 Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. To everyone who has stayed on with us through the start, you had a very engaging discussion on communicating with today's always on customer. And we realize how important that is in times like these where the consumer is at the core of everything that a brand is doing. So now taking the evening forward, we have our next panel where we're talking about technologies for enhanced customer engagement. We're gonna be talking about topics which will cover real-time user segmentations, engaging back-loss customers, which I think is a very important element. And without taking on too much time, may I please request Sadesa Achievement Service, MD of Fulkro, to please take the conversation forward. Thanks, Michelle. Welcome, everyone, on the panel. I'll just give a brief introduction of everyone who's here for the benefit of our audience. First on the panel, Prakati. Prakati Basu is a head marketing initiative at Talkwalker across India and parts of Europe. She's an inbound marketing professional with eight years of experience under her belt, having worked at Google, Rocket Internet, and startups both in India and Europe. A digital native is what she claims and is a report of that. She's always looking up new ways to generate leads and create magic moments for customers. Welcome on the panel, Prakati. Thank you so much for the introduction. Happy to be here. The second panel is Malay. Malay Harsha is a director of marketing at CleverTab with over 12 years of experience in B2B and B2C marketing across SAS and at Tech Startups. Welcome, Malay. Look forward to some interesting insights. Yeah, I mean, we're really excited about what CleverTab brings to this topic and hope to get a lot of good perspectives on that. Happy to be here. Umesh Krishna is director of brand marketing at Swiggy and in marketing insights, media, and brand management functions at Swiggy is experienced fans, automotive, and e-commerce with the past half decade being spent at Ola and Swiggy. Seeing through crucial periods of brand building at both these companies. Welcome, Umesh. Okay, thanks for the introduction. Very delighted to be here. Thank you and we look forward to a lot of insights from Swiggy. I think you're probably making lots of money in these times, probably a few businesses which are now shipping everything. I mean, very soon you might be a competitor to Amazon. The ratings are going. All right, we'll see about that. Great. Last on the panel, Sonali. Sonali Malavya is a senior vice president, client partner at Essence, a global data and measurement-driven company which is part of Group M. In our role, she leads the agency's relationship with Google in India and Southeast Asia. She has over 20 years of work experience. Sonali is a seasoned marketing professional with specialties including strategic planning, consumer analytics, creative problem solving and crafting business solutions. That's quite a lot. I wish I had your repertoire of expertise. Sonali's love for building connections between brands and consumers has taken us across the wide spectrum of industries and geographies including Twitter, MindShare and Roy Morgan Research. Welcome, Sonali. Thanks for the introduction. I think it's a bit much. Now I know why you asked for 100 words. Actually, something more to share in our profile and I said, I mean, that will be the session. Right. Happy to be here. Happy to meet my co-panelists and thanks Exchange for Media for having us here. Thank you. Thank you, everyone. We look forward to a great session. Feel free to interject, add your points of view, disagree with each other. Let's make it as interesting as possible. Right. So I just said the context before we sort of handed over to all of you to share your experience and views. Marketing technology or Motech in whichever way you refer to it is really an option. In last I think there are some 7,000 solutions, Motech platforms out there probably it could take you a year to even understand how many Motech platforms are out there across maybe 30 different Motech stacks. Many companies, and I think even Swiggy is one of them have even built some of their own Motech stacks. So technology has been around for the last few years. We have talked about AI, ML for the last four years. But I think people now want to know what is really happening with these technologies. We've talked about data, we've talked about programmatic, we've talked about a whole bunch of stuff and we keep talking about them. Sounds really nice and powerful in presentation but I think we've got a great panel, a mix of people who are on the Motech side and some on the brand side who can I think bring in some perspective about what is really happening with customer engagement, customer experience and the use of Motech platforms. So before we sort of get into a discussion I just thought we will structure it into three stages because the entire stack is so wide that if we just fold open for the audience we could be talking in various directions and so what I thought is we split this up into three stages. Largely, an aggregation of the various customer life cycle stages. Okay, so the first stage is basically where we look at brand, brand building, awareness, preference, how we build brand love and how does Motech platforms and technology help doing that because if you don't do that then further stages of the life cycle really don't kick in. So we'll have a discussion around that and your perspectives with respect to the first stage of the real human behavior. The second one which I think in today's context is extremely crucial. We were hearing the previous panel also talk about it, ROI, et cetera, which is the entire acquisition part. Motech is today playing a fairly aggressive role in the acquisition space across various technologies. And I think the third stage is, again in today's context, extremely critical is how do you retain your customers? How do you generate more lifetime value from your customers? How do you prevent a share and how do you re-engage lost customers? So this entire value chain of existing customers and how do you work with them and how do you build value across the value chain? So before I get into each of these stages and throw questions and start starters to all of you, maybe all of you can start with just a minute summary about your overall perspective on Motech and customer engagement and what you feel both from your personal experience on your views with respect to how this is going. So we'll start with you Pragerthi since you're on the top left of the screen. So thanks for the introduction. So my perspective on Motech is very simple. Marketing is not anymore just about creativity. It's a science really. So without data, it's not going to have the desired impact and the desired impact. So anything that is done in marketing, whatever you see, actually there are several layers of data behind it today. And without data, like I said, marketing is not going to be efficient. And since ROI, like we just heard, it's the three magic letters, Motech is extremely important to trace that, to be able to justify further spend, especially in times like today. So it's very, very important, I feel. And looking forward to chatting more about this, just wanted to add that marketing will get you everywhere if you listen to your customers or consumers and basically give them a piece of what they want to hear or feel a need that exists already for them in the market. Thanks, Prakati, good initial thoughts. I think that was interesting. Creativity is not good to get you to your destination. You need to put some science to it. Quick thoughts, Malik? I think building