 Without much further ado, may I now call upon our panelists. I'll be calling out your name one by one. Request you to please take your place right here on the stage. We're going to be discussing about how digital is affecting the business outcome. We've got a very robust panel from various brand representations. To moderate this particular panel, may I invite on stage Mr. Ranjoy Day, Head of Digital Havas Media. Ranjoy, requested to please come up. The panel will be of exactly Ranjoy 40 minutes and will take about 10 minutes for a Q&A with the audience, so you may want to keep that in mind, 40 plus 10. Mr. Amitabh Tapadar, Brand Group and Consumer Insights Head Bajaj Electricals and I am graduate. I am M.Dabad graduate and has been with companies like HCL, Tata Power, Voltas and more. Ms. Anuradha Agarwal, Chief Marketing Officer, Mariko and I am Bangalore graduates who's been managing both local and global companies including Mondales and HUL before she joined Mariko. Mrs. Siddharth Banerjee was also our jury member. Senior Vice President Marketing Vodafone recipient of the Shivening Scholarship. Siddharth has worked both with Unilevers both in India and abroad before joining Vodafone. Could we have a loud round of applause please? And we also have a representation from Flipkart as proceed requested to please come up on stage and join this panel. We have Mr. Somnath Kedia who's flown in from Goa especially to be a part of this Business Head IFB Industries responsible for the P&L of the company and his USBs that he turns around the fate of unprofitable businesses. All right, Ranjoy, all yours. We're looking at a 50-minute panel discussion and let's take home some great points here from this panel. Thank you. I think whatever they say today most probably it's going to be positive because we are participating in a digital marketing award show. So therefore I will definitely take out some of the best inputs or opinions or point of view I guess and I hope you will enjoy this panel discussion. So let's start. There are three key points that IDMA has been has asked us to kind of discuss. The topic as you know they are talking about is digital marketing moving the needle so to say. So therefore is it creating a business impact? There are three sub points that they want us to discuss what's the panel to opinion it about. One is digital marketing in the future therefore going to be the sole marketing media mix as part of the brand initiative. Secondly, therefore how at this point of time looking towards that future the brands are deciding what share of the media mix is digital marketing going to be or currently is and if that's the way the brands are thinking today seriously then how they are going to define the metrics of the benchmarks and the measurement criteria that they are putting in place to define where eventually digital marketing is going to be the key factor to define business impact. So I'll start with Prasid here because he is representing online platform Flipkart and while Flipkart themselves are in majorly their own online business but at the same time they are building fantastic and very innovative brand partnerships also to support them on their digital marketing journey. So Prasid how would you like to comment upon the first point that is digital marketing in the future going to be the sole marketing mix for the brands? Yeah so I think I'd like to say yes I think in the future digital marketing will be the sole part of the mix but when I say that I need to qualify it saying what we know of digital media today is probably not what digital media is going to be in the future. We believe and lot many people in the media agency world or the marketing world believe that all media is becoming digital and therefore if media is being used for marketing and if all media is going to be digital then of course yes digital will be the sole marketing mix but if we would talk of what's happening right now then as some of the marketing veterans sitting here they would all agree that it is finally about chasing where the consumer is. So even as Flipkart though we are an online digital platform we invest behind other media today which is print, television, etc. We believe we need to gain consumers from other sources and therefore we need to employ other marketing vehicles other media vehicles but like I said at some point in time all of that will become digital and therefore to answer your question yes digital will be the sole channel for marketing or media. So therefore are you guys able to convince the brands that this is where the investments should be and by partnering the brands you are able to move the needle for them? Yeah so on that front I think I'd like to split that the answer into two so there are brands that work with us and there are brands which do not work with us so even on this panel there are some brands which work with us some brands which do not work with us for the nature of the product or the brand that it is. For brands that actually work with us or retail with us it's a great platform for advertising because that's exactly where consumers are coming. What we have seen is branded search queries the volume of branded search queries on our platform are sometimes 4x to 6x as high as what happens on a Google for instance. So consumers are definitely moving towards horizontal platforms like Flipkart to figure out more details about brands so therefore that habit is moving shifting to commerce platforms and therefore advertising on vehicles on commerce platform vehicles will definitely serve you much better in terms of leading to better business outcomes than probably advertising elsewhere. Of course the objective of advertising elsewhere as we discussed earlier was driving consumers to the platform and therefore retail happening there. For brands which do not retail how we are helping them is the fact that we have a rich understanding of the consumer what consumers are looking for. For example, a Vodafone for example we know as I think mobile phones today the largest sales channel for mobile phones is commerce platforms and therefore a natural fit for a brand like Vodafone being present there the Vodafone as an entity is probably not selling directly but even that sales channel is happening through SIM cards being packaged along with mobile phones or special offers being packaged with it. Even for FMCGs it's a rich source of understanding of consumers in terms of what consumers are looking at. For example, if it's a detergent brand why wouldn't they