 Good evening everybody, and welcome to the LinkedIn agency conclave partback exchange for media. My name is Santosh Krishnamurthy and I'm the head of the agencies for LinkedIn in India. We are really, really excited to have you all today. Thank you so much for taking out time and coming and seeing us. Agency conclave, like I mentioned, this is the first ever agency conclave in India, originally designed to be an on ground event. We thought we'll come and see you shake hands, share some stories. I'm sure every one of us has some of the other inspirational stories in the last couple of years. Things have changed personally and professionally. Professionally, it has changed in the last four or five years where we've seen that the digital marketing has taken a huge leap and we thought that we will address all that in today's conclave. One and half hours with us and we have a packed agenda. I'm really excited by the kind of the kind of conversation we are going to hear today from the agency from the agency ecosystem leaders, as well as from the LinkedIn leadership. At the same time, at the same time, we are really excited that we are going to get some nuggets from the leaders to how to look forward and and see that what's in store for us. But with that, I actually I'm really, really proud to introduce you to the team, the agency team of the LinkedIn marketing solution in India. Can I have a slide please? Yes, perfect. So this is, this is your agency team in India. Like I said, I'm Santosh. I had the agencies. I have Widget Shetty joined with me. Widget is the agency lead based at Bombay, takes care of holding companies. And I have Hari Sangha, who is the independent agency lead based in Delhi. We are really, really happy to take any questions during the conclave, if you have, or after that also you want to reach out to us, you can look for us at the LinkedIn, send us the connection and we'll be very happy to start the conversation. The team has put this put this conclave together to share the knowledge and to learn from the leaders from us. With that, I would just like to deep dive on the agenda. Can I have the agenda slide please? Perfect. We'll start with the macro trends, which we which actually is going to define the next, next probably 10 years from the V2BI Institute, which is a think tank of LinkedIn. Who better than Alex to take that? Alex Savoy is the director of agency and channel sales for APEC, based out of Singapore. And because of that, we have a conversation which is which we all are very interested about in today's scenario, which is the trust based marketing, and how the leaders are looking at post pandemic recovery. We are Prashant Kumar, the CEO of South Asia Group M. We fondly know him as PK. He's very grateful that he actually took our time to speak to us. Ryan Sharma, who's the director enterprise, LinkedIn marketing solution India and and novel co founder of exchange for media will be speaking to these two gentlemen. And I'm sure we will get a lot of insight how leadership has looked during pandemic talking to their customers talking to their, their own people post that brand marketing is something which we have always been talking about the top of the funnel marketing. We wanted to actually get an agency's point of view. Manoj Rijwani will be the session chair. Manoj is the director of bid market SMB at LinkedIn marketing solution India. He will be talking to Vinod Thadani, the chief digital growth officer of Densu media and the CFI prospect Chandni Shah, the founder and the chief operating officer of Kinect. The Mishra, the chief strategy officer of Lotsha and Bharat Khatri who has just taken over as the chief digital officer of APAC Omnicom. What I'm more excited about this group is that this group is actually going with a very diverse knowledge and diverse experiences. They are going to really give us some most of the point of view, all about an agency's point of view, which will be help us. We are okay with question and answers. Please let us know. With that, I think I would like to call upon Alex to tell us what to look forward in the next 10 years in the decade in 2030. Over to you Alex. Thank you Santosh for this great introduction. I'm delighted to welcome everybody to the very first India agency conclave organized by LinkedIn. I'm excited to be introducing some of the biggest trends uncovered by LinkedIn B2B Institute, which are going to help accelerate business to business relationship. We've worked with the some of the brightest marketing minds in the world to enable marketers to deliver more value. I'm Alex Ibois. I'm the head of agency and channel sales and for the next 20 minutes, I will present to you three of those trends. There will be mega trends, which we believe are the most impactful and contrarian trends. And we will invest in those trends in the next 10 years. And we're hoping that these will become references to the B2B marketing world. So let me share a little bit of context to start with to set us for success. So marketers often ask the same questions. What is everyone else doing? This is actually the wrong questions. What you should be asking is what is everyone not doing yet? If you're looking at the matrix, you will see that you can be either right or wrong. And you can be have consensus with everybody or you can be contrarian against the people. If you're wrong, you're wrong and you're not going anywhere. If you write while you have consensus, this is great. But ultimately you're not delivering much value. What you want to do is be right and be contrarian so you can foresee the trends before everybody else. So at LinkedIn B2B Institute, what we've been doing in the last five years is just exactly that. Defining those biggest trends in the market, which although they may not be widely used today, we believe they will become the benchmark of B2B marketing in the next 10 years. And that's where we're trying to basically share those discoveries with everyone of you today. So the three biggest market trends that I would like to cover today with you are the most durable and the most contrarian. We're talking about the Warren brand, blockbuster marketing, and the death of hybrid targeting. If you follow Jeff Bezos, you may have noticed that often he's been asked the same question. What will change in 10 years? And this is actually something he doesn't want to answer because his reasoning is very simple. The only way to plan and build a performing business, future success, hyper growth is by planning based on what will not change. So this is what we're going to do with our trend, assuming that these will not change and are the consistent commendment for your future B2B marketing strategies. So let's start with the first trend, the Warren brand. And this trend is actually all about the right balance between short term activation and long term brand. If you're considering short term activation, which will deliver its full potential roughly over a period of six months, you will have great results very, very quickly. But over time, after six months, not much more will be delivered. Whereas while brands and marketing start delivering its value, longer term, this is where you're going to see a real difference. Now the big question is, who are the marketers who actually look at their campaigns and the performance that they generate beyond six months? Actually, our research has uncovered that no more than 4% of B2B marketers are actually measuring beyond six months. And consequently, brand marketers are actually using the budget battle because 95% of the budgets used are actually performance based budgets, mostly based on CPC. So we've looked for the right balance between brand and activation budgets. And we've realized that we're roughly at 50% on each site with a slight benefit to the activation side. But if you're considering the current trends, B2B buyers are mostly now doing their own research. And what they tend to do is they look for the brands that they are already familiar with. Therefore, this is becoming much more important today for brands to overly invest on brand marketing to emerge and have greater visibility and greater results at a time. So if we're looking at the different benefits that each type of marketing delivers, and if we're looking at the brand benefits actually, we're seeing that both brands and activation deliver short term sales. That's a given. But over time, brand marketing is actually delivering much more, a greater number of benefits, long term sales and pressing power and so on. I will not cover all those benefits today for the sake of remaining time, but I will invite you to go to b2binstitute.org and download the full report. You will have all the details for all those different benefits. So let's concentrate on the first three benefits. Benefit number one, short term sales. Here, what you need to look into is basically how much value you can generate and the multiplying factor when you are marrying brands with acquisition companies. This is actually an existing case from a client who ran advertising on LinkedIn. And we realized that by coupling brand activity with acquisition strategy, the conversion rate was increased by a factor of 6x. This is pretty big and this is something to always remember because you're missing out if no branding budget are actually associated with your acquisition activities. Benefit number two, your marketers, we all know the very standard mental model that is the conversion funnel. You've got the top funnel, you've got the bottom funnel, but I'd like to invite you to flip that funnel on its side in order to reveal the extent and the importance of the time in that process. If you're looking at the bottom of the funnel, actually that will allow you to target, let's say if we're in the data cloud marketing service industry, maybe you have the potential of 20 clients. This is what we would call the in-market bias. You know them, you will intend to reach out to them and sell to them. This is a known territory. Now, in order to have growth all the time, the only way is to grow the number of potential accounts. Here we're talking about 200 accounts. And for that, you need to dramatically increase your branding budgets over a much longer period of time. And this is what we call out of market bias. Now, the interesting thing about this model is that one will define the current cash flows and the second one will define the future cash flows, which is always key elements to consider when you're talking to your finance people or your CFO, because this will talk to them and this will support your marketing strategy in a very effective way and concrete way. Benefit number three, pricing power. Strong brands can actually raise prices. The stronger your brand is and the more leadway you have on a plane on certain key parameters to increase the profitability of your brand. Price is one, sales volume, fixed costs, variable costs. All of these levers can actually be tweaked around to change and increase your profitability in a meaningful way. So this was the trend number one. Trend number two, blockbuster marketing. People talk a lot about creativity and they always think about how we can value their creations. Now, there is no better company than Walt Disney to actually look into how creatives are being used to deliver value over time. We think that a company like Walt Disney is a very good benchmark to apply certain principles to the B2B marketing world. Let me show you what are those different principles that could apply to the B2B marketing which help Walt Disney be successful the way they are