 Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the session, Unlocking Audio Potential. My name is Rita Sahej Paul, and I head up Product and Marketing Science for Zaxis in India. Audio is new. In fact, traditional radio has been one of the oldest and most trusted ways of community. We've made a lot of strides with digital audio, streaming, and so on and so forth. But I still feel that somewhere it's still an underutilized media. Zaxis very recently released a playbook where we're looking at audio, and some of the facts that came out from that was, you know, the advertisers are actually spending less, you know, budgets out of their media spends on audio. I think 70% of the advertisers who actually participated in the survey reported that they spent less than 10% of their media budget on audio. 50% of the publishers actually spent less than, you know, they got zero revenue from audio. So I feel like there's definitely a huge potential for us as an industry to grow from an advertising perspective. The playbook also covers things like, you know, the barriers to adoption as well as the benefits around programmatic audio as well. I wanted to actually delve a little bit deeper on this topic. So today I'm joined with a panel of experts from the industry who will be sharing their views on audio advertising, why it matters, and what branch should actually be thinking about in planning around audio. So without further ado, I'm just going to take you into this quick one. Virginia Sharma, Vice President, Brand Solutions at Gino Savil. Hi, Vishal Kamat, Director, Digital South Asia at Milsim, and Ravi Sharma, VP Revenue Head at Ghana. Unfortunately, could not join us today. I'll take him and, you know, great to have all of you here today. Vishal, I'm going to start with you. You know, we know Nilsim conducts a lot of panel based, you know, research to understand consumer behavior. Could you maybe help us understand what do you see from consumer lens when it comes to audio as a part of it? And maybe also talk about, you know, where does audio play a part in the marketing funnel for a brand? Sure. So Rita, let me start by saying that these are interesting times for all of us. And we have experienced in a way what I call as the demonetization moment for the entire digital media in India. In fact, if you look at, you know, what happened between, let's say, March to June, which was the pre, you know, the lockdown period per se, we have, for obvious reasons, seen a lot of eyeballs of consumers shift from traditional media to digital media. And this has obviously led to a spike in engagement and time spent across most of the categories that you can think of. In fact, we as Nilsim have been monitoring digital media very closely and more so, I would say, behavior of users of smartphones. So I'll just quickly highlight some of the, you know, data points and insights which we have observed on our panel. And to start with, you know, if I look at the month of March pre lockdown, what we saw is that the average time spent by a user on his smartphone per day was about three hours and 22 minutes. This actually increased by 32 minutes to reach three hours and 54 minutes by end of April. So as you can imagine, in a very short span of time, there was a huge expansion when it comes to time spent on digital. This was obviously led by, you know, most of the digital categories, but there are certain categories which, you know, obviously shine the likes of education, which have, you know, apps which are certainly emerged, gaming apps, for example, video conferencing apps, what we are using today, unlike doing, you know, offline conferences, they have all found new level of relevance and hence the reach and time spent for these categories have definitely increased. Now when I look at audio as a category and instead of looking at, let's say, last four months, I would go back to 2015 and see how the journey has been till date. So back in 2015, you know, what I recall is from our own same smartphone panel, we used to see a reach of audio streaming as a category of about 15% back then. Last year, beginning of last year, we saw that this reach had increased to 38%. So just in about four years, the reach of this category increased by more than 2x. And as per our latest data coming from the same panel, we see that the reach stands at 49%. So as you can imagine, in a span of just five years, the reach of audio streaming apps and platform and category has expanded by, you know, more than 3x. So that's one. The other interesting bit, which we also observe when it comes to audio category is back in 2015, when we look at audio streamers within a month for the number of days that they used to listen to music. If I was to compare that with today, we have already seen a 2x growth. The bottom line is in the last five years, not only has the reach of this category expanded by 3x, the engagement and frequency of usage of different audio streaming apps has actually also increased. The other interesting bit again, which comes from our panelists, typically when we looked at audio usage during a day pre-lockdown, we see a peak early in the morning. So somewhere between 7 a.m. to 10 a.m., what we call as the transit time or commute time is when a lot of content consumption on audio streaming apps used to happen. Right now, when we look at it, where we are still in the unlock phase, that peak has in a way disappeared. And what we see is a fairly consistent usage of audio throughout the day. Advertiser perspective, I would say that earlier, if I was to, you know, as an advertiser think of planning my spends around a particular time band during the day, now I believe there are enough and more opportunities throughout the day of a consumer where I can now reach out to my relevant eG through different platforms, which are available. The last data point I would call out is, again, it's an interesting one. Beginning of 2019, what we saw is that, you know, amongst audio streamers, about 80% of users were accessing only one streaming app back then. From then till now, I would say there is a huge behavioral change that we have seen amongst consumers, where as per our latest data, right now on our smartphone panel, only 31% of users are actually accessing only one app within a month. We believe there are three reasons for this huge behavioral change that we have seen. The first is, obviously, there have been a lot of new audio platforms which have got launched in the market. Some of them are being aggressive. So what it means is consumers are today also flirting and trying out some of the audio apps to see what is this one giving versus that one. Hence, maybe using more apps. The second thing that we are seeing is most of the audio platforms are also pushing curated playlist with their users. And then, you know, from a user perspective, I would have my preferences. So maybe for a Bollywood curated playlist, I may prefer platform one versus, let's say, Hollywood. I may prefer platform two versus, let's say, you know, for workout a playlist, I may prefer three. But the biggest reason what we believe, you know, why we have seen this behavioral change could be podcast because when you look at audio and when you look at music streaming or radio, for that matter, the content on most of the platforms are fairly similar. Unlike that, when you look at podcast, it is very unique. And hence, from an individual perspective, I may have my own taste and preferences in terms of what kind of podcasts I may want to listen to and these content and this kind of content could be available on multiple platforms. That's why we believe that users today have also