want to target a washing machine buyer? So it is an understanding of the consumer that exists with commerce platforms and as Flipkart we've gone beyond our own platform in terms of taking our audience and therefore reaching out our audience outside Flipkart we have something called Flipkart Shopper Audience and we are able to reach them out on other inventory or other exchange network which is available elsewhere. So yes, we are not limited to the fact that it is only for brands which retail on Flipkart it extends beyond it. Great. So Amitabh, taking the discussion forward you were mentioning in our discussions that there are some interesting experimentations that your brand as well as your category some of the brands in your category are doing which Prasid was talking about that partnering with these third party portals. So how are you looking at digital marketing investment or digital business investment that you are looking at? So I think when we started the digital journey the primary question was should we have our own e-commerce website or should we go along with the e-commerce players? So apparently that question has literally become a bit of a non-entity now so the next question is how do we work better with e-commerce players whereas we also keep some silence for our own business identity. So the way we see it there are many players who are doing interesting things in this digital space so if you look at new brands as well as brands which have once gone out of the market and they are seeking to come back into the market they do a lot of stuff around digital. So earlier in the physical world we would have companies launching flagship products with a lot of publicity. The product might be based on an interesting concept it might not be a concept which will sell with the consumer so it might be a product before its time but it helps establish the brand equity of the company in say a space like innovation or it even establishes the company in a particular category we see a lot of that happening now in the digital space so you will again have products which might be before that time too innovative but they are brought in at a price point or at a feature which really shocks surprises sets up the brand equity and players are doing it in terms of new players as well as older players who are now wanting to re-enter the category or re-establish the brand it may be in a premium manner. So do you see a future where almost all your category products might be sold online so that your marketing investment becomes completely digital like Prasid was mentioning? I think it's a mix Like you gave example of some of the challenger brands I think it's a mix because in our category of electrical appliances there is still a lot of touch and feel so when we go and talk to the end consumer the retailer or the influencer has a lot of impact upon the purchase so the retailer also educates the consumer in terms of things like wattage and all so even if we see the e-commerce portals a fair job is being done so even when we put our products on e-commerce portals we try to give as much rich content as possible as much of videos and demos as possible but at some level physical touch and feel is still important in a high involvement category like ours so I think the answer is linked to how fast the consumers are going to gravitate towards digital purchase that might take a bit of time Anuradha we were discussing that today awareness distribution and purchase are the three key pillars so in a mass market portfolio how would you respond to what Amitabh just said that today the physical touch and feel is critical because with the retail distribution such as large as your category is digital marketing playing a role in terms of defining the business impact as introducing digital has changed anything the way you look at business Sir Anjur I think this is a really vast topic and I've said this before the digital marketing world is a many-headed hydra and you cut off one head and ten more come out of there and that's currently the way I think marketers are looking at this beast I am pretty much an old fashioned marketer who has learned the journey of digital along with the growth of the digital world and my basic belief is that marketers go where consumers are and it's as simple as that sounds really basic and right but at some point of time when all consumers are online all marketers all brands all access will be online till then I think and the numbers look humongous right now I remember four years or five years ago when I used to look at brands, mass brands we were talking about 50 million Indian users online and now we're talking about 450 million Indian users online and the scale difference is so large that now we can afford to sub-segment consumers online you can develop almost unique business models to reach consumers with only digital medium you can decide that this is the only availability channel that you will have so now we have really interesting FMCG competition emerging with pure business models which are all e-commerce led models and awareness models which are only digital models I have brands now which have I mean we call ourselves a mass company but I have premium brands where 20% of my business is coming from the e-commerce channel and of course I have brands like Parachute where we wonder whether it even makes sense for us to go online but the interesting thing is that you know India is a young country we're always talking to young people so if I want to talk to young people I have to be online whether I am Parachute because I'm as ubiquitous as it gets my consumer is very much online and I go there for building affinity, engagement and bonding maybe not for awareness and availability on the other hand there are brands like Setwet where almost 80%, 90% of my audience is online and is engaging with this and actually is not even watching TV so I just want to point out one irony that I noticed when I was sitting on the other side all the sponsors of today's events are traditional media but the interesting thing is they're all making inroads into this space which is purely digital so I think these lines are blurring, its content is keying, virality of content is important and brands are going where consumers are going, I mean that's really what I would say then in that case how are you measuring that you're growing investment in digital whether awareness perspective or conversation perspective whether it is making a business impact or not I think that's one key question that's there