on what Prakati just pointed out, yes, it's a fact, whatever, marketers practiced in some 10 years ago that's completely redundant. A lot of marketers in today's world could be really scared and intimidated by what Prakati has just pointed out. There's so much of data, there's these behemoths of data that rests in the back end, and there are those many markets, marketing text tags. The net essence is it needs to be simple and it needs to be simple enough for people to be able to take insights out and actionable insights at that. A lot of data what it tends to do this is just old school knowledge, just leads to analysis paralysis. And moving forward from that era is important. At the same time, you will find, especially with businesses as we have Pumasia, which operate in real time, or a little prior to real time. So I was speaking to Shobit Anderson, who heads the dominoes in the Middle Eastern region. And he talked about before your order is actually placed, you've actually made a card payment. My guy's actually on the street because there's a probability basis which we are running these engines. So, and he pointed out dominoes is now a technology company that also offers pizzas. I think that's where we are. Aren't we all that? You're all technology companies offering some service. And just to set context in Malayan, Pumesh, and I'll come to you, Pumesh, for your opening thoughts. I think Swiggy is in talks with Malay's company. So the two of you can do some tango over here. I think it's well post that stage. And I think we're on closure or implementation actually. Yeah, at the implementation stage. Yeah, yeah. So the two of you can share, join from client and solution partner perspective. We'll come to that later. Pumesh, opening thoughts. I mean, wonderful topic. I think anything which is data or marketing technology was treated like back end. It was treated like an execution piece and your leaders wouldn't even want to hear you. Very often, there are like certain top line strategies that wouldn't execute on ground. Luckily, thanks to a lot of technology providers thinking through both from client and consumer side. I think over the past half a decade, especially the solutions are brilliant. They speak to each other, they integrate well. And I'm delighted to see that in the perspective of marketing leadership, now technology stack conversations have started coming back. The share of discussions, maybe three, four years back on technology stacks would have been very, very feeble. Versus now, there's that switch. People realize how tech is both your strategy and your implementation. Without that, there is no branding. There is no marketing strategy. Excellent, great thoughts, Amish. Sonali, quick words. Right, so I think it's up to me now to be the voice of dissent. I was hoping for some support somewhere. But going back to what Ragithi said, I think while I agree that it's become a lot more of a science, but I think it's also really important that while everybody is suddenly in equal parts intimidated and in awe of MaTeX as a concept and wanting to jump on the bag and bag and a couple of things come up. One, we're at the best place today and we're poised to actually take the most advantage of art and science. Saying that creativity does not play a very important role still, I think would be a disadvantage to our brands. Especially since everything is starting to look the same because there is that human intelligence that does power everything we do and does power the technology that we go with. And I think so that's one broad thought that my head is going into. I think the other one is really important to see that with so many and you just touched on it, Savya, when you said that there are more than 7000 solutions and I mean, anywhere you look, it is the most cluttered space to be in. So more than ever before, it's really important today to know exactly what you're going after and what are the desired outcomes you have because it's so easy to get intimidated by this world and MaTeX is not cheap. So investing behind the right tools and technology is the single most important thing for us right now. So I think in my head, a marriage of art and science and we're in the best place ever to actually leverage both as well as knowing what you're going after rather than jumping headfirst into it. Thanks a lot. So now that you just saved my job, maybe a bit of creativity with science is still relevant. I was getting the feeling that we should truck shop and let go of the office. I'll come to you then on exactly what you just said. So we let's focus on stage one which is about building brand, brand love and you brought in a different point of view that creativity is also important, right? So in your view, creativity in messaging powered by data, how do you see this entire space of creativity now being data powered? If I may use that word, if that's the right way to put it across or how is messaging now data powered? So I mean, this is something that's really close to my heart and which is why you heard the different voice. Oh, but I think the good thing here is that, so I mean, if I think that creative agencies were actually the slowest to adopt technology, right? But we've also realized how powerful that technology can actually make your creative because it isn't a one size fits all solution today, right? It isn't about data and analytics today allows us to cut our audiences in many different ways at scale to figure out where these people are, how to target these people, what is the best way to start eliciting a response from these people? And the intersection of both is actually the most important thing to do. I did touch upon it to say that, you know, technology without creativity will have all our messages look exactly the same. And at a time when differentiation is so limited with a lot of brands actually providing the exact same solution, there has to be something that sets it apart. And I think that's where the intersection of both could actually make a big difference. Also in terms of how you infuse or how you build relevance into your message comes from a lot of insights that technology powers for you. I'll give you an example of Google Maps and I don't know if any of you guys have seen that creative, it actually has won all the awards that I know of. But I think the most powerful thing about it was, our task was to encourage adoption of Google Maps and it's not today, it's about four years ago. When Google Maps was just something that people hadn't, they were intimidated using it. They didn't know where to start, they didn't know what the blue, yellow, red actually meant on Google Maps. At that point taking signals from both consumer behavior as well as real-time data to say, for example, on the most congested Mumbai roads, what we ended up doing was making it a multi-channel experience and actually putting up large billboards which had real-time powered data to say, this is what Google Maps could do for you. Which was these huge billboards which had real-time maps to say, up ahead you will face congestion which will delay your journey by, say, 45 minutes if you're going on to, say, Carter Road or wherever you were going and wherever that road led to. Instead you could take this detour and it would save you the time. We did that in many places across and I think the power of the messaging was that it was a different way to communicate. It was taking a message and in the previous panel they talked about saying, don't disrupt a consumer experience but become part of that consumer journey. And that's exactly what we did. At a time the consumer was most frustrated with what was going on. A solution