 As you can clearly see there's no section 144 here, a lot of people here. So the discussion is very interesting to talk of data in communication, because so far data has been the forte of market years, pure play. We always relate data with market years. Now when the communication professional comes in this conversation, it becomes a different ball game. I can begin with the right from that end, so I can begin with you. If you compare the way communication is practiced now and how it used to be earlier, when it comes to the use of data, how do you see that journey, how has it come to become as we see now? Data I feel is extremely essential and crucial for anybody involved in media or marketing. Ultimately it's a messaging which you're trying to get across, you're trying to influence somebody, which is the target audience which you're going to influence. Without data, you're going blind. Unless you have data, like I work in the Delhi Metro and data for us is extremely crucial for anything. Wherever we do our tunneling, we will be tunneling blind, because Delhi is a city which has, it's already developed city. You have sewer lines, water lines, telephone cables, etc, etc, wherever we take. This is completely what I'm saying is completely different from what you're expecting. But point is, if I don't have data on what is below the ground, I won't be able to do anything. I'll disrupt the whole city. So data, this is just an illustration. Data is crucial. Mr. Thakur, your thoughts on this? So I think the topic has two distinct points. One is how much is communication using in citing analytics and data in designing communication campaigns? And the other component is that once they've done their campaigns, how actively are they able to tweak them, monitor them and measure their effectiveness? So let me start with some thoughts. And you also asked a question, how is it different from before? So a few years ago, advertising value equivalence or AVE, and I think most people in this room would know. That was the holy grail of measurement. It's a very rudimentary aspect. And we like to think that we move far away from that onto more sophisticated matrices. But as for the latest reports, that's the World PR Report done by ICCO for 2020. In Asia Pacific, 56% of the companies or the respondents are actually still using AVE. And you can contrast it, let's say, to UK, where only 16% of them are using it. So that's a sad part. A lot of them are still living in that. But I'm an optimistic guy, so I think let's look at the positive side of the rest of the companies that are trying to use this. The fact is, some of this inciting was driven by the fact that when PR practitioners moved from just handling the media, or being conduits to media, to many more stakeholders, they started using not just earned media, but the whole gamut of vessel, which is paid, earned, shared, owned. That brought with it far greater integration with the marketing folks. That brought with it a lot of data and inciting that they had at their hands. So I think most large organizations today, before they're going in for any communication campaign, it's quite inside driven. And I think later in the session, if you come to examples, I would be able to cite quite a few, which I've seen others do, what we have done ourselves and so on. So I think both in campaign design and campaign measurement, a bulk of the industry has come along with it. Ms. Mera, you're telling me that when having a discussion that how do you use data to get the insights, could you just tell me the importance of it in the way you practice your communication marketing? So in fact, I moved to communications from marketing after spending about 7-8 years in marketing. So for us, and at PNG, data is the starting point, because it's finally you want to reach out to your consumer research to the patient. And you have to first identify their journey. And for each of those things, data is important, because you have to be present where they are. So that's what we have been doing. And this data comes from all sources. Now earlier, for a long time, and many of you who have been in the industry, we used to largely depend on consumer researches, which were very few. You had to wait for a long time. Now with digital, it's just all out there. So as a practice, what we do is we bring all the marketers, the ad agency together, the PR agency together, and the digital agency together. We spend a lot of time on the drawing board, going with the objective. Get all the data out there, and that's how we identify the mix. So a lot of time goes into planning. So data is through and through. We start, and of course, to measure along the way. What digital also allows you is to keep, you know, because as you go along, you'll see what's working, what's not. So I think it's a big goon. It's complementary to what we need to do now. And so this is the way, and I think we should all leverage it as much as we can. Okay. Any questions? How has it become as important for this domain of communication as it has become for the marketers? Is there a parallel between the two? I think when someone says that data is a new oil, it's just a fact of life. Without data, you can't do communication. I mean, communication's gone other days when it was just a fashion statement that we need to be in the press or whatever. Today's time actually forces to actually base all our strategies on data. So for us at Goldrage, we have 22 businesses and over 40 of its brands. And the fortunate part for us is we touch about 750 million consumers in this country. If data is not available, we are not able to create a strategy that's aligned to what the business needs are. So the three things that we use data for