today. Four of them. One is big bets. I'm not talking about small bets, we're talking about big bets. Number two, all content, all recipes are actually the best ones. This is surprising, let me get it. Number three, creativity is actually something that Disney is not working towards so much because they don't want to change the whole recipe. We all content so much. So this is what we call consistent distinctiveness. And fourth, we're talking about how you leverage in the content, create merchandising and deliver, distribute via multiple number of media platforms. This is what we call total merchandising. So let's go to the first principle. The big bets. The fundamental idea is that small bets are risky. The bigger your bets are and the more return they will generate. And if we're looking for the biggest block busters of the last 20 years, which are listed here, you will notice that actually the smallest investment have delivered the smallest return whereas the biggest investment have delivered consistently greater return from a ratio of one to six that much. Second principle, surprising familiarity. If you're looking at the list of all the biggest highest grossing movies of all time, you will see that the majority of them are actually, again, born out of all content, all recipes. They're all sequels and prequels. This is what works the best. And this is the reason why Hollywood today has shifted towards a sequel model. This is what works the best. And we're looking at one of the best b2b marketer in the market today, Salesforce. This is exactly what they're doing with their state of sales report. This is the same recipe over and over again, just different data every year. Principle number three, consistent distinctiveness. If you're looking at the different campaigns of Salesforce, this is the same sort of creativity, the same two tone blue shade, the same raccoon kids icon and the same wording. This is the same creative model. If you look at those ads, you know this is Salesforce. It cannot be any other CRM couple. Principle number four, total merchandising. The same creative are used across different channels. This is what pays off. And if you're looking at the spread of the revenue of Disney, you can realize very easily that actually not the revenue from movies are the biggest ones, the one coming from toys. So they are milking the same model and they're leveraging creative and different media platforms to the fullest. And the same way that's what Salesforce has been doing, same creative, different channels. That's trend number two. Finally, trend number three, the death of hyper target. We've all been talking a lot about how to target the best individuals at the right time, the right place. Well, I'm sorry to say, but I think this is going to change in the next decades. This is going to shift today. Today, B2B is mostly a niche and a very specific hyper targeting model, B2C broader targeting model, but this is going to change. We believe that over the next 10 years, B2C will target even more broadly than today to accommodate the ever faster changing trends and audiences. Whereas B2B will still require some level of targeting, but will require some different type of targeting. Here we're talking about buying category talents. So let's look into it. So we've got different assumptions that we're going to cover, which we're actually supporting hyper targeting model. But let me explain to you why we think those assumptions are actually not valid anymore. Stable buying committee. Well, if you consider all the people involved in the buying process, those individuals are actually moving targets, even more so today. Everybody's changes, jobs, industries, companies, more and more often. So today, the marketing director may have been before an agency director, for example. The current CEO, previously was a finance manager. The current IT decision maker was maybe a junior IT person. The latest research that we have uncovered from our member base is that 54%, nothing less than 54% of the LinkedIn members have changed jobs, company, industry, year over year. This is a very fast moving network of people that you still need to target. And so you need to do very good targeting to capture those individuals. Assumption number two. Only buyers matter. Well, they couldn't be any more wrong by assuming the same. Influences today around the buyers are everywhere. Think about the partners. Think about your employees. Think about the media. Think about the clients. There is a plethora of influencers everywhere. And this cannot be ignored. So in the B2C world, they have to target very broadly their category of buyers. This is the very nature of mass marketing. This is how it is. No other way. In the B2B world, what you want to do is actually target 100% of the potential category buyers. Nothing less, 100%. Obviously, you don't want to target everyone because in the case of IBM, for example, we know that not everybody will want or will be able to buy IBM. So there is no logic in targeting a broader scope. But you will need to cover 100% of those category buyers. This is where you're going to have the greatest. Assumption number three. Here, what you need to understand is basically by doing hyper-targeting, unlike a lot of what a lot of people assume, you're not going to save money. This is not the best strategy for it. There are three types of targeting. There is no targeting at all with lowest CPM level, very high level of wastage. You have broader targeting level, which is mid-way, and you have hyper-targeting, which is the most expensive activity. Actually, the upfront investment for hyper-targeting, this is the very reason why ultimately this is the most costly exerciseable. So broad targeting is the right middle ground to exercise a little bit to be active. So these are the three trends that I wanted to present to you. And I would like to finish this demonstration with one slide, which I think is probably the very most important graph of the B2B marketing industry today. Which is basically the model of the category rich is the single greatest predictor of sales. If you're looking at the difference between share of market and share of voice, if you're growing a brand, you're going to lead a share of market and you're going to intend to grow as much as possible your share of voice. But here is the catch. If your share of voice is smaller than your share of market, your brand is going to shrink. Now, on the other hand, if your share of voice is actually bigger than your share of market, your brand is going to grow. This is a fundamental concept that every marketer in B2B needs to remember. The more clients you have, the more clients you need to acquire to continue growing. This is obvious, but this is the reality today and this is how marketing needs to be done in B2B. So growth is a function of effective share of voice, which is a difference between the share of voice and the share of market, food for thought. So how can I apply these trends? Number one, do invest in brand building. This is the only way to deliver future growth. Number two, invest in blockbuster franchises. This is how you're going to deliver value from your creative. Number three, invest in category targeting. If you want to be the leader of your own category, this is the way to do it. So hopefully you found this information valuable. I would like to invite you to visit the B2B Institute.org website where you'll be able to download the full report and all the other 30 trends that were delivered by this Think Tank. And with that, I will pass the button to Nawal, our co-founder of Exchange for Media, who's going to moderate the fire chat on the topic of trust-based marketing and post-pandemic recovery. Over to you, Nawal. Good afternoon and welcome to the first edition of the LinkedIn Exchange for Media India Agency Conclave. I'm here to talk to two gentlemen today. India CEO of Group M, the South Asia CEO of Group M Prashant Kumar is with me and is Sachin. Sachin Sharma is the India Director for Marketing Solutions for LinkedIn. Thank you gentlemen for joining me. Thank you for taking time out. The agency world has gone a significant transformation in the last year and a half, especially due to the pandemic. And today's conversation is going to be centered around what's happening in the agency, the marketing ecosystem, how media partners are helping clients and agencies reach out customers better. And to curate that conversation, we have these two gentlemen with us who will guide us through what's happening in the agency ecosystem. Let me start with Prashant. Prashant, thank you for joining us. Thank you, Nawal. Hi, Sachin. Prashant. Prashant, you know, you took over Group M a little before the pandemic, roughly, in 2019 sometime. And, you know, there were a lot of things going on. Even then, the digital world was storming through the media industry, the advertising ecosystem. And the pandemic has just disrupted everything in a very short space of time. Tell us a few things that agencies have gone through in the last 18 months. What's the significant change that has happened, which the pandemic has brought in, which might not have happened otherwise? Yeah, that's a question which I think for now, people are probably pondering what happened in the last 18 months, right? I think a lot of things have happened. First of all, this was quite an out of syllabus for everybody, right? I think every leader, every CEO, you know, in 2020, you know, people realize that there's something different, right? It's quite unique. I think a lot of things have happened. It has happened across consumers. It has happened across the entire landscape, evolving every single week at that time, right? It has happened with all of us as people, right? So we look at clients, we look at partners, we look at the entire landscape, including our own, ourselves, itself, right? If I were to really look at some of the aspects, I think it's already aware, all of us, that digital acceleration has been at the maximum, right? We were all, probably we were all in the working from home syndrome for a very long time. And that also gave in time, that also gave in bandwidth for people to be curious and try and understand more and more things. And digital became a big advantage there, right? So getting information, getting different data, trying out different platforms, content consumption across digital platforms, all of that came in, right? Including some of the products, some of the consumer behavior, etc., started evolving, right? And that again is through discovering and being curious, including product availability, etc., became and we all witnessed it ourselves, right? All that became a larger aspect of evolution. I would say that one of the aspects which probably become more important when we look from now is not just knowing the consumer, but also where do they belong, right? And what are the cohorts of consumers, right? The segments of consumers. I think if I were to draw in an example, if you look at some of the recent campaigns, you know, modernists did, which is about knowing where the customer is, not just knowing the customer, including the pin code, what do they do, what are the communities, etc., becomes handy in knowing the taste of the consumer and targeting them, right? I think it's also important to know the consumer journey and not the consumer strategy from there, because the journey itself was evolving. So that's the second point, which you look at it, right? And as we discussed about digital acceleration, we looked at the technology enablement on that, whether