started using more than one, you know, audio streaming app. Some of the top lines and learning symptoms of, you know, what we as Nielsen have been observing in the industry thus far. Interesting. Thank you. Thank you, Vishal, for that very extensive sort of understanding about the consumers and their preferences, how they've evolved from, you know, 10, 5, 10 years ago to what it is now. And as you rightly pointed, yes, of course, there is now a lot more variety of streaming apps, you know, for audio that are available as well. Rami, it's been a decade of Ghana streaming app that, you know, it's been launched and yourself have been part of the audio industry for such a long time. Would love to actually hear your perspective of how you see the audio, you know, landscape that has evolved, you know, from an app perspective, from a publishing perspective, you know, how that has changed on your platform. Thanks, thanks, Rita. And I kind of concur with Vishal. And actually, I've seen this, you know, evolution in the last four to five years, how audio, you know, has seen some tremendous growth. And it's largely driven by obviously, you know, this whole internet and smartphone revolution that's happened, changing consumer behaviors or, you know, the way we consume media and audio content is changing and evolving as we go along. You know, there's an increasing demand for more personalized content and me time where we see, you know, a lot of consumption happening. Plus also, one of the factors that's really changed is this whole massive, you know, depth of content that's available. You know, just think about it. I mean, a few years back, a few decades back, you know, when you look at audio technology, possibly our parents and grandparents, you know, it's used to heal vinyl records. It migrated to cassettes, to CDs, to MP3 players and iPods. And now suddenly at the touch of a button, you have access to millions of pieces of content, whether it is music or now with podcasts and, you know, long form audio content as well. So I think technology has played a massive role, you know, in this adoption as well. I would, I mean, our estimates, I would beg this whole genre or the kind of users that are currently upwards of about 350 million across all platforms. And we have largely A-Bot platforms and a few S-Bot as well. Our estimates actually, in the next three to four years, we are seeing this number grow to maybe 500 to 600 million users, you know, across audio streaming platforms. So that's like a massive, you know, growth in reach and consumption and the reach and the growth is happening. I mean, obviously in urban metros is saturated, but we're seeing tremendous growth happening in tier three, tier four, with this larger adoption happening. That's one point, the sheer reach. The other part is what Vishal also mentioned is usage time. And what's encouraging for us is I think Indian consumers really love their music. Our average consumption time in India is higher than the global average. And that's a very interesting and encouraging sign. That means audio not only reaches out to the large swaths of audiences, but it also engages them for a longer duration. And I feel for brands, what it means essentially is, you know, really getting access to a listener's time and attention, you know, when they're engaged with a piece of content in a native brand safe environment. You know, and that's, that's, it's a fantastic to see, you know, this adoption happening over the years. And even from brands perspective, I've seen a few years back, you know, brands will talk about audio as an experimental kind of, you know, media spends and now we see more and more brands coming to our platforms, which is again a healthy sign. Interesting, yeah. What are the thoughts for the experimental piece? Because that's very interesting. We'll come back to that. Virginia, I think you guys have just released the festival predictions. Maybe yesterday or something, so hot off the press. Could you maybe just talk a little bit about that? And also, especially, you know, with the current prices that we are in, I want to see, like, you know, what are the kind of changes in the consumption patterns and maybe the nature of the content that has been consumed as well. Also alluded to the fact by, you know, Vishal, like you mentioned that, you know, we're able to create curated content on different platforms. So have you also seen certain changes that have happened on your platform specifically? Yeah, I think there have been. And interestingly, you know, Vishal and Ravi played a really strong sort of what is, are the broader macro trends and overall you're seeing they're all in the positive direction. But it's very interesting this year. We sort of dipstick checked, obviously we check every day, we're a digital platform, but we took out a COVID playbook and then we just took out the festive playbook yesterday. So a couple of things in the COVID playbook that I would say had persisted because it's become the new normal is, you know, Vishal alluded to podcasts, right? So one of the big things that we seeing as persistent growth is, you know, the pandemic really did increase. It was about 18 percent. We saw that in the early days of the pandemic. And that sort of persisted in terms of growth as people have sort of become more comfortable with this idea of being screen free and listening to content while they're doing other things. So this idea that your life can't live and revolve around video, right? You have other things to get done. Otherwise, your family is going to give you grief that you're not cooking, cleaning and doing the other thing you have to actually keep life going as you're consuming content. Now, the one thing that from a content genre perspective, right? When you look at playlists, we saw kids content increase one hundred and fifty five percent during the pandemic. And when you look now, there's a lot more content that's been curated stories and podcasts and things like that. There are people are really paying attention to kids content as a genre, right? So Nani Kikahania and this and that, you can see, I got a message from a dad over the weekend to say, thank God for that, because while I'm working, I can keep my kids kind of occupied with these things where I don't have them stuck to a screen. We also have been cooking and working out and cleaning playlists. And that's persisted. The one change that happened from covid is during covid, while spiritual went up like 18 percent and dance music went down about, I think it was about 21 percent, spiritual went up 16 percent and dance and E.D.M. went down, you know, 21 percent. When we married that with the early signals of Navrat, of what we saw with Ganesha Chathur the just last month is that we saw 69 percent increase in Marathi streams during the beginning of festive, right? And these are the dance numbers. So people are actually moving the party indoors. So what we're predicting in, you know, last year when we typically see a surge during festive of certain types of genres. So we actually think that the dip that happened in in dance music while maybe E.D.M. may not be coming back sort of vernacular festival sort of dance music, a wedding mixes is going to go back up. So, you know, what's really interesting just within that genre of vernacular music during festive is that you think that, you know, yeah, Hindi music would go up. Yeah, we, you know, what we saw last year is 12 percent, it goes up. But what we saw is like Assamese went up like 53 percent, right? Gujarati went up 31 percent, Telugu went up 21 percent, Bengali went up 39 percent. So what's very exciting about this