 How does a 144-year-old institution continue to remain relevant? Now, let me welcome Mr. Pundi S. Sriram. Please put your hands together for him, Chief Product Officer of the Hindu Group. He will be disclosing all the secrets. Please, sir. And among the whole storm and all Andhi Tufan, since the morning, I've seen one person who was just calm, still calm. I'd like to welcome Sneha Walke, National Director of Growth and Strategy Exchange for Media Group. Please put your hands together for her. She'll be accompanying Mr. Pundi Sriram for the session. Thank you, sir. Sneha, thank you so much. And thank you. Please, bigger round of applause for her. She is the one back born behind this. And thank you, ma'am. Please take it over. Thank you. Thanks, Anupam. You called me calm. I don't think my team agrees with you, but thank you for the compliment. Namaskara. Can everybody hear me at the back? Yes? OK. Actually, I wasn't checking the mic. I was checking whether the Bisibele Bhat and the Chicken Biryani have worked, but it doesn't seem like they have. So thank you so much. Good afternoon, Mr. Sriram. How are we today? Good afternoon. Thank you. Thank you for this wonderful event, and thank you for having us be a part of it. Most welcome. Ladies and gentlemen, not very often do we get to hear from somebody who's managing or who's the chief product officer of a 144-year-old brand. I don't think many of you have missed this, but the Hindu celebrated its 144th birthday, 144. 144th birthday earlier this week, and they did some very cool stuff in that birthday celebration, like dropping newspapers through drones and all of that. First of all, a big round of applause for the 144. I don't think 144 years ago there was anything like a title like Chief Product Officer. I don't even think that Philip Kotler and his four piece of marketing existed. And today, Sriram, you have this huge responsibility of carrying this legendary brand on your shoulders. So let me rephrase and ask you this question again. How are we today after the launch? After the launch, actually quite relaxed. It's been a very, I would say, very successful launch. I don't have to bear this burden alone. I have a team of wonderful people that's 2,500 of us who all carry that load together. But you're right, it informs every decision we take. We have to be extremely conscious of the fact that this is not a little change of font. It's a change of a legacy of 144 years, and it's got to have a very good reason for why we're doing it. Every one of our decisions has to be informed by the heritage and the legacy of the brand, because it means a lot to our readers and our consumers and people who have been with us for all these years. So this launch has been good. It's actually gone off. Don't hold your breath for drone delivery of newspapers anytime soon, but I think that was a very cool little thing we did, but feedback. It went viral, right? People have been sharing this, and maybe sometime in the future you could get drone delivery, but it's a little easier to read it on your mobile. So we won't go there yet. Since you mentioned reading on mobile, so I'd like to, perhaps I've not done this and I'd like to do this, formally introduce Mr. Shiram. So he's the Chief Product Officer at the Hindu and it's also, as the business head of a division called Step, and I believe you are interested with the responsibility of creating high impact products across the Hindu group. Mr. Shiram has been an entrepreneur himself. He's also been consulting with a lot of Fortune 500 companies on corporate strategy. So lucky to have you here, Mr. Shiram. We are very excited about this few questions. Some of them perhaps difficult, but let me start with the most, I think fundamental question. Newspaper relaunches. There's a lot that goes into it, monetarily, energy-wise, bringing lots of different sets of stakeholders together. What prompted or what motivated this relaunch now? Yeah, interesting question. See, fundamentally, a lot has changed. The last time we, the Hindu has been redesigned about, I think this is our 9-3 design in those 144 years. So it's not something that happens often. In fact, I don't remember the last major redesign of any paper other than the Hindu in India might have been around 10 to 12 years ago. So this isn't something that we do often. And then it's actually a fairly complex thing to do. We don't think about this every day, but the newspaper is a new product every day. Like every day, we have to put out a product that has no resemblance to the product of yesterday. And this is true for other media as well, of course, but in the newspaper business, it's complicated to do that because you have to create and design a structure that will work for every one of those situations. That's what takes this kind of effort. So newspaper redesign is a pretty complex affair and we don't get into it unless we absolutely want to. So what prompted this redesign? If you think about, the last redesign was 2017. And in the last five years, the world, the earth has shifted. A lot has changed in these five years. Consumers have changed in terms of reading habits, in terms of how they access news, what kind of news they have access to, how they want to access it during the day. It's no longer, I mean, it hasn't been that way for 15 years, but it's even more so now that the newspaper that you get in the morning, you already know all the news that's in it, right? Because you got it on WhatsApp from your grandfather and you got it on Telegram from your son and you got it on late night news with Arnab Goswami. My five family groups, yes. Yeah, with Arnab Goswami screaming his head off. You had all of this, right? So you already know what news is gonna come. So what can we do to make that