predominantly are the first one is for the course correction of the overall communication strategy. That's the bedrock of any strategy, so data is important there. Second is to create insights based on what competition is doing, what we are doing, what's working and what's not working. Based on that, the inciting part, that's the second pillar of our strategy. And the third and the most important point is the pulse of the market. So unless we have a pulse of what's happening in the consumer market, are people using Good Night, are people using Amati, or how's the competition doing so? Everything is based on data. Based on that, we co-create and strategize in a way that our campaigns are more effective. I fully agree that data is the new oil and it's absolutely important. I think the real question is not whether people are using data or not because I can promise you everybody sitting in the room is using data to manage their commerce programs and to take decisions. I talked about the measurement curve in the presentation that I just made. Your level of maturity on how effectively you are able to use that data is more important today. In the past, because data was not easily available or we did not have the know how to process that data very well, we were using very basic elements. So we were just counting exposures. We were just counting some numbers. Now, if you saw the last slide that I presented, if you are moving to the integrated level, at the integrated level, you are able to now correlate data coming in from different sets. We work with clients wherein they work with data that is available from media. They bring in internal data elements from sales, bring in different data elements from other businesses that they have, and they are able to correlate and make sense of that data to take better decisions. So how far you are going on that maturity curve? How well are you able to use that data is a more important question, but everybody is using data. My point is also about the evolved state. How evolved is the communication domain when it comes to the use of data. So basics, all the panelists did throw a lot of light on the topic. The presidential elections, the democracy, the very fundamentals of the society is being fought, lost, and won on the basis of data. Think about it. 90% of the data that we have in the world is created in the last few years. After 2015, they say the data boom. Every time we click a screen, we buy on BigBasket or we are on Amazon, we are sending an email, we are even switching off our screens, we are creating data. If the world has changed, how is it that we will not? So there is almost a need of the hour to deal with data as is. The question and what he said, as seen, was interesting. Do we have, just as we say knows when you, do we have the eye for data? What do we need to analyze? Do we know the questions we want to ask of the data? I think the challenge is communicators and the experience that we have as a reservoir will come handy in asking the right questions of the data. Computing is not a problem. Storage is not a problem. Analytics tool is not a problem. Partners like Aseema are there to light up the way. We as communicators need to come to terms with our roles and we got to be more intelligent, more business-aligned, more community-aligned to be able to asking the right set of questions. And I think that is where our focus at Tech Mahendra is, are we asking the right questions of the data and then are we learning from it and doing the right thing in the course of action? Yeah. Ms. Sude, I want to come to you with this next term. So we know that data is domain. I mean, we can't, we can't be using it. And definitely everybody's evolved the stage of using in communications. But there's another factor, which is the big data, the talk around big data. Now, people seeing big data itself is not enough. There's something called small data, which is more relevant. So within data, what are the bigger narratives shaping up the use of data? With big data, the biggest challenge is how to manage so much data. And given that it takes time to get results from big data, speed also is of essence. These days, most of the time, you'll hear the word real-time data being used at all conferences. When we work with our clients, in our client organization, we divide the people into two categories. One is what we call the power users. People who are in communicator roles, like the people here. And then we have the business users who are not responsible for day-to-day communication activities per se. We believe real-time data is only important for these power users, because they know how to assess, understand, and assimilate this data. For power users, the business users, we recommend a term called slow data. We want that all the communicators are able to absorb, assimilate all this real-time data. Coming back to her point, ask the right questions of that data set. And with the analyzed results, then take those results to the business leaders, rather than giving them access to real-time dashboards. Real-time dashboards at times, when given to business leaders, have a negative impact, rather than having a positive impact. Therefore, for business leaders, we push the concept of slow data. For power users, we push the concept of real-time data. Also, a small point here. It makes us very powerful as professionals to be able to go back with data analytics, real analysis to our business leaders, who often have a point of view. And if you have a point of view and you just get into a discussion without that data set, chances are that your business leader will always trump because the balance sheet is on their side. But if you really have a genuine point to make, it's always