 Well, hello, welcome, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you so much for joining in. My name is Robin and it is truly a pleasure to welcome you here to the 21st edition of exchange for media conclave, the meeting ground for global thought leaders and industry experts from the marketing world to discuss the changes, trends and experiences dominating the industry. In the past, we have received immense support and participation from stalwarts like Mr. Mark Reed, Sir Martin Sorrell, Mr. Martin Anthony, Mr. Carter Murray, Mr. Stephen Allen to name a few. At home, we have had CEOs and MDs of brands as huge as Hindustan Unilever, Godrej Group, PNG and many more participating and enlightening us at the E4M Conclave. Hence, we invite you all to our flagship event. It's time to bring out the conference for which we are absolutely excited. We have Dr. Anurag Bhattra, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief Exchange for Media and Business World for the welcome address. Dr. Bhattra, I'll hand over the screen to you. Good afternoon. How are you? Thank you so much, Robin. The exchange for media conclave is a flagship knowledge insights platform where we bring thought leaders from the globe for the last 18 years. We've done it physically. Last two years, we've done it virtually, or shall I say, in a hybrid mode. And today, we have the exchange for media conclave. We are discussing what's happening in the digital economy. And to be very specific, first of all, I hope and pray that all of you are safe. Your families are safe. You're taking all the precautions. And you continue to stay indoor and safe as much as possible. Today, exchange for media for the last 21 years has been the homepage of marketers, media planners, buyers, media agencies, advertising agency executive, communication executive, brand owners, business leaders to know what's happening in marketing, media planning, advertising domain. This year's theme of the exchange for media conclave is agile marketing in a digital world. And our legacy marketing practices at stake. Do they need to be reinvented? We're also looking at how has the pandemic really made sure that these fast-paced digital transition happens even faster? And is the marketing Bible being rewritten? I can only say that we have a lineup that is enviable. We have Mr. Daryl Lee, who's the global CEO of IPG Brands. As the keynote speaker, we have Mr. Adam Gerhardt, who's the CEO of Mindshare as a keynote speaker. We also have thought leaders from India and business leaders who are leading their organizations and building business and brand. We have Ms. Divya Karani, who's the CEO of Densu in South Asia. We also have Mr. Arjun Mohan, who's the CEO for India for Upgrade. We also have Mr. Shalini Kattral, who's the MD and CEO of Lenovo in India. We also have Mr. Shashank Chirvastav, who's the executive director of Maruti. We have Mr. Viveesh Sharma, who's the CMO of Pity Light. We also have Mr. Sivam Ranjan, who's the CMO of Motorola. We have Mr. Sudhad Bhutalia, who's the CMO of Elisha. We have Mr. Sujatha Vikumar, who's the head of marketing of Visa. And last but not the least, chairing that particular session, we have Ms. Vaishali Varma, who's the CEO of Nixit. Now, I've already said that pandemic is making sure there is a digital transformation. And I want to give you two stats, which are a couple of months old, but I'm sure in the last few months, those stats have become even bigger. The numbers have become even bigger. Before the COVID, the global e-commerce market was 16% of the overall commerce or retailing or market. In the last 19 months, it's become almost 12% more, 12% more in the last 20 months. So from 16%, we've gone to 28%. From 16%, 16% in 20 years, another 12% in 20 months. So you can see the adoption of digital and no longer brand-bending is important. What is very important is commerce. And the D2C commerce, the digital direct to commerce, direct to consumers or digital to consumers is growing. A lot of new D2C brands have come into the play and they are really gaining traction like never before. The second trend I want to say is that because of pandemic, Indians saved a lot. And they also went to the stock markets. So the stock market saw more people betting their luck on stock market and investing in the stock market than in the last few years. So it grew from 1 crore investors, we went to 2.5 crore investors. So it's 1.5 crore investors being added. And those numbers are moving numbers, they mean even more. So clearly, these numbers show that the digital trading platforms also played a big role in these new investors coming to the stock market. The point I'm trying to make is that there is a whole new world to borrow that song from the Lion King. There's a whole new world and it's a digital world. For the last 10 years, we've been talking about digital economy. The true digital economy has arrived. Today, digital spends are almost 20% of the overall spends. Over the next three years, they're likely to become between 40 to 50% of the overall spends. And within these 40 to 50% digital spends, 6 to 70% will be programmatic. So clearly, digital is growing in a way that we never imagine. I also want to say that the more the digital grows, I was reading the traffic in the physical Walmart stores in the US last week. I mean, while the e-commerce is growing, the overall retail experience is not going anywhere. And let's talk of a country like India. We are not in either our country. We are in our country. While e-commerce is growing, there is also physical retail. So the keyword is hybrid. I think I also want to say that the more the contactless economy grows, the hybrid economy grows, the virtual economy grows, the value of human touch becomes even more important. So experiences, brand experiences that combine the best of both worlds, digital for convenience and efficiency and physical premium for experience will thrive in the future. Also, the marketing dollars are being stretched. Digital has a beautiful way of being able to measure its efficiency. I think that's something that market leaders are adopting more and more. So we have today's speakers involved media agency CEOs that work with a plethora of brands, brand owners in categories like Adessives, PD Light, so we call this a venerable brand, Maruti is the category leader in auto. I can go on in financial services, Riza. So really, Motorola, we have an EduTech player in upgrade. So experiences from them, from their insights on how they're building their businesses. We'll today be able to see whether there should be a new marketing Bible that is emerging. What is this new playbook? And in exchange for media, marketers are at the core of what we do. Brand owners are at the core of what we do. Also on Wednesday, we have the India Brand Concave, where again, we have marketers from a cross section of industry talking about their journeys and what's changed in the marketing landscape. And there was an old saying that marketing is business, business is marketing. I think for the first time, the way D2C businesses are being built and new consumer, facing consumer tech brands are being built by using the digital distribution and reach and content. Content is becoming even more important on the internet. Content is leading to commerce. Content is leading to communities. And that community building is leading to commerce. So I look forward to a day of conversations, insights and really masterclass in marketing. Today is our 21st year of exchange for media. We also announced a new brand identity in the evening. So I hope you see our new exchange for media, new brand identity at 6.45 pm. I'll also be doing a conversation with Mr. Adam Garad in the evening. So I look forward to more interaction with you. And I wish you a great day of learnings, insights, and most importantly, fun at the exchange for media conclave. Hopefully next year, we'll be back with a physical conclave, meet you and shake hands, hug you and be able to do social interactions. So all the best, go on, build brands, make an impact. Sustainability and people are more important than profits. I think the last 20 months I've made all of us more humble and more sensitive. And health and immunity have become more important in the way we conduct ourselves personally and professionally. Even for brands, the digital experience focuses on convenience, but it focuses on security and health. So all the best back to your oven. We have a plethora of leaders waiting to speak and talk to our audiences. So I wish you good luck with the conference and I'll be myself tuned and be able to learn something new. Thank you, God bless you. Thank you so much, Dr. Bhatra, for setting up the context wonderfully for the day to come. And with that, without taking any more time, ladies and gentlemen, we'd like to begin the exciting session with our headline speaker, Ms. Divya Karani, CEO, South Asia Media Services, Densu. Ms. Karani is a highly experienced industry professional with three decades of work in the leading agency networks, marketing and media ecosystems. In South Asia, the United Kingdom and Asia Pacific as well. She has demonstrated a history of repeatedly building sustainable businesses that thrive in the marketplace and is best known for helming Densu to the dominant position that it enjoys today. Ms. Karani will be speaking on balancing traditions with innovations, the agency of the future. I would like to invite Ms. Divya Karani to take the center stage. Thank you. Thank you, Ravind. Thank you, Anurag. Thank you both of you all. So without too much of time starting straight off, we live in extremely exciting times. Just one minute. I'm having a little bit of a glitch. Yeah. So Anurag touched upon it, extremely exciting time, lots to listen and learn from where we are today before we step out to embrace the future. We mentioned balancing. We mentioned tradition, flipping the word tradition to a few constants. And these constants have held good 30 years ago. They hold good today. And I dare say perhaps we'll also do so for the next 30 or perhaps next three years. So I've handpicked these constant, very mindful of the various trends that are there. The first one is consumer centricity. Having a consumer at the center of all we do, stitching up holistic consumer strategies, centered around delivering exceptional consumer experiences that respond to their ever-changing need is what we are all about. The second one, of course, is storytelling that engages consumer attention as well as gets them to participate. There's no going away from it. Stories sell. Great stories build brands. Stories create value. Think about it. The typical Swiss watch narrative that's all wired in our brain has us forking out far more money for any Swiss watch as compared to the good old digital watch or our mobiles that perhaps give you as accurate if not more accurate time. And there it is. So stories create value. And today more than ever before. The third one is loyalty. While the jury is out there between loyalty and penetration of being the key supreme driver of growth, to my mind loyal consumers are their weight in gold for any brand, brand category after category. So these are three constants in a world that is completely changing. 2020 was the year that changed everything for all of us as people. These past 18 months perhaps is not something that we would have ever self-prescribed to ourselves. Over the next 45 minutes, what we are going to do is try and understand all the changes that have happened in crafting our future. It's definitely changed the way we work. Think about it and beyond the picture of the dog running the company, the fact is our personal and professional lives have become even more closer and almost merged. And let's face it, as we go towards the future, our work life is certainly not going to come back to the pre-pandemic days. These months, these past 18 months have changed the way we consume media. Is my presentation visible? No, ma'am. No, it's not. It becomes better and better. My apologies, guys. So I am okay. And kudos to you guys. You all kept quiet all this time. Ma'am, you're having a great time listening to you. Thank you. But sometimes and more often today than ever before, pictures speak far, far more evocatively than perhaps any speaker. So can you all see my screen now? Yes, it's visible now. Yeah, just just. And when you say it's visible, there is a problem I have. So we spoke about the fact that the way we work has changed, right? We also spoke about the fact that what and how we consume media has changed. And forever. Think about it. We today live our lives in media. It has changed the way we consume news, the way we form opinions, with the way we form worldviews. It has changed the way we entertain ourselves. It's changed the way we romance. It's changed the way we socialize, interact. The way we eat, sleep and drink. Undoubtedly today, media is a single most important pivot of this change. These 18 months have changed the way we shop and buy. Look at the way our purchase decision funnel in itself has morphed various shapes. And sometimes in certain categories, I wonder if there's a funnel at all. These 18 months have also changed our understanding of justice and equity, right? Both here in India as well as around the world, it's brought home the power of networking like never before. The fact that consumers today expect brands to take a stand and walk the talk is undoubted. And lastly, it's changed our language. It's changed our terminology. It's changed concepts and thoughts that we never even had before. I'm Zoom fatigued. I am 100% sure. So are all of y'all. So most importantly, I do believe it's changed our values and priorities as well. And that is something that perhaps is here to stay in addition to all these changes that we've just walked through. And therefore, we've now truly live in the age of an empowered consumer. A study done 10 years ago where all the different touchpoints the average consumer was interacting with found that two-thirds of these touchpoints were brand-driven, advertising, direct marketing, in-store experience, promotions, and so have you. The same study done today has found that two-thirds of these touchpoints are all audience-driven. Think about it. Think search. Think about marketplaces, social communication, communities, reviews, blogs, influencers, and so have you. Right? There is a fundamental shift from a brand-led world where we had captive audiences, sitting ducks for forced exposure, all scripted and marching to the marketeer's agenda. To a consumer-led world where it is with your permission-optim culture, rich experiences are getting aided and abetted by marketeers to drive the consumer's agenda. And therefore, it's all about listening, engaging with your consumers to do so. What in essence we're talking about is a shift from changing consumer behaviour, where marketing success was changing the consumer behaviour and tracking it, and we all have our trackers with us and swear by it to changing brand behaviour in today's world. So how do we change brand behaviour is a question we need to all ask ourselves. Right? So changing brand behaviour is changing the way we go to market, the way we use media and tech, the way we live up to consumers' expectations, and these are ever-evolving. So if I may, living up to the expectation today and perhaps anticipating the expectations tomorrow, that is what the call is. And paradoxically, when we actually reached out and did our annual CMO survey, we found as much as 42% of our CMOs were unsure of whether consumers would ever return to the pre-pandemic behaviours. And at the same time, we found that only 12% of CMOs are using new strategies that are different from previous ones in times of crisis. The challenges that marketeers today face are acute. They are grappling with increasing competition every day, and this does not necessarily come from within the category. It comes from new startups. It comes from spaces which perhaps did not exist yesterday. And at the same time, this in parallel is going hand in hand with consumers becoming increasingly intolerant of advertising and continuously weaving out what they want to engage with, what they do not want to engage with. Why? Because simply there is an information overload coming at them. And therefore, in today's extremely interesting, challenging world, we are living not just in a digital economy. We are living in an attention economy where the amount of choice, the abundance of choice that is in front of our consumer is never ending. And it just continues to reframe itself. This sheer abundance of choice in front of the consumer is making it so difficult for marketeers and agencies to navigate at the same time that we are trying to figure out the tools and tech that marketing allows us to use. And you can see that consumers don't necessarily agree with what we are doing. Take a look at this data. This is a certified Google Trend search of the word retargeting, and it goes all the way back to 2004. The exact same rate that we as marketeers are trying to figure out how to retarget and meaningfully engage with our consumers, consumers at the same time are looking on how to block us out. Think about it. And therefore, accelerating growth in this digital economy, in this attention economy is as much for marketeers and agencies is as much on how do we do things differently, not for being different, not for the sake of being different, but to do them a little better. How do we do that so that they are that much more meaningful to our consumers? And in doing that, trying, thinking about how do we augment their lives, enriching their experiences when they are using apps to make purchase decisions, which they typically would have walked into a store for. So marketing today is all about fueling these new experiences and living up to the changing expectation, which is like I mentioned, continuously evolving. So in that context, for us to be able to keep up with the way the consumers think about and react to the brand's advertise and what that means for us, we as marketeers need to keep three things in mind, much, much more connected. I mentioned this earlier, understanding the action our consumers are taking today and almost anticipating the next one. The second is contextual. And in that contextual, sorry, and in that contextual, and this was exactly look, it couldn't have been better, there was a call from my office. So here I am talking to you guys, and they whatever important thing that's happening, my office has reached out. Now, if for an instant or two, if there was a ad that was served to me when I'm speaking to you, I'll just just think about it. So engaging with our environment in the way and our consumers as they live, breathe and act contextual and most importantly, personalized. How do we show our consumers that we really are listening to them? How do we offer value in their day to day lives? How do we understand their motivation and then celebrate them for knowing them? How do we do that? That these are the challenges. And in very many ways, we know our world has changed and dramatically so. But when we talk about change, just one minute again, when we talk about change, to say everything is change, would in very many ways be an understatement, right? We've just walked through that. But it would also at some level, perhaps be an overstatement. Why? Because as we speak, things are continuing to change and dramatically so. And in certain cases, the velocity is only going to increase. So if I may, I would not use changed. I would not use changing. I would use change in continuum. And the way brands are talking with more purpose, with more equity, with more justice, the new environment in which our brand and marketers are getting involved in, the new platforms that they are creating and that are uplifting the whole consumer experience is what is needed to respond to them on their turf. So five, in doing that, there are five key catalysts. So if you talk about instead of themes that come to mind, we all know about new media habits, right? The time spent with digital has, of course, surged and is going to continue to do so. But the point is, it's not just an increase in time. It's also the fact that consumers are that much more leaned in, that much more connected, that much more engaged with digital, more than they ever were, right? And then what are the ramifications of that? If you take a look, a new normal means new standards of engagement. So with your chat and live streaming have become the norm and it enables one on one, it enables all of us in a group, it enables all of us in one network. The second key call out is gaming. And gaming, gaming is on fire, but it's not just the diehard gamers that are exponentially increasing. It's also among some perhaps a more sedate, larger populace with premium offerings. I was looking at the numbers at Ludo commands and they are large. So there it is. Cut to our lives, I spoke about the fact that we live our lives in media, right? Romance, entertainment, it is out there, we are all new standards of engagement consumers today are actually talking to us live, telling us what they need, provided we listen, right? So it's all about delivering experiences to them that is meaningful. And therefore to that effect, it is delivering virtual experiences that supplement or in fact at times even surpass reality. And before you know it, maybe, maybe tomorrow I will not be using my computer and all you guys will perhaps have that Oculus on and you all will be actually in the room with me, right? And therefore, moving on from there, the next trend that we have, which is all about omni commerce. Now much has been spoken and written about this. The fact is that the pandemic has collapsed into three months or perhaps even shorter what might have taken a decade. I say three months because it happened very quickly right after a couple of months into our lockdown. Look at the way India is topping the chart. Of course, it is a base effect as well, but topping the chart as far as e-commerce sales growth is concerned. And this is, it's spanning across electronics, across household goods, across groceries, essentials, digital wallets and payments have also kept pace in tandem. So today, digitally connected consumers are increasingly wanting to shop where and when they choose and now expect to shop where they swipe. And this picture to my mind actually sums it all. We are truly living in the digital economy. The other bit on this e-com is the rise of social commerce. Retail brands today seamlessly connect social engagement to e-commerce and the ones that do it right and do it well will win. There is no two ways