it is across platforms or whether different products which came in, all of that really got embraced in the form of consumer journeys, which was a lot of curiosity for all of us and then drawing solutions for the brands and clients. And the third aspect which came in quite handy and useful is the entire relationship aspect. So consumer relationship at one end, relationship with our clients, because they are also part of the same journey. They are also going through similar aspects. One thing that came in handy is the curiosity to learn the platform digital became a universal need, right? It's not just for one expertise. That really helped in terms of having different exchanges and all that matters relationship there. This included relationships with our own employees, our own team, right? Because there you've got to be in touch with them, you've got to be connected. There were lots of things happening personally, professionally. So third aspect is focus on the relationships, whether it is from a consumer perspective or brand connected to consumer or the client practices, how it's transforming from their end as well as our employees, right? I think we also saw a situation where, you know, what we really embraced more is the new areas, the new habits, the new practices which are coming. Whether it's the area of e-commerce, the area of social commerce, the area of tech-enabled products, etc. that happened. I think they're, you know, supporting and enabling the human factor because it is, if you consume it as a human, so are we, right? From that aspect, developing them, skinning them, platforms across, right? Even including LinkedIn where data, more than data insights became more useful and therefore using them and enabling them became very, very critical. And last, I would say all of this stood behind a lot of values, right? I think that is where the aspect of facing it boldly, getting courage on attempting to do new solutions, learning and experimenting them. You know, the value aspect of working together because the ecosystem needs to progress from that aspect. So these are some of the few learning we had and I think now when we look at and we look behind, it's a great learning. I think it was a crash course of how crisis and especially a global crisis in different footprints with different characteristics can be looked at. I think it just adds on to the experience of how we look at different crises and find solutions as well as create some great solutions for future. Thanks Sachin, let me just come to you now and tell us, you represent the platform side and digital platforms have seen significant growth in the last 18 months. The momentum that was already there pre-pandemic has taken on to a different level and you are at the forefront when it comes to connecting brands with their consumers. What are the significant changes you have seen in the last 18 months as a platform, the expectations agencies, clients have from you and what are those changes which you think are here to stay? Yes, first I want to say great context PK. I think the four trends that you covered pretty much sums up what we have seen over the last one year. But as a professional platform our vision is to create economic opportunity for the global workforce. So you can imagine it was never more relevant or important than in the last one and a half or two years. That is entirely what we have been focused on. And there was a lot of product innovation, trusted information, insights like PK said that we shared with the workforce so they can adopt to the new normal. So there is a lot of new launches that we have done. For example company tab, we have new job titles, a ton of launches that have happened over the last two years. And then on the platform usage front, PK covered this again but massive digital acceleration is what we have seen. So we are now 800 million plus members across 200 countries and you will be amazed but every minute 130 new members start on the platform. There are 10,000 new connections, four job hires are made every minute on the platform. So massive acceleration there but I think as a platform we were very cautious and again this is something that PK alluded to is that the values and the background with which we have always served our members we kept them at a forefront. So factual information was shared with the members. We had to do a lot of product innovation to deal with the new normal which is hybrid and remote work and how people would interact with each other and within their organizations and outside their organizations. So that's been the focus over the last one year. In terms of the last bit that PK said is that there's been a massive acceleration but it's still not back to normal. So I think we are very conscious that we'll continue to innovate and see where this is headed over the next few months. Fantastic and there's a lot of headroom to grow still. Digital has grown significantly but as you mentioned there are 30 people coming online on LinkedIn every minute. And there are still many people who are not onto the network yet so the headroom for growth is significant. PK let me come back to you and ask you something about you know what's happening as far as the consumer journey is concerned. And some of the conversations I've had with you know brand CEOs over the last 18 months tells me that in many ways reaching out to consumers has become both easier and difficult when I say difficult more complex. So can you tell us because you deal with brands across multi sectors you deal with consumers who are across all media content you are also into content curation. In what ways do you think reaching customers has become easier as well as more difficult so complex. Yeah it's a good situation to be I would rather put it because when the pandemic happened it came with a lot of challenges but it also threw in a lot of opportunities right. And enablement of technology to answer some of the solutions whether it is reaching consumers or engaging came with some easy solutions as well as some complex solutions right. A lot of plan working with platforms like such and mentioned helped in collaborative understanding about where the journeys are going right. What are how are the tastes evolving how do we get to reach them etc. I think you know the so-called old or you know pre-covid formula of looking at only compartmental media wise planning or media wise thinking moved away and moved into the modern marketing way of approach right on reaching consumers. This means that accountability ability to see outcomes and therefore match with that became a primary priority for clients and for brands right. So platform really helped in terms of understanding that and I think the way the plans and the thinking was going on is to see how the reach can be more effective and outcome based. And not just from an efficiency perspective right because efficiency also meant how wastage can be taken off right. Adding that advanced solution as I mentioned earlier is where are the segments right and knowing them more where the technology platform also gave you know solutions or opportunities to know them more helped it right. Otherwise I think it was a pretty much game because as we talk about consumer yourself are part of that and there were many many platforms coming in discovery happening during that time. Whether it is the area of distribution with the area of social commerce or there have been influence of marketing right when I look at you know seven eight years back and look at all the solutions that you would draw to a client's task. You might probably have bought six to seven you know solutions. That's right. That has probably exploded to some fifteen twenty of them right. You probably did not have the influence of marketing as one of the key solution at that time. But now I think brands probably leverage them in a unilateral some of the brands and make it useful for the outcomes that they require. So that again is basis the reach perspective. So the looking at it was Mars or it is very concentrated universe of consumers that itself became a part of the brief or the thinking. That's how the thinking on read itself has changed right. So this again I would think that the scaling up of some of these products and you know solutions is happening as you speak. I think somewhere this itself is evolving right. I would I would also feel some of the emergence of newer solutions that come out of it. You touched base on the content perspective. I think the entire advancement on how content should be looked at from communication perspective is itself as an evolutionary space. A lot more personalization a lot more ability to at the same time real time basis talk to different consumers. Technology emerged which again is bringing the engagement to consumer much more effective. So all of this is actually a very exciting space right. Some of them actually for all of us and when I look at more and more is applicable to our own organization because our own employees are in a way trying to learn most of this. So it's a great learning. I think a lot of unlearning and unlocking value for brands are coming through many of this new you know modern marketing approach. Fantastic. I'm going to come back to this learning unlearning bit a little later. Let me jump back to Sachin now Sachin you know as I mentioned at the beginning you are at the forefront of you know what's happening with consumers. Digital has had significant uptake because of pandemic but it's also made a life very challenging and complex for digital platforms per se. There is fragmentation. There are multiple platforms where consumers have to spend time. So keeping the engagement going and making sure that you are relevant because in the digital world you are only as relevant as you know yesterday morning. So how do you make sure that your relevance and the engagement keeps going up when every day there are you know newer and newer platforms launching. Absolutely. So back in 2020 when the impact and scale of the pandemic became apparent. First thing we realized is that our members were actually flocking to trusted sources of information. And so both content creation content sharing spike massively which is also something that we can cover is the digital acceleration piece across platforms and across social primary. Now one of our strengths always have been that we've taken up members first approach and we've also been globally the most trusted platform for the last six years. So there was a lot of goodness that we could share with the members but yes we had to do some product innovation. We had to figure out ways of how we can scaleably share trusted information with them that they could rely on. So that is what we've solved for also coming back to one of the points that we curious very very interesting is around influencer marketing. You would see that new influencers from a professional perspective that we wanted over the last few years and that has happened globally not just in India. So that's the other bit of acceleration that we've gotten some members could get access to the information that they were looking for. But just to give you an idea we've seen about 29% year over year growth in public content sharing on the platform. And it has not been easy because as the members and as our customers were going through the pandemic this painful journey we tried to partner with them. But like PK said internally our own teams were going through the same journey and it was just so chaotic. It was very difficult to have the agility to innovate on the fly and to build products