time is India loves to celebrate, but it's very unique celebrations around the country. So building on that, what we anticipate is there will be e-gifting of music. We've seen a big increase of birthday anthems being done on social media. You must have seen that if you haven't already gotten a birthday cheer done as an e-gift digital. You'll see a lot more people gifting playlists in their local languages to celebrate, to send to friends and family. So I think vernacular is going to make it big, e-gifting music is going to make it big. The other thing that we're finding is that there's going to be a lot more focus. We looked at sort of also how they're thinking about purchase behavior, right? Usually this is the time people are out and shopping. What we're finding is that, you know, music is a great companion and tends to sort of trigger purchases, right? I mean, you guys know the age-old thing. When a florist played romantic music, the average bouquet size grew, right? When a French wine shop sold French wine, when they played French music, they sold more French wine. So there is a connection between versus when they played Spanish music in this book, it's been more Spanish one. So the idea is, can music that's playing in the background while you're doing online shopping, can it actually, if I hear something, will it influence my basket size, will it put me in the mood? And so we're actually seeing how does that retail experience of in-store music and that ambiance, how does it translate to when you're actually shopping from the safety of your home? And then the last thing that I would say is that, you know, when we look at, you know, GeoSauven listeners, we actually pulled over 2,000 GeoSauven listeners on how do they plan to bring in the festive season? You know, what do you plan to do? And 61% of them said, you know, the most essential element is friends and family. And 61% is the most essential element is music. So these two things seem to be the things that are making people feel safe, comfortable, warm, connected. And so as an industry, I'm very excited to be part of an industry that provides that comfort at a time that people are looking for and enjoy. Right? So I think my advice to marketers is think about how do you integrate your message into vernacular, into shopping experiences, into moods that create better shopping experiences and, you know, think about how are you going to make the connection between friends and family and music? Right, absolutely. You know, I agree with you 100% because, you know, like you mentioned already, right, music creates that nostalgia, right? It brings that safety factor. And every time I need to feel, you know, I need to go back to a certain good time or good memories, it's more or less, you know, often related with music, right? So that's definitely there. That's the comfort factor that we've always grown with and Indians love music, right? And music and food, if they can go together, I think that's perfect. But I think the fact that also that, you know, we as platforms, right, also understand the audiences and their preferences really well. I think that's also quite important because, you know, when we look at a media from a brand's perspective, right, while there's reach, there's time spent, there's engagement. The fact that we're also able to understand the nuances of the preferences, the moods, that kind of, you know, the genre that people are actually engaged in, that also brings that value to the advertiser, to the brand, onto the table as to, you know, where they need to be looking at and how do they need to actually plan for media, right? And I think Ravi mentioned already that, you know, it's a brand safe environment, right? We've got premium licensed content that's coming in. And when we looked at, you know, the paybook, you know, some of the advertisers who opted for audio, right, specifically and also for problematic, that some of the factors that they were looking at, what audio should be giving to them is one, obviously raising awareness, right? That's the brand objective. But they were also looking to reach very specific audiences, right? So that reach, the targeting, the insights that we were able to generate that adds a lot of value. And we know that our platforms are very capable of surfacing these insights, which make planning better for the advertisers, right? So I think that's definitely a great, you know, sort of value and the perspective that you bring in. One other thing that, you know, I always, it is always there on the back of my mind, right? That, you know, while we talk about all the benefits of problematic audio, you know, a similar sort of, you know, parallel can be drawn for video as well, right? You know, is there, and we know India is also a very heavy video market, right? And on the back of, you know, the data and the, you know, the broadcasts that are now made available at a very low cost. Do you, do you see that debate that happens from a brand's perspective? Like, do you, as publishers, do you feel that there is a bit of a competitiveness between audio versus video? Or like, is that one of the factors why audio is probably a bit underutilized? Is that something that you feel that's there? I mean, I don't think it's an audio versus video thing. I mean, smart marketers will use whatever combination of medium that will get the message across and think about all of us as consumers, right? We haven't chosen. If I say, do you prefer to sit in front of the screen or listen to music? Nobody's going to say, oh, I only listen to music or I only watch videos or I only watch, you know, it doesn't work like that. What's interesting, though, is that I think about it more in terms of maturity, right? When, you know, when, if you think about, I'll use the analogy of electric cars, right? Electric cars will become more popular when there is more electric outlets to fuel them. So if you think of that video in the last eight years, six, eight years has enough of an ecosystem building video content, you know, to feed the video ecosystem, right? But like, let me give an example. We know from the trends that I just mentioned that there's a lot more interest in kids content searches. But how many kids programs are really popular on audio? Have we really invested in building the pipes that feed the demand? So as content creators get more active and, you know, all of these platforms, you can actually post your songs, you know, as, you know, emerging artists, independent artists, podcasters, you know, as we make it easier for creators to come onto this platform and generate quality content. Remember, video went through this period that there was very crappy content also, right? And then what's going to happen is there'll be a critical mass of content for more people to come right now. If you have one kids podcast and you have two of these, so let me give you an example. If you want to do for the Diwali, people have these do-it-yourself projects, right? Like decorating your house and putting flowers and stuff. If you type that in into a video platform, do-it-yourself decorations, we get a thousand videos, right? How many do-it-yourself creativity shows are on any of the audio platforms, right? Sharing tips on how to decorate your home for Diwali and make candles from Scotch. Hardly any. So what we have to do is we as an industry have to invest in the ecosystem, the agencies and the creators to give them confidence that, you know, if you aren't scared of creating videos, right? Audio is even simpler than that. But we need to actually encourage people to take the leap. I know so many people that have web series and videos and, you