 to everyone who does have a question in mind, we hope that you can meet the gentlemen and the ladies in person and ask them your question later on. Truly sorry for that. We do have a lot of information back today so we will be moving on with that. As you all know and have been told this is the 17th edition of the exchange for media conclave but this year for the first time we are taking the conclave down south. It gives me immense pleasure to announce the exchange for media conclave south scheduled for 1st December in Bengaluru. We have an amazing line of speakers and the theme is making brands purposeful. The event will devote an entire day to engage brands, agencies and technologies so tell your friends, remind yourselves and we hope to see you at the exchange for media conclave south. Before we move ahead to our next session I would like all of us to take a look at our partner AVs again please. Then it juggerne since inception is more than a mere newspaper a newspaper beyond news great editorial content with balanced view of things. Bathbreaking initiatives have been running for years which actually touch people's lives and indeed the society at large a newspaper which engages involves and lives on India's most awarded most red and the most credible newspaper with over 100 national and international awards to its credit. Welcome to a new awakening then it juggerne. I see a little bit of an exodus happening might I remind everyone that we will be continuing with our second session the AV was just that much so if you if you do need a little break please be back soon because we're going to get started with our second session. The topic for this panel discussion is print innovation the road ahead and how digital is complementing print magazines and newspapers are valuable marketing real estate over the years we have seen some truly remarkable and path breaking campaigns done on print how can the print industry ensure that such innovations happen more regularly from the creative perspective how does print continue to attract and retain top quality talent and become future ready please help me welcome on stage the moderator for this discussion who is a part of the impact top 50 most influential women in media and advertising and marketing if I may have on stage miss Anita Nair CEO India and South Asia Havas media joining her on stage are the panelists mr Anand Chakravarti managing partner wave maker Mohit Joshi MD Havas media group India Bobby Pawar managing director chief creative officer publicist worldwide and mr Sandeep Khosla CEO midday if you may have all of you on stage and get the second session started please good afternoon everybody interesting you've been hearing about women women women through the first session and women the world is coming out of everybody's ears proud to be one myself and very happy to moderate all men's session today yeah so without much ado I just want to get on with the session because I'm told that the time is is limited and we would like to cover as much as we can through this firstly Anurag thanks so much for having print innovation as a topic because these days when you go for various events the only thing that is being discussed and rightfully so is digital how is digital impacting what are the screens doing about it is tell what is the impact of digital on television and I don't understand why print is not at the fore because it continues to be one of the mainline mediums in our country today I don't think we can close the rise in spite of the fact that I understand that the spends on prints print are going down but that doesn't mean that the medium is dead you know so so here we are back on discussion on print innovation and to me the dictionary meaning of innovation is something new or different that new can happen it can be a new method it can be a new idea it can be a new product so before we get on to the discussion I just want to ask these gentlemen do they agree with this definition and what to them really is the meaning of innovation so can we start with you Bobby I mean innovation is something that drifts away from the norm gets you to see the same thing a little bit differently right it breaks the shackles of the the status quo and does something that has been done before it's quite simple it may be small it may be big the only thing that's commonly in all of those things it's then it's different I think what Billy on what Bobby is saying I think innovation is a bit like insight it's about seeing what everybody else is seeing but doing something different something different that delights and engages a consumer and anything that does that to my mind is innovation I think innovation is something that brings the mojo back into the brand so you know that's something that the brand misses so it should be something which the consumers connect with love and most importantly it should be something which is meaningful for the consumers so Sandeep you guys come back to to the agencies to say look at this innovation that I have for you so what to you is innovation so I think it's with all other mediums coming up it was very imperative that print keeps on innovating regularly and that's what's happening as we go along perhaps in the session I'll be able to point out some of the innovations which the print media has been doing continuously one of the oldest mediums yet it's been surviving all the onslaughts of other mediums so so if you look at the panel so we have the creator here and we have the planners there and we have the executor there right if you look at it from from that perspective so coming back to the question of creation Bobby you guys get client briefs yeah and that's when you understand what your objective is and how you want to go about creating a campaign conceptualizing a campaign how much of that is the mind space of yours attuned towards print because you will agree that you know when you create anything a campaign for example you know for different mediums