was offered to them and the numbers speak for themselves. I mean, we had the biggest uptake possible and of course then it was scaled all over India. It was just a trial that we had done in Mumbai but it was such a big success. And that brings me back to saying that this had everything, this had creativity, this had technology and the intersection was what made it more relevant. Excellent. I think you all remember those large Google Maps buildings and it was all over. Prabhupati, since you come from an experience of listening to conversations and I think today, even in the previous panel we talked about that, one of the martex tax that has evolved from just being listening for a while to listening for insights, product ideas and a whole bunch of other stuff. I mean, since that's what you do for a living, how do you see consumer insights coming out of conversations being a big part of the brand building and communication part? Sure, thanks for that. So basically the biggest thing about consumer insights especially on social is that the information is already out there. So you don't have to do anything extra to get it. So you don't have to do like a survey or a focus group and our job as a tech company or even as marketers is to listen for that information. And you'd be surprised at how many insights you can get from it. So just as an example, if you're a B2B customer or B2C customer, you kind of at the end of the day have similar ways of expressing your opinion. So if you like something at a restaurant, you will say something good about it on TripAdvisor or if you don't like it, you will say something bad on TripAdvisor Google Reviews and it'll be the same for B2B on a platform like G2 Crowd. So that's where you get information out of it and it's not just about reading a review. So you can look at it with some KPIs using maybe whatever tool you have at your disposal. It should be some of them are sentiment analysis, engagement, themes, insights from not just texts but also images. And that should be able to give you some really actionable insights and you can bucket your consumers according to that. So just as an example, I'd like to share something that we did a couple of years ago. We worked with OpenTable, it's a consultancy firm based out of Italy and their challenge was to find the next location for a pizza area brand in Italy. It's called Bella and Brava, it's specific to Italy. So the challenge was where can we find a place where we'll be successful and how do we do it? Is there a way that we could get information out of consumers? So what they did is they used image recognition technology for this. So the way they went about it is they studied like thousands of images of pizza, sorry, in Europe because that's where the business is based. And they were just looking to open in Europe. So they studied thousands of images and they looked at it in terms of also things like sentiment analysis of how people feel about the image that they've shared on social media. And this is really, let's say insightful because it's unfiltered data. So you're not preparing for what you're posting on social, right? You're just expressing your opinion. And based off of this, they were able to shortlist 10 cities and potential cities where they can kind of open their next outlet. And of course, this was just one of the factors where it was one of the key factors that they used for selecting their next location. They looked at also some other stuff like supply chain or logistical issues. And based on this, they were not only able to narrow it down and find a location, they were also able to customize their offering. So this is the part where it comes to just listening to customers and giving them kind of what they want in the restaurant. So they looked at, they were able to identify certain themes like vegetarian options or stuff like meat in Italy was important. And across these pictures, they were able to find a large concentration of these themes. And they were able to thus tailor their offering accordingly. So they had vegetarian menus, they positioned that themselves with that. And also they were able to show that they're like authentic, you know, an authentic Italian brand which is with ingredient sauce from Italy. So that's just an example of one of the things you can do using consumer insights. And just the fact is that as marketers it's just our job to listen. So it's kind of easy to do. So that's just one of the things you can achieve with this. Excellent, Raghavi. Next time I'll be careful when I post a picture of a pizza. I never knew you would take my pizza picture and do so much research on it. That's very interesting, really. But one of the things you know which I think brand marketers always look at is the effectiveness of measurement. You know, when we're building a brand we want to know whatever activities that we're doing looking at. These are pictures to decide where we want to open a store or we are looking at any form of data or creative. The effectiveness becomes one of the factors that everyone looks at. So Umesh, I think is in a business where effectiveness is critical to growth and survival. I think it's a very cutthroat segment that you're really. So I'm sure you have some perspective on this. Sure. Definitely a very interesting topic. And I just want to add on that to something that Preeti was saying. I look at my social media listening tool and even today there are people abusing pineapple toppings on pizzas and that's usually the conversation that we can see. All right, so coming to food theory it's something that is, you know, people relate to a lot and it's like faith, right? You know, for Indians, food is like faith. All food is supremely important and when we are as a brand preaching to them we have to be very careful around how we navigate. So we could be very creative in our storytelling and we could test it out a number of times pre-air but it's only when it actually goes out in the market and let's say we will see it through a TikTok or seeing it through TV versus seeing it through a personal mobile phone the way people react to it is very different. So even if it's a pure play creative execution we try to get a real time read in terms of how people are reacting to that creative and we kind of marry it back to the media deployment of it. So we never think of it as just digital or TV. We try to be omnichannel. I may use a solution like syncio or sapper to understand who may have had a greater probability of having seen our creative run surveys and get, try to get real time answers in terms of how the creators are performing, right? Is it rubbing people the wrong way? Is anything unfunny, funny, et cetera? So you may have seen our creators also have a lot of humor which means that you can't show the same job. You can't tell the same job price. So you have to be very prudent about not only how people react but how much are they exposed. So the media metrics are also kind of like measured quite a lot. Now we, when it comes to and something that we fundamentally believe in is that this testing and people who could call it let's say a split ratio test or an HB it is something that we can even, you know such tests which are more technical in nature can be even adopted to our CRM systems, for example, you know, or digital channels. So whenever it is not omnichannel we kind of go towards more statistically sound methodologies of understanding how we behave, you know how it has worked out. And we make the marketing stack in a manner such that it is able to segment the data quickly, set up the right kind of baby experiments and are friendly for even an executive to, you know who's on the platform