about it. But the amount of time that we spend on social, the context is just right. So you're connected, it's in the right context served right there and there and it's a win-win-win. Moving on to this example is acutely captures what I've just described. This is an example from Korea where consumers are swiping and shopping during their commute and by the time they reach home, the product is delivered to their home. And therefore, preparing for live commerce. Now this is, we're talking about merging live streaming with live commerce and this is proved to be extremely, extremely popular and I believe in Singapore it's gone through the roof. So that's what is there. I won't even say it's on the horizon, it's already here. And therefore, the third catalyst, the expectation and we touched upon it very briefly earlier, the expectation from brands. So brands today, brands today have no room to hide in very many ways. Consumers are demanding and therefore, brands should step forward and stand up for both equality and I would say equity as well. And brands that issue a statement in support need to follow it up with specific concrete actions. Else they will be labeled as exploitative. So like I said, no room to hide but instead forget hiding. If we look at it as an opportunity to stand for who and what we are all about, it actually is an opportunity to engage with our consumers and we spoke about loyal consumers increase their loyalty. So that to me, this is what this opportunity accounts and consumers expected and brands are doing so. They've stepped up in almost unprecedented ways right at the start of the pandemic and brands that do this and do this for real stand to benefit undoubtedly brand purpose is almost evolving into universal activism. The other call out is that once we've done it and we walk the talk, it is a commitment for the long haul. But it is a win-win that is also there undoubtedly. And therefore, the fourth catalyst and I recall this creative problem solving a little different from the storytelling while that still holds true and good. But creativity today, we all know is the biggest most actionable driver of brand effectiveness. But this is creativity and a little more. Again, going back to our CMO survey, as high as 85% of our CMOs identify and agree with us that creativity is the single most important capability that any future agency can have. And it's proven that high growth CMOs are twice as likely to completely change their creative strat and particularly during the time of in the last 12 months as compared to perhaps their other low growth CMOs. So having said this, creativity, what we spoke about outside traditional spaces and places. What do we mean by that? And I will show you an example which I hope will epitomize all that I'm talking about. But what it does is it does accord us unique possibilities to drive consumer driven experiences. And it also, this creative solution has to be of utility to our consumers. It has to, it can't be just a gimmick. It has to provide real substance, enable our consumers live their life much, much better. And the use of tech is going a long, long way. But if I may, it is technology with purpose. Because if tech is used for tech's sake, consumers see through it. So using tech to add value to consumers life is the asset test. Take a look at this example. It's one of ours and it to very many ways epitomizes the fact that we live our life in media. It epitomizes creating and adding value to consumers life. It epitomizes being connected, contextual and personalized. It brings it all together and using tech and media to engage our consumers creatively like never before. Take a look at it. And this is to my mind what you call true innovation. Out with the best future audio messages. Like a book I know. It kind of looks like a nacho, right? One kabab, two kabab, three kabab, four kabab. So many years worth of food vouchers from cities. Free food, tastes better, better. Poo. Poo. On bristles, on gags and so on. Average of over 50 DMs from cities. I think that soon became 20,000, 30,000 and 150,000. Wow. What this case does is it brings a life the fact that we managed to catch the most expensive currency on social media, which is our Gen Z's attention. We spoke about the attention economy. We had them actually participating in the program and you saw the numbers. And then the numbers apart, the work speaks for itself. So when I called out an innovation, this to my mind is just that. Our last one on loyalty. We spoke about the fact that loyal consumers are worth their weight in gold. Consumers routinely reevaluate their purchase habits, right? But what these 18 months has done is completely disrupted their purchase habit. They have actually, again, we go back to the survey that we did, where as many as 74% agreed that because of this pandemic, they were becoming far more price conscious. They were becoming far more frugal. And at the same time, as many as half of them were willing to try new brands during this moment of upheaval. So brands that approach this disruption with a mindset of strength versus survival will be able to actually ensure and seek out opportunities that they can use to their advantage and bring home real value in the consumer's life. So all that we have spoken about in the past half an hour is ensuring disruption is as much a time for opportunity as it is a time for change. Think about it, consumer journeys, we've moved from curated by brand to curated by consumers. Expectation, we've moved from a market at me to a market to me. The way brands are built, we've moved from an advertising down to an experience up. The remit of marketing leaders from being stewards of brands, they are now stewards of growth. And as far as role of marketing is concerned, and it is what if it's from changing consumer behavior to changing brand behavior. So how do we do this? We speak a lot about innovation and obviously everyone is talking about innovation. But the problem with innovation is that it is really easy to spot. That Swiggy example, I don't think anybody on this call today will refute that it is an innovation with a capital I. But the point is it's not so easy to define and it's that much more harder to produce as a habit. So if you get it right, innovation does drive brand value, it drives brand growth, it drives a competitive edge, it actually is a magnet for talent as well. But this is provided you get it right as a habit, not just as a one-off, right? So how do we do that? How does the future agency make this into a process, make this into a mindset rather than a one-off? And that is the challenge that we all need to grapple with. When we went back to that CMO survey, as many as 84% agreed that innovation is high priority. And yet an even higher number admitted that they had no approach to innovation. It is of such critical importance. And what do we have? We don't have any, you know, thought-through process. We don't have anything that the rigor that will make it happen again and again and again. So what we've really focused on at Densoop is how do we build a process for focused innovation? Take a look at, take a look at the way we used to innovate earlier. There was this lone genius, there was a Eureka inspiration moment and there was this disruption and innovation is a thing. You will all agree that far from it, it is not a lone genius anymore. It's all about themes and diversity. It's not about running a Eureka moment in the middle of the night. It's a paradigm shift that we are talking about wherein, you know, it's about doing things right rather than stimulating each other and building on each other rather than I know it all, right? It is not about a paradigm shift, but it's more about the intersection of culture and consumer and tech, all intersecting and coming together. It's not a thing. I mentioned this earlier. It's a process and a mindset that we all need to inculcate. And that is what we have done. And having said that, it's not yet over. It is, we are in very many ways competing with ourselves and agency of the future really needs to think that it means competing at the rate of learning. How can an organization learn faster to understand their consumers and therefore instead of reacting, preempt and serve them what they next need. That is a distinct call out. And what it definitely does is innovation drives a performance culture. It is transformative in ideas that affect outcome. It definitely has a business focus and a real time understanding of results which perhaps were not was not there earlier. And this is what helps all of us marketers and agency meeting consumers needs met and unmet needs as well as unmet business needs. Both it is a coming together of consumer and business and, you know, marching in tandem rather than one after another or one scripted to the tune of another. So the agency of the future is all about maintaining a state of constant self disruption, staying ahead of the curve, moving faster than perhaps, you know, the ecosystem is. And that is what the agency of the future is all about. I'm excited. I just hope all you young guys are equally excited. Thank you. Thank you so, so much. Thank you. Thank you so much, Ms. Karan. It was truly an enlightening experience to hear you talk about what the future is going to be. And on behalf of everyone involved, I would like to thank you for your valuable time. Thank you. And you'll notice right on the dot, in fact, with five minutes to spare. That's wonderful. Thank you so much. Once again, ma'am. Thank you for listening. So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. That was our first session and what a session it was. Ms. Divya Karani, CEO of South Asia Media Services, Den Su was here with us. So with that absolutely amazing session. And we'd like to thank once again Ms. Karani for being here with us. Thank you ma'am. Thank you. With that, we'd like to continue this amazing day of fantastic conversations right here at Exchange for Media Conclave and move things forward with our next session. All right, there we go. So the next session is going to be about a lot of things. But before we actually get to that, let me quickly introduce the speaker, Mr. Shailendra Katyal, CEO, Lenovo India, who will share his knowledge and insights drawn from more than two decades long career in PA and L leadership and marketing space. He will be highlighting the new marketing practices in post pandemic world by giving insights into consumer behavior, their shopping habits, and how marketers can make the most out of their new lifestyle with correct marketing strategies and initiatives. It's going to be an amazing session and I have a fantastic speaker, Mr. Shailendra Katyal. I'll hand over the screen to you, sir. Hey, thanks, Naveen. Can you confirm if you can hear me clearly? Yes, I can. Okay. So you'll be helping me put up the charts? The team will do that, sir. There you go. Okay. So let me know when the screen is up. I can see it. The screen is up, sir. Okay. So thank you, Naveen. Thank you for having me on this program. I'll start with maybe a couple of caveats. The title does look a little heavy. And I've been out of active marketing for a while now, since I moved on to business roles. But I continue to be interested in the topic. So what I'll share is more my observations and the liberty that I've taken is to take maybe a longer term view because you get perspective only if you're not reacting to the immediate, but you're taking a longer horizon in which to look at trends and changes. So while the title does say it's a post-pandemic world, what I'm looking at is maybe a 10 to 15 year kind of horizon. Now things have changed and now things are likely to change in the future. So with that disclaimer, if I can have the slide move, please. Yeah, so a lot of us are facing this question, right? What really has changed in the last two years? What is the new normal? What is the post-COVID world? And as we see vaccinations improve even with the new variant, I think the desire of people to go back to the way the world was is very, very high. We've all been working in a hybrid kind of environment, but we've also seen revenge shopping, revenge travel, a revenge going back to office at a level coming into full force. So I think the only lasting impact that COVID would have created and I'm sticking my neck out here, obviously there'll be many more changes, but I think the real change is just an acceleration of digitization and virtualization of our lives. And the reason I'm using the word acceleration is because it's not new. This has been building up over the last, I would say, 10 to 15 years. Internet is now a two decade old phenomenon more than 22 years. But what the pandemic definitely has done is put this in maybe the sixth gear in terms of the rapid pace of change that we are witnessing around us. If I can have the next slide, please. And this, I looked it up yesterday. This was an HBR article in 2012 when I was still in an active role in marketing. And all of us were focusing this thing about is the world going to change completely? Is there a very new way of talking to customers? Digitization had started becoming a fairly big phenomena. And actually this was a title article saying marketing is dead, where their view was the traditional ways of looking at marketing. The four pieces is out of the window. And there'll be a very new way. But the reality is, we are still around, right? Most people on this call still have jobs. Marketing is pretty much alive and kicking discipline. And yes, there have been new techniques, new tools which have come in. But the fundamentals I don't think have the fundamentals remain where they are. There are consumers, there are brands. And there's always a story to be told there. If I can have the next slide up. And this is what we all saw as marketing practitioners in the last one decade, right? And all of these were buzzwords. A lot of jargon came in. Yes, new tools and techniques also came in. But how much has it affected the fundamental way of looking at a consumer, looking at his or her needs? And then finding a way to having a conversation in favor of your brand with that customer. But like I said, when you look at things over a longer period, all of these kind of predicted that this is the new wave. There's only content marketing, traditional advertising will die. Or let's move completely to performance marketing or movement marketing, or this new way of big data or hyper personalization. So all these are trends which have come in. Yes, they're here to stay. But they're just one part of the conversation which actually makes the marketing conversation a lot richer. Because of the number of touch points and the number of things you can leverage or use to talk to the customer. But has it killed marketing? No, it's made marketing even more richer than it used to be. If I can have the next slide up please. And this again is a controversial statement. I've held this view over many years that whatever was the big promise of digital and it largely because of the way the largest publishers or the largest tech giants who control the technology narrative have operated. There was a big promise of getting into one-on-one conversations, having a very deep insight of customers. But where is it? It's still a bit of a black box here is you get a lot of numbers. But numbers may or may not tell you the story. The real intimate conversations are still I think a long way away. There was a thing about digital leading to zero wastage that you are doing broadcast, the moment you have a digital touch point, you can do precision targeting. But how much of that has really come alive? And then there are these new topics of data privacy and digital actually was supposed to be the most trustworthy source of information. Because belief and trust in traditional media was dying out. And people felt that with social media, the citizen journalism, the accountability of content and the trust on content on digital will be a lot higher. But we've all seen that also change very quickly over the last few years. If you can go to the next slide please. Which is leading me to this and this is not a new statement. This I think is in the early part of 19th century, 20th century, which is half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble I have is that I don't know which half. And I still find that very, very relevant when we look at marketing, ROIs, etc. There would be a lot of data, but there's a really very clearly measurable on what is working, what is not working. There's still a lot of subjectivity, despite all the talk of performance marketing being available at your fingertips. If you can move on. So I started with the view that fundamentals have not changed. There are consumers and there's a problem marketing problem to be solved. Yes, obviously, using new techniques and tools. But what has fundamentally changed? And if you look at the two charts on the right, by and large, the world is a lot more prosperous. A lot more people have been lifted out of the poverty zone. There's more spending power. And almost all of them, almost the entire world is now digitally connected. Average life expectancy is also up, which is again a sign of prosperity and health. Yes, the pandemic has come in a bit of a root shock. But if you look at the broader trend in terms of the overall planet that we live in, we are living in far better times than what was there maybe even a decade back. And with all this digital device proliferation and the internet, obviously, all of us are spending a lot more time on maybe 8 billion people are using far higher media and screen time than what they used to. And there is an information overload, which makes the task for marketing that much more challenging, right? Because you're spending a lot more time on the screen, but you're also getting bombarded with a lot more information. And on the bottom left of the chart, you would see the amount of data getting created. And this new term that I learned, Zetabytes, which is a million terabytes of data, and look at how the graph is growing exponentially. And people say that every two years, almost the entire amount of information that is available on the planet is doubling. And the third big trend, and like I said, these are more pointers, these are not a comprehensive list of all the trends that we are seeing around us. But this feeling about moving from permanency to transiency, that is a definite trend and a lasting one, I would say, which is broadly called Uberization, that the young people don't want long-term ownership. They want to live more in the moment and have more experiences rather than getting caught up, which is changing consumption patterns that people would spend a lot more place of premium on travel experiences versus long-term asset ownership. If you can go to the next chart, please. And obviously, we've not seen the end of it. This is what is coming. On the top of the chart is what you see is, it is a live thing from my counterpart, the country out of Japan, who did a virtual avatar meeting with his team. So the monthly business review, which is a lot more interesting than having a boring Zoom call. Data exists, tools exist, platforms exist to do it even today. And with 5G, 6G coming in and this topic out of Metaverse, the fact that there'll be a lot more of digitization and virtualization of our lives is, and this is likely to change very, very quickly. It's not a five-year-out or a 10-year-out trend. I heard Bill Gates talk about it, I think a few weeks back where he said almost all meetings will turn into virtual avatar kind of meetings in the next two years. That's how fast the changes come. And obviously, we've heard what Facebook is transforming into over the last couple of months. The bottom right is actually from New York Times last week, which talks about having a virtual avatar-led kind of wedding rather than a physical one. This obviously will make and you can visualize right now if people will spend a lot more time on the medium, but how do you talk to these customers because you're talking to their virtual cells and not the real cells? How does advertising look in the Metaverse? This is a topic that we'll all grapple with over the next few years. You can go to the next chart, please. So these are some of the pointers I would say again for marketers to reflect on. We see the world having a lot more conflicts and in my entire experience, brands which solve a conflict or at least have a point of view have far more lasting impact and lead businesses profitably. And I would say that the world is giving you a lot more opportunity now because polarizations are increasing and brands can always help choose sides. We've seen that when brands take stands, the loyalty and the affinity towards the brand does go up. And I would say you will always have three choices on any conflict that you want to take. You can be on either side. You can also be the bridge because there is a room for brands to act as a bridge on a conflict-driven situation. The second again is to once you've chosen your battle, be consistent, authentic because you are under the watch. Our distances between the consumer and the brand have shrunk dramatically. It's almost a direct to consumer conversation that is on at any given point of time. So you will be held a lot more accountable. So don't keep flipping. Be consistent with the narrative and be authentic. Put your money where your mouth is not just for advertising, but build your brand around the philosophy that you want to talk about. The fourth one is to invest in building experiences. Like I said, there is this thing about people living for the moment, people living for experiences. Now, how does your brand operate in that context, whether it is a physical experience or a virtual experience? It can't be a cold kind of narrative that I have a product of then advertising. And then I hope that the customer makes a choice in the fear of my brand. The investment that you have to put in experiences has to be a lot, lot more. And yeah, this will never change. You have to know your customer and you have to tell your story well in your active practitioner of marketing. And there's some setup, right? The more things change, the risk change both in terms of the environment, the consumer, the medium in which we communicate with the customers, a lot of that will change. But the fundamentals of building a good solid brand with good customer loyalty will always remain. Can go to the next chart, please. So I started off with that slide from HBR 2012 saying that marketing is dead. In my view, lazy marketing is dead because the environment has become a lot more difficult, a lot more clutter, a lot more