 Hello, everyone. I have with me Ted Prince Jr., the Chief Product Officer at Kantar. Kantar, as you know, is in the midst of a transformation from being a data company, a data and insights company to being a tech-enabled product company. Ted is here to tell us more about it. Ted, firstly, like I mentioned, Kantar is in the midst of transforming from a data insights and consulting company. That's the perception we all have about Kantar to a tech-enabled product company. Can you tell us more about this transformation and the key learnings that you've had over the past couple of years? Yeah. So, overall, if you look at Kantar, we have this incredible relationship with 93 of the top 100 advertisers in the world, and we also can give them insights in 100 countries around the world. So, we have this great, great confidence. Our clients have great confidence in our ability to deliver insights, but what we want to do for these clients is deliver them faster and be able to bring in more third-party and second-party data sources. So, whether it's search or social or CRM data, being able to tie together our brand data, our media data, our creative effectiveness data with a whole bunch of other data sources, and that's really why we need more data and analytics capabilities, and we're investing heavily in tech to be able to do that. So, we'll still provide the same insights to our customers, but we'll be able to provide them with more flexibility and faster turnaround times. You mentioned data, the first party, second party, third party data, and also data from multiple other sources, but how do you drive a seamless integration between consumer technology and experiences, particularly in the omni-channel world that we see today? Yeah, and so, and I've come from the data and analytics space, and I think what Kantar has that is very unique is we have our panel, and so we have 169, excuse me, million consumers around the world, and our ability to ask that panel a number of questions related to brands, you know, whether it's brand equity, media effectiveness, innovation around new products, customer experience, excuse me. So, it all starts with the consumer and making sure we seamlessly are asking the consumer what they think of the brands and the advertisers. So, if you start with the consumer, I think it's easy to be seamless. If you are bringing together all different sources of data, but not coming back to the consumer, get sort of disjointed, but bringing it all back to the consumer, and in our case, our panel, helps us really make sure there's alignment and consistency with how consumers are seeing brands around the world. Great. Now, you also have a presence in India with two technology hubs in Bangalore and Chennai. What role do these hubs play in developing and delivering to Kantar's global offerings? Thanks. So, yeah, we have a number of locations. Most recently, I was visiting Bangalore and Chennai. So, Chennai is our R&D hub, so it's where, so for instance, all the work we're doing around Gen AI and AI, like launching our link AI and launching our trend AI solutions, all were developed out of Chennai. Our Bangalore is more of a delivery center, so we have a technologist and a number of data scientists and data engineering. So, a lot of the solutions around analytics that we deliver for our clients are being driven out of those two centers, and we have great, great talent and great innovation coming out of both of those two centers. With the focus now being on technology and digital, Kantar has also acquired quite a few companies in the recent past. Are you looking at any more companies to acquire, and if so, in what domain are you looking at? Yeah, so we did, we've acquired a company that does MMMs out of Denmark. We recently also acquired another panel company out of the UK called CUME. So, we're looking for a number of things, but one is very clear insights, getting clear insights from consumers that help us lead our brands and really understand, helping our brands understand where the consumers are going. So, there's so much new technology around consumer feedback, and so that's an area that we want to be nimble and continue to get consumer feedback, expand our panel, both our behavioral panel, which is our sales panel, but our overall panel where we can go out and ask questions about brand or media effectiveness. So, areas that enable us to do greater analytics or greater build our panels, and certainly AI is another area we're looking at. And we'll look at companies, we've bought companies all over the world, and we will certainly look at any companies in India. India is one of our biggest growing markets, it's been a great market for us, so it's certainly ripe for us to look at potential acquisitions. You mentioned AI, chat, and even chat GPT, but how do you see being integrated in marketing communication while you said consumers should be at the center of it? What's the challenge in right now, integrating it in marketing communication? Yeah, so I think if you look at how we're going to use AI and Gen AI, it's all based on the research we've done with consumers. So it has a basis in actual consumer, the nuances, how consumers feel, the emotion, and then we train our models to learn off of that. So, I think there's a lot of AI and a lot of companies that can