know, they're happy to do all these social videos, but you tell them to do an audio clip and it takes them three days to turn around for the audio clip. So I think we have to encourage people to create the content and then the demand will come. Yeah, yeah, I agree. And I think like with the current crisis that we've seen, right, with the production houses, you know, shutting down. I've seen in other markets and also in our markets, right, it's much easier to churn out a podcast from, you know, your home office versus, you know, getting the entire production team together to get the video content to be created. And I think I agree with you that definitely from a content perspective, it is more that we need to be able to give the tools to the content creators to be able to be comfortable creating the right kind of content that we're looking for. Also from a brand's perspective, right, like when we look at, you know, the activations that we do and we also kind of always profess the similar sort of thought that, you know, it doesn't have to be either or in the media mix. It has to be, you know, something which is holistic enough where we're bringing audio and video together. They need to be treated as media, which is complementary to each other, right? And when we've seen, you know, activations where we've added audio to a media mix, we've seen that there's always a positive incremental uplift, right? Because we know inherently audio as a media is very engaging, right? We know there is a higher attention span. You know, people are more engaged. They're more attentive to audio content. And when we're actually using that as a media to complement other media, there's going to be bound to be an increase in the uplift that we see in, you know, various brand metrics. So absolutely, I feel like, you know, that's kind of where, you know, we need to be educating the industry and the marketers as well to kind of bring them together and embrace them together versus, you know, having to choose between the two. And with the content creation, hopefully, you know, there is enough and more, you know, inventory that's available out there as well. And the other, you know, factors that we've also looked at, right, you know, audio versus video is probably one of the challenges. But then, you know, the other factors that the advertisers have also sort of, you know, voiced out in the paybook that we explored was mainly just coming back to the pure play understanding of audio as a media, right? The awareness, the education, like how do we plan about it, the different formats? Is it display? Can we use display? Can we use audio as well together? Like how does that work? From a planning perspective, from a targeting perspective and also maybe from a measurement perspective, not really having the clarity on the impact that it drives. And that's something that I often hear as a feedback from the marketers to say, you know, what is the impact that audio drives? Can we measure it? Right? So and I feel like we've done enough and more as an industry ecosystem to bring that measurement up to speed. But Vishal, I'd love to hear your thoughts on, you know, how measurement has actually evolved for audio, given that, you know, it was obviously not a native, you know, just like this year, you know, the DSPs and publishers had to evolve to, you know, bring audio as a format into being very measurable. So just, you know, have good luck to hear your thoughts on this. So, so let me start by calling out some of the findings which come out from your report itself and at the cost of reporting, you know, repeating some of them, but they are important ones. What you mentioned earlier, you know, where, you know, about 71 percent of the advertisers and agencies today allocate less than 10 percent of their media spends on audio. And I think that number increases to 89 percent to invest less than 10 percent on programmatic audio. So that's, that's why telling. And in fact, internally when we look at our own data from a scale perspective, these numbers largely collaborate with what you called out in the report. So that's one. The second thing from a measurement perspective, what I at least picked up from your report again is that advertisers feel that lack of campaign measurement and lack of ability to measure impact of audio ads is actually a barrier for decision making, whether to invest more or less on this platform. And the last bit, which I gave something that you spoke about, which is around metrics, you know, the advertisers that you surveyed also said that, you know, there are certain metrics that they believe is critical for evaluating audio ads. Three metrics which, you know, kind of stand out for me from your report. The first one is brand awareness. The second one is audience reach. And third is targeting efficiency. So my message will be, you know, for all the advertisers out there, the good part is, if these are the, you know, critical metrics that you are looking for evaluating audio ads, you know, measurement solutions are available in India to evaluate them. So that's really a good part. To start with what we have seen, at least in the last couple of years is most of the leading audio platforms, you know, Ghana or Geo7, are already integrated with agencies like Nielsen to enable both reach and impact measurement for advertiser clients. And as a result of this openness, apart from other factors, you know, like, Ravi also mentioned about brand safety and all, the fact that, you know, there is an openness that has been demonstrated by some of these audio platforms, what we have seen is when I look at the number of campaigns that we have measured, I would say in the last six months of 2019, and if I was to compare that with the number of campaigns that we have measured in the first six months of 2020, we have already seen a 3x increase, right? So that's, that's, that's quite a, you know, jump that we have at least seen at RM. The second point is, you know, something which, again, Virginia and you spoke about, what we also believe is that audio as a platform, maybe because of a highly personalized usage and, you know, to that, you let's say add programmatic. I think data is possibly getting leveraged well enough to create a good pen portray of what the user looks like. And this is also enabling, you know, better targeting accuracies. So in India, we have a solution called digital aggregatings. It's been in the market for four years, using which we report a lot of metrics to advertisers based on which they take certain trading decisions when it comes to different platforms to invest on two key metrics that they essentially look at more keenly are in target and on target percentage. In target reaches fairly self explanatory when we look at on target percentage, it's nothing but a percentage of impressions within a campaign which are landing on the right TG. Now, in the last four years across some 12,000 campaigns that we have measured in India, what we see is on an average about 70% of the impressions are landing on the right TG. And when I look at all your platforms today, they're already there. So from a reach perspective, on target percentage perspective, you know, if these are the metrics that advertisers are looking at, they can be measured on most of the leading platforms out there and our internal data based on the norms and benchmarks that we have created. We see that, you know, audios are, you know, actually delivering on those numbers. The other bit, you know, I would just add is that, you know, we have been working with a lot of partners in India, you know, with a big ask coming in from advertisers, I don't