competition, a lot more decent remediation, all that is live around us. And I've chosen the context of cricket given how popular that is in the country. This was a very familiar site, right? Very portly gentleman who were at the top of the game, the best batsman in the world, the gentleman. I'm just joining. Sorry, can I continue? There was. Yes, sir. Please go ahead. So on the top is a picture of David Boone, one of the persons at the top of his game, a very explosive batsman, but that was his level of physical fitness. And that is what a lot of marketing was, right? Which was kind of make a couple of TV commercials, ensure that the brand doesn't change too much. And then you got into very large market share kind of monopoly kind of positions. Obviously, the market is a lot more fragmented and there's a lot of change, which means you have to be at the top of the game. And I did hear the previous speaker also talk about it on the pressure on agencies to remain ahead of the curve, which means that you have to upscale, you have to learn something new almost every day. So it's almost becoming like people in the IT world, right? Software developers, they can't rely on one skill set because the tools, the applications that they work on change every year, if not faster. So constant upscaling, building new muscle, building new ways of competing in the market is kind of forgiven. And obviously, there's a new kind of marketer which is required and it's been building up over time, right? Earlier, there was this thing about only having artistic people in marketing or advertising, which was the art part of it. And over time, we've seen that there's no it's not only about art, there's a lot of science which has come in. And now there's a third layer, which is how good are you with technology because unless you appreciate, unless you absorb the technology, you'll not be able to implement that. So that pressure will definitely come, which is now almost like you need all around skill sets, you need a lot of muscle to compete and become a successful marketer. So obviously, I would say that the opportunity is also huge because consumptions are on the rise, by and large, the world is more prosperous, it has by and large more connected. So opportunity to engage with a far wider audience set is always available for marketers and brands. But it doesn't come easy because the same price that you are eyeing, there's a lot of other people would be also eyeing that price. So you have to gear up and develop that muscle to compete. So that's pretty much the end of my short spiel. There's a last slide I had if I can put that on. So this I'm sure a lot of this audience would have read at least one of these books already. But I do believe successful marketers are who understand the context, the environment and the trends a lot better and then they are able to apply their thinking, their process onto the one of the trends and make a successful business outcome out of it. So do read these. I've read the first two, the third one, I'm halfway through very well written books. And it gives you a very good idea on where the future is headed, looks a little bit like science fiction. But like I said, science fiction is becoming reality faster than what we anticipated it to be. So with that, I'll end my session and happy to take questions or any dialogue now. Shalindar, you did a fab job in bringing a perspective for business owners. I wouldn't say just marketers and brand owners, because you're really, as I said in my opening address that marketing is business, business is marketing. How you build the Lenovo brand and the brand stands for a lot more than just the product. And I admire you for the fact, because I'm a book alcoholic and in every presentation and every interaction with a book recommendation. So I'm glad you did that. And I got to know about Mr. Jalan's book, which I don't, the rest who I read. So clearly you added to the commerce part. And again, I've been following Lenovo India's journey for a while. And you were appointed during the pandemic when Rahul quit. Now, during the pandemic, schools, offices, cinema halls all came home. Technology became a bridge to conducting your life, conducting your business. Tell me, how did Lenovo rose to the challenge and make itself relevant to all the stakeholders and step up its game? Yeah, so great question, Anurag. And I don't think we were unique in how we responded. Because the first thing that the pandemic taught us was to be empathetic, right? Because business definitely took a backseat. It was more about ensuring that our employees, our extended partners, their employees, their families are kind of taken care of. So I do believe we were empathetic. We were not, we were first prioritizing the care of employees, whether it is medical, whether it is insurance, whether it is even arranging for oxygen cylinders, because we had a globally efficient supply chain. And when the country was going through shortages, we were able to provide that care to our employees. On the business front, yes, that also became a dire need, right? Our products almost become essential commodity because to remain productive or to attend school, you needed a device. And devices were in short supply at that time because the supply chains were kind of disrupted. So we stepped up our game there. We created new, while online always was an option, a lot of people wanted the comfort of buying from their neighborhood stores. So their entire omni-channel approach, doing a video demo, ensuring that there's a touchless kind of end-to-end purchase model that we were able to create even for our neighborhood stores, I think that was kind of unique. And we also did that thing about bringing the store to you, where we rented vans with the latest products and took them to a lot of communities. So multiple fronts, I would say, to enable the customer to buy a product. But more importantly, I think the fact that we came across a very empathetic brand protecting jobs, no layoff, no partner got impacted, their earnings were protected. With zero revenues we've paid salaries, we've paid partners their incentives for a quarter or so, both in the first wave and in the second wave. So I think that's what gives me a little more joy that we were there. We've contributed to the community. We spent almost a million dollars on hospital bed extensions and getting oxygen cylinders for not just the employees, but for the larger community in multiple states as well. Shalinda, use the word compassion, use the word care, use the word community. I think pandemic taught us that profits are important, but they will only be useful or relevant if we take care of people in the planet. The earth sustainability has become a very important issue. Now two more things have happened. A lot of businesses have gone D2C. A lot of brands have gone D2C. Now how is Lenovo kind of exploiting that and leveraging this D2C bank wagon in a very deep way? That's my first question. And second is SMEs initially saw the burn of the businesses coming to an halt. But the growth in the last six months has evolved from SMEs. So how are you serving the SMB or SME segment? That's my second question. My first question is what is Lenovo India doing to really in some way... Sorry, your video went off for a second, Anurag. Couldn't you repeat the first part, please? SMEs I got, the first one was what? First is the D2C revolution is happening, the direct to consumer, the digital to consumer. Again, you're a technology brand. You're a brand that I know in your school segment because we had business world to work with you. You created a website where all the stakeholders in the education ecosystem can come and really find resources if I may use a platform that is selfless. So you clearly believe in building relationship directly with your community and your consumer. So how are you leveraging the D2C phenomena and how are you serving the SME and SMB? Yeah, no great questions again, Anurag. And on D2C it's not new to us because we've had a brand store, Lenovo.com, alive from I would say the 2013-14 period. So we're used to selling to our customers directly, but yes, they have other channels of buying as well. They can buy from ETL, they can buy from our Lenovo exclusive stores, they can buy from Krumar, Alliance, etc. So that's one of the things available for customers to engage with us directly. And we do believe that we'll follow the customer, that whoever wants to buy directly will allow them access and whoever wants to buy from route of their choice will not prevent access to our customers. So in that sense, while D2C I know is the flavor of the season, we have to be clear from a business point of view, what is the logic? Is the logic to become more efficient? Is there a cost efficiency to be had? By and large we see it is more or less the same whether you go through a partner because there's a cost to serve when you want to do D2C. There's a shipment cost, there's a credit card fee, and there's a service cost that you take when you go direct. So if it's making business sense to move a large part direct to consumer, one would take that. Otherwise, I think one has to follow the consumer in terms of their buying patterns. And by and large consumers are I would say turning omnichannel. It is not necessarily one way or the other that I'll only buy D2C on online. People have a hybrid life and they want a hybrid shopping pattern as well. The other logic is if you want more intimacy, you want more data. And that is again, you can do experiments etc. with your loyal community. That is one I would say smaller role that is there with D2C. But D2C is not our only play, it is maybe about a 10% reality for us. On SMEs it's again a great question, our level of entrepreneurship in India is increasing despite the pandemic. We've seen earlier we had one unicorn in 10 years, now we have a unicorn a week, and the count has crossed 300. So a lot of entrepreneurship, a lot of I would say good money, good capital, chasing good ideas. And we are partnering very strongly, a lot of the unicorns we've been with them right from the first laptop that they bought when they were a 2% shop. So that's again to the point that you made earlier. We believe in relationships and SMEs need a little more than just laptops or tablets or phones that we're able to sell to them. They need an IT partner because they need also scale very quickly from having two laptops to needing a data center to needing managed services. So the entire suite of products which goes into the overall IT spends, I think we are able to partner with them. And then we have very innovative models like device as a service, where a lot of startups don't want that CAPEX, they want it in an OPEX form and they want other services to be loaded. So the fact that we've taken a lead there and we are able to offer our entire bouquet of products and services on a pay-as-you-go model, I think that again is a differentiator for us. I can go on having a conversation with you and clearly we share our love for books. I buy 50, 60 books a week. I get 100 odd books because we review books, but these days I'm reading more emails than I'm reading books. But my last question to you, Shalinder, is you alluded to it in your presentation, but if you had to make three predictions about the future in 11 to market years in terms of a new playbook, in terms of the next 12 to 18 months, and we know these days, we know that we don't even know what we don't know. I mean, we knew that we don't know some things, but now we know that we don't even know what we don't know. So what are your predictions or let's say trends, sometimes predictions can sound very mega, but what are the trends that you believe will become bigger and bigger? You outlined some of them in your talk, but as we wrap up, give us some of the trends that you believe will be relevant to building businesses and brands from scratch. Yes, I think I covered most of my thoughts in the presentation. Maybe I'll repeat myself. I think the world, while it is getting more connected is getting more polarized, whether it is geopolitical, whether it is religious, whether it is community driven, or just an individual's point of view. And one can see it as a problem. I also see it as an opportunity that you can be a conflict resolution provider as a brand. Take a stand and build your brand around it. I think that would be one. This constant upskilling I think will be a need for marketers to really adopt. It's not about just doing one more digital certification online. How do you truly embrace the new technologies and take a lead there? That would be the second one. And the third is, I think, always good to refresh rather than getting caught up in jargon or the latest wave or the latest buzzword. What are the true fundamentals of knowing your customer well and doing your four Ps around that? To that extent, classical marketing has not changed. It's pretty much what it was. So again, maybe I'm referring back to going back to school, read up a lot more, upscale a lot more before you get into practicing that. And in my view, there are five lessons we learned from the pandemic. Those lessons are first, never say never. In business, don't say this is not possible. It's just that we may not be coming from a point where we are not open. Now we know that anything can happen. I mean, working from home, I know Lenovo gave flexibility and gives flexibility now also to its colleagues in Bangalore. I've been to your office in the past. I came in the right in the middle of the pandemic to meet Rahul and I know. So never say never. Second, the why is very important. Purpose. I mean, we had the purpose written on our vision boards in the office, but purpose came into play for the first time. Third, sustainability has become very important. What happens in one part of the world impacts all of us. So marketer need to know what is the value chain? What is the supply chain? Where is it coming? Are these the supply chains? All product categories will ask that question. What are we doing to be able to be carbon neutral in a lot of industries? Fourth is we're questioning the drivers of every business. Do we need to do this? Can we do this more efficiently? And fifth, I keep saying while I came some data in the morning, while I was looking at Walmart's sales number in the US and they are like even the traffic in the stores, the physical footfalls in the stores continue to surprise the e-tailing pie has gone from 16% to 28%. So it's not an either or situation in India. While digital will grow, the physical retail has a way. So it's been hybrid in a lot of cases. I mean, you said while D2C is growing 90% of your business, last but not the least, compassion. Compassion is the most important. Compassion, self-care, it can manifest in immunity health. So I think we all are humbler. You know, whatever happens in life is a bonus staying alive and having our families alive. So I hope we've learned to care for each other much more than we did. So on that note, we would like to express our gratitude to you, Shalinder, for making your session thought-provoking, real and authentic. And thank you for that recommendation of the book as I and let me recommend, I always recommend the book. I recently read this book and even presented this book to a friend today in Bangalore. I'm in Bangalore. I know you live in Bangalore. I'm doing this from Bangalore. It's called the NP social network. It's written by Ben Mezrich. So Ben Mezrich is the guy who wrote the book, social network, around which the movie was built. So it is an interesting take, you know, some of the things we know instinctively, but it's how the author puts it out. So it's called the NP social network by Ben Mezrich. You may want to read that. Thank you, Shalinder. Look forward to more interactions with you. And back to you, Ravind, for the rest of the exchange for media conflict. Thank you. Thank you, Anurag, for having me. Thanks, Ravind. I'll be signing off. Thank you. Bye. Thank you. Thank you so much. Once again, Mr. Katyal. It was truly an honor. And of course, Dr. Bhatra for joining in the conversation. Thank you. So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. That was Mr. Katyal with some insights that we are really thankful for. With that note, I would like to get your attention towards the audio visuals that you'd like to show me on the screen. Can we have the EVPs? Exchange for media. A name synonymous with the latest news about the advertising industry in India. The exchange for media group set up in 2000 has the most credible media platforms covering the entire advertising, media and marketing domain with its highly acclaimed digital, print and on-ground assets. The group's flagship news portal ExchangeForMedia.com reaches over 6 lakh subscribers who are the first to receive breaking news in the industry. The buzzing website not only covers the news but goes beyond the obvious to bring in a fresh point of view. 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After two enriching sessions, we have a panel discussion on pandemic impact, emerging challenges and opportunities for CMOs. For the CMO panel discussion, we have with us Ms. Vaishali Verma, CEO, Initiative, who's going to be the moderator. Mr. Shashank Srivastava, Executive Director from Maruti. Mr. Vivek Sharma, CMO PD Light Industries. Mr. Shivam Ranjan, CMO Motorola. Mr. Siddharth Bhutalia, CMO Air Asia. And Ms. Sujata V. Kumar, Head of Marketing for Visa. I'll hand over the screen to the panel discussion. And Ms. Verma will be taking charge from here. Ms. Verma, over to you. Thank you. Thank you so much. A very good evening and a warm welcome to all our panelists for this evening. The topic for today is how are we agile in the digital world? Has this pandemic led fast-paced digital transition forced us as an industry to rethink or realign our marketing strategies? There were various challenges. There has been varying degree of impact felt by different sectors and different industry. And today I'll start by asking Mr. Shashank Srivastava, CMO, Executive Director Maruti. Sir, marketing plays a vital role in stimulating demand for goods and services. And of course, there has been challenges faced at the value chain. And they have been, I mean, all of us know that auto sector went through challenging times in the last 20 months. Would you want to share how did you adapt your marketing strategies during the last year or so? So thank you, Vaishali, for having me on this panel. I'm looking forward to a great discussion today. For your question of how COVID has affected our marketing outlook and strategies, I must tell the audience here that for the first time ever in the auto industry of our country, we actually had zero sales in April 2020. That was really shocking. And in fact, that sort of changed the entire outlook, not only towards marketing, but to consumers and business in general. So I was just hearing the previous panel talking about the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns, the Black Swan events. And this was that unknown unknown and that Black Swan event, which actually really made a difference to the way we think. So for auto sector, of course, when it became zero, the sale, we took it in a rather positive way and we said, this is actually the power of zero. And the power of zero is that you reexamine everything, assuming nothing. At that time, we really didn't know when the auto industry will bounce back. Fortunately, it did after a couple of months. But at that time, we didn't know that. And we saw a complete change in the consumer behavior as well, which as marketers, we will have to be very cognizant of. And the first thing which we saw was that because of this increased safety perception, there was a move away from public transport and shared mobility towards personal mobility. And that in our terms, I'm not sure how many people here are from automobile, but in terms of the buying buyer type, actually we classify a first-time buyer, additional car buyer replacement car buying, each of these categories have their own reasons for buying. So what we found was that the shared mobility in public transport came down, personal mobility went up. That means the first-time buyers went up. And as it is in India, the first-time buyers are large, about 45, 46% jumped up further, about 3%. And the additional car buying increase, that's probably because people didn't want to use shared mobility. Rather, they would have replacement buying came down. The replacement buying is when you exchange your old car for a new car. That's basically aspirational buying. Aspirational buying came down a bit. Remember in car, all buyers have aspiration when they buy cars. But aspirational buying came down reflecting from about 26% of the overall market to about 80-90%. Utility buying and functionality buying increased. What does that mean for us? We of course had to look at our entire marketing communication built upon this changed consumer outlook. A lot of people actually lost jobs, lost or at least had reduced incomes, reduced businesses. And what we observed was what's called a telescoping of demand, which means a higher segment person moves down to the next lower segment and so on. Maybe the entry level car guy moves to the used car, used car to the two-wheeler and so on. That's something which we as a marketing strategist had to grapple with. And more importantly, there was a great shift away from in the way the consumers bought vehicles and the way they approached buying. It was completely digitalized. So there was that really big shift in those three months in that lockdown period in the first wave of COVID. So there was this science earlier from 2016 that digitalization was on the increase. We had about 23% of the enquiries coming from our web platform. And it took us three years till 2020, actually four years, March 2020 to reach from 3 to 15%. But in three months, we reached from 15 to 50%. That was a real, real big change as far as digitalization was concerned. A lot of people actually changed their buying habits from an outright purchase to what we call subscription. It's an asset-like way of usage of cars. So you use the asset, but you don't buy it. We had, of course, many other things. Personalization was expected because media habits changed. And yeah, and we as a response as marketers, we tried to digitize our entire process. There are 26 touch points our research shows when a customer, from the point he starts to buy a car, when he thinks to buy a car to that point when he actually takes delivery, we digitize 24 of them. And only two points, which is the test drive and the actual delivery remains. So we are talking of a digital