the treatment is very different you know what I think it starts not just with what do you want to do with it but it starts with what the objective for the medium is most of the the briefs that come in for print these days pretty banal right the one they offer up there just like quick down and dirty medium that so it's like let's hit them hard straight on the head with an offer or something that sort or if it's real estate tell them hey this this is the place some pity line about the lifestyle and all that and this is how much it costs the whole point is that if you set higher goals for yourself for any medium you'll do much better at it for example you know since it's launched Volkswagen done a lot of commercials but one of the things that is still recall to this date is a print app which is the talking newspaper which is done maybe seven eight years ago right so despite all the great spots I did on this thing that's the one thing that people so if you set goals for yourself for as marketing goals that are different for print you can do achieve great things but just what do you want out of it so it's so interesting to know that you know a blurb on a print ad can pass off as innovation in print really or an offer can pass off as you know most of it I think is that offers and all that is what the medium has come down to right I started life as some 24 years back like as a proper copywriter copywriter started life as a print writer actually starting writing copy on bottle labels and stuff like that and at that time the medium was sexy you know you had a rims body copied now everybody says nobody reads right and the truth lies somewhere between because yeah people don't want to read your ads the thing is can you make them and the great ads always do make people read so you know interestingly I think these days specifically to do with print innovations formats get passed on or confused as innovations you know so three jackets in the times of India or in Jagaran or in midday wow innovation the client did an innovation what was it a jacket on a jacket on a jacket so that's that's what innovation is all about so do you think and for example that you know innovations today are only occasion-led and they are only restricted to formats so I think like we're going back to the discussion of what is innovation I think the fact is that why do we need to innovate do we need to innovate for the sake of innovation so the agency team says we did everything right we tick marked on innovation is it important for the marketing team to say look we did innovation in this campaign I think if we step back why do you need innovation I think would be the first question you need innovation because it's getting tougher to reach out and engage an audience I think when it comes to print innovation or any kind of innovation the reality is this and at the risk of pissing off some of my clients the fact is that when a category when a marketing person is briefing the creative agency you start with the creative brief and you are not even considering the media mix at that point of time let's look at automotive or two wheelers a category print is hugely important to auto and two wheeler because time and time again it has been proven that print ads do drive inquiries you know in the dealer outlet but the reality is that the media agency builds the plan much after the creative work is already started if print is so important for the category then shouldn't the brief start off by saying that I need a very effective print campaign and let the creative agency start thinking of okay here are the five newspapers we're taking what can I do to really capture the attention of audiences and I won't call it innovation I will call it capturing the attention effectively so I think there's a lot to be said about you know jackets is become a norm right if you don't have I mean to my mind if you don't have a great creative you're saying okay just increase the size of the ad so let's take a big size maybe people will notice it and that seems to be the challenge where more and more brands are doing that I think if you approach innovation as a need to engage consumers and make it a co-part of your brief right at the beginning of developing any kind of marketing program I think then it starts becoming more powerful and more meaningful irrespective of the medium whether it's print whether it's TV whether it's out of form so Sandeep do you agree with what Anand is saying because when you guys go back to the agencies or to brands you know and go offer them innovations apart from the fact that innovation is equal to premium in terms of costs apart from that fact the thinking that goes behind the innovation that you offer brands as solutions does that kind of gel with what Anand is saying in terms of you know engagement or in terms of really you know ideating that with for the consumer so so so we do we do and this is a excellent platform thanks to exchange for media and Jagaran you know it gives a product like midday to showcase what innovations have been done to everyone and you know I would last one to miss such an opportunity so so look at the couple of innovations we've done so this is an innovation which let's say nobody else has done where we had a 200 page issue we went and spoke to Shivai which was releasing that point of time and had each and every copy of midday put into this apart from that a specific innovation I would like to show which no other medium can do because as far as sampling is concerned you can only do it in print now this is an activity which we did for HUL recently about a month back they wanted to launch which was aimed at office goers typically they believe that at five o'clock is the time where people feel hungry so rather than go for you know vada power or any junk food why not in your office itself have an odd and they the target to us was around 50,000 odd office goers so they wanted this to be delivered at the desk of 50,000 people and