know what is it that audio gives to me. And that's when we, you know, spoke to a lot of partners and said that, you know, it's important for us to come together and work towards creating certain empirical learnings for the industry so that those empirical learnings can be taken to advertisers, which will enable us to showcase the strength and power of this media. What we have seen couple of top lines, if I may call out this, you know, across multiple campaigns on audio platform for impact measurement or brand studies that we have done two callouts. You know, I have first is when it comes to brand KPIs like, let's say awareness or consideration, there are campaigns where we have seen audio platforms delivered upwards of 25% brand lift. And this is not restricted only to, let's say, established brands. This is a pattern that we have seen even for new age brands, which are getting launched in the market. So that's one. The second thing that we have also seen is that audio ads have been able to capture the consumers' mind space. It could, you know, have to do with the kind of unique creatives which are getting used, it could have to do, let's say innovations as well, which is available on the platform. So when we look at, you know, the numbers essentially we see that over 80% ad record and brand record is what we have seen audio ads actually deliver out there. So be it reach or impact, you know, like I said, there are a lot of campaigns where we have seen audio, you know, being able to successfully deliver on the client's core objectives for the campaign. And those are some of the learnings that I wish to share. Our only guidance would be, you know, audio as a platform itself offers a slew of different ad assets, which advertisers can leverage for both reach as well as their impact objective. So it'd be important for us to leverage on some of the learnings that we have already and continue on the same path to only showcase the power of this media more emphatically to our advertiser friends. Great. Well, I think that's great, Vishal, like all the, you know, the fact that you mentioned, you know, is something that internally and the signals that the fact that publishers are willing to pass back those signals, the DSPs have evolved to read those impressions of the signals that allow us to, you know, do all of this analysis from, you know, beat audience analytics, being doing brand studies or even, you know, where we're at a point where we're able to do, you know, football attributions as well on the back of, you know, the audio impression that's being served, all pointing in the direction that, you know, everybody in the ecosystem really, really is working towards making audio more measurable and we are seeing results of that as you mentioned that, you know, there are, you know, definitely empirical and strong results that brand impact is actually being driven as a format as well. So I think that's very promising and I think exciting for the measurement space from an audio perspective as well. Coming back to the fact that Vishal, that you also mentioned the different creatives, right? That audio offers and I know that, you know, purely I'm a big fan of audio, purely audio format because I feel that it's got it's very, you know, sort of different sort of strengths that it holds. But there are obviously other formats which are available in audio and this particular space is actually buzzing with a lot of innovation as well. So, Rami, maybe if you want to just, you know, talk, you know, purely audio as a format and, you know, how a brand should be thinking as creative storytelling, being a good mechanism to leverage pure audio and maybe also touch base on, you know, some of the creative innovations that are happening in this space. I know you guys are leading a lot of work around voice activation as well. So, yeah, I mean, rightly said, I mean, we have to understand, you know, that typically music consumption is largely driven by our moods, you know, and emotions, you know, and when that's happening, you know, you might, you might be listening to guzzles in the evening or you might be listening to classic rock in the morning. It depends. You might listen to a different music, form of music when you are, let's say, Jimmy. And what we do and platforms like ours are doing us are kind of perfecting that part of marrying the technology with the right, you know, contextual targeting mechanism that we have put in place and offering these services to advertisers. When it comes to creative, you know, we, I mean, and that's a big learning curve that we always tell our brands and agency partners as the look, look at audio streaming as a separate, you know, platform which demands its own unique, you know, native creatives rather than, you know, cutting pasting and existing or a traditional, you know, audio format. So we always encourage our advertisers to design and create very interesting creatives and so much so that I think most of the major platforms offer, you know, creative services to design these ads for brands. We do understand creative agencies haven't noticed, you know, or haven't started doing creatives for audio platforms. So we, you know, GeoSarvan has, we have our own, you know, team of copywriters, script guys in production and we offer these services to advertisers. Coming to new technology. So you know, so you, hey, you have, you have these fantastic cohorts that could be made based on the user's consumption. So choice of artists, choice of the genre, what time of the day they're listening, you can craft very, very different narratives over there. And then you have these technology innovations as well. I mean, we launched something that Dana called Dynamic Ads, which are essentially what I call smart ads, which essentially automatically target users with let's say, predefined triggers, like it could be weather updates, it could be temperature, it could be time of the day, it could be, you know, cricket scores and you could do customized messaging, you know, with these audio ads. So let's say somebody for the same product, somebody sitting in Kanpur might hear a different ad in a different language versus someone sitting in Calcutta. So I think those are variations in dynamic audio. And of course, the something new that we launched a few months back is voice activity ads. And being audio mediums, I think it is, I guess that's one of the most native ad formats that's available. And that kind of, you know, the idea is to solve the whole click through problem with audio, you know, how do you create a click through with just a pure audio ad? And essentially with voice activated ads, a user can actually interact with the continuous dialogue with that particular commercial or an ad and actually go to the landing page or do a user action all by the power of the voice. So imagine that, you know, that technology is available. Now, if you marry that, you know, with the right targeting, you know, brands can really craft, you know, compelling narratives based on users, mood, artist preferences. So I think those are really interesting innovations that are out there. I mostly believe, you know, over the course of time, these will become more mainstream as well. And we have seen a lot of brands started experimenting with such kind of bad units as well. Right. Yeah, I know I agree. I think like voice is definitely the next frontier for consumers to actually engage with IoT devices and brands, both, right, without any screens or any interfaces which are available. So I know Virginia, when we were discussing this, you had a very interesting take on, you know, how should brands be thinking about