definitely in auto sector. People still come to the showroom, but this acceleration towards digitalization has completely affected not only our team, our entire outlook over showroom. We were talking earlier of physical showrooms. We are present in 2000 cities, 3000 showrooms. But now we are talking of also digital showrooms in addition to that. So now we have 6000 digital showrooms. Of course, as you know, it is geographic, like agnostic. So media spends also changing based on what the consumers have changed. The genres of investment change, the digitalization, the message, the communication, personalization, which consumers expect also change. So all in all, I think it affected all our business marketing starting from strategy to the way we approach our selling, to the way we communicate to the customer. Great. I mean, I know. So one thing which we've all learned is adapting to this new consumer behavior. And as you rightly said, the big advantage of digital is about personalization at scale. And as your consumer journey changed and evolved, you could get into sharply targeted messaging as well. And that's very nice and very interesting to hear. I'll move to Vivek, personally a big fan of your brand. And you did a lot of interesting light-hearted messaging on unlock to drive social change during pandemic. And I'm sure while it would have their challenges when it started, but there was a huge urban demand which would have come through. And as you were battling with other issues of safety and security and morale of the employees, etc. What were your key learnings through this pandemic? Firstly, Vishali and a change for media. Thank you for having me here. It's always a pleasure to be here in the events of exchange for media. And a very good evening to my fellow panelists and the audiences. Vishali, I think Shashank raised some very relevant aspects of the changes which pandemic has brought. Let me add to what he's saying. And of course, I'll come to the communication which Shavik called it during pandemic, which was a bit counterintuitive, but it worked for the brand. So just to underline what Shashank said, the consumer has become far more digital in his behavior, her behavior, more value-conscious. There are obviously explosion of touchpoints, fragmentation of touchpoints, more towards touchless economy, more health-conscious, etc. But there are changes in other aspects of marketing. Big stretch I would like to bring forth, which actually has impacted marketing processes and marketing approach. First is, if this channel has changed, we have seen more consumers actually participating in e-commerce. They have become more comfortable with a digital approach of brands. And consequently, there has been a rise of D2C approach and D2C direct to consumer brands. Second is, in our industry, we have consumer and V2B businesses both in fevicol, waterproofing, adhesives. We have something called intermediaries, contractors, end users, plumbers, carpenters. And we saw a change in their habits also. So they also became more digital. But we had to support them in this time to get them businesses because their businesses were shrinking. So we launched a program for them digitally. We gave them what is called safe working at site practices. We did digital campaign towards consumer to allow them to work in their homes with PIDLAT certified safe practices. And I think other aspect was that we saw more role in digital marketing. As in B2C, for example, more mothers were doing art and craft in home with children. More consumers were in the first wave. After first wave, they were doing more repair at home. So more usage of our adhesives was observed and more search behavior was observed for repair, how to repair, how to waterproof, how to do this and how to do that. And I think we went along with the behavior and we actually delivered a lot of marketing content to mothers and to consumers around do it yourself and the art and craft. So, and I think we also laid more emphasis on the marketing programs. For example, there's nothing called all India marketing anymore after pandemic because marketing markets are opening and closing at different points in time due to pandemic. So I think the role of localized, regionalized campaigns, which are city specific and only digital can deliver on that became far more common. We laid more emphasis on performance marketing. Delivering leads to our teams in waterproofing and I would say woodworking carpentry through performance marketing analytics. And in B2B also, we have a B2B business for the audience in pigments and paints and adhesives. Waterproofing coatings. And in this, we also observed that our B2B customers were also getting more digital. They were approaching us for information on digital. They were doing the search on digital then they were often buying on digital. So we automated our marketing program through salesforce.com and use more of CRM to actually do targeting campaigns with our customers. And last but not least, I think two more things change underlying the supply chains become, became disrupted. And as Sashank said, it has impacted auto mode but it's impacting our industry also in terms of raw material prices. So there is of course more pressure on bottom lines and consequently for CMOs, they increase pressure on delivering ROI driven targeted specific campaigns. So lot has changed, I must say. Well, of course, working remotely with your teams and agencies also has its own challenges. And I think COVID has an impact on the way you work and the way you work with your talent as well and your extended partners. But last but not the least, I would like to touch upon the campaigns which you mentioned about Fevicol. So Fevicol is a woodwork, is a adhesive brand for art and craft for children and for woodworking for carpenters and for industrial customers. It spans across multiple stakeholders. And we thought that as a brand which is loved by Indians and you know, Fevicol is a nickname for adhesives for anything which bonds, unbreakable bonds. So we said we must participate in all the social, I would say, dialogue, chatter and communication around this issue of pandemic. So we did this campaigns around, you know, using tool events which actually are close together. But counterintuitively we took them apart saying you must play a social distancing role. And we did a lot of, I would say, positive empathetic poems and emotional messages to consumers, customers, stakeholders asking them to have a positive approach towards post pandemic. It works. And that really increases the emotional bonding. So I would conclude by saying that, yes, as market year we have to, we have become more digitized, we have, we are beginning to use more analytics, all that is happening. But one thing which pandemic has taught us, the biggest learning is that in these change times, brand must actually adopt a far more empathetic approach. They're also in difficulty, people are looking for value conscious options. So I think emotional, strengthening of emotional bonds with consumers and stakeholders is very necessary across the value chain, not only with end consumers, with your retailers, with your wholesalers, with your dealers, with our contractors. So I think that is what Fevicol and a branch like Dr. Fixit did throughout the campaign, strengthening the emotional bond through digital campaigns and non-digital means afterwards when the COVID led to opening and maintaining a deeper relationship. I think that was one of the learnings and digital emotions when they meet. And that's what makes for effective approach to post pandemic world. Yeah, very interesting because while the entire ecosystem changed to digital world and then the ability to maintain an emotional connect it becomes far more challenging. And I think you did it beautifully. It still rings a bell. So thank you for that insight. I'll move to Shivam. Shivam, I know Motorola has done great business. At least that's what I read over the last 20 months. But how do you see the future of retail? Because that's important. I'm sure you would have also transitioned from offline to online. And this particular category is big on online and e-commerce. But how do you see the future of retail going through a change post COVID bird? And how does a brand like yours or in a category in which you operate adapt to this? Well, thank you, Vaishali. Thank you for that. That's a great question. And before I begin, thank you to E4M for having me here and hello to all the panelists and the viewers. Now coming to Motorola, like you mentioned, I think we've been growing fast. And thankfully, the reason for that is actually the COVID impact made a lot of people move towards working from home, the health care, the education, all of that moved to home. So basically the need for tech products, and this included laptops or tablets or smartphones, the need for the consumer demand for these products actually went up during the pandemic. And this was basically something that sort of helped the industry overall and not just Motorola. I think there was an increased demand. However, obviously, we have to look at various other factors which basically we had to consider to ensure that the consumers were getting what they wanted. And like Vivek mentioned and Shashank mentioned, the value chain had been disrupted, the different touch points for the consumer, whether it is the channel where they can procure it or the backend supply chain, all of that had been disrupted. So definitely a big shift in terms of the changes that the consumers saw and we as marketers, as well as businesses had to see. But coming to your question in terms of the future of retail, I mean, I think the retail, while it has decreased in terms of the amount of presence that it had or the market share that it had before the pandemic, I personally believe that the retail is here to stay. However, how will it evolve? I mean, if it has to stay, it has to evolve to give consumers the flexibility, the convenience that they're looking for, because a lot of consumers, while it is important in their decision journey to sometimes go and actually experience the product. So that's the reason why retail exists for us or for our industry. Because for example, if somebody wants to buy a flagship smartphone, they do want an opportunity to maybe have a touch point where they can go and see the product, they can experience the product before they actually buy it. They might end up buying online later on, but they still need retail to give them that experience. And hence, retail is there to stay. But I think what is important and how I see the future of retail is actually the way it evolves to give consumers the flexibility. So for example, for us in our business, while we are traditionally heavy in terms of e-commerce and digital, we do have a retail presence. And what we try to do to give consumers that flexibility was to try and give them virtual demos, try and give them home demos, try and give them AR, VR experiences with which they could actually get a demo of the product in augmented reality or virtual reality. So that, I think, these kind of changes at retail points, giving them the flexibility to actually get the physical overview while also getting the facility to get something at home, which is something that e-commerce typically does, is I think what might be important for retail to continue to evolve. And I think it's also the entire thing that Shashank mentioned about being fidgetful. So while the physical presence is required, I think the digital interventions in different forms could definitely ensure that the retail continues to have a role to play and continues to grow. So I personally believe that in our industry, the retail is there to stay while the shares might change, while, of course, during the pandemic time and there was a lockdown, there was a massive shift in terms of share that went to the e-commerce portal. But as you see over the period of time, the share is normalizing to quite an extent. And while there is still a skew, it's reduced by a significant margin. So with that, I think it's important for retail to evolve to ensure that there are those healthcare, those hygiene metrics that are taken care of to give people the confidence to actually come and visit them at the touchpoints, to give consumers the flexibility and the convenience to actually get the same experience from their homes or get the products delivered from home. The O2O aspects are also important where they can work with online stores to get the delivery done. But I definitely see the future of retail and I continue to see that it will be an important channel for us even in the future. Yeah, no, absolutely. Completely agree and very well spoken. And I strongly believe that it will coexist. The share might keep changing, but it will coexist. And one of the insights which we are picking up from consumer is about brands which gives them a lot of flexibility, ease, convenience. So in the consumer journey to a certain extent, yes, the search and the behavior of digital will happen, but the last mile that touch and feel which as a consumer we are so used to, it's not going to go away. So great. So Jata, I'll come to you. There's been a massive tech innovation which we've all been reading, which is VR, which whether it is AR VR, whether it is AI, machine learning, and it's all enabling a better consumer experience, right? How has been your experience at Visa and what have you adapted to and want to share anything from your learning in the last 20 months? Yeah, sure. Thanks, Vaishali. Just wanted to check you can hear me properly. Yeah, it's all right. Yeah, sure. Yeah, great. So as my co-panelists have talked about prior to me, all industries and I think every brand has seen a huge change in the past 20 months, and I think the change has been as pronounced for us because you would know, and most of you know that India has been largely a cash-driven society. You know, we did have demonetization where there was a slight change to cashless, but then we saw that it came back. What the pandemic did is it actually necessitated people to move from cash to cashless because we had an extended period of lockdown, which was not there in any other part of the world. So suddenly people were stuck in their homes, not able to meet or go out, but needing to purchase things and needing to buy things, and therefore there was a huge adoption of online and e-commerce. Now, interestingly in India, we're one of the few countries where even when it was e-commerce, largely purchase was by cash. We, you know, you will know a lot of brands actually started cash on delivery when they launched in India, which didn't happen, but of course that had to come to a stop. Therefore, what was the role of our brand was to facilitate the customer's journey and but also to sort of alleviate all the worries they had. They had huge amount of worries about the safety and security of their transaction, the convenience, I mean, where the country of WhatsApp forward. So there were all sorts of forwards going around that, you know, this can happen to your money and that can happen to your money. So I think, you know, we used a lot of tech, we used a lot of the things you're talking about, but basically it was for three things. It was to tell consumers that feel free to make your purchases, whether it's offline or whether it's online in a cashless method. Number two, your transactions are completely safe and secure and every transaction is encrypted. And number three, you'll actually find that, you know, it takes much less time, it's much less, it's much more convenient and you will find the purchase experience very, very, you know, favorable for you. And true to that, what we saw is growth that have been quite unprecedented in the last 18 months. Both in e-commerce growth, as an industry, payments via e-commerce and as well as, you know, when you go to face-to-face at outlets, once the pandemic and the lockdown was lifted, people moved away from using cash even at face-to-face purchases and preferred to use cashless methods. So I think, you know, the role of the brand, which every brand you're talking about within our value, it's to understand what change is going on, keep pace of the change and adapt your brand to suit their lives because the moment you answer a need that they have, like for this, for us, it was we can't go anywhere, we can't do anything. How do we continue living our lives? How do we make purchases? You know, we had loads of millennials who were stranded in one city and old parents in another city who have never been able ever able to use digital payments. So we had to work with them very, so we did a lot of education videos, we did a lot of partnerships with merchants, partnerships, without issuing banks to ensure that all consumers were able to understand the safety, the security and make payments to get what they want and just be able to lead their best lives during this period. Yeah, very encouraging. And I think a lot of brands which comes to my mind navigated this journey very well in terms of how-to videos, which is help consumers navigate through this shift, right? And when it comes to payment, you're always very guarded and there is a lot of apprehension. So that's great. Very nice to hear that. I'll come to Siddharth. Hi, Siddharth. Good to meet you again. Travel has been one of the most impacted industry and yours is a young brand. And while I think business traffic is crawling back, slowly, what has been your experience and learning and how did you adapt to your change in marketing strategies in the last few months? Thanks, Vishal. It's a pleasure to be on the panel with some stalwarts from the industry. I want to give a shout out to Vivek and the Piddleite team. I started my career in advertising at Ogilvy working on the Piddleite account. And a lot of the good work that we've seen in the past couple of months including some of the entries in the awards. Have been some fantastic work again again by Piddleite. And it just drives that sort of consumer insight and sentiment learning home. I mean, travel as you said has been really one of the most adversely impacted industries globally by this crisis. 2020 saw about a 60% decrease in travel. So 2019 flew globally 4.5 billion passengers. 2020 went to 1.8 billion. And we saw some major shifts in microeconomic drivers. China became the largest domestic market for air travel in 2020. Which is a good indication of the size and scope of a domestic market. And in India also we pivoted significantly into relying predominantly on domestic which became an advantage for us in many ways. As was the lack of a reliance only on the corporate sector. Because as you said, that has been crawling back a lot slower. Whereas BFR, first time travelers, holiday makers actually recovered a lot quicker in terms of their trends of travel. What also happened is the speed at which a lot of new norms got accepted which is something that Sojata spoke about in terms of digital payments. Has seen the same thing in terms of digital engagement. Not just in terms of booking behavior. Which at least in the case of airlines has been largely digital for a few years now. Whether through the direct channel or for online travel agent partners. But things like Web Check-In. Which used to be at 30 to 35 percent. Suddenly moved up to nearly universal Web Check-In. Which gives a lot more data and insight. From the period of the booking to the period of the actual travel. To be able to personalize communication. To be able to upsell ancillary services. Seats, mails, etc. The other thing which happened is because of the regulation across the board the amount of data and nature of data which is getting collected. Including personal information. Whether it was health and contact. Declaration related information. To the kind of information that we have now on our consumers that we never did. Which includes postcode information. We always knew which destination people were flying to. But I didn't know where they were going to stay before they were flying. Once they get there. Has enabled a lot more personalization even in the ATL media strategy. Because you now know down to a postcode level or a house residence address level. Where the individuals are staying. And how they're traveling. How often they're traveling, etc. They're traveling, how often they're traveling, etc. And I think the new norms will adapt very quickly to this. The other thing that we saw is that the younger age groups. 