this was only something which a print could do because we're the only ones with our vendors who can actually enter offices as you know most offices today don't allow people to enter so this was an innovation done where we had midday where we had a nor soup we went in to these offices had photographs clicked and this entire sampling exercise was done this was highly appreciated by a client because each 50 each of the 50,000 was relayed back to them now this was a complete ROI which they could calculate they could sample their product and an innovation like this come once you start doing it then it starts lending a lot of weight to the product which you are out to do and it is it gets away from advertising I know what you mean by jacket upon jacket so jacket at one point of time was an innovation once you keep on doing it it becomes a part of a regular so you keep on needy you need to keep on innovating every now and then Jagran does a lot of these there was fragrance which was added to the newspaper a lot of broadsheets do innovations almost on a regular basis so Mohit coming back to again the examples that Sandeep is giving to you what is innovation is what you've explained but how have you you know gone ahead with your clients to to actually find such solutions which really engage with the consumer or bring the brand top of mind whatever objective the brand has set for itself for that particular innovation one thing that I did not mention at that point in time and which is very important when we talk about innovations is that they have to be new you know anything that is new is innovation and if it is happening again then obviously it becomes something that has already happened and it is not an innovation anymore and while you know you were I think Anita you said that innovation today is equal to large cost innovation today on print specifically is also equal to one day impact right that's something that we should change because if if innovation is only going to be that one day impact then we'll not have too many innovations in print because you know the cost will always overbear the the the possibility of having it for a longer period of time so innovations should actually be something which are more sustainable and they need not be they need not be costly and I'll give you a few a couple of examples you know where we as an agency have tried to do these and not not they've not been costly but they have been maintained over a period of time the first time was when Times of India changed this changed its logo for the first time for one of our brands today it's become a become a norm and they are earning a huge revenue out of it but the first time happened for MTS when MTS launched in India the O of Times of India was changed into the MTS logo but that was not just one day affair if it was a one day affair that would not have been sustainable whenever MTS launched in any market in 2009 as it went across markets we did the same thing with Times of India in those specific markets now that's sustainability that's impact as well as sustainability another example which is absolutely low cost but very relevant we have a client called quicker which is talking about you know used cards and you have you were mentioning that auto as a category is absolutely for auto as a category print is absolutely relevant a simple thing we did was we asked our partners to place our quicker car ads just below or above the print the car ad now now that is also in my view an innovation because what it delivered to the client was a larger recall for that particular brand and it was hardly costly so my point is that innovation when we go with innovations to the client most of the time we go with a high cost one day affair on print and that's why they just get a sideline no no we don't have that kind of money let's just go with regular standard formats if we think about something which is more engaging involving and more more sustainable I think we'll do a better job at it just want to add one thing right I think maybe innovations the wrong thing I don't think anybody kind of needs innovation in print right okay but what we need to think about is meaningful innovation right does this any innovation deliver value not to the medium not to the brand and the marketer but to the the reader right if it doesn't move them emotionally or do something for them physically then you shouldn't be doing it at all you're just like sort of pleasuring yourself which might be fun but eventually pointless so any examples of such meaningful print in print innovations that like the talking newspaper we did that and then there's a long time back it was surprising to people I mean you know the police commissioner of Mumbai sent out a warning that this is not a bomb in the newspaper it's like at the same time it caught the attention of people right when apple launched the iPad they this thing repeated the front page of the time magazine on the back page right the exact of that and the same so those things right actually sort of surprised and moved people because they start with people first and not innovation first yeah I think that's interesting because it's always people first because those are the guys you're talking to as a as a medium so that's a point well made also you know the the core of print as a product is really to disseminate news right now if you look at the way news is being consumed today it's being more consumed you know on on the screens in everybody's hands consumption of news on screens is also reading by the way you know so it's just the format that is changed so it's not as though you're not reading you are reading and the format in which you're reading has has really changed and it's there's a big challenge and I find that from a lot of advertisers coming back to say you know what we are we are targeting the millennials and the millennials are only there on on their cell phones they are not there they don't read the newspapers they don't they