innovation, right? And I know audience, I think like leading in terms of all the other, you know, creative innovation that are coming in. Would you want to talk a little bit about, you know, how you think that should be thinking about? I feel like there's like two alter egos of me, right? The first part of my career, the marker and the second part where I'm supposed to say everything Ravi said, but I'll say that whatever Ravi said is true. So thank you, Ravi. So I believe in dynamic ads. I believe in innovations. I believe we need to experiment. But I think that when I think about innovation, you know, especially at a time like this, where, you know, marketing really has to prove its value to the business, especially when the businesses are struggling. You know, I think that when you look at a lot of the broader marketing research that's out there, they say you have to protect your existing customers. You know, the communities that you've built and you have to keep them sticky with you. So to me, innovation is anything a platform that can do to strengthen your communities around your brand is innovation, right? Because it's it's around this time. In fact, when we did our research for festive, we noticed that our listeners are as open about 48% are open to new brands, 52% to existing brands. So, you know, users are not very sticky right now because it's almost like the pandemic forced you to look for other options for whatever's available. You know, it's like, oh, if I can get it, I'll just go with there. So even if you've always bought a certain type of shampoo, you might be open. So creating communities around your brands to say, no, I will not buy this. I will go to another store to find my my brand like that and come back. So I think any innovations around communities and like, let me give you an example of an innovation to strengthen a community. We have something called a brand channel and here's a problem statement of a brand that's executing campaign right now, right? Amazon Prime Video and all of us are OTT watchers. I'm presuming all of you guys watch shows and stuff like I do. And you know that you typically hear about from your friends and family, which is the hottest show and you just go to that OTT player. Sometimes you even forget is that show on Hotstar or Netflix or Amazon Prime, right? But you know what the show name is and you have to go find that show. Now, what's the problem statement? I don't care whether that shows on Netflix and Amazon Prime as long as it's on there. Now that doesn't drive brand stickiness for APV or for Netflix. So how do they use a music like a brand channel to build brand for why Amazon Prime Video gets you, you know, when you're tired at the end of the work, when they understand your mood. So they've created a brand channel around moods, right? That we have a show for every mood. Netflix has done something similar. They're doing this because they're trying to bring stickiness onto their platform. So I think number one is what can brands do for innovation at both stickiness? The second thing that we need to do from an innovation perspective is a give to get, give and get with brands. When brands say I have to show more impact for my innovations or my show more performance. My ask of them is, are you willing to draw, you know, a conversion tracking pixel on your website? Right, so it has to go both ways, right? Like you want a higher performing campaign. I can give you data, you know, Vishal can, Nielsen can give you data. In fact, one of the great data points that Nielsen's given us is like, we have a 96% average audio ad completion rate. That comes from Nielsen. So Nielsen can do their bit, we can do our bit. But until we draw pixels or if you use programmatic, you can get even more insights. The innovations in measurement to me is about the brand allowing us platforms, Nielsen and programmatic platforms, DSPs to connect our data with their first-party data. I think the magic and the innovation is imagine how powerful that cohort is if we can validate the cohorts we have in the DSP with first-party data and imagine we could do lookalike targeting. We could do, you know, custom cohorts. We could do account-based targeting. You know, if you just want everybody from the same set of accounts, you want old family-owned businesses. So I just feel like the innovation has to also be a partnership, right? I can do bells and whistles and do a dance and you like my ad format, but I would say let's innovate together is the thing. And don't do innovations for an award. Do innovations and you wanna look good at the board. Yeah, no, agree absolutely. And I think to your point that, you know, currently user stickiness is more around content and from a marketer perspective as well, what we need to be thinking is, you know, how can programmatic help us reach the audience irrespective of the platform they are out in, right? So that is the whole premise of anyways, bringing programmatic and the targeting efficiencies that we're able to bring it. And to your point, yes, innovation and measurement if it can, you know, bring in the entire heartache world, you know, bringing in the, you know, the data sets that help us actually prove the value and the ROI on the investment which is happening on a media that is absolutely brilliant because that does kind of create that, you know, effectiveness and for a particular brand, right? Versus just like you mentioned, creative formats, but I would still argue the creative formats have a point in, you know, and a place in the way of also solving some of the challenges, right? So for example, as Ravi mentioned, from a click perspective, right? We know voice activated ads are gonna be purely intentional, right? The technologies evolve to a point where we can get rid of any, you know, fraudulent clicks and so on and so forth. So in a way, technology is also helping us solve for some of those issues and challenges that we've seen have potentially been existing in the format of a particular media. But I agree with you that, you know, we definitely need to bring that sort of a paradigm shift essentially, right? Within the industry that, you know, we don't necessarily need to look up to audio for being just an innovation driver, just for award winnings, but also kind of making sure that the measurement is robust enough that it becomes part of our always on strategy as part of a media plan, right? So I think that is where, you know, all of us need to work together in partnership, in conjunction with the brands, with the entire tech, the ecosystem, measurement ecosystem too, so that we're actually working that journey. And I think, Jini, as you mentioned, it's almost like starting from the beginning, right? Like we need to make sure that everybody really understands what is it, you know, what is it about audio, right? How do you plan on audio? What is the reach? What's the targeting capabilities? What's the measurement? What we can and cannot do within the constraints of, you know, the ecosystem, within the constraints of, you know, how many pixels we can actually apply and, you know, what sorts of targeting, what sorts of data we can overlay, and what sorts of measurements that we want to bring in together as well. Before we actually then, you know, start to take them also in those experimental zones, which are really fun to work with, because, you know, it's always fun to kind of being, staying at the edge of the technology to bring something which is new and exciting, but completely agree that we need to kind of work that journey to make it more mainstream. And only then I think we'll probably see that shift that's happening in the