news special? So that's a big part of what we had to think about. We said, the world has shifted in these last five years. Consumer preferences have shifted. And it's important for us to meet our consumers where they are and bring to them something that they've gotten accustomed to in the digital world. So some of the principles that we had going in were how do you make this more colorful experience? How do you allow users to, or I should say readers, to have more of a browsing experience in your newspaper? Skim through a lot of stories and dive deep into those stories that you think are really important. How do we create that kind of experience? So when we said, that's the kind of experience readers are looking for, we realized that that's not the experience we were offering. So that's really what prompted it. It's a big exercise. I mean, in eight, nine months later, here we have a completely redesigned newspaper. I think the AV kind of highlighted a few key changes, but if you could throw some more light on it, what specifically has changed? Yeah, somebody called this the Instagram style of news. So I think one of the big changes you'll see, whether it's a business line or the Hindu, is a lot more imagery that we're using. You'll see that we have big promos, these big square promos that consume like seven, eight centimeters at the top of the page, that call attention to you. The news is calling out to you to read in the same way when you scroll to Instagram, we're calling out various influencers or family, are calling out for your attention to watch what they're posting. So there's a little bit of that, that's a big shift, both on the front page as well as on the inside pages, there's a lot of that. I think a lot more use, just use of images and infographics, not just in the format. I think another big shift for us is the use of white space. This is really underused in design of course, and in newspapers because every page and every square inch of newsprint counts and it costs money, so it's a bold decision to take. But a lot more white space to draw attention to the things that matter. We want to be able to say this is our lead story for this page, this is the second most important thing you need to know today, and these are the next five things you need to know. This kind of hierarchy that we create with white space and the use of imagery is not easy to, it's not easy to create usually, and it's from a reader's perspective, it directs them through the curated experience of a newspaper, which is what they're paying for at the end of the day. So this is another big shift for us, the use of white space, all of these imageries. A lot of users have told us about readability, a lot of people are used to reading larger fonts on their phones, so we have made the typeface a little bit bolder and bigger. And we've also done something interesting, I think if you see the newspaper today, you'll see two line and three line headlines. This is not something you often see in India. So this is partly to enable users to browse through the paper. You can read the headline, if that headline interests you, you can read the strap line below the headline, that's another two or three lines, and if both of those interest you and you still want to read the article, you read the article. You don't have to read the article to get the full gist of what it is we're saying, right? So this is a completely different type of storytelling that we've now embarked upon this direction. Not without resistance from our editorial colleagues, but we've had to go in this direction precisely because this is what our readers and learners want. So I think it's also prompting a lot of rethink. I think after the, if you look at, I think it was there into the Bangalore paper as well this morning, but if you look at today's paper, you'll see something interesting. We did a, the top is a L, right? An inverted L shape, and probably for the first time in my memory, there is a cinema story on the front page of the Hindu at the bottom, at the top left. It's still a very Hindu cinema story. It's about the French director Godard who recently passed away and has impact on cinema, but it's a cinema story on the front page of the Hindu where it would be news and politics and almost nothing else. Maybe India winning the World Cup, right? That's about it. So we're also learning to play with content in a different way to be able to fit all of these new formats in and work with the new formats, allow this kind of different presentation, right? And that's a big part of what you'll see in this new paper. Business line of course is another big, big, big shift. I think if those of you are used to reading business line, you'll notice that the new design is a much more younger, much more vibrant, energetic newspaper, a lot more color. It's not just grays and blues or grays and pastel blues, which is what we used to use before, much. And I think that reflects the, I mean we're 144 years old, but we want to be young. And if you look at the Indian economy today and the stories that the business line tells, it's telling stories about a young, energetic, vibrant economy. Business line needs to reflect that energy and vibrance of the economy, and that's part of the spirit of that redesign. That's the other part of why we did these redesigns. And I think you will see in the next few months, we'll also do something similar around two of our magazine publications. And I think people are gonna ask, really, are magazines needing to be redesigned today? And I think they are. Sportstar and Frontline will go through another redesign over the next four to six months, and we'll see there as well some very fresh ideas and new things that we'll do for the younger digital age reader, but also