deliver insights, but they're not based on actual consumers. And so what we're trying to do is take our 20, 30 years of learning about consumers and then use AI and machine learning to extrapolate that to new use cases or new creative or new products so we can help in very short time companies predict how something will be successful. So it still comes back to being based in the very, very complex way that consumers think and making sure we really do understand that. But is there any time frame you see that this technology could possibly become mainstream? We're all talking about it now, but by when do you see it becoming part of the mainstream? Yeah, I mean I think AI and Gen AI as consumer applications are going to become mainstream pretty fast. As enterprise level solutions, you really have to train the models on actual, in our case, actual consumer insights and actual consumer responses to surveys. So we already have LINK AI which is using our $250,000, $250,000 ads tested and deriving through AI, how those ads will do on different platforms. So that's something we do already. But we're going to be cautious because we don't want to just use AI and machine learning to give faster insights. We want to give faster insights based on actual consumer feedback and our history of consumer feedback. And that's the unique intellectual property we have is understanding consumers' perceptions of brand and media and creative. So we don't want to lose that historical, this historical databases and research and methodologies that we've always had. We want to augment them with AI, but always be based on what the consumers thinking and what their responses and feedback were. Now, while chat GPT and AI has, like you mentioned, it's all in the conversation, but they've also been skeptics about these products. How, what would you say to an advertiser when they're looking to integrate this into their communications? While the pros are there, there are a lot of cons too. How do you maintain the balance? Yeah, I mean, I think there are a couple key things and one, we'll never use AI on anything other than our opted-in consumer feedback. And I think the danger is people start using AI to derive all kinds of insights or all kinds of solutions for clients that doesn't have the privacy under it and doesn't, and it's just going out to the general web and scraping information off of it. So I do think there are some inherent dangers, including hallucinations that will continue to monitor, but for us it's making sure whatever we are deriving with machine learning or AI is based on our uniquely opted-in databases and profiles and panels that we own. Besides AI and chat GPT, are there any other technology or domain areas that you are looking at actively? Yeah, one of the areas and especially for creative testing that we're really interested in is neuroscience. So whether it's facial expression or eye movement, we've been tracking ads for dozens and dozens of years and we now can have a very strong database of what ads people like and what ads are most effective, but we can get how their eyes work or how their facial expression is to help derive future effectiveness of creative. And so neuroscience is in the whole nother area that we're very, very excited about and being able to predict how consumers are responding to new products or new creatives. So in addition to all the incredible work that's happening in AI and Gen AI and chat GPT, I think neuroscience is going to be a whole new area for marketers. That would be really exciting. If you can give me an example about, you know, in your testing, how it happened, because this is interesting. Yeah, so yeah, when we test ads with consumers, we have them turn on their cameras and we run through a timestamp of that ad and we see, are they delighted? Are they concerned? Do they look at something else in the screen rather than the main thing you're trying to, the brand that you're trying to promote? So using eye tracking or facial expressions, you can really see in very slow increments how consumers are responding to different pieces of an ad. And it's actually, it's incredible technology that you can use that to then predict future ads, how consumers will respond to. So you mean to say that marketers now have a chance that, you know, it's a 100% success ratio when they put out a campaign? Yeah, it's certainly is higher. I mean, that obviously goes to your ability to target. So you can optimize for an ad in a certain demographic. Now you have to make sure the ad gets to that demographic. But if you're interested in men 35 to 45, because it's a beer ad, we can optimize creative for that segment. And then obviously you want to target that segment. You won't in all instances target that segment. But we can run a lot of tests to see, yeah, this is what that targeted demo responds to and how their, you know, how their eyes move or their facial expression. So we can get a lot closer. I don't know if it was 100%, but we get a lot closer to really great ads for that demographic that you're focused on. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. It was a pleasure talking to you. And I'm really, really keen to see how the neuroscience aspect of it plays out in the ads. Yeah, great. Thank you so much and enjoy our conversation. Thank you. Enjoy can.