 All right, so let's quickly invite our panelists on stage. But first up, I'm going to invite our session chair. We have with us the chief marketing officer of Pepper Fry, Mr. Kashyap Vada Palli. Can we have a round of cheer for Mr. Kashyap, who's a seasoned speaker himself? And it's wonderful to have you here once again, sir. Thank you for joining us. Well, joining him, once again, I'm going to be inviting Siddharth Pal, who's the brand marketing head with Under Armour India. We're going to have Siddharth back on stage. I'd also like to invite Elzabeth Venkat Rahman, who's the senior EVP with Kotak Mahindra Bank. And may I also invite Mr. Mayank Shah, who's a senior category head with Palli Products Private Limited. May I please invite Ashish Lingamnaini, who's the AVP marketing with Swiggy. Mr. Zubind Dabash, chief operating officer, digital with Shamaro Entertainment Limited. And Siddhi Sanyal, business head, motion content group, India. So let's, I think we've kind of just crunched all the name tags here, but let's just have all our speakers also take your seats. And while they do so, we've got an esteemed line up of speakers here, ladies and gentlemen. Let's welcome them with a huge round of applause. And I said, huge, come on. We just had a rock solid presentation, a rock solid applause over there. And with that, Kashyap, over to you. So we've seen a couple of sessions, actually three sessions already talking about content. Some of the questions that were raised, you know, when Anurag was speaking and when Pam was speaking, some of the questions that came up was, yes, we do a lot of content, but what happens to the ROI? Okay, how do you measure it? What kind of goals do you set? I think those are practical questions that all marketers and even content creators and advertising folks, et cetera, all of them are grappling with it, because I think everybody agrees that content is important. How does it finally come back in terms of driving business results is, I think, kind of the holy grail, okay? And there are a bunch of speakers here from very different industries, and they must be having different experiences, how they thought about this. And I think we can hear all of their experiences and kind of take away some of the answers to the questions that keep popping up. So, obviously, there's a fairly clear definition of what is content marketing as different from other forms of marketing. We've seen a bunch of examples just now, but just to set kind of everybody on the same page. I think the key differentiator is that in content marketing, the information or the story is the hero. Okay, so in all traditional forms of marketing, whether it is digital performance or brand or TV or radio or outdoor, of course content can go on any of these channels, but in the traditional formats, your brand is very important, your message is very important, there's a very strong call to action, and it's been around for 1,500 years. There are frameworks that are in place. You know the process that you need to go through to launch a performance campaign or a television campaign. You know the format, you know whether it's a 15-second ad or a 30-second ad. You know how to measure the results that are coming out of it, whether it is direct performance in terms of traffic or footfall or business growth or market share gains, or you know even if you're doing something that's not so easily trackable like television or outdoor, you link it back to your brand metrics and brand metrics get linked back to market share and you know potentially again business again. So there are a lot of well-established practices, there is a lot of well-established frameworks when it comes to all the traditional marketing efforts that all of us are used to doing. But when it comes to content, I think those are still question marks, okay. And you know I hear different types of currencies. I say people say you know we got impressions, people say we got click-throughs. You know I don't very frequently listen to people saying you know my market share went up by 5% when I did this you know a piece of content marketing. And I think that's something that you know hopefully some kind of light will be you know will be thrown on that kind of a mindset through as we go through this panel. So you know without much more introduction let me first start with Sudheep and ask him to share his views on this. Yeah, hi, hello to all of you and hello to all of you. So I probably represent the side of the table that is across the table from all of you. I come from the whole WBP ecosystem. When we look at content, we essentially what we believe in is partnerships where we try and partner with not just content creators but also we try and control the destination that it goes on. There are different metrics for everything. When we look at for example when we partner something on a project that goes on social media, obviously the engagement comes into play. When we partner something on mass media and then we see what are the kind of brands that can come in. It's not just about being visible on the content piece that's there. It's also about the talkability that can come in. For me for example whenever we partner a project or a content creator destination, the proof of the pudding is when a person calls us and says that hey we should have partnered on this objective. Simply because of the kind of chatter that it brings up and also the kind of shoulder content itself that can be taken out from there because is controlling the destination where it's landed. B is what is the content that you can generate through that partnership which can be used on different platforms. And I thought the whole example of Michael Phelps was an amazing example of something like that. You create content