and services that cater to our members. So it has been a great learning experience for sure. One of the things I really liked about what PK said is the partnership that say a group M agencies have had with networks. And the idea for that was to share factual trust for the information and use relevant insights to cater to not just our consumers but also to brands. Now one of the things about this pandemic and a lot of research has gone into this is as brands look at emerging from this cycle from this economic cycle. Partnerships and trusted partnerships are going to be very important which brings in the element of trust. And what we've realized is 70% of purchase decisions by the consumers is actually linked to the trust that they have in an entity. In fact, there's a great recent Harvard study that's been published. Two key drivers of trust that we've realized is one's competence. So both technical competence and social, the environment that you operate in, how well do you innovate. And the other is ethics and a lot of communication and a lot of our partnership with group M for example has been about how do we help brands be open and communicate the values, their culture and their work modalities and operations to build that trust with the audience as they try and look at economic recovery. So from a consumer perspective, yes, massive acceleration to answer your question. But we've had to innovate in parallel and we are still obviously grappling with a lot of problems that this industry is facing. But also on the brand side, on the marketing side, great partnerships, the data that we have access to, all of us have helped cater to some of the elements. Yeah, very important point Sachin, you mentioned there and I think the pandemic has kind of opened a complete Pandora's box. I recall during last year, the first lockdown, there was so much news floating around and one would typically bank upon credible, trustworthy, reliable sources of information for any news about how the pandemic was spreading and digital platforms because of the way they mushroomed in the last few years. I think trust and credibility has become a very, very important aspect which kind of segregates the reliable platforms versus the others. And a lot of brands, you work with brands across so many sectors, they are also extremely conscious of the fact that they need to be present on platforms that are credible and that are trustworthy. What's your experience with clients when it comes to working with platforms which have trust and credibility? When I ask this question for a reason, is that there is a saying always in content and journalism, any news is good news. But at the same time, when you are looking at news which might not be true, fake news has become such a big menace online these days. On one hand, brands are seeking reach, higher engagement. On the other side, you also don't want to associate with something which is kind of not trustworthy. So, it's a very thin line you are walking. How do you make sure that you continue to walk the thin line without falling on either side? I think as we all discussed, it's not, I mean, during the pandemic, this issue is not just a pandemic issue. That's right. This has always existed. I think trust and integrity is a lot of value that drives any content and also enables ambience for brands to communicate with consumers. You know, what probably we witnessed is because we were spending a lot of time with ourselves, with our families at home and probably there was a lot of consumption of content starting from our children to our parents and our grandparents and they had all different platforms from digital platforms, TV, newspaper, radio and multiple aspects. And of course, it was not an easy context because the pandemic itself was not a very challenging one. And we have seen how different countries have started using that for their own, you know, progress and dealing with the pandemic in different form from digital platforms, content, etc. That too happened during this time. When you look at our clients, I think every single client today has only got more educated from all these happenings, right? And educated because they themselves got involved into it as a consumer as well as a practitioner. Now that enables us to study this and talk to them and discuss and co-create what are some of the good, really purposeful aspects for any campaign which should happen. So many of the first which we look at is observing, learning them, right? Formulating some benchmarks, understanding what is it, talking to platforms, talking to partners, aligning with them on some of the principles that we should look at, talking back to the clients, understanding what is this and therefore leading with it and therefore collectively trying to build the trusted marketplace for the entire ecosystem. So clients value this in a very primary form. I can say today that more partners and existing partners also value this in a very progressive manner. I think all this enables us to have right conversations, right solutions and bring in that aspect of trust and integrity into the solutions. And we have seen this progressing very well. Benchmarks have been useful. Many of the tools have become useful. Many of the data insights which partners provide just like LinkedIn with such dimension, they become useful when you do discussions with clients. So I think it's a progressive space but yeah, the ambience is something which I think every content owner will also look at how it can value back to the consumer first and then how it can be leverage for brands to communicate with consumers. Yes, especially since most of the brands aspire to be brands or brands of purpose. I think being on platforms where brand safety is ensured has become even more important. I will take this question to Sachin with a slightly different view, Sachin. And again, you work with a large number of agency partners and brands. In your sense, what is the importance? Brands are now increasingly attaching to things like brand safety, credibility of data. You know, ad fraud has been a conversation we've been having for the last few years. Digital has grown significantly in the last few years and, you know, increasingly more and more brands are investing money on digital, viewability, measurability. What's your sense of what is the kind of conversations, importance that brands are now giving to these conversations? Now the interesting point is because of the digital acceleration that we've seen over the last one and a half, two years, I loved it when PK said it's all family members now consuming information and data at an increased pace and because of that, there's been a lot more focus but these, some of these issues predate the pandemic itself. That's right. And so we've always at LinkedIn, we've had a members first approach and that means every decision we make, every product feature, innovation that we do and then we have to make trade-offs most importantly. We always keep members as a most important priority. So that hasn't changed and in partnership with agencies and I know a lot of cutting edge work has actually happened with GroupM in terms of privacy, in terms of trust. Some of these partners bring that insight and knowledge to us but one of the principles that we are driven now is privacy by design which means everything that we design, every new feature we roll out. We have to be conscious and respectful for the fact that we sit on a massive heap of first-party data that these members have willfully shared with us. So for example, if you look at LinkedIn as a platform, all the people are building these profiles and giving out this information and therefore the responsibility or accountability to use this. Yes. But yes, we've seen a lot more interest and that's the direction you will see us going in. The other great point that we curious was this trusted marketplace concept and what I would like to underline there is the importance of doing this collaboratively with partners across the ecosystem. So it's not just one platform that's probably going to solve this. One is it's an ongoing journey and all of our innovation, all of our thinking, we are collaborating very actively with partners, with third parties. We're trying to bring in the stakeholders to try and see eventually what does the final outcome look like but with our members as the core focus area. So how do we solve for their privacy has been the top of mind at LinkedIn forever. I think we have a slightly advantageous position because of the access to the first-party data as more privacy-related regulations come into effect and some of these industry changes take effect over the next few years. But I think that's one of the other reasons that there is a lot more thought introspection at LinkedIn of how we want to use that. But yes, we are going to partner with the agencies. You will see a lot more focus on this. And I think eventually this landscape will evolve over the next few years. Yes. And very interesting things have come out like PK said. Pre-pandemic, we had so-called compartmentalization. These would be your sources for news. These would be your sources for entertainment. This for sports. This for non-fiction. Now that sort of compartments are gone. Almost every platform has become source for information. Almost every platform is source for entertainment. So if you're consuming so much news from so many platforms across the board, brand safety, the credibility of the platform is also very become extremely important. Let me come now to the post-pandemic world as we come out of COVID and hopefully the worst is behind us. We've seen PK, you've done a bit of restructuring as well as created sort of new verticals within your company. We saw news few days back. You created something called Group M Services. You've appointed somebody in charge. You've doubled down on content curation, what you're doing with clients in that area. Can you tell us a few, give us a glimpse of what's happening across various verticals in Group M. And as you come out of the pandemic, how you're restructuring and how you're looking at the post-pandemic world in terms of how an agency ecosystem will be structured for the client. I don't know if I can still say post-pandemic, though I would like to happily mention that. But yeah, we are there. I think for us, everything is in the area of driving benefits to our clients. And partners. It's an ecosystem and since we are fortunate and blessed to be a leader in the market, I think there's a lot of responsibility to ensure that we look at from that context. During this last, you know, 18 months, and this is not something, you know, I can't say that we didn't plan any of this or we didn't have any of this in mind. But I think just like a lot of things got accelerated, this is also an opportunity to look at how we can be more effective, how we can have specialism and leverage that, how we can contribute to newer radical solutions like commerce, data, insights, technology, as well as how we can collaboratively bring in all the solutions back to our current clients, as well as work with partners. You're right, specialism is an important word here because I genuinely feel that there's only one expert. The expertise, I mean, as much as you expertise on specialism, you have to do that. There's only one way to do it, right? Playing a cover drive is like you have to have one way of playing a cover drive, right? Of course, hitting a six, you can do multiple ways. So this is not hitting a six because hitting a six is in a different way which you look at from an