industry to bring, you know, audio as part of, you know, this on strategy as well. Yeah, actually, I should qualify. I should have said this earlier, you know, one thing that I want to be careful about, I caught myself using jargon, and I want to apologize for that, because one of the things that we get kind of excited about when we talk about our platforms is we start getting sophisticated. We onboarded a number of new radio clients onto our platformer this summer. This is the first time that they've ever tried digital. Forget digital audio, like any kind of digital. And when I think about the conversations we've had, everything that I just said in the last five minutes, pretend I didn't say it, because digital audio is the innovation. The fact that you have a display unit that runs at the same time as an audio, the fact that you have basic measurement and targeting is innovation for them. And so what we learned is let's not, there's more than enough interest in the market to try digital audio by digital, like very early, like I think we need to do the whole work with traditional outdoors and radio players to help them access digital audio simply by not making it overly complicated. So I've learned more Hindi in the last three months and I haven't in the last six years, because I've also learned how to talk about digital audio and Hindi. That's another thing I learned. Vernacular sales is the new thing I've learned as well. That's actually a great segue, because I wanted to actually, also like final thoughts before we maybe jump into a little bit of the Q&A as well, is what are your thoughts in terms of, what's the outlook? I'm not gonna ask like a five-day outlook because I know that's too far away, but maybe Ravi, what do you think, what are the new trends at the risk of, again talking about innovation and trends, but essentially what are the few things that you think are going to be exciting in the next couple of years for audio? Yeah, sure. I mean, I'm taking you from what Virginia said, while we may talk about innovations at this stage is not important, but the very fact that as audio platforms, we have to rely on a display unit to justify the existence is my biggest problem. And that's where I think the future is when, I mean, all audio platforms can really use the power of voice to drive transactions. I think that's one. But on the lighter note, I think I see a lot more changes in the way the content consumption will change. We have seen the shift from, I mean, a few years back, it was just Bollywood and Hindi, that kind of drove music consumption, but I see the resurgence of more vernacular and original content coming up. A large part of the music artists who are essentially in the indie space, I think platforms like ours give them a massive reach and distribution strength. And I see that changing, I see more consumption. I mean, Bollywood will be there, but overall consumption may be a little less. Indie artists, original music, created by our own artists, I think that I feel is gonna grow up in the coming years, yes. And hopefully advertisers will increase their budgets from 10% to maybe a cent or more. Great, yeah. So localization in the artists love that. Virginia, any insights in terms of how you think contents can evolve vernacular have heard? Yes. So I think if I go off this particular call, the people that take over all digital audio platforms, their last name will be Sharma. They'll be the credentials. So if you wanna monetization for an audio app that room, I think that we have a sample size of two here. So I'm, I think my biggest prediction is that we will actually be able to serve the indie artist community as Ravi said, create those platforms that also give them insights of what people want to consume so that you can actually, like we've created, we launched something called the artist insights dashboard. I think we've always been very focused on listener dashboards, like what are the trends, what's consuming, but a lot of young artists are much more open to adapting their sound, not just based on what they feel like, but looking at the data and say, oh, you know, maybe my track will do well in Bhopal. You know, when we're looking, I was looking at some data last week and say, if you observe what's trending in Bhopal, it usually trends in the rest of the country. And so now young artists can figure out, like before I even spend the time and the effort producing these tracks, can I use data to prove the ROI of the track to a label by saying, I built this track because I believe Telugu rap is really gonna be hot based on early signals. And how fun would it be if the same creativity we've been able to bring into digital agencies of creative and data can be brought into the music artist world, right? Like where they can actually make sounds that actually are informed by insights that we can provide them. So more successful tracks, larger reach, more streams and therefore more monetization opportunities for artists so that they don't have to, like, still live with their parents. So that's my prediction, which is artists are any more successful because we're in the picture now. Right, yeah. So from those two content creators, right? So I think that's the journey definitely wanting to look at. Vishal, any thoughts on how measurements can probably evolve further? Yeah, so, you know, at least from a Nielsen perspective, we believe we are at a cost where cross media measurement in the market becomes critical. And I just talked about a couple of reports that we have reached in the US and tell you why it becomes important for India as well. So in the US, we have a total audience framework using which we measure the total time spent by 18 plus years on both traditional and digital media. What we have seen is, you know, from let's say Q120, 80 into Q120 this year, the total time spent as actually on any kind of media with traditional or digital has actually expanded by 11%. Now interestingly, what our data also shows is that during the same frame, the total time spent on traditional media actually dropped by 10%, right? So what I'm coming from is that the fact that in markets like US, where you have these cross media measurement solutions which are available, it only enables advertisers, agencies, publishers to essentially take data back decision, right? And in India, I believe at this stage we are not there, we don't have the numbers. So, you know, in the near future, at least going into 2021 and beyond, I believe this is a part that Nielsen will definitely look at and enable for the market for decision making. Great, yeah, agreed. I think definitely looking at incremental reach when we look at traditional versus digital media, specifically, I think that will definitely be interesting and the question that we get asked from the brands and marketers as well. So, you know, would love to see how we actually evolve and bring that solutions back to the table for the brands. Yes, I think it's very interesting conversation. I think we can carry on for maybe another hour because there's a lot to sort of cover. But I also wanted to, you know, open the floor for some Q and A. I've seen a few questions which are coming along. So maybe I can pick up your claim. So first of all, I think we've covered this a little bit but maybe if anybody still wants to take a shot at this is why would brands use audio platform when they can get video platforms that are much lower or CPR? I want to take a shot. I love these questions, you know, and the simple, you know, my question is, you know, cheaper is not necessarily better. Something that you get really cheap and that's commoditized, right? Media