not necessarily around a whole specific objective which was let's say Olympics but it's about the whole persona and how do you draw on the content that's taken from there and amplify the same model across different media. To me that's a key aspect of partnering on any content. So talkability, how do you take that content? How do you amplify it? It's a 10 into 10 into 10 formula. You do it with 10 people. Can you spread the word to 10 more and then build a chain reaction from there? And there is no perfect formula. It's as long as people talk about it, I think that's where content builds. As far as content goes, everything that we talked about and that we heard about in the earlier sessions right from probably a tweet going out to probably a meme, to maybe a blog or whatever, we use all of them. We have 50 odd brands and depending on the objective. So what becomes more important for us is what sort of thing do you want to use? What sort of a content do you want to use to push your brand? So that is decided by the objective that we have. So typically the way we work is normally, and that's something, the way we work with traditional communication, where we say as a part of your funnel, marketing funnel or sales funnel, what is the objective of the brand? Once you have the objective of the brand clear and agreed upon is when you look at options as to what you need to do. So if it's something like a new brand where you're looking at generating awareness, the kind of things that you do is very different from probably a brand, which is Dev, which is a heritage one, where you're looking at some kind of bonding or advocacy depending on what funnel are you looking at, whether a marketing funnel or a sales funnel. Depending on that, we decide on what content are you looking at or what kind of content do you need to get into. So as far as if you ask me, and we talked about even earlier sessions, I mean we heard that, basically when you talk about, or if you're clear about what you want to do or what your objectives are, quite a few things they fall in place, right from whether that content is effective, having the right matrix in terms of ROI, what you should ideally be measuring because quite often we've seen that you might do a great digital campaign, but at the end of it, and as you rightly put, people talk about increased market share and stuff like that, that can be marketing objective definitely, but that needs to be further narrowed down and you need to arrive at a communication objective, where you decide how do you meet your marketing objective using the communication objective, your communication objective is nothing but something that's being derived from the marketing objective to meet the marketing objective you need to. So once you decide on your communication objective, what you want to do, quite a few things fall in place, right from what kind of matrix do you want to use or should be used to measure the efficacy or effectiveness to the kind of ROI models that you need to build on. So for us, when we talk about content, as I said, I mean, pretty much everything right from a tweet to a meme to maybe even a, why just 30 seconds, I think five minute of film, also on digital, is a content. That's one thing. Secondly, what we also normally do, especially when we talk about, and we've quite a few heritage brands, legacy brands, where- If I may just interrupt, can you take a specific example on something that works? So, if I talk about my flagship brand, Parle G, it's a heritage brand, it's a legacy brand. And I think objectives are beyond sales, honestly speaking. So sales, of course, I mean, is something that you look at, but beyond, I mean, you're talking about bonding, you're talking about advocacy, and that's what we saw recently also. I mean, you talk about the brand and the kind of responses that you get for consumers. I mean, that's one brand, which I time and again say, is something that we don't own. It's owned by consumers. It has transcended that boundaries of we really owning it and has now really been owned by consumers. So for a brand like that, it would be really difficult for us to, I mean, talk about something that, so normally what we do is, when we talk about content for a brand like Parle G, it's more to create bonding, further the bonding, have advocacy for the brand. We did some really good campaigns and last about one and a half, two years, they all two and a half, three minute content pieces. What we normally do when we do that is, we don't go out and brief somebody. That's another thing that I would like to probably bring to the table that, more often than not, what we have seen is, typically brand owners call agencies and tell them, okay, here is the brand, this is my brief, can you create, curate or whatever, generate some content for me. I think the approach has to be a little different. If you really, and now advertising as we all know is, really dying on digital medium, people are not really interested in what you want to say. They're more interested as we also saw in the other presentations, what is in it for me. In a scenario like that, unless and until you're not giving them interesting content, and that's what we also saw in his presentation where we talked about early days of digital, when there was no such push, but still people consumed it, they in fact went out and checked out what is happening on old spice. So if the content is interesting, people will or consumers will flock to it, they will check out. So we did some really good work in terms of content. We had some two and a half, three minute, I wouldn't say ads, they were more like content in which the brands were viewed in. So the brief typically that goes out from us is, okay, if you have some great content, share it