hardly watch television I mean thanks to to Netflix and Amazon Prime and everything else that is there they just watch everything on on this handset in their hands so so that to my mind is actually a challenge for print as a medium so how do you think today print is really gearing up you know to connect with the audiences which are also essentially a lot of millennials there and also the fact that since the whole ecosystem is changing where again I'm leading print back to digital to say how is digital really complementing print or print complementing digital so Sandeep your point of view on that so so you know I completely disagree with you great I think print is print was there print is here print is there to state but I never said print is dead by the way I'm coming to that I'm saying it is still the most authentic media you would come across for incredibility nobody believes any other medium today fortunately for us television has done enough harm to itself every night you believe that the world is coming to an end you watch any channel the next day morning you open the newspapers 99 percent of the stories are not there so you open any newspaper broadsheet or midday you would find very soothing stories there if you know a small mention by a BJP MP on the Agra temple the television news channel goes buzzer and they will have different sides and it will have a small mention in the newspapers the reading time earlier was 29 minutes around 15-20 years back it is dropped down to 27 10-12 years down the line it might come down to 25 which is I think you know more than enough secondly the moment you talk about handheld devices I think more and more when we have spoken to people millionaires I have two of them at home the moment they get up in the morning the first thing is the social media so they would go on to whatsapp they would go on to twitter they would go on to facebook and not as much unless there is a breaking news which comes in which is very very important let's say in european matches got over and you want to know what the score or some big development has happened that's the only thing which is consumed as of today in india I believe the content is still the most important one which newspapers are able to give and as we move along that would start going into different mediums if you again see as to five years back perhaps in the top 10 newspaper sites that's websites there was hardly any newspaper site so you had first posts and others who were very prevalent because the newspaper didn't have their act together today you will find in the top 10 almost five or six are the newspapers themselves if they've got their act together they have now realized that it's not print first but whatever medium needs to come out so an indian express site is one of the most excellent sites today and if you look at five years back they were nowhere so innovation is again coming within where you're saying my content how am I going to give it in the best possible medium tomorrow if this the same news has to go on kindle but perhaps most newspaper will innovate to that as well so innovation like the topic is the game and most newspaper the the serious players are only geared up the definitive thing here is that they have to ensure that they remain as neutral as they are today most of them so and what do you think about this because you know we have their challenge right you guys as planners have their challenge of how to really get that adaption from print to digital or you know whatever is being consumed as as news or as any content on the digital medium is also available on print but the consumption of that because of the ecosystem is happening more you know on on the screens or on digital as you may say so what what do you how do you try and bridge that gap and manage that situation I think first thing I think it's easy to blame millennials right millennium seems to be the bane of all marketers the easy guys to blame are millennials they are lazy so if you talk to anybody who runs the office they'll say the millennials are the most lazy very difficult to engage them if you talk to a marketer he says impossible to get their attention they are who they are they account for more than 50 percent of the population in this country they will always be a massive and they are a massive audience base the reality is that mediums be it print TV have to adapt to what they need right their attention span is low they need bite size news bites I don't see any newspaper creating content like that you still want long editorial yes we'd love to you know get them to educate themselves but that's not how they are that's not how they were brought up you know and it's most of us adults in the room who actually gave them a mobile phone very early in their life stage so we had to blame to weather and I think we're not seeing enough of that now to my mind there is product innovation possible if you want to target young people through a newspaper as well but I don't think we're seeing enough of that so I think a great example is the Guardian in the UK so the Guardian is now almost a fully crowdfunded newspaper and the reason they're crowdfunded is because their editorial policy is about being non-bias and being true to what's happening in the world and the people who are contributing to the Guardian are not big businesses or rich people the people who are contributing to the Guardian are young readers in the UK and other parts of the world so it is an interesting article and a real revelation that newspaper with obviously a strong online footprint is being run because of contributions from young people around the world so I think it's easy to say that you know millennials are to blame and they don't have an attention span they are moving to digital but I think it's possible for newspapers to keep their attention if they innovate in product so as much as we're talking about innovation and advertising I think innovation and product is extremely