good to have data backing you. That's when you get the respect and the years of the business leaders as well. So it is in our interest to embrace our data as much as we can. I'll give an example of what she just said. I in principle agree with both of them in terms of the real-time data and the importance of real-time data. So during a crisis situation or an incident which occurs, the natural propensity of all of us communicators to immediately try and respond. If a negative tweet comes for a brand, say for example for Good Night, you know one of her brands, if a negative tweet comes, the natural propensity for a brand manager or a co-com team or a corporate brand team is to respond and try to nullify that. But we've seen in more than 10 instances where responding was not necessary because if we had responded, it could have just become even larger, could have reached more number of people. What enables us to take that decision of whether to respond or not respond is the availability of data. So I'll give you a classic example very recently and this keeps happening every alternate days. So when a kind of a negative tweet comes, automatically the ORM system, the online reputation management system which throws up real-time data, gives us the insights in terms of what is the tonality, how many people are actually retweeting it, how many people are actually seeing it. That saves us the effort of actually going on the bandwagon and trying to defend that whole issue and create a larger price for ourselves. So I think that data, importance of data analysis, availability of data, real-time and acting upon it in terms of whether to respond or not respond is absolutely necessary and in that parlance real-time data is really a necessity. So I guess I'll only take on her point of credibility and for many of you here who are with agencies or communicators, is a lot of time the brand team comes with a certain thought and I think with data you actually need to ask why and many times you should sit up and say that you don't need a payout campaign for this, maybe digital is the way to go. So that's how you build credibility and that's how we've been encouraging our marketers because they'll come and the solution is completely different and it's okay that you didn't do a campaign but they respect you more and then they consult you throughout the journey of the program. Some thoughts on the user? So I'd just like to reframe this a bit. I think what we've established is one measurement and data is being used more often. That's giving more power to the power user and thank you for calling us that. I think this makes us feel good. But the reframing that I wanted to say was what we're measuring now, which we weren't before, how important is it to the business leader, to the C-suits, to the board, etc. Because each time we go out with our budget, how do they see it? They see it as asking for an investment and it is their right to therefore ask for return on that investment. And for the longest time now, communication has been talking about returns such as changing the level of trust or improvement in perception, you know, the reach, impression, etc. They're not being able to draw that connect between the final value to the business or impact to the business, you know, impact to the business. So somewhere we have to make sure that our analytics and the campaigns that we run are able to shorten the time to impact. So from the time the money was spent to the real impact on business. Because communicators typically ask for 3, 4, 5, 6 years time frame. If you do it today, then the brand-mit trust will increase in 3 years. It will impact revenue in 6 years. You know, and you see, I is glazing over. One of the points that I sort of wanted is table. Look at the data protection regime that we are in, right? GDPR now requires you that if there is a data breach that within 72 hours you have to actually put out a fresh release, you know, that wasn't the case in the past. We just had the look about sort of, you know, go ahead with the data protection bill. It is so important for communicators because authenticity is very critical these days. And in the age of rage and the fake news and everything else, I think there is a price to authenticity. It's so important for us to know how are we going to deal with that data? How are you going to leverage it? Because you will, you can potentially be behind bars. So it's time that we invested a little more mind space on this one. Mr. Vayan, do you, I mean, small data, relevant data, big data? I mean, what are the grades of data? Whatever is measurable is that definitely bringing you the ROI. Is that the correct approach to take when you're looking at using data? It's an ocean of data. And I'll give you two examples. Analytics has become so important today. Apart from advertising and media, Donald Trump is suffering because of data. It was a data analyst who found out the connection. Osama bin Laden. Side effects of data. Osama bin Laden, they took a risk. The data was there. One lady analyzed it. They took a risk. It was a 60-60-40. They took a risk based upon data available. He's no more. So data analytics, data is there. It's a skill. And as a profession, also data analytics is becoming more and more important today. Only then you can go forward. At a point here, I think it's also important to educate the market here. Because many times you would find people with years of experience, who don't really know what they're looking for. And that's where our role comes into play. And what I try and do is set KPIs right at front, ask them what do they call success. Transparency tells them that this is not going to happen. And that's not really the right way to look at it