey of creating a very, very serious and robust and more importantly a sustainable business model. This means collaborating across industry to create a standard approach to metric and measurement is very, very important. Popular game titles can provide a useful platform for content integration, helping reach and wider audience. What this means is again a message to the game publishers ecosystem is that the very, very popular games who have a lot of stringent policies in terms of what they can do and what they can't do. Now experimentation needs to happen at the top, it can't happen at the bottom of the pyramid. So therefore we need help and support from the publisher ecosystem who have popular games to possibly come forward and create some interesting case studies and we are giving couple of them in the report which you guys will have access to in some time. Where in interesting case studies to be created which will motivate a lot of brands and advertising community to eventually experiment and come on board and try to see if they can engage with their consumers with their audience through that platform. And if it works, obviously more dollars will be poured in into that business back. Moving on, we are looking at six ways for brands to participate in gaming ecosystem because at the end of it, we all as an industry can do many things without the brand support, without advertiser support, this is not going to be possible. So we are just trying to give six ways or six approaches in which brands can possibly use gaming e-sports as a platform for them to promote their brand stories. So first and foremost, look at ad networks from an in-game elementary standpoint. Apologies on queuing in which is the time closure has happened towards your session. So we just request you to in the next few minutes please continue. Absolutely. We have got two more steps and then we are good to go. Perfect. So detailed ROI tracking and audience targeting case studies, reliable delivery of impressions. It's a known model. Absolutely, they're tried and tested through the programmatic pipe. That is something which is quite obvious. Look at community streaming platforms, reliable delivery of impressions and audience tracking is something which is available in those platforms and therefore that's an experiment and that's the baby step that one can take. E-sports tournaments as we walk into open world again are going to be very, very popular online, offline, various different ways to engage through various different sponsorships to various different sponsor prices that you can give and get closer to the community. Team associations, I mean we have seen in the light sports ecosystem, team associations and sponsorships is such a massive business today and a successful model. Nothing stops us to take those learnings in that and have our participation by sponsoring various e-sports teams. In game integration again, a very low barrier to engage so we can integrate brands and reach established audience to low barriers, high immersive way because once you are there as a part of the game, your brands can be seen, your stories can be told in a very, very interactive way. So that's another way one could look at and of course the gamer ecosystem which we call it as influencers, how you can, what you can do with them in terms of content, how you can use them through various different social media platforms through their own platforms like YouTube and Instagram and Facebook is something which we can look at. So that's six ways advertisers can use the gaming ecosystem today and I think the industry is looking at a lot of support and both ways to look at how we can work together on this one. So what are the five lessons that we have learned through the process? Okay, five lessons will be targeted on that gaming audience, be aggressive, we need to be very, very aggressive on platforms. Don't look at putting limited resources, if you're putting resources go all hog, combine two or more platforms consistently if you want any results. So we spoke about six ways to engage, at least at any given point in time we would urge advertisers to use minimum two ways to look at, don't use any one, you may not get your desired results. Second lesson we learned was no way your fans are to avoid overlap, understanding your audience becomes very, very critical, so therefore your investments become very, very targeted. Don't shut out game titles, okay, don't look at preferences because as I said loyalty is very, very important point, it's hardly there. So don't look at preferences, I mean today audience could be anywhere just be open to various different game titles and don't stuck to one or two. Brand safety becomes very paramount, I spoke about it a couple of minutes back, look at brand safety guidelines before you choose the game. Pushed learnings, don't just tone down what those learnings are, we need to learn everybody's going to be evolving this space, a lot of learnings going to happen. I would want to believe there is no expert to this business, we will all learn over a period of time. So learn as much as you can, get as many insights and use that in your second time. So that's something which we would urge, last but not the least and I will just zoom through this slide. The potential challenges for brands when investing in gaming, we need to look at those very, very carefully and I'll just quickly take you guys through. Gaming audiences are highly fragmented across titles, devices and platforms, prioritize your segment before we decide. Games have a shelf life, brands cannot assume that a title will remain there forever, so keep your eyes and ears open, monitor what's happening in this space very, very carefully. Gaming lacks cross industry standards on issues like measurement, brands would agree on their approach, their objectives with the publisher before committing to their investments so that the publisher, the agencies and the brands can work together to look at what are the measurable objectives so that everybody is happy at the end of it. In-game violence is very common and as I said, those are most popular games across the world and India is not too behind. So look for that, look for your brand guidelines, in-game violence is extremely common, marketeers should ensure game content is appropriate for their brand. Livestreaming platforms are hard to monitor in real time, marketeers must repress their approach to brand safety monitoring because otherwise you will do something, it will not be appreciated by your core audience and that is something which none of us want, right? Look at gaming influencers from a perspective of brand safety again because of the violers, because of the language, young guys, boys and girls who are doing it, language, discomforting language is very, very common across platforms we have noticed, so look for those things beforehand, give the proper brief, have an engaging conversation before you take your campaigns live. So these are potential challenges to look for and on that note, since we have very, very limited time, I'm extremely happy and proud to announce the launch of the E4M Group MESPs first India online gaming report to be published here. All of you can download it from the GameOn website, it's live as we speak, I'm sure you will find it very, very interesting. We have done our best to research across the various different data points across the world and India and try to give you various different perspective and numbers which potentially can make sense for us to look at this business in terms of how can we scale this up in a more sustained way for the next couple of years to go and on that note, happy reading to all you guys, extremely proud about this initiative. Thanks a lot E4M team who have worked relentlessly with us to put this together over the last couple of months. I hope you enjoy reading and thanks a lot for this opportunity and see you guys soon. Thank you. Thank you so much Mr. Karnit for those valuable insights and thank you for joining us.