analogy. When you look at platform expertise, you need to focus there more. So how can we create more experts in different areas? How can we have different story aspects on the thinking and strategy, et cetera, as well as how can we drive benefits to our clients and therefore work along with a lot of partners became the core of how we do this. While all of this is happening, I think we should also embrace the point that transformation and growth go hand in hand. There is transformation happening in the consumer side, in the client side, and that is actually making us also transform. And growth is also going hand in hand because all of us are trying to how we can progress. So what are some of the areas where you can bring in more specialism, where you can consolidate, bring in more benefits? What are some of the areas where your new tools and new ways of working can be looked at all of this started applying? So we therefore came with one of the group of services, one of the areas which we focused and brought in more expertise, specialism, and working across some of the services, some of the products we launched, looking at the technology aspect, as Naval mentioned on the content aspect. So going beyond some of the only short format or long format and focusing more on platform-related video customization, all of that started happening. But I must say that when you're trying to do all of this, it's important to bring in together everybody. So as Sachin mentioned, working with partners enabled, working with other partners in some of the areas, enabled the thinking to go even sharper and more stretched. So driving benefits to our clients become very, very critical and we're able to do that. So we see a situation going forward for us where transformation growth go hand in hand. And therefore it is a necessity to keep the relevance of transformation, learn from it, observe as well as apply it back into areas of growth. And that is where you see a lot more people coming together, applying the technology aspect, enable them, because I think as technology enables human from that context, wherever effective and as an efficiency can be obtained, I think that's what everybody is focusing on, which applies to our own industry. And we see that a very progressive journey so far and a lot of exciting aspects coming in. So many co-created products with different platforms, so much of insights which can be looked at, and real-time aspects can be looked at. So I think all these new ways of working is making the excitement even more. So let me come to some softer aspects of what's happened during the pandemic and as we come out of it, what's likely to happen, PK. As I mentioned at the beginning, you took over in 2019 before the pandemic. What's been the toughest parts of being a leader in these last two years? Frankly, there have been times when you're tough. Things have been tough. And sometimes during this pandemic time, I believe that we are all social animals and sometimes you feel a bit more lonely. That to me is the most toughest time. So definitely I have my own ways of doing it. Those are some of the new discoveries. So you speak to your colleagues, you speak to your friends. Of course, you're with your family. I do have a pet, so I spend some time with my pet. All of that is important for all of us to sustain and drive ourselves out of this so-called crisis which we never knew, probably from many of our parents or our grandparents. So that's very important. Loneliness, how to get over it. But I must say that it's important to recognize first and accept that there is a challenge because by doing that, you open yourself to trying many multiple things and also bring your original, genuine values up to leverage. So for me, collective thinking became extremely important because this organization is a collective result of multiple talent, multiple leaders who really bring, brought in the journey of progress every month, every year. I think the sense of gratitude is very much from the bottom of my heart to all the people who advise within the organization as are all the people who help. So my colleagues, including my bosses, including some of the partners, including many of the clients who are part of this journey. Advises are very critical and the moment you realize this because you've got to exchange some of this because that gives an idea for somebody to jam and come with solutions. I would also say that as this pandemic had a mixture of many challenging personally, professionally, across different people, let us not get distracted for something which I firmly believed while emotionally we're connected to it and therefore 24 hours, 65 days from that context, we should not get distracted because the moment you get, it could be an issue that is ledging you or it could be something else that is doing. But if you get distracted, then you lose the focus on what you're trying to do for the organization, for your people and therefore to our clients and therefore to our partners. So that's very, very critical. I think a lot of it has been a good experience. So I must say that a lot of it also included things which we never wanted, right? But bringing a lot of things, gems within ourselves, within our teams were a great discovery. Of course, there are also some disappointments which happened, but I'm sure. But gems, discovering them, discovering the solutions, et cetera, became extremely useful and encouraging in this journey. So well, there's more, but I think these are some of the key elements which I really felt during this journey and inspiring each other, a collective influence, being transparent and honest to what is happening. All that helped to carry along people to a direction which we can do more and be progressive. Yes Sachin, you lead a fairly large team again as marketing solutions at LinkedIn. While on one hand, pandemic has delivered significant growth to the business, but the human, the people aspects have been very difficult and very challenging last 18 months. A lot of us have gone through personal tragedies while trying to keep focus on what's happening at work. What's your leadership style? How have you dealt with it personally as the team of the leader? I would actually break this into two parts and I think one part we discovered really well which is your leadership with the internal constituencies which is your team, your partners, people that you interact with and work with every day. So a lot of gratitude for this fact, but we have very progressive leadership at LinkedIn and it was very easy transition for us because typically we've worked from the starting point or culture of trust in our employees. So you'd have seen some of these messages come out but we went into a complete remote and hybrid work model and we continue to be in that model and of course we've seen our results only get stronger over the last one year. So one aspect of this was with the team's internal and I think what we are seeing right now globally is probably one of the biggest changes to hit the world of work which is the people are not just questioning where and how they work they're questioning why they work in the first place and therefore the massive resignation drive and the flight of talent, but we at LinkedIn believe we call it the great reshuffle and we believe that this will eventually have very beneficial impact to the world of work and to the overall ecosystem. So we believe leaders have to lead with inclusion, with empathy and you have to innovate on the fly. You have to really see what's working for your teams. That's exactly what we've done over the last one and a half years. I also know that it's been very surprising for some because people were not initially convinced that the business would continue to do as well in the new setting with the remote and hybrid environment becoming so mainstream and it's very convincing and also promising to see that really the business hasn't suffered at all. In fact our employees, our teams, much more in a state of mental well-being are able to contribute their best and so we are taking a very gradual, very paced out approach to how we want to get back to the normal and what the new normal looks like is also something we're trying to define. So that's internal. And then I think the other aspect of this is with the brands with the marketers and how we educate them and spoke a little bit about this earlier but brand hit home, close to the families, to the teams but it has definitely opened our eyes about what's possible and how you can delegate and give more authority to people to figure out what progression and careers look like for them. Very well said Sachin and one of the I think important aspects that pandemic has brought about is the value of empathy and compassion and the fact that businesses exist not just to make profit but to contribute to society to make sure society members are taken care of. Sachin I'll let you have the last word. Tell us what's in store for us from LinkedIn next few years. What are the going to be the focus areas, new products, solutions that you are looking to introduce? We are very excited about the future. And as you know I've discovered this multiple times in this conversation but it's going to be more of digital acceleration so you will definitely see a lot of features about how employees can work in a remote or hybrid environment but still get the experience that you would get face to face. We've launched many new features like live virtual events. We've done a lot of information on the ad side and that will continue to happen while obviously looking at the privacy principles but how do we share more information in terms of measurement in terms of attribution so some of those features are going to come up next. I think the last bit that I would say is that we are also seeing massive interest in learning and upskilling on the platform so millions of people are signing up for courses and so as we get to the end of this conversation I would like to just reinforce what PK just said is there isn't an opportune time or there isn't the best course that you should be taking because it's just a concept of can you learn a new any new concept or go back and revisit a concept so I think that is going to be very very important for LinkedIn because working professionals, they are now in a new environment there are so many more opportunities so obviously everyone wants to reskill and upskill but that shouldn't come with any sense of pressure so that's what we are looking forward to and you will continue to see a lot of new features, new innovation personally last one and a half years I've spent a lot of time with my 7 year old daughter to revisit in the Uxher so I finally realized that there is still time for me to learn something that I wasn't ever able to learn so that's the positive note for you Fantastic, thank you gentlemen and like a lot of people say the important thing in life as in business is to continue to make mistakes that's the only way to grow you should be worried if you are not making mistakes doing is most important getting out and doing it get an opportunity to meet you in person and this is an on ground initiative Thank you PK, thank you Sachin for spending time you're free to shoot your questions to us and we'll take them to PK and Sachin till then, goodbye and I hope you enjoyed the session You were on mute Sorry, I was on mute Thank you so much Naval and thank you PK and Sachin for take out time I think we are here and over to you Manoj for the most interesting panel we've been waiting for Thank you so much Santosh That