with examples with data. And I think that is equally our role. If you take them on board right at the beginning, also the success is owned, the failure is owned, and the iterations are owned. They're working together. So I think that's a very important tool. Take them through, when will the ROI come in? For what activity, what should be the ROI as well? I want to come to you in a second. What would be your word of advice for people sitting in the room when it comes to using data for communication? In terms of upgrading the tools, bringing in new technology, can you cite an example of how you are looking at implementing these kinds of applications within your organization? All right. My first advice is that please don't be afraid of data. These days, I'll give you an example of what happened three years ago. I would go out to various conferences internationally, and I would see everybody is talking about big data and how they're using artificial intelligence and machine learning in the work that they're doing, and initially, we got a little nervous. We were not doing that. We didn't have all of that. And today, I can see the same nervousness when we look at public relations professionals who are doing PR advisory work. So the first thing I'm going to tell you is that it is not important to learn how to do machine learning. It is not important to learn how to do artificial intelligence. But what is more important is what Tuhina talked about earlier. What are the questions I can ask experts who know how to do machine learning? What objectives I can set for them? Because that understanding is very, very important. Because what has happened is because of machine learning and artificial intelligence, the kind of detail, the kind of questions, the kind of insights that you are able to demand from experts has increased manyfold. So if you don't understand what AI is capable of, you're going to be at a loss. How do you change that? You need to read about AI. You need to talk to people who are doing work in AI and machine learning on how they are able to use this in the communications domain. That's my advice to everyone. And I will say this less is more. There's no tearing hurry because I found myself at loss of time, how do you be on all social platforms? How do you be omnipresent? Right? I mean there is only the battles that you can fight and win. Choose your battles. Go back to your business objectives. Don't be in a hurry. Don't think you're losing out on the race. As long as you're true to that authenticity and your business objective and if you're doing justice to that, then you're good. And you don't have to be everywhere all the time as long as you are somewhere at the right time. That is the bit that I would like to share or advise. Let me allow me to play the assistant moderator. I think the audience, we've been living in this theory zone right now. The audience really want to know about some actual campaigns. We can give examples of which we may have done in our own company's own life where it has been used powerfully. So I just want to have this quick point of best practices of producing data for communications quickly for our audience and then we come to those live cases. So there's only called a best practice. Every practice is best. I mean it is delivers for you, it becomes best. So I think for us at Goodridge, data is absolutely, like I said, it's like oil. What do we do with data? So I'll give a classic example of evaluation of an influencer. I mean, database evaluation. I mean, we had the experiences where we signed up a person who had about 12 million followers and when the tweet went out, it had 11 retweets. It's a no-brainer that nothing is happening and so much of investment just goes for a toss. When we started looking at a plethora of influencers trying to analyze what are their followers, what are the journals they write, what are their expertise. I mean that data itself gives you the first element of reaching out to the right influencer. So I think that's one application of data being there. Second is during the crisis situation in terms of what is the real impact. I mean, we have this tendency of overreacting, you know, writing press notes and holding statements. Sometimes it's actually not necessary and my experience has been eight or ten times it's actually not necessary because we overreact. If you have right data in terms of what has been the impact, what has been the reach, where has it gone, it's a no-brainer. So we have a tool which crawls. As I speak, it's crawling one billion sites across the country for 18 of my brands vis-a-vis the competition and if there's any negative which happens for any brand, I get an alert. So what does that data help me? It just helps me analyze whether I need to really respond, not respond based on the level of incident or the crisis which happens. So I get data. I seem to have spoke about AI. I think going forward AI is going to revolutionize this whole thing. AI is nothing, it's very simple. It's about programming and, you know, harnessing the data which is already available. Tomorrow if a crisis happens, micro markets can be targeted and the machine language programming can throw up results in terms of whether the impact has been good, bad, ugly. You need to respond the authentic real-time sentiment based on which the campaigns can be planned. So I think there are thousands of examples which we can share in terms of how data can be really effective for corporate communications assets. Awesome. Maybe I'll start with the case study and it's been really clipped to my heart in my previous organization. We worked on infertility awareness and infertility, as you can imagine, a taboo subject, not much information