20 to 29 year olds particularly. Who are the most resilient during the last year and a half. So their travel only reduced by about 16%. Versus an average reduction of across other age groups of 42%. At the same time we had many new first time flyers come on board. Traditional train travelers. A typical of your frequent corporate travelers. And we have and still do have campaigns. For example, running at places like Kaurah station. Looking at how to influence people. To move from train travel into air travel. Because that's where the markets of China and the US have actually grown from. Is by increasing the share of the pie rather than fighting for within the share itself. And I think it's early days a long way to go. But the initial trends have certainly been in a direction that leaves us very optimistic about the future. Especially optimistic demand in the country. That's good to hear. And we hope and pray that that continues. And you know travel continues. And you rightly said. There's a lot of shift which we can which we notice from the rail traffic. From rail and roads given the safety. And that's the reason visit to VFRs have increased far more. And there was a pent up travel which we all saw right. So there were flights which were booked to go on. And it took a while to figure out. So that was encouraging. So as you rightly said. And you know there's a lot of consumer data now which we have. So Shashank I'll come back to you though you spoke about it. And today we are sitting on huge amount of data. And as you said that through your consumer journey. There is a lot of omnichannel presence now. Because the consumer journey has gone through more digital. Now when you sit with so much of data. There is of course a lot of data mining which is happening. And what are the new opportunities which are emerging from there. Anything you want to enlighten us with. On you know with help of data. What has what has been some new insights. Or new opportunities which you had never seen before. Anything. Yeah, sure, sure. So as you rightly said. We have now huge data about consumers. Because now the digital touch points have increased. And you can actually make sense of it. You have machines which can make sense of it. You have technology which enables you to handle that data. You have connectivity which enables the cadence to be good. The data transfers to be good. You have so many things which are relating to digitalization. And yes, a lot of data just does get generated. We have virtually about 22 million consumers on home. We have data which is actual transaction. Because they are the actual consumers Maruti Suzuki has. So we have been actually digitalizing a long time back. Especially the transactional data. So we do know how many times a consumer has come to our workshop. Is he a happy customer? Is he not so happy? Has he complained before? Has there been a problem? Has he bought accessories? What is the state of his finance repayment to the banks etc. And so on and so forth. There's a lot of transactional data. Which we have been actually accumulating since 2005. Through our DMS system. However, however, what is now changing is. That you also have interactional data. So you have a transactional data. And you have interactional data as well. Which interaction could be through a website. It could be through social media. It could be emails. It could be SMS. It could be so many ways by which you have interactional data as well. So for what we have done is. We are trying to form what is known as a single view of customer. SVOC. Which is you put all the transactional and the interactional data of the consumer. To have a single view of that customer. And that's great. Because and I can tell you a lot of you asked for what how it has helped. I can tell you so many things in which data analysis has helped. We put all this data into what we call a data lake. And then we run the analytics. And you have advanced analytics based on AI, ML. We have even through our connected Suzuki connect. We have data on the individual cars as well. Which means of course there are data privacy issues. Which we cannot use them for individual as individuals. But as cohorts we can. So we know how many times a car is being break. Or how many times it has accelerated. How much fuel it has been consuming. And so what is the you know speed at which it is which driver is driving. And so on and so forth. So what what has been done. Well these things are not just relating to marketing. It could be relating to design as well. So for example we know in India if the number of times consumers apply brakes are a lot many. So you might actually want to use a material on the brake pads. Which is different from what you would probably use in some other place. As an interesting this was done earlier in a in a in a mechanical way. And not the digital way. Long time back you know when Marty Suzuki was introduced. We found that the haunts were failing. And a team from Japan from Suzuki came and said what is happening in India. Why they are failing when they are not failing in Japan Europe etc. So they went around. They found Indians use the horn too much. And it was not designed for that sort of. So the material was used to change. That was based entirely on observation. But we have now digital data. We can have for example predictive servicing. We know that this guy has been using the vehicle for so long. His brake oil is coming down. We know that. We even know the fuel level for example of cars. So you can actually not only design vehicles. You can also have predictive servicing of vehicles. There are other ways. You have actually sensors. Which can which can process the Ratina movement on a on a on a on a real time basis. You can tell whether the driver is distracted. So if you are sleepy and you are on a highway or wherever. You can actually get an alarm saying that your Ratina move. I mean it's it's dangerous to drive while you are distracted. So some people are distracted because they are sleepy. Some others are distracted because they are looking around. And both ways you can actually be warned that this is. So you can have actually safe driving. Because you have now data on on on that. You have of course many other things. You have intrusion alarms. You have geo fencing. You have predictive maintenance. As I said you can even monitor tire pressures telling them when they have to put you know in the tire itself. And of course for marketing this data can be used for ad suppression. It can be used for personalization. There are thousands of uses and we are just starting. Yeah and yeah. And and you know the uses are as ordinary as a geo fencing. Which means if your car moves up beyond a particular region or area from where your house you will get to know that it has moved. So if for example my teenage daughter if she takes the vehicle my geo fencing is on. I know she says I'm going to Munirka. I stay in Vasankunj. It's about three four kilometer. It's fine. But if she goes beyond that I know that she's on the way further than what she said she will take the vehicle for. So of course these are all data which can be used immensely across the chains supply chain logistics. You can have weather predictions which which direction or which the truck should go carrying your material should go the shortest route. Then there are predictions of rains where there is road blockage and so on and so forth. You have immense usage and we are just starting. Actually and I think going forward we'll have thousands of uses. It will be really really good for the customer on a very personalized basis. Yeah no I mean that's very interesting and thanks for sharing some anecdotal stories. They're you know how the importance of data is not only in marketing but of course design and deep research which is available on product you know innovation as well. So that's very interesting. Vivek consumer expectation is evolving as we are saying right. They are wanting brands to come to them. Brands which is engaging with them. You are one of the most trusted brands and what do you do beyond that to engage with the consumer? You know it's a most loved brand. So what are the challenges you face when it comes to you know going beyond what you're actually doing. How do you elevate that? Okay that's a very generic way but let me give an this answer in context of brands like Fevicol and Dr. Fixit. So what are consumers expecting of brands in this change scenario and what they normally expect? Of course they expect brands to be delivering the proposition the right way to respond to them etc. But awfully three or four things which we observed is that the first thing which nowadays consumer want is their access to brand has to be very easy because pandemic has often made brands accessibility difficult. So we have to ensure that somehow whether our distributors are ordering online or retailers are ordering online the brands are physically available where they are supposed to be available. That's one. Second is as I said in many segments and categories consumers have become value cautious so we have to make sure that we are actually present at the right price points which where brands can be accessible to them and many categories we have seen what is called down trading to lower priced SKUs. But having said that I think more so in these pandemic times consumers are expecting brands to be more listening. So the role of marketers actually for us is to and we have also done the same is to invest more in listening tools and to ensure that with our partners and within the company there are structures and people whose job is to listen and to actually respond to consumers and that so ORM online reputation management is becoming more important and that expectation actually has I would say galloped and gone very high in these times very normal times so listening is one. I think you touched upon the convenience so I won't go there but I think you spoke about relationship and tonality and I spoke about it that as well. So in these times I think brands have to try you see moment marketing is very very popular and very very in vogue but I think in these times brand have to be more sensitive not to be appear to be I would call opportunistic and very hard sell because somewhere consumer mindset emotionally is different so brands have to be empathetic and knowing where consumer is emotionally and relate to it. How are we doing our campaigns of course we are doing a campaign in relationship to offering so as Sashank also said the other role of data is to match and observe the changes in the consumer journeys. Consumer journeys have changed so we also have to modify our offering whether it is addresses for carpenters or the art and craft kit for mothers or the waterproofing package for household for new construction of repairs so we have to modify the offerings. We are doing the campaigns which are far more regional far more need specific but at overall level we have actually up our social media presence where we are saying that brands not only have to convey their proposition they also have to have a dialogue with consumers on an ongoing basis about issues with concerns and which may or may not be brand related. So Fabric all will talk to consumer as you may have seen a post and it's making its comments and engagement with consumers Fabric is doing it Dr. Fixit is doing it and I think doing it in a tonality which is very empathetic and warm and of course with a bit of humor which is typical of Fabric we can Fabric all. So I think a layering of communication which is proposition driven and a layering of communication which is relationship driven and I think digital has made it very very easy for marketers to actually a personalize the communication okay. The role of digital actually in my mind is to is to actually build the and track the personas of consumers and target that communication whether it's B2P or B2C and also respond faster in terms of when they talk to you that they can respond. So I think it's a whole set which comes and in context of B2P I must add to what Shashank said you know B2P communication has changed from just making the offerings in technical sense to actually changing the personas and customizing the customizing the communication as well as offerings. I was saying more use of analytics so if we have begun to do use more of data analytics and CRM on a platform like Salesforce.com and we are customizing our communication and tracking the customers through the funnel and that enables us to actually cross-selling and upsell as well. For example we may see that a customer who was buying pigments from us may now be needing adhesives also because in the industry the need is there. So the and AI tool like Power.org allows us to do that. So I think a communication in B2P and B2C is a good mix now of personalization use of AI and analytics to customize and micro target to personas and as per the change consumer journeys and if you wrap it all up in a very empathetic and relationship tonality which is warm which is relatable by customers and consumer I think that makes for a winning combination and package for price. That's right absolutely and that digital gives a very open and nice window of personalizing at place moment behavioral targeting which we had not explored for many years. Shivam do you think data-driven marketing decisions will become the norm post-pandemic in the digital world? What are your thoughts on that? Absolutely I think there are no two ways about it and like Shashank and Vivek have already articulated I think data is continuing to add value to the communication that we are doing and this is not just adding value to say the communication or the proposition that we are doing but it is also adding value to how we think about the product, how we think about the placement. So all four P's are actually getting impacted by data and this is something that will continue to add value. So for example let's talk about an example from our industry. The change of the pandemic like I had said earlier as well is clearly that people are using their smart devices to do more of work, more of education, more of entertainment from home. Now what does that mean? That clearly means that one there is a significant increase in the proportion of time spent on screen which also implies that the displays of the smartphones or the displays of these tech products are becoming far more important than maybe earlier. So for example there was a time when cameras were one of the top priorities for consumers but now since consumers are not going out and they're spending all the time on the displays, display actually becomes the most important feature for them to consider buying the smartphone because they're entertainment, they're work, everything is on that display. So from a product perspective we need to start paying attention to ensure that we are able to give them devices that are able to deliver on the display experience. The second insight that that is related is that people are becoming cord cutters, they're moving away from television, they're moving to OTT, they're moving to virtual video platforms. What does that give us an insight in that form? It gives us an insight into promotion that we have to be present more in terms of these platforms, the content that they're consuming on their smartphones, you have to be present there visually to be able to actually appeal to them, to be able to interact to them. And the third thing is placement, right? So with the increased use of e-commerce etc. we have to be present on an omnichannel display, we can't be present on one channel that is not significant in their lives. So it's a very small example but then an example that shows you how the data actually plays a role across all the four Ps and it is going to continue to be absolutely critical for us as marketers to be able to deliver ROI-led campaigns, which as I think Vivek also mentioned, I think that's one of the biggest challenges that we as marketers have faced, one of the biggest expectations from us is how do you deliver ROI, how do you ensure that we are also just increasing brand parameters is not important, how are we ensuring that the product is actually showing sell out and hence these insights will definitely help sharpen our products, our communication, our placement, which will ensure in turn to give results in terms of ROI. That's true. So Sajata, we're talking about data-driven and ROI-led marketing and of course when you look at the consumer journey for the top of the funnel, there's always a television and a digital kind of a convergence. How have you seen that evolve for you and for your brand over the years? So yes, digital is the new world but how is the TV digital convergence playing for you? So I think Vaishali you raised a great point. What I think is you can't choose one over the other. They both need to coexist and we've seen that very strongly in our campaigns that we've done for even if you look at just the last 12 to 18 months. I think the role that TV plays in giving you awareness and reach can't be met by any other media in the large-scale in such a short time. So we continue to definitely look at TV to get that initial reach and awareness. However, it's not one or the other. It's on me channel, it's all channels and what we do is we then you know more for just awareness, it's TV, then we go to social and digital where number one you can go into more details because there's so much more targeting that you can do. So we look at different messaging for different consumers, different target groups. What you can also do on social digital is actually do retargeting. So you can do a primary targeting of communication on TV and follow it up with much more details, much more relevant content to that person that you're talking to. So I think that both go together. I'll give you an example. So for example, when we launched a campaign just now all about cashless confidence, we talked about the fact that anybody can go cashless. So that was what we talked about at that point on TV. However, how to target people, whether it's someone who's using, wanting to know how to use a debit or a credit card, that takes time. Or if we're going to look at, does someone want to travel and what do they need in help for traveling? Which stage are they in their travel journey? All those can be done through digital. But I think the basic two points that I really notice is number one, the consumer is a distracted consumer today. No matter which form you're using or which media you're using, they are on multi-screens at all points of time. So to assume that they will sit and watch your message when it comes on, it doesn't happen anymore. And therefore, the importance and the need for quality content is all the more key. Whether you do it on mass media or you do it on social and digital, quality content, great content is still key. And then you can choose the different methods to reach them through their purchase chart. Yeah, absolutely. Interesting. Siddharth, I'll come to you. And, you know, so within the digital pie, we see most of the spends or ad spends happening at least on videos and display. And as you, you know, for you, there are different kinds of cohorts. When there's a business traveler and then there is the fund traveler, the vacation traveler, and I'm sure you're doing different communications. How has that changed? So is the mix kind of changed over the last few months? And it has gone more mass, given that you're trying to win share from the non air travelers. So has that impacted the digital mix or it's the same right now? It has impacted the mix. And I think the nature of travel, the kind of concerns and the uncertainty around travel have also changed the conversations that are happening. We saw in the immediate aftermath of the first lockdown in 2020, about a seven x increase in social media engagement. Part of that was driven by the fact that they just want enough people to take calls, contact centers, cancellations, people with multiple changes, changes in regulations by states, etc. So we took every opportunity to actually introduce at that time, a new AI conversation chat pot that was able to address most of those queries. We have the chat pot engaging now, not just on the website and on the mobile application, but also on WhatsApp and on Facebook Messenger. So there are at least a lot of the support related conversations are managed very differently. But each channel is very different. We still see a lot of support related issues raised on Twitter, for instance. We see a lot more engagement of video, like you said, on channels like Instagram. And we've pivoted for a lot of the brand communication that would historically have been done on television, two channels like Instagram, especially with younger consumers, because the engagement is higher. The shareability is a lot higher. We've tried various new techniques like branded stickers as emojis that have done phenomenally well from an ROI perspective. So the mix has changed. The nature of conversations have changed. We invested heavily in online reputation management tools because we realized that if people are looking for or the concern has moved on from hygiene factors to how empathetic you're going to be as a brand, how responsive you are as a brand, especially in times of uncertainty. And that has seen an impact on the way in which people are shopping, including the channel which they're buying from. We've seen a lot more people interested in looking at the direct channel because they believe that refund to be is your process on the direct channel, rather than booking thrown into media. So those things have also had an impact. And I mean, in that, we've essentially said that we want to have global benchmark levels of response times and resolution times on social media. And that means obviously manning that appropriately across the board and investing in both the online reputation management rules as well as the human resources. To ensure that that level of empathy and engagement continues to be there. But that's really the future because people are not interested in waiting for five or six minutes on a call. But they'll be willing to wait five or six minutes for a response to a tweet because we've not reached the level of response time yet where a five or six minute response to a Twitter feedback is considered a long time. It will get there at one point. We want to make sure that we're there first. Great. I think we are over time. So thanks so much. I think very interesting insights, very interesting conversation on how brands are adapting fast to the changing consumer behavior to the changing, you know, media landscape in the new digitized word. Thanks Shashank and Vivek. We are all learning from you. So very interesting insights. Raveen, if there are any questions we could take or if there are any, you could just let us know. Absolutely. So now is the time. If you have any questions, anybody from the audience, you can go to the chat box that you see down below and just mention the speaker that you would want to ask the question to. We have time to take a couple of questions. So if anybody's got any questions, now is the time. In the meantime, of course, it'll take some time for the people to figure out where the chat box is and type in their questions. And I'm absolutely sure there are so many questions right now in their head. So while I have you all here, I would like to really ask you this question. The whole world has changed as you all rightly mentioned. It's gone digital from what we were really used to. The marketing angle that the whole world was accustomed to has changed, as you already said. How do you foresee not just the marketing but the whole industry shaping up in the couple of years coming down from now, say probably five years from now? How do you foresee how it's going to change? Anybody who would like to add on to that question? Well, I can start it. Sorry, go ahead. No, I'll just do quickly. So I just say that I think there are a few trends that have started that will continue. One is we will see that a lot of brands that have offline retail presence will move online. So that's one thing that will happen. I think there's a huge phenomenon in buy now pay later that's coming up, which we are seeing going to influence a lot of people's spending purchases and how much they think they can spend. I think the people will be looking at offer based. Where can I get the best offer? And like I said, I think they're going to look at what fits in with their changing lifestyles. So those are three to four points and Shivam hand over to you to continue. Yeah. Thanks, Sujatha. And I think I was going to say that if we had that kind of a silver bullet that could cut across industries and predict the future for five years, I think we would all have love to have that. But unfortunately, we don't. So it's a tough question, Raveen. And