with us. Let us see if we can, or if we have the potential of weaving in our brand, is there a synergy between what we want to say or what we want to highlight, any of our brand attributes and what you are trying to probably say. And then we try and marry it, rather than we going out and telling here is a brand, this is my objective, can you generate or cure it, some great content for it. How did you measure the outcome? The outcome, I mean, so while you know the medium is new, the outcome typically, as I said, if you're clear about your objective, if you're talking about bonding, then you know, you'll typically measure it. The measurement matrix, they still remain traditional and same, so I mean, you have your brand tracks through which you measure it, you measure your bonding scores through your brand dynamics, map permits or Milord Browns. So brand tracks are typically the best way of measuring if you're talking about emotional bonding and stuff like that. Even if you're talking about awareness and stuff like that, they give you an indication of that. But beyond that, there are other digital ways also to measure those kind of matrix. But when you talk about bonding and other things, I think something like a brand dynamics or a brand track works, a traditional thing works best. Got it. Ashish? Sure, actually after hearing a lot of the conversation, I think there's honestly between what content is and what advertising is, there's a really fine line and I myself was starting to wonder, where does that line really, where do you really draw that line, right? And I think the way I think about it is that advertising is that pesky annoying stuff in between content. So what you really want to watch as a consumer is the content and what you get in between, even if it's an amazing ad, it's still an ad. So that's how I like to think about it. In terms of what I have kind of like done over the past few years, I'll just talk about one specific example within that. So about four years back, I was working at Ola and we were kind of thinking about how do we again, drive specific business objectives and marketing objectives and which is when we said that, okay, let's go down the content route, where create content that consumers really want to watch and we realized that we didn't think that we could do it. So we instead partnered with TVF and the entire process eventually turned into what was the second season of Permanent Roommates 2 and versus a product placement route which is still actually advertising in the middle of content. Here, the brand essentially became a part of the entire story where there's a character who's an Ola driver and his entire journey becomes a journey that the consumer goes through, right? So that is just again a nugget in terms of how to kind of like think about what is content, what is advertising. The important part is, and the reason we're here is to kind of talk about measurement as well, right? And I don't think honestly it's easy as in when you think about the overall consumer outreach that any large brand has, content essentially is always, as in unless you're a very, very content oriented B2B platform or a SaaS product which is talking to a very specific audience. As a large consumer brand, more often than not, you'll have a lot happening in the market and a lot of touch points. So it becomes fairly hard to measure content from an output metrics point, few at least in my experience, whether that's a brand track, whether that's market share, et cetera. So we often end up relying on, for instance, we're a digital platform. So for us, we even get stuff like how does traffic move? But if you're a large brand that often becomes much harder when there's a lot of other ways in which consumers essentially discover about your product. So I work with Swiggy now, so we've got our delivery guys roaming around the streets like pretty much day in and day out. So how do you really like isolate and attribute increases in any of these output metrics is hard. So we use a combination of firstly being much more scientific about the input metrics, which is how do you look at your digital parameters itself, whether that's engagement, whether that's reach, how do you kind of like use different, calibrate differently depending on type of content? Is it shareable content? Is it likable content and try and arrive at the right parameter for that? We found share to view as an interesting ratio to kind of like look at what does share, what's the shareability index on a piece of content looking like? And then we try and see if it's a significantly large investment, is there actually business metrics movement as well? So that's our journey so far, but I think there's a lot more to learn and look forward to what the rest of the panelists have to say. Okay. You know, I was, for very selfish reasons, I was hoping that, you know, I was hoping to listen to somebody say that we did this content program and it did this to our sales or market share or something like that. And so far I'm hearing words which are, which are, you know, partnerships, chatter, talkability, shareability, bonding, you know, reach and all of that stuff, which is great. I think stuff like that, it's all great, but when you actually, you know, when it comes down to choosing between, you know, where will you put your money? I mean, and I think that's the, that's one of the things that I struggle with all the time is you have a certain number of dollars, do you go in for, you know, performance marketing? Has it scaled? Has it hit kind of a benchmark ROI? So where else do you put your money? Would you rather do television, but television needs threshold spends? Maybe my budget doesn't allow it. So at this time, should I just make one nice video, feel good, you