to understand that, okay there's a negative reaction and how we can like potentially push the right communication to the right audience. So I think one being, one understanding the consumer how we think both in terms of the creative route and what it means or how many times is this creative being delivered to the customer. These two are things that we look at from a customer from whenever we set up measurements, the tech and the setup, we always look at how flexible is it for anyone in the system to react and change it, right? And therefore we make sure that the plans are not written on stone, but we remain flexible to change our media plans and creative mixes as required. Sure. Great, that's interesting. Let's try just one more. Are these tech stacks something that's the same as some of the, yeah. No, no, I was talking about, because there's a thread that Umesh mentioned and something very similar that Sonali mentioned. I thought I'll take a point and collate those two pieces. So what Sonali mentioned about was a high degree of creativity for Umesh's point of view there has to be a high degree of creativity but at the fly, on the fly, we should be able to ascertain how things are going and make those changes. There are multiple such tools that are available out there that take what Sonali is doing and married to the concept that Umesh is talking about. I don't know if you guys have used Grammarly. Grammarly is something that we frequently now use. A lot of students started using and now I think professionally everybody's using it. It helps you define whether the language is right whether the language is appropriate. Similarly, we recently built something that's a free tool out there for anybody to use. It helps you define the emotion of that conversation. So assuming Sonali had a brilliant idea but she doesn't know in times like COVID where she wants to be empathetic but still generate a factor of FOMO then by this message, how do you ascertain it has the right mix of FOMO percentage, let's say 52% and let's imagine Sonali's boss is completely left brain while Sonali is the right brain mix that comes from an agency. And that's where it becomes very important for you to be able to predict how that behavior is going to be. Having those creators like Swiggy, if I may dare so, Amul did a fantastic job in the good old days where the creators were damn neat. You would always remember the girl. You would always remember the cricket bat campaign that they ran and on the fly they would always stay contextual. Like, Umesh can listen to the pizza topping or there is a world and I belong to the pineapple on the pizza world. So I'm a minority here, I get that. But there's a, thank you, Justin Trudeau is in our party, so that helps. So the kind of ins, for even for those handicapped with a left brain who think with numbers, the stacks today are such that they will help you get over that creative hurdle that a left brain comes with. That's what I wanted to add. No, that's a great perspective. I think creativity or changing creatives on the fly basis of people are reacting to it is extremely important. That's one of the evolutions of creative people that you don't get married to your own creative and you're able to listen to feedback and be able to change it. I think it's always done a great job. We love your creatives on social. So now we, you work a lot with data, right? So if you have to deliver great customer experiences, how do you look at data assisting you in building those customer experiences? And customer experience, I think Swiggy obviously is one of those apps which, you know, and this is for you, it was a heavy tomato user, but it's just probably the user experience which shifted me to Swiggy. So that's a win on that side. So how do you see this? Okay, so, so two spaces. And I think for me, both are equally important right now. I think, and I think when we talk about the, you know, delivering the, so the right analytics and tools to get to the right customer experience, I think what we sometimes end up taking for default is performance. We do a great job in measuring performance, but I think a lot of times we end up not spending the requisite amount of time at the top of that inverted pyramid, right? Where we say that how do you assign the right attribution to what is happening and, you know, to awareness and preference. A lot of times we spend a lot of energy and effort at the bottom of the funnel. But what drives to that bottom of the funnel is often ignored. And I think we have a lot many tools and it's a very binary way of processing data at the bottom of the funnel. But understanding what's working and what's not working at the top of the funnel can actually be detrimental to what happens to your acquisitions and your transactions and what people do, which is why I'm really happy to hear what Malay just talked about, which was to say how a consumer is responding and reacting to a piece of communication. And this is not in terms of actions, but how are they feeling about it? And I think that along with multi-level attribution, which is true attribution and in a world where it's not contaminated, because I think we still haven't gotten very far in terms of cleaning up that top of the pyramid kind of measurement solution to figure what's working and what's not working and what touch point is delivering the right kind of response. So that's one space. The other one that often a lot of, and I think that comes from an old mentality of saying that, you know, you run a campaign six weeks later, the campaign finishes. Another six weeks you take to process what happened and three to four months later, you figure out, hey, this is what happened. By that time, you've not only finished that campaign, but you finish the next one and you're probably at a stage that you can't impact the one that is currently happening. So I think a continuous process of testing and learning has to become part of our DNA. If we were to, in fact, be able to do what Omesh just talked about, which is creativity on the fly. Now, on what basis do we change our creatives on the fly? On what basis do we decide what is right and what is wrong if we are not getting the right signals at the right time to be able to influence it? Often in our lives, we don't have the luxury of a long window and we need to impact it then and there. And I think, and by then and there, I don't mean this instant, but this owner, we can. I mean, we don't have the luxury of six weeks anymore. So I think these are, both of these things working in tandem would end up actually making even the top of our pyramid, which to me is actually extremely critical because getting the right audiences to go through the funnel is actually going to make our campaigns and our marketing a lot more accountable, which is today's ask. And then the right people coming through that funnel also, again, goes back to saying you are building a lot more customer satisfaction because you are able to interact with them in the way that's most relevant and appropriate to them. Great thoughts, Malik. Malik, I come to you. You've been with ATEC and you've basically been on the tech stack side as I understand it. And currently working with a company, representing a company, which is heavily into doing everything with data. And something interesting that I saw on your website is segmentation on the fly. I'm sure a lot of companies can benefit from using all of that analytics, data, et cetera, to be able to deliver experiences. So stage one, your thoughts on how you use, you being a part of the tech stack space, player in the tech stack, how do you see companies like, let's say, Swiggy or anyone