I think frankly, my view is that every industry and there are people from different industry across panels here has seen the impact of pandemic in a different way. And all of us have definitely adapted or reacted to it in a different way. So, yes, I mean, there are changes that we are seeing across different industry in the way we market, in the way we develop products. And I think all of I spoke about it, I think Shashank and Vivek also spoke about it, that it's just not, I mean, the changes have not impact just the way we communicate with consumers, but also how we develop products and where we place them. And hence, it's holistic. And it will continue to evolve over the next few years. But yes, like I said, differently for different industries, and hopefully in a more positive way. So yeah, that's it from my side. So I have a small question. There was a report recently that said that advertising industry in India will grow annually around 6% to 8% annually. So how much do you agree with these numbers? Do you think it will be more or less? All of you can answer. So if I may, you know, just start Nazia. So last year, we saw that the advertising industry was down by almost 22%. And it will take at least two years for us by maybe end of 2023 to get back to the pre COVID levels, which is at the level of 2019. And pose that once we stabilize, there could be a growth of 6% to 7% if that helps answer your question. I think advertising growth is highly correlated to GDP growth. And most countries will see that it's going to happen in India also. If our GDP growth is spent at anywhere between 8% to 10%, I think we could expect a sharper recovery in advertising spends also. Now there's no, I would say uniform answer as to whether it's going to come and how it's going to come. Because there'll be some leading industries, leading segments, which are going to lead in advertising like ecom, gaming, fintech services, which will recover faster. There'll be some services which will actually follow with the consumer recovery of demand like FMCG consumer growth. And there are some industries and segment like travel and hospitality, which will follow. So it's a mix of how things pan out. But I'm optimistic that the recovery is going to be fast. And it's going to go hand in hand with the GDP recovery. But we have to see which part of GDP is recovery is happening as service or goods. Because advertising spends is more correlated to services and recovery at MSME sector level, as well as I think the other factor which will drive advertising spends will be how will the shape of rural demand shape goes. After the government infusion of money in the hands of farmers and all the money which has gone to the direct transfers and benefits and a good monsoon, it is going to be positive. But I think that is very important. Equally, I think brand owners and brand manufacturers have to go hand in hand in ensuring that the offerings at the right price point and the distribution and supply chain actually matches the sentiment and the shape of the recovery. So I think there's no straightforward answer to it. But I think we can assume that the recovery is going to be around this one and maybe more. Siddharth, do you want to add? I did not notice that. I mean, either of you can do it. Yeah, so I was just probably I'll agree with Vivek. It all depends on how the GDP grows. And from an Indian perspective, I can say that the growth to my mind would be much faster, both because the GDP will grow faster and also because you will see a lot of new emerging segments coming out. We are still very much in a young nation just coming in the initial part of growth stage of any major economy. So I would say that new product categories will emerge, new players will emerge. And I know from an automotive perspective, definitely is going to be complete change. And that would require a lot of communication with consumers. So I would expect the growths to be much faster. Like in case of automobile, we will probably have to come to the earlier question, we probably have connected cars, you may probably have autonomous cars, we may have shared mobility and a long-term electric and environment friendly vehicles as well. All this would require new segments emerging, new technologies, new communication. And therefore, I think the growth of advertising might be much faster than that 6% Yeah, I can add one data point to Shashank. So you see we are seeing this data point of more and more unicorns emerging from India, right? I think that should be a leading indicator because many of the unicorns will need to actually engage in marketing investments and communication to shape the demand. Absolutely. So those would be the leading sectors which are going to lead this growth early on. Interesting. Siddharth Sivan Sujatha, if you can quickly add to it because Arjun has joined his next speaker and we have exceeded the time. No, I think that there's been a fair bit said already by the other eminent panelists and I tend to agree with them. I think there are various indications that show that the advertising industry will grow at a relatively faster pace than what we've seen earlier. But the reasons as others said is likewise and while different industries will tend to grow differently and at a different pace and hence the contribution to advertising will vary, I think at an overall level you can assume that as we see recovery and hopefully Omicron doesn't become as scared as big as what other people are expecting and if that doesn't happen, I think definitely the way the world is moving towards and especially the way the recovery is how we're seeing in India. Hopefully it moves in the direction the stock market is moving without any fare, without any inhibitions. I think if that happens well and good, but yeah, we are definitely optimistic and that's what I would like to say. I also joined in because I had to thank Peshali for doing this. I know how I got her into this last minute. Thank you so much, Peshali. Yes, welcome. Please continue. Thank you so much. So that's all the time that we had for the session but thank you so much once again for that interesting and enriching condolences that we all had. Once again, Ms. Verma, Mr. Srivastav, Mr. Sharma, Mr. Ranjan, Mr. Battalia and Ms. Kumar, thank you so very much for your valuable time. We truly appreciate you being here. Thank you. It was a pleasure. Thank you everyone. Thank you. Bye. Thank you so much for all the viewers as well who are joined in here. Before we move on to our next session, I would like to assure you this partner, A.V. Can we quickly have the A.V. on the screen please? Can we do the A.V. later because Arjun is already waiting for some time now. We can plan this later please. So we would quickly move on to the next speaker. The headline speaker is Mr. Arjun Mohan, CEO of Grad. Mr. Mohan is a highly experienced professional having worked in sales marketing and product development domains for the last 15 years. He has worked with brands like Baiju's, Titan, Tata Services and of course has a tight grip on modern marketing practices and building startups. He will discuss with us scripting new marketing practices as the world evolves as an after effect of the pandemic and changing socio-culture dynamics of the world. I would request Mr. Mohan to kindly take the screen. Thanks, Ramin. Can I share my screen? Please, sir. Yeah. Is my screen visible? Yes, sir. And your audio as well is clear. Okay. So I can start right? Yes, sir. Good evening, everyone. And thank you so much for this opportunity. I will not take too much of your time. I know that I've been too many sessions going on. Possibly all of you guys are already saturated with all the marketing yet. So what I'm going to do is give you a light view of what we have been doing at Upgrad. Talk about the marketing concepts we have been following, the ideas we have been working with. I hope you can get something out of it and can use in your career or in your perspective companies. So quickly to speak about Upgrad, we started out in 2015, launched the first program in 2016, which was an entrepreneurship, moved on to understand that people in India don't believe in learning entrepreneurship. So hence, diversified into more of tech portfolio, including data science, ML technology programs, digital marketing, so on and so forth. Actually, if I look at the way Upgrad has grown, I can divide the entire company into two parts, or the time of growth into two parts. From 2015 to 2020 to 2019, typically, we were completely focused on building our product. We are a company which is obsessed about our customer and hence it took us multiple iterations before reaching to the best product possible. So we did not go out expanding our reach or acquiring too many customers till the time we were really sure about it. So that's what we did till 2019-2020. It is actually in 2020 that we started scaling the business in a big way. Once we were confident about the product, that's when we went out and started really doing marketing. So that's the phase when Upgrad's marketing starts and that's what I will talk more about. As you can see, till 2018, we had hardly 10,000 learners. Our base increased to 1 million in 2020 and we have already crossed 2 million this year. So that's the power of marketing. Yeah, so let's talk a bit about what marketing we were doing and the concepts or what we believe in. So our marketing largely is focused on four dimensions. We invest a lot in social performance marketing, other digital technologies. Our focus majorly is a content-driven marketing on social because we feel that that is required to get the eyeballs. We do a lot of TV but not as much as a large-scale brand in India does. We have a very clear strategy on what we want to do on TV and hence we go ahead doing it. I'll speak more about it when I come there. Content has been a very important part of our entire marketing strategy and hence YouTube and OTTs are a big piece of our business or marketing strategy. And of course, PR. PR is an important part of our marketing and we have been doing quite well with it. Again, more about it when we speak about it. To start with, if I speak about content, the social media strategy for Upgrad has been content-driven. We did the social media on content in two ways. Number one is we associated with a lot of content creators and tried to place our product as part of the story these content creators use to communicate with their customers or with their viewers. So fundamentally, the approach or the insight we are seeing is that people today are moving away from just seeing ads and there's so much of content around them that they really don't want to spend their time seeing blank ads. As a result, if the brand is not ready to write itself into the stories, a particular viewer likes to hear or view, it's very difficult to get yourself noticed. And that's what we have been doing with these content creators. We've been always very clear that we want to take a lighter view of things, but at the same time, we're born to be associated with educated content and we don't want to deviate too much from the education which we represent. So two parts. One, as I mentioned, we have got associated with a lot of content creators, filter copy, TVF, a lot of individual creators. One example given here is Dhruvrati. So what we do is we do high quality content videos with them, which typically is the style they follow to get to their viewers. And in that video, we ensure that our product also comes in. So the placement is very, very organic, very, very relevant. And as a result of which we have been able to get good traction through it. And as we moved on in this strategy, we became more ambitious. And then we decided that let us rather than just doing content with creators for their channels, why don't we start investing on an IP? So hence, we started working with this creator BUNIC and worked on an IP called as the Office Canteen. Now Office Canteen is a proposition of taking a very light jibe on what happens in your office, the office politics and what people typically do, so on and so forth. This is the same theme which we have been using for our TV ads. I'm sure some of you at least would have seen our donkey ads where we give a lighter side of what happens in office around the idea or around the insight that office politics is something everyone feels is curtailing their growth. So we did a series with BUNIC and it has been a three episode web series, extremely successful. So we've been able to reach more than 8 million views. And we have seen the traffic and the sales go up by disproportionate level. So one of the insights about doing such thing is the fact that we do understand that RTG predominantly is present on the internet. And today, RTG has got so much of content to consume that they consume only very customized personal content, which they think works for them. So you can't really do carpet bombing or mass market advertisement to reach to them. So that's the reason why I started RTG around it. Now coming to TV, the most premium advertising inventory available in this country. The moment you go on TV, there was a time when people in this country thought that, okay, this is a big brand. Now I can trust it. In my view, all those days are gone. TV has become pretty much, I mean, it is definitely a medium which will give you a huge, huge reach, but it may not be really the right medium to get to certain niches of audience. So the approach we have been using for TV is quite simple. We have been focusing on huge properties, properties which doesn't have online equivalent. And hence, we are fairly sure that this will give us reach across the country. So we have been investing on IPL, ICC World Test Championship, Wimbledon, UFA. We know that our audience are interested in it. Follow this and hence we are there where they are looking for us. The next one is OTT, another interesting proposition. So again, as I told you these days, brands have to be part of the stories and that's where the brands get noticed. So this has been one of the things we are focused in. Along with creating our own content on OTT, we have been also associating with large, I mean, high, a property which has potential to reach very, very large number of audience. So we have tied up with Shark Tank India, the version of World Famous Series which is just going to start on December 20th. But the reasoning behind this has been that most of the people or all of the people who come to Shark Tank or the people who will watch Shark Tank will be the aspirational ones who wants to go up in their life. Since Upgrad stands for the same aspiration and lifelong learning, we feel that this is a great fit and that's been the reason why we will be seen on Shark Tank. The strategy has been to create a lot of content with both the brands present in there. And finally PR. Of course, PR comes to you if you are doing a lot of good work. So we have been working extensively to get a lot of organic PR. It helps that we are very active in the market. One of the aspects other than the business stories which we are part of is the marketing story. We feel that we have done quite a good work in marketing our brand and hence we have been very active on PR telling our marketing story. So far we have been quite successful in getting good organic PR and I'm hoping that this way of marketing will continue. Now one aspect or one theme which you can hear or see in all the things I have told you is the data driven or data driven way we do our marketing. Everything we do, every campaign we run, we are obsessed with data. We ensure that we measure everything and we try to understand impact of each campaign has on our traffic leads and eventually conversion. This has helped us optimize and hence change our marketing mix to what we want or what we see is delivering the best. So if you ask me one single thing across different things we do is this data driven marketing model. Now that was more of the heavy things. Now let's talk about bits about what we do in our brand and the campaigns we do. As I told you it is in 2019-2020 that we really started marketing the brand upgrade and started the whole idea of going big talking about the brand and trying to scale our business. So when we started off one question which was clearly there is what does upgrade stands for when it comes to a learner or a customer or in other words what is the positioning we occupy in the minds of our customer. Now this was a problem statement we had to solve for before getting into the marketing part. So we did a lot of discussions a lot of interviews with our learners more in depth less survey doesn't give you the right data it's in depth interviews with your personas which will give you the right information. So we heard them saying consistently that I definitely want to up still but I will only up still if it's giving me some value out of it. And we kept on hearing people using the word degree for everything which is I mean every course or a certification or a diploma which is useful and which will give them a job at the end of it. In other words they kept on saying that degree should be calm key that should be I mean it's a play of word there should be a job at the end of it or it should be of some use. So basis this we decided that if this is what people are looking for for and from an upskilling course maybe that is what we should see ourselves as or that is what the consumer should see ourselves as and hence we moved into this positioning where we started tagging ourselves as if naam ke nahi kaam ki degree that we are offering you something which is of use and which has a job at the end of it. We are talking about making them more specialist so that's the positioning these took which we went on to implement in our first brand campaign post 2020. So another thing which had come out very clearly is because we work in the working professional space we heard that most of the working professional fields that they are not able to go ahead in their career because of office politics. I mean so basically we said that okay then let's pick up a team which is very close to them and give it a humorous touch to it because the moment you do that it's a lighthearted way of telling a story and at the same time there's a great message to it. So that was the idea behind our first campaign which is which became famous as the donkey campaign so maybe I should just show you this video. So I'm sure that at least some of you would have thought that your boss is an ass and doesn't know anything so that was the idea or the insight we got from and we did this campaign. Went out quite well, worked well for us because there is a smile to it but also see the message right you're saying basically the protagonist is telling you that don't worry about all these things you will go ahead in your life if you upskill because that's all that matters finally. So this was the first campaign sorry we followed it up with a sub-brand campaign we also realized that if you want to build a big brand we need to be associated with the existing brands in higher education. So we decided that the way we want to go ahead is that we want to work towards bringing all the masters program online in India. Now it's simple right I think about so the working professionals in India start working immediately after their bachelor's every year a successful person start making more and more money he or she wants to do masters and it upskills you in a very different manner it helps you go up in your career but to do that you have to take a break in your career a risk which most of us don't do that and as a result of which people get saturated or people get hit a ceiling after some time because they don't have the upskilling which comes with the masters. So this is a proposition we worked as a subset of our upgrad brand where we said that we want to also develop the brand Upgrad MBA. So Upgrad MBA was the next campaign which we did take a look at it we took a very different stance to it. So as you can see here we are trying to take a stance that you can do an MBA online more a lot of people in working professional today wants to do an MBA but doesn't want to take the risk of leaving their job and taking a break in their career. The fundamental idea is you can do it today online and you don't really need to bother about it. It is the same theme on which we did the full page jacket ad in DOI economic times I'm sure at least some of you would have seen it. We took a direct message alongside CAT a lot of people ask me why you take going against CAT my answer has been only one that we are not going against CAT the fact of the matter is every year when you look at the number of people who starts to prepare for CAT that's in lakhs around two lakh people write CAT but almost every beginning of the year there are almost five lakh people who start preparing for CAT. Finally it is only numbers in thousands maybe a 10,000 people who get into the IAMs of their terms it is not for them or it is not against CAT the ad was it is for that remaining lakhs and lakhs of people who finally don't even go and do the MBA of their choice that this proposition is for. The fact of the matter is that there are so many options today online you don't really need to make big changes in your life and take a risk. So yeah the second campaign which we followed up with the donkey campaign was another take on donkey. We found that the donkey figure in itself has become very famous and hence we did a second campaign following out on the same idea where we spoke about donkey being picturized as someone who is now telling you that hey go and upskill it out and I don't think I have time to show the ads anymore so I'm just skipping out on that we are I mean like a short of time. Post that again the sub-brand strategy we launched a product in the degree space and we did a campaign for upgrade degrees again the same strategy we saw that there is a huge market sitting there for degrees especially after the new education policy allows bachelor's and master's degree to be done online which we wanted to tell to the students who are now stuck because of corona that don't worry about it there are things you can do online and you can take these degrees online and you really don't need to think about going to a city now though you are stuck because of corona coming in there I'm again now I'm going to skip all this yeah so this is the latest campaign where what we realized is that after one and a half years of brand building we saw that the idea of online education and upgrade awareness have been on a high so we thought that it is time to move to the phase two of brand building where we talk more about