is indeed a very interesting discussion Hey everyone and welcome to this panel discussion Today we are going to have hopefully a very interesting conversation with some veterans from the agency space in India So if I could request Bharat, Chandni and Arithi switch on the video so that we can kick off with introduction Hey Chandni, hey Bharat Hi guys Welcome to this panel discussion I think we'll let Manoj join whenever he can But to kick it off I really just wanted to start by introducing all of you and just looking at all your profiles and I think Hey Manoj, welcome Hi So I was just saying that I was looking at all your profiles and between all of you guys have probably a century or more of experience in the agency space in India so across industries, brands, verticals of all shapes and sizes and obviously you've seen the media industry in India evolve So hopefully we'll get some very interesting insights from all of you So I think to sort of, I just want to make sure I introduce all of you to the audience So I'll probably start with Chandni So Chandni you've found it connect about 10 to 12 years ago and this is obviously most recently partly acquired by IPG So you're part of the IPG group now and obviously worked with some wonderful brands So many congratulations on that Thank you You know, Manoj who's been a again a veteran who's been with GroupM in multiple roles across in sort of the WVP group in multiple agencies there across multiple roles but most recently has moved to the CDO role at Densu and is also the CEO of IProspect so you know congratulations on your new dual role and welcome to the panel and Bharat again who spent a lot of time with the WVP group mainly with its access building it up, grounds up for several years and again very recently has moved to a new role the Chief Digital Officer APAC for the Omnikom Group so congratulations on your new role again Bharat Thanks And Aditi, obviously you've been with the Loadstar sort of group for a while now and currently are in the Chief Strategy Officer role and obviously you've done a lot of work working with several brands devising you know and deploying product strategy and you know brand strategies across various industries so welcome to the panel Aditi as well Just to kick off I thought I'll go around and just get a sense from all of you as to how you've seen the client agency sort of relationship evolve in India particularly over the last you know five years or so because there's so much has changed obviously you know digital has become more important content has become more important so I just wanted to see from each one of your lenses through the agencies that all of you have led and the various brands you've worked at what are like maybe a couple of key changes that you observed so maybe Aditi we can start with you So I think in the last five years what has fundamentally changed in the agency client relationship is an increased desire for accountability so you know everybody is looking at agency partners to be accountable more from a business partnership lens rather than just the deliverables that they had in terms of media or in terms of pricing or in terms of content so now clients are looking at agency partners to partner their journey with full accountability and that has obviously changed the relationship because in some ways it has become extremely strategic because you are actually a much bigger part of the business planning that you now are contributing to versus perhaps what you were doing earlier but at the same time because of the increased pressures of business there is a big ROI focus so it's I think a dual kind of a challenge which agencies need to now work with clients as well Do you think that has made life easier or more difficult for agencies as a result I think it's made life interesting because it also has forced all agencies to look within everybody has to now design themes which understand complete journeys they need to not just look at one siloed piece of the pie but see how everything is coming together and that has helped I think agencies also figure out what are the areas they need to invest in what are the kind of people, the talent the tools data is the big buzz word now where all should we go as partners and where all should we be focusing on to make sure that we do the best for our clients I would say Makes sense, makes sense, thanks Althi you know your perspective on this Yeah I guess initially like you asked Manoj I guess what has changed I think it's made the relationship much much more stronger the client agency are no more vendors or an agency I guess now clients understand that we are more partners in business the clients work with agencies obviously because they know that these are the agencies who also have skin in the game and in the last two years I guess like I think Aditi mentioned so rightly articulated like it has become interesting but at the same time more accountable right the clients and the agencies work together and I have seen in boardrooms working together putting the entire business plans while we understood that initially on covid there was no playbooks there was nothing which was ready but people have evolved people have taken that into their stride and currently I think businesses have opened clients are happy spending consumers especially on digital have grown exponentially and we need to see all reports which are there in the market where is the next 500, 700 million coming from I guess agencies and clients understand this that it's together that we need to make sure we evolve this medium to another level you see it moving more from a transactional relationship to like a true partnership where there is more skin in the game for agencies as well is that I guess it's already a partnership I won't say it's transactional anymore because if you see that when we discuss business objectives and not only advertising or media I would want to believe that it's going to be a partnership and not a relationship okay you need to just execute my campaigns it's much more strategic in nature and because if you're relying on your client as well as the client is relying on the agency to make sure that we together achieve those business objectives I guess it's an integrated partnership together absolutely absolutely thanks you know Chani and again I know that you're not sort of an independent agency in that sense anymore but given your journey as an independent agency is there a special lens you have in terms of how the relationship has evolved with clients yeah so what happened for us is that initially when we started off digital was just an amplification medium you know the mainline agencies would be cracking the creative communication and digital was just supposed to be just uploading those pieces on YouTube, Facebook and that's really the role that they were playing now what has happened is especially after the pandemic what has happened is digital has come into the forefront and how you know the kind of contribution that a digital agency is having in a business or a CEO and a CMO's life has only changed I think most CMOs now have a KPR as to how much what does this spend that they're doing on digital how are they innovating on digital in fact some CMOs have said that we don't know please teach us how it's done because we need to kind of make sure that we have our jobs in place so what I'm saying is that it's really become a conversation in boards in the CEO tables and the CMO tables and digital has really come into the forefront from that standpoint so the relationship has become far more integrated than before I'll tell you for example like a lot of the marketing signals are now coming from digital you know when we're launching brands also like a digital launch let's see how it goes you know if this market is it's getting the right kind of reception then let's go out there and launch the product and XYZ cities so a lot of marketing signals are coming from digital from that standpoint and therefore contributing to the business so I just feel like also digital is evolving really fast so what's happening it's not you know so agencies are becoming more critical because it's very difficult for the client side teams to keep up with the pace at which you know things are moving so therefore I feel like forget transactional it's now very very strategic and you know far more integrated than before I suppose what you're saying is that given that digital skills have become hard to keep up with agencies and the ecosystem that has that you know we'll see brands and clients or are you already seeing brands and clients become more dependent on them for those skills because it's hard for them to build those skills yeah exactly it's not that they aren't but I mean if they want to go deeper and you know grow faster then you know the agency dependency has definitely gone up from that standpoint would you say that's true of some of the new age digital only brands who come out of digital even do you think they're that dynamic is at play no that's not the case in those clients I mean they largely have their own digital teams where you know especially important services like performance marketing and all is kept in-house but a lot of you know traditional businesses like brick and mortar companies for them this is a little bit of a journey so for them their dependencies on agencies is pretty high yeah makes sense thanks Amin Bharat I would love your perspective especially from more of a you know how are brands now or clients when they're dealing with agencies looking at you know especially measurement right given your background with taxes is that changing has that changed a lot definitely I think most of the brands are right now I would say in between the two worlds of digital one which exists right now and one which is there coming in next few months and more or less I think in my recent experience with all the global brands regional brands I think the first thing which they asked me in my new role is that how can you hand hold us into the new web 3.0 journey and what are the disruptions happening so more or less I think brands are now bringing a lot of accountability and trust on the agency side to give them a vision in the future prospective approach that from a measurement since how these clean rooms will going to play what is the role of cookie and identity depreciation how is going to impact the business some of the brands are quite interestingly I would say taking a leaf faith and moving very fast example some brands are already doing what you say the new conversion API pixel from facebook so that they're still able to track the convergence at this stage and do a A B testing before things go out on that way for India as a market and most of the brands are also I think relying and trusting agencies to bring certain type of knowledge from different geographies so considering most of the holding companies manage brands globally regionally so I think there is a lot of learnings which we get from other markets we have already seen an impact like of a US or a China and similarly I think measurement is again becoming a quite critical element not just for digital but I think overall holistic media measurement because some of the old school media mix modelling is currently now being outdated and again now digital bringing more solid balls not allowing brands to actually export any sort of data is bringing more challenges around what is the future of measurement so there are ways in which brands are now thinking about how to use certain tools which actually give predictive modelling type of approach