available. So when we began, we started scouting around for information, what's available and the researches, a lot of the data was very medical it's a very sensitive subject to the patient and the consumer and then we started mining data and it was the digital, you know, the data that gave us the most insights and we found every day people were actually searching for infertility-related information. There were different kinds of groups that we could identify and we spent a lot of time listening and our entire campaign which was initially planned as a traditional PR campaign completely shifted to digital and we realized that infertility is something people want to be discreet about so make sure you're just talking to the people you want to talk with their data on a and we started with a pilot, we kept learning the content kept changing just to give you an example, there are people who are, for example, first time going for a treatment for infertility, there are some who failed so you have to have very different approach we were not really selling a product what we were trying to do is give people hope give people information and it completely went to a digital campaign and an always on campaign something which I'm very proud of because the change does not happen with a two-month campaign or a three-month campaign it has to be always on that's where your digital media matrix comes into play and now it's been third year running that campaign and it's such good given us the results that we wanted Just to add, the importance of data also when you file stories nowadays if you see media also picks up stories which have data I'll give you a classic example of coming back to Good Night not that it's my favorite brand but the thing is, when we were launching a newer variant of Good Night we had no story angle last week because the Good Night is a Good Night only the part with change was the efficacy part of it so we again conducted a research data we had a hypothesis that the dengue mosquitoes bite only in the morning right, now if I go to the media to a journalist and say we make a headline saying dengue mosquitoes bite in the morning he says take a walk, I mean it's not written so I can't believe it we did a research, we did a data driven approach and we found that 92% of the people didn't know that so the headline which was created this is how we frame narratives using data for PR we frame the narrative that 92% of Indians don't know that dengue mosquitoes bite it's become a kind of a de-fact the next day it became a national narrative because it's an important thing given by data how it helps the brand now the moment you set a narrative saying 92% of the people in India don't know that dengue mosquitoes bite in the morning which is the TG which is the most vulnerable any guess kids where are kids who have formats no, opens up an entire market opens up an innovation pipeline where we came out with we came out with stickers which could be used by kids in a very non-intrusive manner that's how the business also grows in terms of having research data which is available and that's the power of data so data power is, I mean I can cite thousands of examples it's such a wonderful space absolutely thank you, now we know India knows that dengue mosquitoes bite in the morning so coming to I think the question I asked as much as to the other panelists are there some interesting examples now most of our campaigns are run on the basis of insight but these insights come out of research which is commissioned by either the product team which is doing viability study for a new product category or it comes out of usage and attitude studies done by the branding department I'm not going to talk about that the one that I want to talk about is something which is commissioned by the communications department of one of our group companies max life so that category is life insurance which is one heavily research category because there are 24 competitors there there are a lot of commission research syndicated research etc it's also a very complex purchase decision and so most of the research and the insights that were there were more about demographic wise ownership, geographic ownership etc of insurance but I think insurance purchase is a far more complex decision so the communication department you know commissioned the study or the research across 15 cities, 10,000 respondents led by a communication leader there Abhinav Rahul and they wanted to check does an individual feel safe and why not and of course they layered it with what does he do to make himself more safe and this is way beyond just talking about insurance how they save, how they spend how much do they spend on making themselves feel safe etc and then on the basis of this they drew up a campaign which transcended both the traditional media and the newer media in traditional media of course they did geographical segmentation, went out about the findings of the studies but in the social media marketing space there was micro targeting done on age profiles, psychographics there were different kind of messages sent to millenials different to women because it came out the need for safety and the reason is quite different so to give you an example you know of women's need for safety was always driven from the fact on how safe her husband is and how safe her kids are as against her own safety and even if she's working she doesn't think of herself as a chief bread earner etc so the messaging was around that and similarly different for millenials similarly for working men etc very powerful campaign we could show direct results to business so you know it has been used well despite AV is still prevailing those are very interesting examples thank you for