else, benefiting from all the solutions which are available on the brand analytics and brand lock trading space? So I'm not going to be discussing Swiggy because it is covered under our NDA. So let's just park that aside. So I'm sure your colleagues, you can anonymize and talk about. So let us take an example of a food delivery app that is doing remarkably well today in the country. There are struggles that the country is going through and the whole globe is growing through and that's applicable across the board. But see, there are certain things that I'm just gonna throw here. And that will just change the way a lot of organizations, digital-first organizations as well, have been struggling. So I was in the tech space for the last 10 years. Most of it was web delivery. Thereafter, we started moving to an app-based model. Most app-based models, especially in, apart from the K-12 space, which has kindergarten to 12, the app-based model doesn't work because to learn, you need a larger form factor because mobile or a tablet is a consumption device. It's not a creativity, it's not a creation device. So most of it happened on the web. The other thing was, you can't expect a user to stay very engaged in the education space. So you, there are about five people who are here. I'm just going to make an assumption that out of the five of us, say 10% of us or 20% of us, were noobies, complete nuts. Into studies, we didn't need a faculty, we didn't need a teacher, our life was sorted any which way, we could have done it even without them. And then there's this larger variety of 70% of the audience. Well, interested enough because we know the benefits of it, but not motivated enough, not engaged enough. So we did, we didn't do, and accordingly, the behavior changed and that's just universal behavior. That's what a bell curve is. And then there is this 10% outlier, which lies outside, which a lot of faculties or teachers said, not much is going to happen with this kid, I'm sorry to your parents, but yeah. Those outliers did remarkably well and that's a different point altogether. We now call them right brains. But my larger point is this 80% engaging with them. You have to identify that there are segments within each of these. A segment is anything that you can define by nature, by property, you could do a cohort and but a cohort is basis, a timeframe. CleverTap is a user retention platform. What it does is, so you acquire X number of users who come to your platform or come to your business. It's a digital business. They come and stay with you, they either land on your face and somebody like an image ensures that they do a login. But after that, they choose to drop out. Using the segmentation stacks, what you can do is you can predict. If a Pragati came on to my, let's say, Zomato or a Domino's app, I can predict by the next three actions Pragati makes, whether she's going to make a payment on the wallet today or whether she's going to move out of the platform and uninstall. How frequently am I expecting a Pragati to come to me and basis the number of profiles and the segments using the AI engines that we put into play. The machine is able to establish basic behaviors for Pragati. That's what a stack does to you, does for you. Now, the creativity part that you want to play with it, where in a Sonali comes in and gives you these five beautifully crafted messages which need to go at these three stages to Sonali, depending on a yes or no. And those parts need to be tested even for Sonali because Sonali is not God. She doesn't know before sending out a message that this message is going to work wonders with Pragati. It has work wonders with a lot of people like Pragati who are the same demographic, same age bracket, same economical bracket, or maybe the same operating system of the phone, version that she's using. Basis this, you are able to drive sub-segment. So, okay, Pragati light, and I'm going to go with pineapple pizza. We were a minority, let's see if I can cut word more. It's a lovely topping, you should definitely try it. And if she did, can I upsell or cross-sell various other recommendations down to a Pragati which may make a lot of sense to her, a role with pineapple in it, for example. Which only a small sub-segment of Pragati's like and not more. And accordingly, also be able to, there's a lot of science that goes behind it. And the most love piece that I love most about in our engagement platform and the kind of stuff that we do for a lot of people is a recency frequency monetization metric. So how recently did Pragati come? How frequently does Pragati come? And how frequently and recently did Pragati make a transaction with us? I'm saying too much of Pragati, don't take it out on me later. But it could be. I'm trying to find some kind of a tie up between the two. Let's say Sabya, Sabya there. So how frequently? I'm out of pizza and pineapples. So assuming Sabya comes really frequently but doesn't engage or doesn't transact. So that means he was a loyalist but he's not a champion for me. It's easier for me to move a loyalist to a champion. But assuming Sabya was frequent but has not been recent, then that means Sabya is about to drop off on that three dimensional matrix for me. Then Sabya is the first person I need to ensure that I'm able to retain. Imagine this Sabya, every month you are bringing in 100 people onto your platform. And every month, let us say you are losing 90% of them. In gaming, especially gaming vertical, this happens within the first three hours. The second iteration round happens within three hours. Which means people will just delete your application or will stop interacting with your application for time. And which means you've lost these people. Assuming you are able to build those segments and identify in real time what they do. Which is where a lot of, which is what is the problem with my text tags. One thing does great analysis. One thing that has great communication, creativity, you can write messaging. Third piece talks about okay, with an API you integrate with X, Y, and Z, you run your communication boss, marketing automation tool. And the fourth thing tells you what your ROI was. And eventually you don't know at the end of the day what truly happened. Which was my story in edtech. By the time I would reach out to these people, they say, buddy, we've moved on. This isn't what we want to do. Because my analysis itself would take these many days and the marketing automation stack folks are gonna tell me these many mailers are already scheduled, you'll have to wait your turn. Working all of this in real time for somebody like me who did pass out of MBA 10 years ago. I kid you not, it was magic. I think that's what it means to a lot of people. It has changed numbers for Dream 11, who Dream 11 if you've heard of is a customer of ours. And I do have the permission to talk about it. They were able to have a seven X win back campaign wherein the number of people who churned out of the system, they were able to bring back onto the platform again. And then there are engagement metrics that we did with Hotstar. There are time to live segments. Assuming Swiggy decides to do a sale, but this sale is limited for the next 30 minutes only. Or maybe Domino's had these extra pizzas that it made and it wants to put out a flash sale on say Swiggy and Swiggy decides to power it. But the only way for it to work is within this 30 minute window. Anything lesser or anything more is not gonna work. And hence scalability and reliability are the key, but there's a lot of magic that can happen with these tags with the right set of creativity of course. And I guess with also the right set of people managing the