so that they can predict the best merchant ratio or any lifetime value plus I think there are frameworks in which as agency groups are working with the big giants to create some sort of proprietary technology so that the brands can start exploring these technologies early stage and become a clear winner in the measurement game Thanks for that I would like to just double click a little bit on the branding or brand building part of it in and I think more in the context of what's happened in the last 18 to 24 months without mentioning the big C or the big P as we call it but how has that shaped how brands are or how companies are approaching building brands like is sort of the full funnel approach getting more traction or brands seeing the value of our company seeing the value of branding leading to demand gen as a more natural consequence rather than the curse of digital which has been major ability and hence we will only spend on what we get immediate value for so just in that context and in the context of what's happened in the last 2 years would love each one of your thoughts and if there are examples of brands who have done some clutter breaking work share that would be wonderful so Aditi what are your thoughts on that interesting question as you know obviously the last 18 months has transformed everybody so both as as companies, as people as consumers everything has changed and one of the big things I think which has impacted brands is this whole need to be much more authentic in their communication much more real in terms of what they are going out to the consumers with and in a sense it has almost become like authentic stories but faster because at the consumer end what has happened is everybody is looking at convenience and speed and the traditional journeys and it's very different across categories like Chandni mentioned when we talk about traditional players and how people may be buying things at retail versus the whole world has in a way merged for a lot of consumers what you put by online you also can buy offline and people are moving very fast and for brands to service them or to reach out to them their messaging, their communication also has to pan both these worlds so that is one big change I think that we are seeing in a lot of clients so while for the same client on one hand you are going the precision path you are deep diving into a lot of data like Bharath was talking about but at the same time you need to tell a story which is compelling because that part of the world and how a consumer buys a brand has not gone away and that is putting pressure on the system both in terms of where brands should focus and how they should I would say deploy their money because both of them need their own investments and the fact that you need to do it over a period of time so that is one challenge that we are seeing I would say across brands the other difference which has happened is that while everybody has become a lot more digitally savvy than they were before but the experience that people get is quite different so you know we can design wonderful creators but how it is delivered to a person in a Mumbai or a Delhi is quite different from what a person in Bhilwada sees for example both because of the device that they have connectivity or the bandwidth that they have and the language that they consume the content in and that again is something which is putting the pressure back on brands saying how do you straddle these two worlds together but at the same time create meaningful connections so that is what we have been seeing I think in the last 18 months there are brands which have been successful I would say especially if you look at brands in the CPG space which are dealing with essentials I think they have had a good run for multiple reasons but at the same time when you look at brands that we work on which are in the travel or the lifestyle category those are obviously being challenged because of business reasons interestingly there are other categories which have picked up like payments or maybe in auto EV which has come a long way suddenly because everybody has become very conscious about what is their impact on the world and with COVID impacting the livelihood you know everybody is reviewing their financials and where should they be investing their money as consumers you know so there are trade offs to be made and this is one place I think where people are seeing a trade off so that's I think in a broad view the changes that the last 18 months have brought in our lives and I would say more in the lives of brands absolutely makes sense we know just speaking on from what is actually your perspective what has happened in the last 18-24 months but then also as Aditi talked about Bangalore versus Bilwada you know obviously the audiences in each of these places have a different aspirations also but more importantly different value to a brand right I mean eventually it's what they value a particular consumer in a location as but then they also have to build a universal brand lot of the you know let's say retail or even you know financial services brand so what are your thoughts and what have you heard and seen from brands yeah so Manoj I'll break this up into two I guess it's a long question but let's take the first part which you asked about in the last 18 months to 24 months how is branding and how are brands developing right on I guess what exactly spoke about in the last one right it's all about you know making sure what your client objectives are and I'll dwell upon this what I mean gone are the days in digital where we used to talk about there is a branding and there is a performance I think it's a very thin line which divides the both anymore it's I was in one of the boardrooms and it was very nicely articulated by the CMO himself he said what I need from you is what would be my growth plan now you could definitely say whether depending on categories to categories right it could be an FMCG versus an OEM versus auto manufacturer and things like that it depends on what your core KPIs are and hence the digital planning or strat like we say would be based on that so some cases could be heavily inclined towards the top of the funnel which we talk about brand and then getting into e-commerce and hence getting into performance as well in certain cases when we are talking about pure play transactions pure play downloads it could be performance but then we have seen some of the D2C companies which started with digital performance have now gone back and doing traditional advertising so like I said it's a very very thin line as to how you divide branding and performance between both I guess it only depends on objectives of the client what we are wanting to deliver for that year for the client and so on and so forth seeing the changes in digital seeing how measurable digital is getting and Bharat spoke about it in this earlier section I guess more and more brands are looking at digital investments the media share changing from traditional to digital very soon I would now try to focus on the second part of the question Manoj which you spoke about different audiences looking at advertising communications differently we know that the next 500-700 million would come from the so called Bharat which we talk about which is your tier 2, tier 3 and hence communication hence devising a strategy for them is that much more critical and in the last 1.5-2 years we've seen platforms coming up to address only those requirements so as a client as a partner agency I think what we also recommend is there should be a mix depending on what your audience is actually consuming so and today we can actually talk about audience marketing thanks to the kind of latest technology which digital has bought thanks to the kind of trust worthiness on brands on content there are very very measurements which are coming out on brand safety and other things I guess it's that much more critical when we are talking to a tier 2, tier 3 audience to talk to them in their language which they understand the most and you will see far degree of maybe a brand salience or performance depending again on the objective of the client I guess it's category to category but I completely agree that in your media mix you should like we always used to say the 3 V's the video, the vernacular and the voice you need to understand how do you interplay between them depending on where your target audience is at the moment so if your target audience is tier 2, tier 3 and we know for sure that because of the kind of networks bandwidth because of the kind of handsets they have is it better to do vernacular and voice for them depending on the metro audiences is it yet better to continue with English or they say language targeting depending on where they originate from and videos for the metro audiences so it's how you want to target your audiences depending on the markets and the TG the clients has I hope I've answered the question sorry for the lengthy answer I was just curious when you think about tier 2, tier 3 what's the main change that brands have to look at is it more just the content and the language or is it also the platforms that you want to reach those audiences on or is the message also completely different what's the above actually you select the platform based on what the reach is you select the communication based on what your audience is you select the technology what best suits the kind of campaign and which gives you the best efficiencies so I can't say one of the elements which you mentioned I guess we will have to look at all of the above and it's not difficult at all but we will have to look at the latest programmatic latest AI ML technologies which we all are currently using for our campaign management I think we are seamlessly doing all of these things thanks for the question which we talked about what has changed or what is evolving in terms of branding but secondly I would like to use the most sophisticated let's say you know just taking examples but upstocks or dream level or some of these right they are never going to be like an upstock so it's unlikely to be a a Bharat brand right it's not going to at least to start off when it's not its audience is not that but even they are relying very heavily on impact properties I mean you could say that everybody has to be on cricket in India so that's one way of looking at it but they are sort of led with impact properties if you look at it can you maybe give us an if you have any insight on what the problem is I feel like for these brands the most important thing right now is to kind of capture market share like for upstocks of a dream 11 market share is the game that they are playing so how do you really do that by increasing your search of you know your voice in terms of higher search volumes it kind of makes sense for them to do this from that perspective in terms of kind of really capturing market share that's what credit has done that's what dream 11 is doing all of them are playing the valuation game increasing their customer please as much as they can so therefore that marketing strategy makes a lot of sense right yeah I think just to add on this one because it's a indeed a very deep thought what a lot of people ask like why brands are investing on impact versus I think if you see the last three years digital audience has become numb because the way we are consuming content the attention span is going drastically down on all the platforms and if you do some sort of there are now tools coming in which is doing the eye gazing movement engagement sort of on the creatives