for our traditional reader who likes what we've been putting out. Nothing changes from that in terms of quality or content, but how they consume it will change over the next few months. Nice, I think you gave us a piece of breaking news here saying that there are some more, so my editorial colleagues here will perhaps pick it up. Since morning, we've been listening to a lot of marketeers, a lot of brands talk about customer experience, customer experience across this whole, the omnichannel way, right? So across multiple platforms. When it comes to a media house, I know you just spoke a little about it, but how are you making it apart from the font, apart from the wide spacing? How are you ensuring that your customer experience across platforms is something that your readers look forward to? Yeah, interesting. Today, Hindu has, I don't know, about 200,000 subscribers. It's like digital subscribers in addition to our new circulation. In fact, a lot more people read our content online than they read in print. There's something that we often don't think about, but a large number of readers who read our print content also then go and read online. And vice versa. People who read online first will come back and read the story the next day again in the paper for a different reason because we would have updated it, or what have you, right? Or they want to go online and watch the video interview of what they just read. So there is a lot of interplay between our print and digital readership. They are active. And because of this, we also want to give that experience. I think we may be inventing ourselves into becoming a younger and more digitally savvy brand, but at the same time, it's the 144 year heritage and legacy that we talk about. Even when you're online, we want you to experience that. So bringing more elements of that, just like I said about bringing more of the elements of the Instagram digital world into print, we're also bringing many of our print elements into that digital world in making. In fact, I was kind of sitting there and smiling as I saw. I don't know how many of you noticed this, but that experience where they showed on that video, the, you scan a QR code and you go, it's almost like you haven't changed screens, right? You scan the QR code on print and you get almost the same experience as soon as it pops up on your phone. And this is the kind of experience we're trying to create because readers aren't thinking of, they want news from us, they want content from us, they are readers are platform agnostic, they are going to consume it on whatever platform is most useful and convenient at this point. And we should create that same brand consistency, product consistency and consistency of experience for users across all of these platforms. So that's a big part of this effort and redesign, everything from that Instagram style of storytelling to the opposite, which is using some of these traditional print elements, which you will, well, we have a digital redesign as well that we will be doing. And you'll see things like drop caps, which even newspapers have dropped, we're going to bring that back into digital so they get a little bit more of that experience of, you know, I'm not just reading a article, I'm reading an article from an established authoritative source, that is a newspaper, right? And that's part of all of that connection that we're building across platforms and across media. Wonderful. You mentioned about this, some concerns that came up perhaps from the editorial side of, and you have a very strong editorial ethos. So on this entire revamp, you worked with Dr. Mario Garcia, and for those of you who perhaps already have heard about him and those of you who haven't, Dr. Garcia has worked on about 700 odd publications, you know, which include newspapers, websites, magazines, and helped them revamp themselves. These include like, you know, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post. So working with somebody like that is like working with a legend. And how was it working with him? Yeah, it's exciting. It's helpful to, Dr. Garcia is 78 years old, right? He's dynamic, enterprising, and he moves faster than any one of us in this room, right? And he's full of energy and he brings all of that knowledge. So he told us when he came in that, hey, let's get started. The Hindu is my 749th redesign and the business line is my 750th redesign. So I have forgotten more about newspaper design than any of you guys in this room know, right? And I think that was a, and that's true. And that's true. When you talk to him, he, in his experience, I mean, I won't get too technical, but one of the big changes that he shepherded the Wall Street Journal through was the change from print to black and white to color. Right, so these are, this is three or four or five different generations of change. And this current change of taking a newspaper and building it for the new mobile first digital age is something that he's thought about in a lot of detail. He's done this in other places, but this is a very, very, very unique thing that we're doing with him in the last minute. And he's an inspiring person, both from a design perspective, as well as his encyclopedic knowledge of how design and content work together in this whole newspaper and media world. It's incredible. Was there some referencing to some international publications or was some part of that conversation also around that? Yeah, yeah, of course. I think we look around the world. We see, you know, papers like The Guardian, the papers like The New York Times that have very well navigated this change. Right, their print publications are still as good as they ever were and they're continuing to grow and their digital publications are also reflecting