the upgrade proposition and what is the USP P bring to the table so that's been the idea behind the new ad campaign it's been not one single ad but one main ad followed by three shorties the story is established in the 30 seconder and then it continues in the 15 seconder where each of the 15 seconders talk about one USP of upgrade we ran this during IPL and a lot of digital the reason for doing predominantly digital is because the working professional TG as I mentioned earlier is online not a lot of them are watching TV they are very happy with their OTT except for large market to properties like IPL so this ad the two sets of ad we did this one probably I can show you guys Arjun the voice is not coming for the ads can you please look into is it oh sorry how do I do that is there any so you need to share the sound that's all one second just give me a minute you have to you have the control right no you have the control so for you need to share the sound this one right share computer sound right yes yes but there's some installation I need to make I don't think I can do it so anyway so I'll rather share the deck you won't share the videos so you do want me to play the PPT yeah if you can if you can do that these two last two videos if we can play it I'll be great I think that's all I have these are this is the latest campaign okay so on the deck we are talking about slide number 31 and 33 I think okay so I will play it yeah just do that I'm just stopping to share it is 29 and 31 sorry slide number 29 first and 31 okay sir yeah yeah this one please show any oh hi long time it need busy over key college seminars may mean a yeah I was off is the sad sad upgrade kind of online course online come on time pass yeah show any don't you yeah I'm the bachelors oh very good she's joining us wow nice nice so superb choice yes excellent choice she's got great potential absolutely this is she will be your new boss boss fast forward your career with online courses from Upgrad top universities top faculty top placements upgrad.com yeah so this comes out of the insight when we did a lot of interviews we heard that some of them told us that their highest biggest fear is that people of their age becomes their boss so we thought we can take a funny take on it where we talk about a colleague or a batch mate becoming your manager after doing an upgrade course and then talk about our USP's and I mean can you go to 31 and show the other version of it yeah it's a similar take on it Matthew sir London yes sir no first time first time it's a favorite city yeah fast forward your career with online MBAs from Upgrad top universities flexible learning placements upgrad.com all right folks that's it thank you so much I hope you got something out of this presentation which you can use in your I mean in your brand building or in your learning process thank you so much for the time and opportunity wish you all the best thank you thank you so much Mr Mohan it was truly an interesting conversation thank you once again for giving us your valuable time we'll quickly move on to show you this partner avi that we'd like to get on the screen can we please have the avi on the screen so are you okay with the 80 crore 10% to 50 lakhs so well this is India's biggest reality funding show horses table jojita hoi sikander on good news today every saturday at eight i'm sure you would be very happy with the product itself so make sure that you check it out with that we'll move on to our next session ladies gentlemen it's time we'd like to all right we have a few other avis before we actually move on to the next session can we have the avis please sg can we play the avis please for media a name synonymous with the latest news about the advertising industry in india the exchange for media group set up in 2000 has the most credible media platforms covering the entire advertising media and marketing domain with its highly acclaimed digital print and on-ground assets the group's flagship news portal exchange for media dot com reaches over six lakh subscribers who are the first to receive breaking news in the industry the buzzing website not only covers the news but goes beyond the obvious to bring in a fresh point of view impact the weekly news magazine from the group is the most widely read business magazine in the advertising trade within depth analysis and news based features providing perspective to key happenings in the industry the monthly pitch magazine provides a ringside view of events unfolding in the marketing landscape along with media and advertising another monthly magazine reality plus is a market leader in repertoire on the real estate industry today exchange for media is not only a leading publisher in the domain but owns the IP of more than 50 events spread across Mumbai and making it a powerful house of information and knowledge sharing exchange for media has curated and launched some of the most successful IPs across marketing digital tv print radio mobile ooh and pr the impact person of the year exchange for media conclave indian digital marketing awards tech munch pitch cmo summit india marketing awards prime time awards indian content marketing awards golden mics n bar are some of the group's top-notch events in addition to niche bespoke events and round tables curated especially for discerning clients exchange for media events attract stalwarts as speakers along with the loyal audience comprising of leaders trendsetters and opinion makers they are the perfect networking platform for the entire media and advertising industry no wonder exchange for media group publications and events have high credibility and reach and are the destination of choice for agency brand and media professionals across the industry exchange for media bw business world presents a rich legacy of curated events that enable conversations on policy issues in india because of the state of our state is we have no option but to build smart and resilient cities digital india is more for the poor under privilege and deprived covering a range of topics bw business world events look to create a strong narrative around smart cities digital india healthcare swachhbharat human resource issues education banking and finance among others the world is first changing best practices are available now on the net because development bw business world events provide a speaking platform to the voices that matter you don't have to be a technologist you need to understand how technology influences the world Mahatma Gandhi was a great man he was the leader of the freedom struggle we believe that e governance and iot will play a very very important role bw business world is an excellent exhibition platform that helps you showcase your services to the right audience to be a part of our legacy write into us at partner at the raid business world dot in well if you're just joining in thank you so much once again this is exchange for media conclave by the 21st edition and ladies and gentlemen it's time we introduce our next key speaker Mr. Adam Gerhardt global CEO of Mindshare he'll be shining a spotlight on the topic of good growth in the age of transformation how to grow your business and change the world for the better Mr. Gerhardt's exposition today will draw from his experience of more than two decades in marketing world during which he's helped build and grow several big client portfolios across a range of global brands he will be emphasizing the importance of sustainable business practices making commerce more inclusive and the need to support diversity and inclusion across parameters it's truly an honor to invite Mr. Adam Gerhardt on the screen sir over to you in the meantime Adam connects with us i would request you all to kindly go down to the chat box if you have any questions at the end of the speaker sessions if you'd like to ask them anything we if we have time we'd be very happy for you to join in Mr. Gerhardt i'll hand over the screen to you thank you so much for joining in with us so Adam you have to unmute yourself so that we can hear you there we go can you hear me okay yeah perfect wonderful good evening everyone thank you for having me um truly an honor to be with you today um today i was hoping to share with you a vision for the future of growth and for our industry um it's a vision uh that hopefully gives rise uh to the profound changes that we've seen in the media landscape around us but also the changes that we're seeing for our society and the planet and it's a vision that delivers what we believe as professionals that media and marketing plays a critical role in shaping the world around us um can we can everyone see the slides okay yes it's there we go perfect um if we move on to the next slide excellent okay great um it really begins with understanding the idea that growth used to be about scale and reach and the idea was quite simple we used to focus where our consumers were spending their time we used to reach them with the right media the right message and we did it in spades as an industry we helped brands scale and go global in other words that's how we delivered growth target the right people with the right message at the right time it was incredibly simple if we move on to the next slide though the biggest difference that's shaping the world around us today though is that the biggest and the largest concentrations of consumers are no longer just in geographies more and more consumers are concentrated and defined by global digital platforms and these digital platforms are changing the rules of growth every single day they've collapsed the sales funnel they've changed the infrastructure required for business and they will redefine what it means to grow in a new world economy so geographical geographic expansion is only one means of delivering growth but our ability to deliver growth sustainably in the future is more and more driven by the fact that transformation will be dominated by these platforms and the impact that they have on our consumers lives next slide please brands today interestingly are either being born from this digital transformation or they're having to adapt to it and if we look at the companies out there that are delivering expansive growth they're actually harnessing both and there are many companies out there that have brands that were built for the platform age and brands that are emerging from the platform age or adapting to it take Nestle for example with KitKat and Nespresso Nespresso is incredibly rooted in understanding their consumers in a D to C or a digital economy KitKat on the other hand was built through brick and mortar retail sales but more and more it's starting to flex its digital muscles to understand how it can leverage these platforms for growth but interestingly not all brands are adapting fast enough soon they will start to pay the price if they don't adapt and the latest the latest view is that in the next three years 50 percent of Fortune 500 companies will be replaced completely because of their lack of growth and understanding of the impact that these digital platforms have so in a new world era of transformation you have to become adapt at harnessing the role that these platforms create and understanding consumers and how they're behaving as a result and if we move on to the next slide if you need proof about the urgency at which things are changing around us just look at these three charts they're incredibly telling us to what's happening in the world around us the first is that the time between innovation and adoption is down as everything has been compressed and accelerates in other words speed to market has never been faster the second at the same time margin volatility over the last couple of years is up three fold in the last 50 years and it's because of this disruption and disintermediation that's becoming more and more commonplace and the third one and arguably most importantly the connection between scale and profitability has been broken as businesses start to harness the age of platforms and transformation and their ability to grow at breakneck speeds is now unparalleled versus anything that we had seen in the past if you take those three things and we move on to the next slide we start to understand that there are a new set of rules for growth that's starting to emerge in this era of transformation that's dominated by platforms these new rules are specifically different to the world in which we've lived in historically and they're starting to redefine everything around us and in the future growth has to be able to live beyond a single moment in other words looking at lifetime value over just short-term sales because quite honestly anyone can grow in this new digital economy but they have to be able to grow sustainably and responsibly for the future growth also has to live and deliver beyond a single sale because everyone will be able to optimize faster and better in this new platform age that means that winning with these platforms means building consumer trust and aligning with the values that are most important to them in the future and then the third dynamic that's starting to emerge is that growth in the future must then live beyond the single platform because much to the chagrin of any one of these platform owners that are out there we don't live in a single platform world and yes there are platforms that are dominant in each local market or by geography but the reality is no platform today fulfills every single consumer need that's out there if we move on to the to the next slide what we start to see is that actually there we go thank you what we start to see is that those dynamics are further accelerating what's happening in the world around us and there's new dynamics that are compounding this platform era that we're starting to see COVID infrastructure issues healthcare societal unrest you name it and what it's leading to is even greater time on these platforms people are spending more time than they ever have before if you look on the left hand side today 85% of consumers in India say that they're spending more time on devices than they have ever before more time on devices means more time on platforms and what we're starting to find is that that is explosively growing as a result of COVID itself and on the right hand side what we're starting to see is that it's starting to reshape consumers views and expectations of the world as just one example 77% of consumers in India only buy from brands they trust that's up from 68% just a year ago and in large part it's driven by platforms it's driven by COVID and it's driven by what we're seeing in the world around us and if we continue to move on what we start to realize is that the role of the platform has become even more pronounced it's where people define themselves it's where they find cohorts and people that they can align with it's where they form views shop acts share all in new ways and so brands have to start to understand these new rules of growth and new rules of consumer engagement that's been brought about by the changes that we're seeing today and if we continue moving on all of this the infrastructure changes new consumer behavior platform dominance it means that we you must embrace the fact that there are new notions of growth and conventional notions of growth are completely out the window you move on to the next slide please and what we start to realize is actually not all growth is created equal and that becomes really important in an era dominated by transformation because what we start to see is we have to realize that there needs to become less of a focus on growth and more of a focus on what we call good growth in other words that's to say business growth which is enduring by unlocking new consumer demand growth that is diversified so we aren't just reliant on a single revenue stream or a single product or skew or any sort of one dimensional factor and that's to say we also have to start to balance the long and the short term something that benefits both society and the planet by aligning with our consumers values because it's something that they have come to expect in the future not just the value that we deliver through our goods or services and if we move on to the next slide what we start to see is that in doing so and moving from just growth to what we call good growth we can start to future proof our businesses the first dynamic that we start to realize is that actually we can start to increase human trust and that means going beyond just delivering value but delivering values our consumer expectations that they expect of us in the future the second the second area in doing so we start to create more enduring connections with consumers creating more resilience and more loyalty for our products and services and the third and arguably most important is in doing so and pivoting from just focusing on growth to focusing on good growth we start to realize that simultaneously we can grow business at the same time as benefiting the world around us whether that's society consumers or our planet and more and more that becomes a critical distinction at a point of competitive advantage and if we move on to the next slide it's it's easy to think about growth in in this progressive view of what the future holds but what we're starting to see is hopefully organizations are embracing this more and more sometimes though it can still feel incredibly foreign or really difficult and unattainable for us to balance what we view as good growth or doing good and what's good for business but we wanted to share a couple of examples with you just to give you a sense of actually how tangible this actually can be if you just make the concerted effort so the first example that I wanted to share is is a round dove and rather than just presenting this to you hopefully we'll play a video in in just a second and the video will speak for itself so we'll move on to the next slide and we'll share just a quick view of how dove delivered on good growth India a country where 90 percent of marriages are arranged they say marriages are made in heaven but not till they are approved by families prospective in-laws judge brides bases an unfair expectation of being slim fair tall and perfect failing which they are rejected resulting into life damaging self-esteem and confidence dove believes that beauty should be a source of confidence not anxiety it launched stop the beauty test campaign with real life rejected brides to challenge this unfair tradition due to regressive matrimony ads and social media conditioning 631 million women in India are forced to adhere to just one type of beauty beauty stereotyping on matrimony platforms became a moment of truth partnering the largest matrimony platform shadi.com we created history by making every bride profile nudge every bride seeker with inspiring real beauty messages these rejected brides became the cover of leading fashion publishers for the first time purpose platforms like humans of Bombay feature their inspiring stories popular influencers came forward and encouraged other women to share their real stories on social media dove partnered leading publishers and rewrote the age-old biased matrimony ad without using biased words stop the beauty test was a fully integrated high-scale high-impact and highly engaging campaign dove created history by challenging matrimony and media platforms and killing the beauty biases and stereotypes with its real beauty stands it built confidence and stirred conversations with women posing a question how much beauty is enough great thank you um hopefully something that you can see is challenging societal conventions and aligning to new values that start to emerge but also something that's incredibly good for business in just this example increase in brand consideration was up 25% and the pr value was exponential over what was paid for in the campaign now arguably what what you would say and what I would say sitting in your shoes is dove is an incredibly strong example of good growth something that's good for the brand people and the world but many of you would argue that dove's real beauty platform is born from purpose and those sorts of brands are almost expected to focus on this sort of work exclusively but I just want to show you one other example that illustrates that good growth isn't just about purpose it's about doing what's good for business and advancing the world because good and growth shouldn't be at odds in the future so if we move to the next slide we'll actually this is just a quick overview I think in the interest of time we'll skip this one and go straight to the video that does a much better job of telling the story than I do so a really simple but elegant example of how you can do what's right for the world and advance society around us but also something that benefits business for Pepsi you know you look at the business results there was 100 positive sentiment around the brand but also Pepsi became Swiggy's top soft drink with almost a 50% market share over the last couple of months you look at the intersection between doing good and good for business and more and more we start to see that these two concepts are no longer at odds in the world today and so if we move on to the last slide I just wanted to end with one simple thought and that is that both of those examples are illustrative of the work that we're doing and a responsibility that we believe we have as an industry to help deliver a new form of growth for our clients one which delivers lasting impact for business but also for consumers and the world around us and we believe this is the future of growth this is what we call good growth thank you very much thank you Adam I you know virtual applause I think one of the things that we realize post pandemic is that we all are interconnected and while profits are important the planet and people are more important if not equally important and they really lead to profit so doing business for good and business being a tool to make a positive impact is something that needs to come into communication in the of course it flows from the strategy of the company and really as we've seen multiple times that making a positive impact on the community and the society also results into building businesses building differentiated brands or what we call purpose led brands so thank you for bringing in the cultural context of India through that add on marriages you know clearly is in some way trying to make a social change through communication is also a very important role it's not just about brand and content and sales now let me ask you Adam first of all you know thank you we've done this virtually I hope we can host you in India soon and you can meet and do handshake and we can get you the Indian