on the platform time of the day what device you're consuming what's the theme of the creative so with these tools if you do a little bit more research I think like sports and impact property is still one of the medium which has high attention span compared to some of the social platforms regular video content where ads are just running and that ancient span of consumer is not as high as it should be to get into a brand recall this is one key factor which is also bringing brand again to the old school thought that the life sports and the impact property although there is a spillover they are not a Bharat brand and they do see that in the next five years also that audience might not be able to catch up with their product offering or might not be able to get involved but I think with that spillover also the attention span is able to drive better ROI compared to the regular digital where the ads are just spring painting there is viewability which the I would say half a decade back we all started debating about whether the ads are viewed or not but now the new currency that brands are looking is more on attention ads are all viewed but is the consumer active enough to engage with the brand and with the ad yeah that makes sense I mean you are saying that even in terms of effectiveness some of these impact properties are beating given the increase in consumption it makes sense just going back a couple of changes or trends you have seen in branding anything than Aditi mentioned seeing the massive shift in terms of spends from traditional to digital a lot on the branding side of it before digital used to be largely more bottom funnel focus now branding has become a significant pie from that standpoint OTT's have become quite big from that standpoint like we just did a really large campaign for one of our clients phone pay on hot stuff really like significant spends compared to what clients have been spending on on digital also I feel like from another important trend that I'm seeing is I'm going to state some examples because everything Aditi and Vinod have said are really the key trends that are there so I'm going to just talk about how I'm seeing that happen on some of our brands so like I said spends are shifting and I've seen that recently with phone pay Amazon is a client of ours so for them vernacular has become extremely important it's about they themselves have launched in different languages so the idea is that of course they are going after the Bharat audience and how do you really tap into that so we really have like we've created like a performance production unit just to create that level of personalization when it comes to banners like 15,000, 20,000 banners you know created for a particular audience in that particular language you know really to ensure that that sort of messaging is going on so you know vernacular is another vernacular personalization of communication and agility of that communication both of these things have become extremely important as a trend and the third trend that I'm seeing is influence of marketing that is one trend also that you know nowadays like whenever we are running any campaigns for our clients influence of marketing is definitely like a part of the entire mix so influence like and literally from everything from celebrities to regional influencers in a small you know tier 2 town you know brands are deploying all of those strategies you know if they want to create impact then let's go out you know go all out within you know celebrities and if they really want to go deeper they are kind of utilizing regional influencers also in terms of communication also platforms are becoming really important like I'll tell you for Amazon when we're trying to tap into the Baharat audience we're also looking at apps like Moj you know MX Takatak all of these apps are also becoming really important from that standpoint because the content is Baharat is consuming that content largely so you know a lot of focus on the right kind of platform communication and therefore and agility in terms of being at the right place at the right time you know it's that's the game plan so yeah these are some of the trends and some brands are actually deploying it really well absolutely I think vernacular is obviously a big trend and I'm going to plug in the fact that LinkedIn launched in India just last week as well so clearly it's something that everybody is investing in I was just curious from an influencer marketing perspective is the measurement of effectiveness evolving or is it just like you've got ex-followers on Instagram or whatever and hence it's sort of in proportion to that or is there more to that so there are tools that are I think we use I think Unbox social and porous I believe I'm not really sure on the names of the tools but I think these are the two tools that we use but along with that there is a lot of manual intervention also that goes in from our influencer marketing team to you know and some of the properties that we suggest in terms of influencer marketing is you know using of Instagram stories whether I tell you swipe ups and then we get them to tag the you know website URLs therefore you understand that you know if this influencer did you know did you get enough swipe ups did you get enough traffic coming from you know Instagram leads so we measure engagement in various forms yeah we are and we are putting like you know unique links across all of these activities to ensure that we are getting some form of measurement in fact a very good form of measurement we can't get better yeah makes sense very interesting Chandy but coming to you I mean I know on the trans part there's lots being covered so but if there is something beyond that that you've seen but I would really have to get your perspective given you know your recent exposure to the region as such a pack if there are anything that's unique or you know what are the nuances between India and some of the the other regions if there are if you could give us some insights on that from a brand-building perspective I think I completely echo whatever thoughts Abhiti and Chandy has already covered and definitely on the short form video whether it's the the Bharat sort of video content or what you say the India content on Instagram read the social commerce is picking up and there are learnings from other markets how they see social commerce getting developed there are big learnings what we have in China or in Australia within the region where we have seen how brands are doing end-to-end measurement on the social commerce piece and this actually one of the medium which I would say fits in a good position both on the top funnel or driving that brand comms video narrative creative engagement content and definitely on the lower funnel also because brand can easily major whether the influencer has drive any sort of sales or what type of conversion models they can build in so there is a good ROI mechanism which the social commerce has brought into the game so that's one element rest I think on the India side if I see from other markets and India there is a big catch up which we are doing on the connected TV site so there is around about 8 to 10 million devices in India and if I compare with other markets all the ratio is quite big but the learnings what we get from other advanced markets we have already seen the curve from linear to connected TV is clearly that how agencies come on board and help brands into creating a marketing plan which is single view of consumer whether the consumer is watching on linear or connected TV so there are ACR panels which are being developed in most markets for you to understand what content consumer are watching in and with this connected TV space which is primarily metrophenominal right now in India I think the brand marketing is getting evolved so recent example is we did a Skoda-Kushak launch in India and we had learnings from our UK team how they did that launch on an Amazon in UK so the whole element of we doing that launch in India was not just to take the learnings from there but we identify that India as a market we are still a fire stick market heavy when it comes to the CTV so we partnered with Amazon fire stick created a engagement sort of a creative on the master of Amazon fire stick so when the consumer launched on the day of the launch of the car they were able to engage with the creative and using the same Amazon feature of how you rotate the interior exteriors of the car the consumer to see a 360 view of a car on the connected TV so that's actually give you a purpose of engagement driven top of the funnel branding but end of the day because you're majoring who are these consumers you have the login IDs and all you can again do a remarketing into the lower funnel understand whether the leads was filled and whether the consumer has reached to a test drive stage or have they bought the car so that way I think new frameworks of marketing are being developed and India is also I think at a fast pace catching up this new I would say device we offer doing a holistic planning and currently when we see I think last quarter Kanta released a report which says in rural also digital is now the second most consume medium next to TV and how in India we are now seeing the lines getting blurred between connected TV and the OTT consumption on mobile device so this is again a good phenomena for India to understand that how these two worlds still sit in a different environment in silos but how as a brand you can see into a single view of consumer understanding what content they're consuming on different platforms yeah I do remember seeing the Skoda creative on fire secret is pretty interesting thanks for that Bharat so as we look to wind up I'm going to put all of you on the spot a little and maybe just ask all of you to name one trend theme call it what you made that's going to be big in 2022 right or you know let's say 22 and 23 like the next year or two years so Bharat you have what do you have in mind I would say unlocking the value of first party data yeah okay Chandni personalization of communication personalization makes sense Aditi I think agility of data usage because there is data everywhere and that's the challenge I feel with digital we have lots of data but how are we agile in using it on one single place I think that's the big thing which is going to happen makes sense Vinod I think a marriage between the attic and that's something which is which can really create magic and that's exactly what I feel that an agency and a client partnership can do I'm just going back to the first question which you asked Manoj just to close the circle I guess that's where the the value of partnership comes together makes sense makes sense awesome thank you so much all of you I really appreciate your thoughts and insights and thank you so much for the time Aditi, Chandni and Bharat hopefully the audience will find this interesting as well and hopefully all of the themes that you mentioned play out over the next year to two years it's interesting times and I know we said we want to talk a little bit about cookie less as well but then we also realized it's a 800 pound gorilla so it's not going to get covered as part of one panel but hopefully we will find time to talk about that in the future as well thank you so much all of you and I think that also brings us to the end of our agency connect event and thank you to everyone who joined in today so thank you thank you Manoj and thank you to the LinkedIn team thank you very much and to the exchange for media team as well thank you everyone bye bye