stacks. Yeah. Sometimes those are white elephants that keep sitting and you wonder what you really bought them for. Okay, let's move on to stage two and exchange for media team. If there are any questions, please have them sent across to us. We'll try and take them along the way and not make it into things only that we want to talk about. Coming to you, Mesh, we now move into acquisitions. And I think for a food delivery app acquisitions would probably be as important as retention, right? So what is your view about acquisitions using programmatic? I mean, everybody talks about we are doing programmatic, some of the clients when we talk about what you do with programmatic or D360 does if you run video. Is that what programmatic is all about? Or is there something more? And maybe the other panelists who have a view on this can also come in in terms of how we are using the tech stack as far as acquisitions are concerned. Sure, I think acquisition for us at least is something that's a very, very high-skill, right? And I think all the amendments that I've been part of are really, really massy applications. It's meant for the general audience and anyone and everyone could use it and use it everyday, right? So for me, I've always been part of systems where there's a rapid push for scale, right? And whenever you are all about scale, especially on performance, you tend to underplay the role that predictive analytics could play. Maybe obviously you can't segment your audience and go after them, but in your performance space, can you at least use let's say a good, like-to-like audience with the help of the right seeding, right? Can you bring in a bit more customer intelligence to understand who's the one you can, who's the best for your acquisition? Something that's largely the pure play performance side of it on branding, definitely the importance is that, assume you're still building the top of the funnel. That means you have to be a relatable brand to the customer. Therefore, the personalization has value. By that, I don't mean addressing Sabia or addressing Prakriti or addressing Malai. It's more on understanding what's a kind of persona the user is from and kind of like, potentially giving her or him a creative that works for them, right? And now just adding it back to what Sonali was saying. It's key that we build a stack that will help us understand the conversion path. Very often, teams work so much in silos that if you ask the company, they have no understanding of conversion paths. Now, it's a tough ask for Swiggy because obviously it's such a high engagement category and very high volume, but if it's industries like EdTech or luxury by the conversion path, the value of it will go through the roof, right? So a lot of your attempts at performance for acquisition or branding for acquisition could benefit a lot by understanding these aspects and bringing them in, right? And something that we always did from the beginning is marrying our programmatic platform to the data management solution, right? Not only with the data management friend, but in terms of all the, for example, Google's Cloud for Marketing Solutions. We brought them in so that there's a bit of intelligence and learning that's continuously in process as we run our campaign. And there, of course, where one should show the willingness is to go talk to your technology partners and ask them for things that the market currently doesn't do for you, right? Very often, we look at a product and see, okay, it doesn't do this, this feature is not available. Therefore, you kind of let it go, right? Versus working with partners very often in betas, giving them the flexibility to experiment and learn could help you bring a lot of these practices into your acquisition and branding. Next piece is just closing in on the conversion analysis piece. Think through how can you carry your exposed audience? Need not be like an added level information, at least on a probabilistic level. The ones whom you know have had exposure. How do you carry them over and give it to your remarketing team? In India, I think the targeting teams struggle to show incremental value anyway. So I think any kind of conversion-led perspective that you could give them could help them a lot. And then, of course, carry it over to your CRM as well as required. So I think that's where we can kind of build a continuity in terms of the consumer funnel. And from our marketing side, we can be more holistic and well-integrated in our approach. Great. Questions are coming in, but I think the question that is just coming from Animesh Mishra pertains to the third stage which is on retention. So we'll take that question when we move into the retention piece. But coming to you, Sonali, again, since you are the one who has all the data and the creativity, how does targeting help drive creative response and engagement? Thanks, Abhiya. No pressure, right? All the data and all the creativity. Okay. So I think before I start talking about what is critical here, I think I have a big grouse. Knowing how important targeting is, a lot of times marketers still end up doing a only lip service to targeting. And just skimming the top of the surface when it comes to targeting, especially in the context of today when there is so much technology available to be able to target and segment better. I don't know if we do justice. Enough justice. And I'm painting it with a broad picture, but still to a large extent, targeting is largely lip service. And why that bothers me, and I think it bothers everybody if we think hard about it, because everything else follows the stage. Not getting that right messes up everything that you go into next. But that said, I think for me, there are two parts to it, the macro and the micro. And I think often what we end up doing, so for me, I think acquisition has just become almost synonymous with everything which is lower funnel. I don't know if we stop long enough to say that is it okay to just acquire a user? What happens, what events happen afterwards? And they actually are way more valuable than just getting a customer onto your stack or onto your platform or whatever you're trying to get them towards. Are you happy with just acquiring them? What happens if they never take action? What happens if they uninstall you? What happens if they make one transaction and go away from your life? So what are you doing about that? I think that to me is a very fundamental question that thinking hard about stage, the funnel does not stop at acquisition. In fact, that's the starting point of the lower end of the funnel which is critical for you. So I think that's one part of it. And the second is what machines can do beautifully in terms of targeting effectively we choose to do on our own to a large extent. So today Google offers a lot of targeting capabilities via UAC, via ACE and it actually helps you beautifully just input assets and I mean assets not creatives to say that you know and then you let the system target according to the right task and that's not just acquisitions but thinking hard about that and thinking about the final outcome that you want before you let the machine do the job that it's actually optimized to do. So the point I'm making is today human intervention is actually required more in the macro spaces and the more fundamental spaces of defining the problem, defining who you're going after, defining the objective and defining what a success metric looks like and then letting machine learning take over and do what it does best. So that's kind of where my head is at when it comes to targeting to say don't try and do what the machine can do really effectively instead focus on the