is commoditized, let's accept those facts. You know, we're only selling impressions and CPMs. Nobody's looking at affinity, quality of audiences, you know, the premiumness of audiences. And yes, audio platforms are maybe, you know, the cost per reach maybe a tad higher but then the affinity to your brand is what matters. I mean, ultimately that's where you are putting your marketing dollars to work for. Just because something is cheap and you want to show a metric of cost per reach does not necessarily mean quality is essentially what I'm saying. But that said, I think over the last few years, you know, with more and more brands experimenting the cost amongst all the audio platforms is actually now fairly come down to what it was two, three years back. So I don't see a massive gap within what's out there in display or what we guys offer. Yeah, I am just to add to that completion rates. You know, audio platforms have 96% completion rates and that's actually from Nielsen, right? Her art platform might be even higher for others. And so when you think about it, when you, if you're running video ads and you're, they're now down to six seconds and even those get skipped, you can actually buy cheap inventory, but if you have to fight to get six seconds attention and audio is giving you 15, 20 seconds of which 96% is completion, there's your ROI right there. And it's because people, when they're in an audio format, don't feel, they're not looking for the skip button. With video, you're actually interrupting their experience, right? And it's, they're very trigger happy to skip that. And so I would say that's probably the biggest reason. Yeah, absolutely. And attention time for consumers. I mean, I was reading a survey that 90% of people are actually looking at their mobile phones while watching television. You know, and that's a fact, look at our lives. You know, where do you get 100% share of voice of a user? I think that's where audio really kicks in and the completion rates are fantastic. Yeah, they're upwards of 90%. Yeah. I would say that reach is only one part of the entire outcome that advertisers are trying to try. Within Nielsen, we say that when advertisers are investing on any media, they need to look at measuring three things. One is reach. Second is resonance and third is reaction. So while you may have a low cost per reach, which a particular publisher is offering to you, that low cost per each may not necessarily translate to high brand awareness or high consideration. It may actually not necessarily lead to high ROI or sales impact. So look at all those three becomes important when it comes to decision making. Right, I agree. Yeah, I think absolutely on point on that. Hopefully that helps, you know, also understand that, you know, like we discussed that it's really not video versus audio and we need to be thinking about a medium mix where audio is complimenting video and it's as Vishal mentioned and as Virginia W mentioned, that it's the quality of the audience that we bring the engagement that we bring, which leads to the higher impact in terms of the brand metrics that we are seeing from a recall, purchasing, type, et cetera, that kind of thing. That's what audio brings to the table as well. And I think there are a couple of questions which are euding to, you know, a similar sort of a thought. Let me pick up this one, which is slightly more different. Industries moving towards performance where brands are looking for conversions, product sales, et cetera. How can audio platform help marketers here? Anybody wants to take a talk? Let me start and others can chip in. Yes, so I mean, look, we do understand, you know, that there is a performance side, you know, to your bias. And up till now, I think most of the audio platforms are very strong in their top of the funnel, you know, metrics, but this problem is something that, you know, Virginia also mentioned, we are also trying to solve, you know, as in when we're launching more and more effective, more engaged units, we are trying to create that whole attribution model wherein audio platforms do, you know, help in creating a positive business outcome, you know, for a brand. But one thing one has to understand, consumption of audio usually is in a screen dark environment. You know, so brands that come back, that we want leads and we want calls, that doesn't work. You know, imagine before this COVID situation, most of your audio consumption would happen when you were commuting, you're driving, you know, you're doing something else. And that part of time, I don't suppose, you know, you would want to step out of your treadmill and open a landing page and fill a long form. So, you know, there are certain really positive ways of how the medium works. The others is something that we are working on with new technology, building new engagements, you know, and at our end, what we're also trying to do is change that shift of consumption on our platform from a screen dark to a screen on environment. And so there are lots of features like videos, there's vertical videos, and now there's a new feature called Hot Shards, which is 15 second video features. So brand, people are spending more time on the screen. So I think that's something that in the next few, you know, in the future will help in building more engagement and more performance driven advertising solutions. Great. Yeah, I just, just to add to that on performance, you know, I mentioned this earlier, drop the pixel on your website or run it through programmatic. And essentially those two things will bring you a lot closer to be able to track performance and also optimize because as you learn more about your website traffic, we'll also be able to tell you, you know, 60% of the people coming to your website tend to have hip hop as a genre, but your anthem is ARMA, right? So like those are the kinds of insights that performance doesn't only come from that, but how you spend your creative dollars and how you build your strategy. I also think that, you know, any of the main pixels that you drop, whether it be the retargeting one, all of these things can drive performance. The one thing that I will suggest to brands on performance that are facing the pressures of performance is if your call to actions include a compelling discount or compelling reason to buy, audio allows you to actually build that into the audio creative. Unlike, for example, with digital where you actually have to read something, here when you say, you know, click on, you know, type in this coupon code, we actually see, believe it or not, audio coupons really work, people remember it, right? Seven, 10, things like that. All right, yep, great. And I think we are on time now. I see a lot of questions, which are there still on the chat. And maybe we can try and answer them back separately. So I think that should be okay. I'd like to conclude the session then today. Thank you all for joining, just a quick summary from my side, just key takeaways, right? So what is definitely growing we know, able to build effective reach, you know, we know audios on when screens are off, the impressions are highly measurable, and we know there's enough and more brand responsiveness, you know, add effectiveness from the audio formats that we're able to bring to the table, and it's a brand safe environment. So hopefully that's given, you know, you guys enough food for thought in terms of bringing and unlocking the potential for audio for your brands. Thanks a lot, Vishal, Virginia, and Robin for joining me here today. Thanks for you for hosting us as well. Thank you all. Thank you all for your time. Thank you. Thank you. Take care. Bye-bye.