sharing couple of basics for us one long format stories are out of fashion how many times we hear that do some data analytics and you'll understand that it's far more authentic it's used for learning decision makers love to read curated content and therefore as a PR department should be focused more on that some basics everyday stuff that we can relate to second we realized crisis communication is a big charter for us and we realized when we looked at the data and we did some in depth group sessions we realized 50% or more of the kind of crisis situation which was rolling out was actually predictable and was cyclical in nature and therefore we realized why do we need to battle this at a corporate communication level can we empower the organization so what we really rolled out at Tech Mahindra is crisis communication sensitization program for the top leadership it's a good 4-5 hours deep learning program and they see their transformation of skills on camera of course we delete the footage and everything else at the end but it's been, you know people have been awake at the end of the 5 hours and what we are also rolling out is an e-module sensitization right at the induction level for all employees for them to know where is that red flag where is that button what is the escalation when in crisis the 3 steps that you should take and we believe in 18 months or 24 months we'll be able to do away with the retail crisis which comes every year at the same time then we have enough bandwidth to deal with the real ones that is where we are required to fight and you know when I'll just validate that point by giving another example I'm absolutely excited to share this example because this has been the recent you know and it can become a kind of a predictive crisis determination process using data so we were in the last 4 months we were facing a lot of incidents I wouldn't call them crisis crisis are end result but the incidents which were like could escalate themselves to crisis so we were able to do away with the coverage properties vertical where customers were you know because of some non deliveries that's not a normal trend by the way great organization there were some you know due to conditions which are not in our control so 6 or 7 parameters which are constantly coming up in the media as negatives which are detrimental for the overall market brand also we did a very simple thing for the real estate industry and analyze what are the 6 or 7 trends which are negative for the industry on which media writes and which could be detrimental for the industry per se we found there were just 6 key themes and narratives which were popping up with a weighted average of higher than 50% rest of them were chudku putku things which could be ignored but the 6 or 7 key things which were narratives and themes which is taken care of in the design stage itself would never lead to any crisis and now those 6 steps are part of the entire planning and design process so those risks are already embedded and that's happened because of data so I think your point of predictive crisis I want to bring in Mr. Dayal before I go to my next question how much of do you have any live example to share the case study to share how data actually change things on ground and the best practices any of the best practices you would like to share you see I am born and brought up in Delhi which I feel is the roughest city in the world how many of you have travelled on the Delhi metro please can you raise your hands everyone and biggest communication issue we face is crowding people will not allow people to debug before they start boarding I thought that was a Mumbai phenomenon for the local so my next question how many of you allow people to debug before you board are you all good guys then I don't have to communicate but it's a major campaign which we launched on the net we've got a lot of films also and we keep on talking about this also whenever I come on radio live this is my last request always let people debug so it's part of our culture in a lift also you notice you know we have this scarcity we are too many people in India so we all try to board in first we are afraid that you know we'll miss this train the same thing happens here so you give me very insightful data I think I'll have to stop this campaign immediately we are running out of time so I'm back to the moderate so we have only two minutes I want to make my final question and quick like to attend second answers so this seems to be this unshakable faith in data like a godly faith in data but data can also go wrong what happened to Hillary Clinton for example so the belief in data is great we are practicing of data but is there also a fear that data can go wrong what comes to rescue then what is the second line of defense in those cases is that also part of the strategy it's two words experience and gut data goes wrong 90% of prices communication and intuition it's about planning it well data can go wrong but if the process of calling the data is right you can never go wrong because data is data it's not a hypothesis so the unshakable faith is actually right it has to be there going forward it's going to be even more higher it's back to asking that right question and your fallback is right there in you you know I think our goal is one refer always to different sets of data not just go with one I firmly believe always have a plan B C and D in place so if you are prepared for the worst that can happen despite the good data lies true lies and statistics data can be wrong how you read it how you read the nuances how many layers are you being able to read it is what can go terribly wrong thank you so much let's have round of applause for Akal lovely thank you very much