more defining aspects of your marketing campaign. Awesome, that's a great insight. Prabhupati, a question for you. When we talk about ROI and since you are in the listening space you can figure out what everyone is saying about your brand. When we do acquisition campaigns is there some way we can build some kind of an ROI linkage between what you listen to and the acquisition campaigns? I mean, is there some correlation that if you're doing a great job at acquisitions you're also beginning to hear a lot more conversations about your brand, how do you see the space? Sure, so there's actually quite, one of the basic things that we could do is you can map the spikes in a conversation against let's say your acquisition. So let's say you're trying to launch maybe a referral program or a new TV show or something like this and you have a defining hashtag or you have just running a simple query for the name of the brand even would give you an idea of the spikes in conversation for this brand or for whichever TV show or hashtag you choose. And one of the things you can do is you can obviously choose whichever KPI you'd like to represent ROI. It can be direct sales. It can be new subscriptions. It can be also subscriptions to a newsletter and then you obviously assign a dollar value to that. But mapping the spikes in conversation against basically the number of new subscriptions during the same period of time will be a very simple way to kind of a simple and basic way to figure out the ROI of your efforts. So is that budget really worth it? Is that agency spend really worth it? Is it just goes beyond taking a conversation or a hashtag or a video to viral levels. It's giving you way more business insights. It's telling you whether you can work with these guys again, whether your acquisition campaign has really taken off and so on and so forth. So there's a lot of other data that you can incorporate into this, such as customer feedback data and things like this. But at the end of the day, one of the biggest things that you can do is basically look at the spike in your conversation or the sentiment for your conversation using whatever sentiment analysis technology people have. The one that we have here is powered by AI and it's quite accurate. So using that kind of, those kinds of metrics or those kinds of approaches can be very, very helpful to map the ROI just using social. Great. So we're running a little late. So unlike, now this is all your territory. This is about retention, lifetime value, CRM, that's your bread and butter. So I'll, Animations sent across a question for us and I think you can take that. How retention campaign is run today for clients without DMP or CDP in place? I think what I'll do is I'll hand it over to you to first talk about retention, your perspective on retention, CRM, maximization of customer lifetime value. How do you win back customers? That's your specialization. So you talk through this and then maybe you can also go and do this question. Without DMP, I guess we can still run retention campaigns without DMP. Everybody's not ready for a DMP and I'll come to Umej after that. We had a conversation about when is the right time to move into such platforms as DMP because you get your first party data in place, clean it up and jump into DMP straight away. There's a lot we can do without a DMP as well. So all yours, Malai, please feel free to share your perspective. Sure. So number one, for a lot of people out here who are listening into this, the reason why all of us are talking about retention and it gets so talked about is also because of the propensity of a retained user who's interacted with you once. To engage with you the second time is way higher. And I'm going to throw this number at you which is from a 2017 study at Howard Business. I'm sure the number may have changed somewhat but hopefully for the better. So they have a 65% higher probability to make a purchase with you again if they have purchased once with you before. Obviously, assuming they've had a not bad experience which is where an NPS comes in very handy which I also see is one of the questions somebody has asked in the chat window. Yes, so you can talk. So answer both of them. Yeah. No, I will not try and answer the NPS. I think I'll stick around with the fact that retention plays in heavy because A, it helps you build engagement because retention eventually comes from what? Engagement. Engagement comes from what? Exactly what rather they talk about. Listen to the people. Give them a very personalized experience. So personalization is a word like MI that is loosely thrown everywhere. Anybody who talks about personalization, anybody who talks about AI and ML but the contextualization and from data to insight is the larger piece which is critical. A Sonali cannot bring the beauty of our creativity to the fore if it is only driven by a chunk and silos of data they need to talk to each other. When they talk to each other, you know a Sonali likes a black scarf only when she's wearing red heels. But when she's wearing a red heels is when she prefers a Gucci and not a Versace. And this is the kind of personalization when you engage with a brand is when loyalty is up in it. That loyalty leads to stickiness. Stickiness for everybody out there is then daily active users divided by the monthly active users which means they engage with your applications at least once in that time window that I've talked about daily as well as monthly is. Hire your stickiness, hire your retention and the way the retention goes up and this is the important piece. I wish I was able to share my screen to show you guys a graph but essentially if this is your y-axis and 100 users is what you acquire month on month and assuming month zero, you are at 100 users. Months to you acquire another 100 users but you've lost 90%. So where are you at? You are at 111. And the way you multiply it becomes an asymptote, a parabolic asymptote but an asymptote nonetheless. An asymptote is a curve that never beats the zero line. This is a reverse asymptote. An asymptote typically falls flat towards the x-axis but instead what's happening is every time you have a multiplier of 0.1 of retention and hence your number doesn't grow. So you will stick at 111.1, 111.111, 111.111. All the money that you're throwing at acquisition which is where the top of the funnel starts it doesn't grow unless you are retaining people. So you need to retain more people and at the same time then only should you start investing and acquiring more users. Otherwise all that money goes down the drain which is the reason why today's growth marketers and not the ones that passed out of their MBA classes with me appreciate retention as much because minus this there is no math in the world where I would be allowed to spend a nickel over a time. That retention is critical. And then over a period understanding what a customer lifetime value is. From retention comes customer lifetime value. For Swiggy I'm a super powerful champion user. Also I'm in love with Swiggy. They started out in an area where there was no food delivery and that was the only source of nourishment for a really, really long time and back in Bangalore because I was stationed in Jala Halley. So that's a offshoot but that's the only... So you understand because they nurtured me through and through and they gave me recommendations that made sense to me then. Is that is the reason why I found value in them and not another platform. So I stuck around with them. And over a period of time, this monthly incremental or daily incremental value that they get from me is ensuring that they have a champion in play who spends say about 200,000 