everything that that print publication was famous for. Right, so those are papers we looked at. A lot of other designs that he's done over the years like Wall Street Journal and all of that of course inspired these. But these were two that are particularly important for us. In terms of feedback, I know that I'm sure there must be some kind of feedback that you would have arrived at from focus groups, from readers. Could you share a little about how you bring together this feedback or how do you collate this feedback both before deciding about the event? And I know it's too early to ask, but what has been like the kind of feedback in the last few days? So the interesting thing I'll tell you is if you look at the paper today, you'll see all our readers' feedback. We're just publishing everyone whether there's good or bad. Without really any editorial thought on whether we should publish this reader's letter to the editor or not. And surprisingly, I mean, not surprisingly, it's been good. It's been excellent. People, a lot of people welcome change in any number of ways. They welcome change in this as well. A lot of people have said really good things about the increase out of color, more white space. They find that the 1,300 word editorial is not as intimidating in this new presentation and they are moving to read it more. So a lot of positive feedback from that front. How we got here, I mean, usual slew of things that you would do as a product person, you've done surveys, we've talked to customers about collecting feedback. We have a reader's editor who gets feedback continuously. And our inboxes are always open, so we hear a lot of feedback. I mean, some companies struggle to do surveys, but when we ask our readers for feedback, I have to turn the survey off before I can turn it on literally because that's how much volume of feedback we get from our users. On the day of your launch, I'm sure that you would have got feedback from a lot of, because there was a lot of mention about making the Hindu more youth oriented and you met with, I think, the most youthful personality of South India, then actor Rajnikant himself. So you met actors, politicians, celebrities that day. Any first thoughts, any feedback there? Yeah, many of these people, interestingly, have grown up with the Hindu. Right. And so I almost want to say that feedback isn't honest because it's a very emotional feedback. It's not a feedback on the product, it's feedback on the brand which they connect with at a very deep and emotional level. Right. So they are great things to say across the board, whether it's politicians who've grown up reading this or Rajnikant and Kamal Hassan. The other thing that we hear a lot about is, oh, I grew, I learned English through reading the Hindu. This was an important part of my life and it's where I am in my career because of this. Or when we talk to people in the civil services, IAS, senior government officials, they'll say, I'm in this job because I used to read the Hindu every day. That's how I prepared for my civil services exam. So there's a lot of different types of feedback that we constantly hear. It's humbling, actually, as somebody that collects all the feedback and collates it. Yesterday, I had this one note from this gentleman who says, I've been reading the Hindu for 77 years. Right. And he had this beautiful note and he said, at the end of this note his last line was, and then my grandson came up to me and said, Tata, where are your glasses? And that's when I realized that I'm reading the Hindu without my glasses for the first time in 20 years. So I thought that was a very, very cute and smart note from somebody who's been reading this paper for 70 plus years. It's great to be able to do something for some of those readers. Nice, very nice. Revamps are usually targeted towards two groups. One is the readers that you mentioned, but a major focus these days is also advertisers, brands who come to you who want to use your platform. So what has been their feedback? What is it that you're doing through your publications for them? Yeah, actually, we didn't forget about advertisers, as you can imagine, through the three design. No, a number of things. Of course, one of the things that advertisers value about the Hindu is the reader connect that we have, right? This is fundamental to who we are. And everything we've done is around building a better, tighter relationship with that reader. So that's definitely a part of what we have to offer for our advertisers. But there are also some very tactical things. You will notice in today's paper, for example, there is a big sky bus on the top. And we've actually given more space for the sky bus. You can build a bigger, bolder ad right under our masthead. That a lot of advertisers will find very valuable because it catches the attention of the user. I think that's one example of a change. I think the other big shift is all the white space, it's not just for, the content is not just the articles. The content is also the advertising, right? So the white space also brings advertising to the fore just in the same way as it brings content to the fore. So we think these are things that advertisers will appreciate over the next several months. We'll see the impact of some of these things playing out. Very nice. Shriram, I won't let you go without maybe two to three personal questions. This is the Pitch CMO Summit South. So I have to ask this question to you. I come from a place called Belgam, and it's a town on the border, the Karnataka Maharashtra border, and it's known for something called Kunda. You come from a place called Pundi. What is Pundi famous for? So Pundi is a small, it's a small village about half-favorite in Bangalore and Chennai. So what it's famous for, I mean, the