know, integrate my product into it, integrate my message into it, put it out there and talk about impressions and everything. So I'm just hoping that, and maybe it won't be fulfilled, but I'm just hoping that somebody can say that, you know, these are how things changed. So I'll talk about your point and we are a relatively new brand in India. We are five, six months old. What we've, and it's a struggle, right? Where other sports brands have been in the space in the country for 20, 23 years. You come in as a brand who's six months old and, you know, you see a clutter market and the sports market is only that much, right, in terms of revenues. And you gotta find revenues, right? There's a global pressure on us that you need to open that many stores and you need to do that many sales. So for us, very critical was to drive sales because of the fact that we knew that there is a gap in the market and we are already late. So rather than moving on with a lot of brand salience, also reach out to the customers who are gonna buy our product. And what we realize is that content is key to this. We started a training program where we've got in touch with a lot of athletes and influencers, so instead of pushing product to them, they are the ones who are advocating the product. And that's how we are measuring our sales. So a lot has to do with word of mouth, right? For us because you can wear our clothes and actually test it out, right? You see under armor on field, you see people working out. So that's the best measurement of how the product looks like and how the product is. And what we realize that is that in sports and in any category, the advocacy or comes through the influencer, the athlete, the partnership that you go forward with. And what we've seen that whatever partnerships that we've done and there are very few right now, they've actually resulted in a lot of footfalls at our store. Why does it happen is that people wanna try out the product that your next guy is wearing or your next guy is actually talking about. And that has worked wonders if you, and I think content on which platform is being used and by who it is being consumed are two critical factors when you talk about moving a shift in the segment of sports category or any category. And what we realize that if you cut across all the clutter which is advertising, focus on the right type of content with whom you're making and you hit the right audience, people will ask him or her that, okay, if this is under armor, then what does it do to you? And a lot of word of mouth has played into us where we've seen in the past six months that whatever product that we push out within in terms of content and within our key athletes, people actually come to us and ask us about it. And that's the job done from a marketing point of view, right? Then it totally depends on the product itself. And if the product is good, it automatically convert into a sale. And we've got one store right now, right? We've got one store in Delhi. And how do we measure the whole piece on content advertising? We measure it in simply that we take out the market share of the mall itself from sports brands. So if I'm in a mall and there are other four or five sports brands in that mall, what's my market share in that mall? Is it increasing due to my advertising on my content or my efforts to bring out people at the store? That's the measure that we... And no other brand does that, right? Not a brand calculates a market share in a mall. So what we figured out that instead of calculating a market share or the salience or NPS or brand metrics increasing in India or Delhi, rather just go to the point of sale and see where the market share is moving or not. And I think that has resulted in a lot of efforts made into marketing that if there is a shift and there is some kind of trickle-down effect due to marketing. And that has worked wonders for us. So guys, we are from Shimaru and Shimaru has been an age-old company. It's been five decades in existence. We do a lot of work in different areas, of course, owning content itself and distributing it across various platforms, including YouTube, where we do about three billion views a month, Facebook, and the likes. We about a year ago started working on, working with brands and today we work with about 400 brands on creating brand solutions and using our inventory and AFPs. I'm gonna straight jump to the topic and just talk about a case study that we recently did during Ramzan. It was for a brand called Indiagate Basmati Rice and their only brief to us was as short as saying, we want to inculcate the habit of sharing. On that note, I just like to play a video if it's possible. I think if you can play the video, please. This is the entire thing that came out of the entire concept, the brief that came to us and I hope you can see it while we are intruding on the screen. Once it plays, I'll tell you the results after it's done. Can we have the video, please? These streets, they may never come out of my mind. My childhood has passed here. This is not a neighborhood, it's my home. This is where my soul is stuck. People come here from everywhere. They come here to eat, to see this place. When it comes to Ramzan, they all come here to get rid of their hunger. Hunger for taste, hunger for very delicious food. Hunger is hunger, everyone feels it. Even I felt it. When I was small, and I didn't have anyone. When will I get food? When will I eat? Often, I had to sleep on hungry stomachs. Even today, I have come here to get rid of my hunger. I just want to get a good biryani. Because this was a very expensive decision between the fate of Kyaateem and biryani. Today, there is something else in the world. With hunger in the stomach, there is money in the pocket. But