essential with your perspective on that I somehow disagree slightly with you you know there is definitely a shift that's happening from the print the published print into the online platforms however the question is not whether print will stay or not I think we we we discuss a very wrong question it's it's whether these brands will stay or not I am a Times of India reader from my early days and I have probably I must be one of the few who have stopped reading the physical newspaper but I read Times of India on the mobile I read Times of India I follow Times of India tweets so if I like the way of you know of the approach of a particular news publication then I am following that brand or that brand is relevant to me and meaningful to me across platforms and that is not good so Times of India is still a very important brand for me it may not be in this form but it is in this form so this is a reality as he was saying millennials are different and we see a lot of this transition happening with them and that's a reality and you said that you know small small bites of news which is why news in shorts is becoming so important because that's where they start consuming so I feel that the publishing as a platform will be relevant because the the format will change and you will continue to have readers in in a new platform which is more relevant to the consumers or the the you know the the people of that particular time you know a couple of things right same here it's been more than five years since I've read the physical newspaper right I subscribe follow a lot and both of them are not millennials by the way far from it okay the other thing is you know what tech 15 years back there was a brand that was born and this born out of technology right and its own existence has been disrupted by movement of technology and how people use it Facebook it started with updates most of them were text move to images and now it's video right so if it can technology can disrupt that it would be kind of not very savvy in thinking that even the published medium won't get disrupted it will right the thing is people are going to want to read it's in our nature because reading gives you something that video doesn't it lets you digest and mull upon information or views at your own pace you can come back to it the other thing it does it is the fastest mean thing to produce you can write it it's out there in whatever in five minutes if it takes five minutes to write it and you can control the size of it so I think it is going to be a mix and match right and anybody who has holy cows should be prepared to slaughter them I might get slaughtered at the end of this session having said that but that's the truth so great just one last question one liners from you guys on the fact that what do you think is the road ahead for print innovation one liners quick ones and I wrap up follow the people man follow the people the rest of it is bullshit I don't yeah so I think the truth is I mean if you don't think about the consumer at the end forget about innovation no advertising will work so unless you create content advertising messaging that is tailor made to like I said delight or engage your audience it's not innovation keep you know keep being relevant and keep innovating across formats so new and newer formats are going to come tomorrow there might be a google which has all the information so times of India should have the news streaming in over there as well for me I think print is one of the only medium where you can do different innovations which no other medium can do like I said you can clearly do as many touch points as possible area wise geographical if you want something to be sampled in a particular locality with certain kind of people newspaper the only one we can do it when you say that these are very expensive then you're obviously looking at only a particular kind of innovation which is large format glaze and not really getting into what more can be done this is a clear example where you can do more at not very very cost effective as long as you keep on doing that I think great sales call there for print sundee yeah so let me quickly wrap this up to say that yeah we all understand whether it is print innovation or any innovation really it has to be something new there has to be an objective there has to be it has to be engaging there has to be an ROI attached to it also innovation only happens once the second time it is it it is no longer an innovation it's a repeat yeah so an innovation is new only when it has that new factor in creativity is important and which is why we have creators like bobby really doing all types of justice not only to innovation in print but across media print is here to stay sundee yeah so we absolutely agree with you it's not dying it has a role to play I don't personally don't think there's any other medium apart from print which gives you a tremendous call to action because you know you read and you act and you keep mulling over television you keep thinking over your cell phone but print definitely is called for action and no better example than automobiles you know where people you know brands have continued to be you know advertisers on on on that medium I think content was a was a great thing that everybody mentioned that you have to be relevant you have to change your content you have to change your product as per the requirement that comes on and which is relevant not only to the consumers but also to the ecosystem in which we are working thank you so much gentlemen thank you for your so much for that session and if I may have you on stage for a while longer I would like to invite Mr. Sri Ranga K. Sudhakara MD and founder of Yoma Technologies on stage to please felicitate the four gentlemen and the lady please after they have their selfie if you sing about it you end up in the big boss house so selfie to Bantia thank you so much Mr. Chakravarti Mr. Joshi Mr. Pawar and Mr. Khosla and Ms. Nayar for that session