rupees with them every year. And accordingly they will be able to identify these are the champions that you want to go after for a referral program. So a lot of offshoot comes right through that starts at the beginning of the funnel with engagement and onboarding but then takes you all the way to a retention customer lifetime value and eventually a brand loyalist who will go out there and put a great word for you. And that dear listener is where NTS comes in handy. Had a food delivery platform not given me delight I would never be where I am. Hence all of these things go hand in hand. And what we often tend to not talk about is a product experience. And a product experience is not just that delivery came on time, the guy was clean hygienic. Of course that's the basic hygiene I expected. But my interaction with the platform has to have minimal friction points. It has to continuously experiment with what I like what I don't like, what users in general like and bases that take certain calls. It could be a yellow background. It works for Swiggy. Maybe it's a red background that works for Zomato but they typically have to try out and maybe for female audience it works differently and male audience it works differently. And you should have that flexibility within your tech stack to make those demarcations to give that personal experience. My two cents there. I think you're running out of time. So maybe one minute each of you to summarize the discussion and then I can wrap it up. If there are more questions we can like with the previous panel take them on LinkedIn and I'm sure there'll be the questions can be asked on the LinkedIn post and all of you can be free to respond to them so our audience can get your perspectives there as well. So starting with Pravedi just a quick summary of how you see Martek and customer engagement. Your top two bullet points. Sure, since we're running out of time I'll keep this short. But I think it's been a really great session over here. I've also learned a lot more about retention. I think the top point for me would be that acquisition is pretty redundant without retention. So that was really helpful over there. And the second thing is I'll stick to this but I think it's always going to be a balance between creativity and data that will take us places going forward. So those are my top two takeaways from the session. And thank you so much again for this really nice moderation of Sashi. Thank you Pravedi. Coming to Sonali, Malai has spoken so extensively just now that we just come to the last. Yeah, without his pineapple pizza. So thanks Abhiyar and it was great to find another lover of pineapple pizza with pineapple and pepperoni. But anyway, besides the point, I still, so even if I managed to convince one of you that creativity without technology and the two work really well together, I think the art and science is what I'd still like to reinforce. And I think the other point is on acquisitions and defining what that acquisition means and at what stage of acquisition do you want to actually optimize your campaigns towards and target your people towards? I think is something to keep in mind. Don't just use acquisition as a loose term of just saying, this is what I want to do. So I just want to acquire a customer. What does that mean for you and for your brand? I think it's important to think hard about it so that the subsequent decisions you make actually make sense. And thank you for moderation and thanks for changing for me for having me here. Thanks Anabhi. Omesh, what do you want to say? Quick summary. Sure, I think great session. I think I've also listened to a lot of perspective coming in from specialists across the marketing spectrum. So quite interesting for me personally as well. Something that I saw was, I think something we spoke a lot about. I think one is about keeping the customer in center and like making sure that you understand him and kind of build a stack that will work for your customer. And by that, obviously, what's the scale of acquisition you need? What's the rate of retention that you need? All of it gets baked in there and the marriage is what helps. And also in the extremely crowded tech market world, I think a lot of folks, I think I saw in some of the questions here as well is that there is this desperation to go in and onboard every part of the stack. So I think we should also stay connected and stay rooted and be clear that not all of these should be on board. It's all about the growth stage and then kind of marrying it to your consumer and how creative you want to be and how personalized you want to be and how does it sit in your overall PNL in the end? So I think that's largely where I would summarize. Obviously great connecting with all of you and I saw a great bunch of audience as well. Thank you very much, Malai. So to begin with, this is question is for the audience. Can you try naming two sectors that should not work on retention or should definitely not have retention? It is bad for business. So try feeding that into the chat window. From this session, a few things that I would want to summarize upon these were great learnings for me. The kind of listening that Praveethi you've talked about, I think that's homework for me. Stitching that creativity into tech stacks or the ability for a tech stack to leverage on that creativity and build scale, I think that's very important. It has to be something that we as a product company also need to figure out. Then most importantly, I think it's the experience that throughout the funnel, not just my tech stack but the product and eventually the delivery that end to deliver is the engagement, is truly the engagement that you build with that customer. And finally, we shouldn't rush into getting everything out there in the world, far too many shining objects, but the ROI is important and we should definitely take a look at the total cost of ownership. Those are my two best. Thank you everyone. Okay, let me just try and summarize this in one sentence. I think what we are saying is there's creativity on one side, there's technology tech stacks on the other side, there's data on the other side, there's a consumer in the middle and we need human intelligence to work all of this out so that we are in a connected world. So we use creativity, we use technology, we use data, draw out insights and then reach out to our consumers to not only acquire them but work extremely hard on retaining as many of them as possible. So I agree having all of you on the panel, it was really lovely speaking to all of you and getting all your perspectives. And one I am sure that you're not gonna get a single guy who's gonna write that they don't need your attention unless you're selling drugs or something like that. So you're in business. Thank you everyone. While we couldn't see any of your faces like in a real panel, it's great. I'm sure there were quite a few of you who watched us and I'm sure this will be available on social media for you to see it later as well. If there are any questions, please feel free to comment on any of the posts whether on Twitter or LinkedIn or any other places where this is shared and I'm sure the panel will be more than happy to come and answer your questions. Thank you everyone and thank you exchange for media team. Priyanka, especially specifically for working all with us over the last week or so to get us here. And just a minute before I sign off, first time after 90 days that I visited office just to get a clean wall behind me. Thank you so much. Thanks everybody, everyone. It was a very insightful session and thank you for giving a valuable time to us. Thank you. Have a nice weekend. Thank you.