one thing I can think of is the suite we call Manoharam. It's, I don't know how to describe it, it's like a chuckly, or a murk, but dipped in good. Right, so it has a... Do we want to have an audience poll whether between the Manoharan and the Kunda, which will win, but I don't know because I've not eaten this. But lovely to know that. Yeah, yeah, lovely to know that. A book that has stayed with you, Shriram, because you're the chief product officer, you would be reading a lot about innovation, about product, about strategy. What is a book that you've perhaps read and stayed with you for a long time? Yeah, maybe the one example that, maybe it's not innovation and product and strategy, but the book that I go back to often is this Thinking Fast and Slow. It's interesting, and it's I think very useful for both marketers as well as for product people and really understanding what users and consumers do. I'll tell you one interesting thing I find. A lot of our users have an instinctive reaction to our product. So among all this good feedback we got, we also got feedback that said, we don't like the new fonts in the Hindu. And you know what? There are no new fonts in the Hindu. It's the same exact font, but something that we did somewhere told the reader that something has changed and made that reader uncomfortable. Now I had no way of knowing what that's, in all the hundreds of feedback we have, that's one example. You will hear, but I think the interesting thing about Thinking Fast and Slow is it understands how you appreciate those inherent biases in humans, right? There is a sense of, there is often the decisions we make are often because of inherent biases that are within us, just like that user, right? And understanding that what is a rational decision versus what's a biased decision is something that's really, really helpful from a buying or marketing or from a product point of view. I think that's something that I keep going back to. Last question, but I cannot let you go without, you know, you are answering this. As somebody who is the chief product officer, what is one product? And it could be across any category, anything, that one product in, say, recent times that has made you stop in your tracks and say, wow. You know, there are a lot. This morning, I wanna say, this morning I was discussing this with my colleague and we looked at the telegraph in the UK as a newspaper, right? And it is extremely well-designed as a product. That's an example. Can I go back to Manoharam? That's a product, that's a product that makes me stop every time. No, there's definitely all kinds of, you know, I'm studying these things all the time and there's all sorts of products that we can draw inspiration from. There was somebody here today. I find Swiggy is a very inspiring product. Yeah, John was here for Swiggy. I find Swiggy is a very, very inspiring product in terms of how easy it is to use, convenience and what length of change they've brought about in life. So there, I give you three examples. Yeah, you spoke of Swiggy and you spoke of Manoharam and my mouth is watering even without knowing what Manoharam is, but thank you so much for this interesting conversation. Thank you. And I'd request my colleagues to play the business line AV because I don't think we've seen the changes in business line, so if we can also play that. Yeah. Change is constant. We are living in a fast-paced world where business is constantly evolving, embracing the one constant in business, change. Introducing the Hindu business line's new look, a redesign that draws parallel to the new age of business. Say hello to a premium news reading experience with an enhanced visual design upgrade and reader-friendly features, a design that will make analytical and explanatory journalism an indispensable must-dreamt. Our brand-new masthead reflects the spirit of our young and vibrant nation. Lesser, sharper edges reflect a soft and relaxed stone, a reminisce of the past and a mark of change. The new logo is a contemporary design that gives the best of both worlds. The concentric circles show how BL has the last word on business reportage. The gray background, red pointers and a large image at the center highlight the best stories of the day, giving the attention they deserve. Headers are now in a distinct red color, big impactful pictures and more visual elements. Clearer content hierarchy and demarcation. Shift to a more digital-friendly brand identity from business line to BL, a reader-friendly design that separates the content from the daily business report. Cross-platform navigators to aid content discovery. Portfolio is now a visual treat with more of a magazine-like look. The reader will be taken into a depth of infinite information aided with powerful visuals. Now standardized to the color family of blue, the BL graphics are dynamic and direct. Layout is now made vibrant, bolder and smart with more emphasis on the magic of white spaces. A page aligned to such perfection, giving the readers the most enjoyable and organized reading experience. Text and visuals blend like magic to carry out storytelling in the same intuitive way in which we communicate via text messaging. When entrepreneurs make bold decisions, our font matches them. When markets become vibrant, our ink shows it in our changing colors. Business is evolving and so are we. So get ready to sit back, sip your coffee and open our redesigned business line. Business looks good. Thank you so much, Sneha Ma'am and Sri Ram. So please step on diaries and Sneha Ma'am, if you can thank him with a small token of appreciation. Thank you. And once again, please put your hands together for Mr. Sri Ram. Thank you for being here and thank you for sharing your insights. And thank you, Sneha Ma'am as well.