today, I won't eat. There are also some friends who will eat with me. I understand the pain of sleeping on hungry stomachs. That's why I always eat biryani. Do they eat full stomachs? Because I eat full hearted. Can you do this too? I have heard that in our country, about 5 lakh children sleep on hungry daily. You share this video. On your every share, India Gate will feed a child biryani. Will 5 lakh children not sing Eid Mubarak? Eid Mubarak. Or Eid Banao Classic. I don't know how these guys pulled it off, but they managed to do it. The results were that within a span of that Ramzan month, there were about 11 million views. There were about 1 lakh shares during that period, and another 3 lakh shares after the period. India Gate went and fed 1 lakh kids across 12 cities biryani. What that actually did, and where the needle actually moved in terms of actual results, was that they suddenly started getting many more distribution orders from many other grocery stores and wholesalers, saying, hey guys, we want to hold your biryani on our stores. That itself suddenly turned the needle towards them. It was that emotional chord that we actually struck, which actually got this entire idea of sharing in this kind of an emotional fashion, and that led to a reason for others to say, we want to also stock India Gate biryani. So that's the only one case study, lots of them, but time is of essence, and that's why I'll leave it back to the panel. I'm going to make that quick, I can see time is running out. So at Kotak Mahindra Bank, my sales team just has a starting point, sells 20 to 30 products. So as a marketing head, it's always, what do I support, and what all can I support? So I do not have the budget to support everybody on ATL. So content marketing is a very chosen strategy for some products, which we want to support and give a space to in our portfolio. That's from the business perspective. For the consumer, we always are very conscious of making sure it is not a very obvious strategy and the brand is at the right balance. And I think that's the trickiest call for a marketer. And let me dive straight into his question, Kashyap's question, because I have a very sharp example on that. We all know we have a 1.2 billion population, and 500 or 600 million of that is women. I'm a diversity champion, so I also look for purpose in business. And I got the perfect opportunity of purpose in business when I realized 280 million, which is 62% of India's population, the female population do not have an independent bank account or are not active users of one. So that's when we found purpose and content marketing was the choice, because at this point, while there was a huge opportunity and a very important aspect of responsible business is to bring more and more people into formal financial services, we had that challenge of saying it's currently a rounding off error. I mean, I need to see proof of concept in the typical stuff. So content marketing was my choice, and over a period of time, we've done various pieces of content. And I think that women say that, all the research told us, women say that please talk to me differently. I'm more into goals and not into products. I need information and education. And we listen to all of that and we realize there is something called gender sensitive banking, which is that you need to talk differently to women. I know it's all about talking the same way, but we found that women wanted to be spoken to differently, and that's what we do with our savings program for women, which is called Silk. And we try to develop content which changes this journey for women. I will give you the results once I show you the video. This is only one piece of video that I will quickly show you. This features Manirathnam's wife, Suhasini Manirathnam, some of you know that. This is also because we have challenges in the Southern market for a brand like Kotak, where it is much stronger in North and in the West. The video, please. Bye, dear. Remember, you have to bring a telescope in class tomorrow. Telescope? I have told everyone, okay? Don't forget. Bye. It's a childhood. Every truth is a lie. The police is more than expected. Deepu? Yes, mom? This life is a telescope. Your fingers are holding the telescope. Don't let sadness come to you. This is how it is, mom. Football trials? Tomorrow, mom. The difficulties that we have overcome together Mom, where am I shoes? There was someone's shadow All the prayers, every happiness shared with us Without saying, dear, this is how it is, mom. The election is over today. But they are asking for too much. You can't leave it. We made our own way We brought people together We hoped for every success We gave everything We gave the birds A fly For the great needs of small happiness A unlimited treasure The love of mom I think this shows the journey of a woman into financial services from she was saving in a box to a locker to finally a bank account and I think that we have to answer this we've seen although we started on a low base we've seen a 50% jump in number of bank accounts and I think our journey to bring more women into financial services continues and I wish all of you would give us great wishes to make sure that all women around you have a bank account. Thank you. The timer shows that we are seven minutes over time and I think the alarm is also rung so unfortunately not too much time to wind this up or kind of conclude but just want to thank all the speakers for sharing their experiences and thoughts. Obviously content marketing is going towards everybody knows its importance I think it's getting it's playing a bigger role in impacting business results and as the day goes by I'm sure we'll see more examples. Thank you everybody. Thank you very much to all of our panelists.