food you know while UK and your US both have Indian food but what we will have here in India is really authentic now YouTube charges the global CEO must a lot of change uncertainty and flux what made you sure and more optimistic about the future which you then could kind of funnel down to all your colleagues because that when you took over you know immediately after that you know clients went on a pause the budgets at least temporarily got slashed there was so much anxiety there was so much uncertainty so you took over in a very difficult period and studied the ship what are your top lessons and what did you do to make sure that you know it was business as usual but not business as usual great question yeah it was certainly a time of tumultuous you know kind of marketing impact I think that the first thing was to start to try and empathize with with all of the stakeholders in the situation whether that was clients whose budgets were cut by the board the CEO whatever the case may be it's not something that they wanted either so to put ourselves in their shoes to lean into our people and to understand what they were going through on a personal level and I think the fact that you're able to try and try and bond with people over their their personal circumstances their professional circumstances is a great means for understanding how to best address things moving forward and what you start to realize actually is you have to get comfortable with change this is a huge moment of uncertainty a huge moment of instability you can argue given the fluidity and the dynamic nature of the way things are unfolding around us and I think as soon as you start to realize that change is the only constant in particular now more than ever it enables you to start to see some of the light and the positivity through what is arguably an otherwise really dark and challenging time at the moment and for me you know I encourage our teams to see the opportunity in everything and as I start to think about and as we started to redefine our vision for the organization around good growth you quickly start to realize that no other industry arguably has the scale or the potential impact that we do and when you start to realize that you start to embrace the the notion that actually we can make a much more meaningful impact to the world than just thinking about the brands that we serve and that for me is what's incredibly exciting and hopefully that creates a virtuous circle of positivity and optimism for everybody involved Dr. Bhattra you need to unmute yourself we can't hear you Dr. Bhattra can you please unmute yourself yes Adam you know the three words that emerge from your though you didn't use them were compassion change and contactless you talked to the virtual digital economy and if you look at the numbers it's a hybrid economy the Walmart footfalls continue to be very robust in the US that's a market that you know well now the word hybrid and the word D2C are being used in the same breath you know retail is becoming omni channel or digital it is becoming hybrid whereas there are brands that are pure D2C and are really becoming very important for consumers so how do you kind of straddle both these words the hybrid world and the purely D2C world I think that the one commonality that they that they both have is that in trying to support and serve those those types of brands and businesses we the industry as a whole has moved from scale to precision now to permission and and what we what we realize as as a result of that is that we have to shift our focus as marketers and advertisers from being less oriented towards aggregation of data and actually much more focused on the application of data in other words can understanding consumers what they will allow the type of information they will share with us how we can best serve them and so we start to see things like user experience or user journeys coming much more to the forefront of our consideration factors but equally one of the areas that we're leaning into very aggressively is data ethics and I think whether you're D2C whether you're omni it doesn't matter the the next frontier that our industry is is going to grapple with is what are the ethical applications of data just because we can collect information on consumers doesn't necessarily mean that we should and so I think we will start to see much more data by design or data that we are collecting only if it is in service of consumers and only if it is permission based and that becomes true whether you're in the US whether you're in India whether you're in Australia anywhere in the world because the scrutiny that consumers have placed within the industry now is calling everything into question and it's part of what's contributed to the massive erosion in trust that we're seeing around the world between consumers and brands even consumers and governments for example the the the way in which their data and information has been handled hasn't always been transparent but more so the value exchange hasn't been there for them and so start to think about data ethics far more readily and how we can best serve consumers in the future regardless of D2C omni whatever type of retailer you happen to be you know we started exchange for media 21 years back and about 10 years back I wrote a piece that every media planner needs to be a digital planner okay I wrote that piece maybe 10 11 12 years back well ahead of your time yeah I mean I had here then Adam but I can only I only remember that now as I said in the morning in India 20% of the spends are already digital and over the next three years they will be between 40 to 50% that's what we can estimate by being where we are and out of that 40% 70% is programmatic right programmatic is growing hugely now that also brings issues of you talked about ethical data access democratization security is a big issue bots is a big issue of course technology is also coming to help in terms of minimizing ad fraud as the growth of digital growth there is also a parallel universe for a lack of better world let me call it the meta universe you know your identity on digital the rising importance of NFTs you know I mean if you look at NFT and meta the point towards a different direction now what are clients you work with some of the most venerable businesses and brands across the world you talk to their CEOs you talk to founders of businesses what are the top two three trends that you see which will accelerate this balance of digital growth with ethics you know we know that digital is going to grow and grow it but how do you I mean there is debate about data privacy there's a debate about benefiting from data there's a debate about how much is digital is good because young millennials are spending too much screen time and they're not spending enough time in football fields they're not spending enough time you're having real conversations so give me a sense of what are your top three predictions or what are the big trends which will balance these out so I think certainly you know the push towards ensuring that we're we're putting consumers first along with actually the balance of digitization of everything that we're seeing it becomes critical component to every discussion that we're having at the moment but actually goes kind of back to what I had said earlier where if we start to really understand consumers and their expectations and ambitions from brands we can start to better serve them and and so it doesn't mean that we have to walk away from from understanding consumers or their digital footprint but it does mean that we have to do so in a more responsible way so we're talking to consumers about things like a data ethics compass that we've created which looks at the application of data and how you might how you might apply some of the data that consumers are even willingly offering up and what the value exchange is between them so I would say understanding risk tolerances and understanding true consumer journeys becomes becomes the first thing the second thing though is is actually understanding what consumers want in the way of values so that your brand can be more more relevant and one of my favorite stats right now is 71% of global 18 to 24 year olds in other words most companies future audiences they think that supporting a cause or a purpose is imperative for a brand and here's here's the irony for me they believe that it's important or imperative even if it's financially motivated or to avoid public scrutiny so in other words it's just an expectation that they have these days so when you start to understand what consumers actually want you can start to adapt your brands and you can start to define purpose better in doing so you can better serve them with more relevant more meaningful experiences you can start to think about the application of data and how you best leverage that to to unlock more meaningful dialogue with them and then I would say that the third as a consequence of that is actually how do you create a more meaningful feedback loop so that you understand what's working not only for your business but also for consumers and I think there's going to be a facet of listening moving forward understanding consumer sentiment understanding brand trajectory which comes much more to the forefront of conversations as we move forward in exploring some of the trends that as you say are going to be unlocked through the aggressive shift towards programmatic and digital acceleration as a whole. My last question one is you know Adam you talk to these founders business owners CEOs you know CMOs now how does Adam keep himself equipped or in some way understand what's happening in the future beyond meeting these people what do you do as a leader as an individual to be able to understand consumer behavior to understand trends you know that would be interesting to know. I think for me on a personal level the biggest thing is seek inspiration everywhere it doesn't doesn't matter who you're talking to it doesn't matter you know what your agenda is find people from outside the industry even to bring internal stimulus to what we do and application to what we do. Just over the weekend I was going for a walk with my daughter and she mentioned something that just triggered a moment for me and I said we have to run back to the house I need to write something down and she said dad why are we moving so quickly and I said I don't want to lose this thought and it was just something that a four-year-old said to me that triggered an idea about what good growth in the future might actually look like for a particular client that we're working with. So you know I would say I wish there was this sort of silver bullet so to speak as to where to find inspiration but I think it's really just being receptive and open to to the types of conversations that we have in particular those that are outside of the industry because all too often we find that we are we are too introspective and too consumed by our own agendas to actually look at what consumers or the world around us are expecting of us. I said thank you Adam for talking to Exchange for Media and various audience over the last 21 years we've been the homepage of CMOs, brand managers and media planners and we've tried to decipher what's happening in the business of media advertising communication. So thank you for talking to us and we look forward to hosting you sometime in India and you know kind of shooting a few beers. At this point I must tell you that Exchange for Media we believe that we need to bring in a new identity brand identity and we would request you at some stage to help us unveil our new identity. While we are Exchange for Media and this is the 18th year of the Exchange for Media conclave we are mostly called by people as E4M I mean that's easy so at some stage today we'll unveil a new brand identity and our ambition is to be in at least three markets over the next 24 years 24 months 18 to 24 months because as you know in Southeast Asia we are red a lot so we want to get into markets like Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and take our product offering our editorial platforms are face-to-face initiatives our community initiatives we don't call them awards conferences we call them community initiatives so at some stage Ravin will keep us all to launch the new identity our editor Ms Nazia Rahman and my co-founder Mr Naval Hoja are also on the broadcast and so are our audiences so I'll hand it over back to Ravin for taking it to the next conversation and we'll bring you in for launching our new identity so I'm grateful to you for your time for insights and no wonder your clients swear by you there's some of the marky names and I can tell you that one thing Adam looking at your profile the age of the global CEO of Mindshade keeps getting lesser and lesser you know you're possibly the youngest CEO I have I can say I've interacted with every past CEO in the last 20 years and I clearly you're the youngest so that is in tune with what's happening in the marketplace I have I do have the gray hairs to show thank you very much for for having me truly an honor as I say congratulations on 21 years and and I look forward to helping you as you as you expand and hopefully doing so in person at some point in the not so distant thank you so much Adam really appreciate thank you for that anecdote from what your daughter said you know I have an 18 year old and a 14 year old and sometimes they say things and it makes you think Mr. Shashi Sanna who's the chairman of IPG brands in India has also joined thank you Mr. Sinha and I'll hand it back to Ravin thank you Ravin bye Adam cheers thank you thank you so much Dr. Bhattra and of course we'd like to express our gratitude to Mr. Gerhard for being here thank you so much sir it was truly an honor to have you join in the conference thank you so I'm sure there's a lot to ponder on with the conversation that you just heard from these two amazing gentlemen and on that note we'd like to take things forward we are all set for the big reveal as Dr. Bhattra just said which we have been waiting for some quite time now it is the moment that we launch our new logo a labor of hard work of all the team members at E4M and of course it has been a long time due and right now is the time that we all are about to unveil the strong vision to bring the community insightful journalism and platforms for the industries to mingle and learn from each other. Launching this new logo will be our special guest for the evening Mr. Darrell Lee who is the global CEO of IPG Media Brands he will be joined by Mr. Sashi Sinha CEO IPG Media Brands India Dr. Anrat Bhattra chairman and founder of exchange for media group of course Mr. Naval Ahuja the co-founder and director of exchange for media group and Ms. Nazia Alvi editor exchange for media group as well along with this of course we'd like to request the person behind this amazing amazing opportunity to tell us a little bit more about the logo itself. Ashwini has designed the logo I'll request Ashwini to kindly say a few words can you know it's not just about the design of a logo it's a brand identity and who could better than Ashwini Deshpande of Elevent Design she and her team have taken a lot of effort work with Naval to do this and it has passed through all kinds of checks including astrological checks Mr. Sinha it's been shown to astrological and numerologists and people like that so we'd like to get Ms. Ashwini Deshpande to be on screen and share her vision and how she and her team were able to come up with this Ms. Ashwini Deshpande. Thank you so much Anurag I think it's been a long journey and I hope that we've reached a really good point today and seems like the great day to unveil. So when we began this whole discussion with you and Naval and Sunil and of course my team members we were kind of you know where do you begin because you have been pioneers leaders in the industry you've been sort of an epicenter of sorts for the ad media and marketing industry so what should your branding be what should it convey what should it do and how does it stand the test of time because you've had your visual identity I think for more than 18-20 years and you have been a very very progressive group with very very amazing progressive initiatives but somewhere along the branding didn't move forward so many a times when a brand looks at itself you know every four or five years and keeps refreshing it's much easier to do the next step but for this brand which in its mindset and actions had moved way forward and had not really reflected that in the visual identity seemed like a big challenge so we said what does e4m stand for and to simply put I think you you just said it yourself as well you are the enablers of connections of communication among ad media marketing communities so basically it's an enabler brand so how do we make it really look like an enabler brand feel like one create a tone of voice and so on of course you're the focal point of starting so many discoveries insights and connections a progressive tech platform of course we are digitally native today and every brand that starts will have its first interaction with its users on some screen or the other so we are a digitally native brand so how do we look like that the difference here is that you're not just a tech platform you are a platform where people and culture matter you know where connections are not just email IDs or designations or company names and you know all of you know people personally and you have actually tracked people's progress personally so how do we bring that alive into the identity and and well there were many such challenges and of course we are in a different age now so digitally native minimalist easy to extend with properties co-branding easy to go with sponsor logos you know all kinds of things had to be considered easy as a long and short form whether you call it exchange for media or like people lovingly call it e4m so all of that put together I think we've tried to do something which is vibrant connecting friendly reliable and of course gives a sense of being global because as you just mentioned you're expanding your horizons and the logo has to stand the test of geographies as well so what we have of course is something that you know it looks simple enough and friendly enough and yet global enough and I believe it should stand the test of time for years to come and you know let's let's just hope we get a good positive response moving ahead because you also checked the astrology and vastu and whatever else so here is to the entire team thank you so much for giving us this opportunity and all the best to e4m in the years to come thank you Anubhav thank you Ashwini for that insights into who we are it was a very accurate description of what me Nawal Sunil our teams Nazia is there she's put together the exchange for media conclave Michelle who's our conference producer she's helped Nazia in this a lot of other colleagues who may or may not be on the broadcast some most of them who work with us now but a lot of them have worked over the years so our stakeholders the industry and the community has really supported us believed in us continue to patronize us continue to give us their time input suggestion so we don't think of it as a business I always say the advertising marketing media fraternity is my community it is my samudai it is a family and that's how you know we have personal relationships and you know it's not we put our heart into everything we do it's not just another conference it's just not just another jury it's not just another award we try and put in that extra because really it is our community so thank you so much for bringing that word of the enabler brand the tech brand the connector the knowledge platform and most importantly you know the word community so yes we're called E4M so thank you for doing what you've done for for us at exchange for media and being the leader in this space for the community so thank you so much Ashwini elephant design has really all the clients that you worked with and all the brand identities that you've created have gone on to build businesses I hope this signals are leaping to a next league and our next phase of growth so thank you so much Ashwini. Really Naval is the one who got this done so Naval it'll be nice if you said few words. I actually want to thank Ashwini for being patient with us I'm sure you have clients who have you know faster turnaround time companies that you you know work with who are far more nimble who are far more you know sort of responsive having said that I think Covid played a big part in the delay the the branding the identity has been sort of you know in pipeline for more than a year one of the things I want to add to what Anurag said and Ashwini and her team have brought it out very beautifully in the new identity is the fact that you know we stand for binding the community together and you know you can you can sort of overestimate the role of a you know brand or identity or underestimated the fact is that you know that is the first thing that your sort of audience people you are interacting with people in the community interact with and what Ashwini and her team have beautifully done is that they brought out that facet that aspect about exchange for media e4m being a sort of community platform which binds everything everybody together it is contemporary it is new age it is you know we we really love the identity and it kind of you know completes the trioka for us a few years back we rebranded and relaunched impact subsequently subsequent to that you know bridge our marketing magazine was the identity was redone and now we are kind of in some ways finishing that project with e4m the idea also is to moving forward make it simpler and crisp and also have the url as e4m and not keep it at exchangeformedia.com because the community now knows e4m so thank you Ashwini for putting the hard work and you know really putting up with our tantrums and the delays i i do hope that you know this kind of signals a sort of fresh post-covid relaunch for all of us thank you so much thank you so much it was a great pleasure wonderful to see you back to you yes i think with that we are ready for the unveil can i please request nazia to take over daryl can you switch on your camera and then we can have the ab Ashwini i want to thank you for that bold red colour the signifies that our journalism is also going to get bolder and braver in the coming years yeah definitely and you've also kept it very rooted and so it carries both i mean the the traditional thing that we have been doing for all these years and then going forward we'll be doing much i mean the first thing that i look at it comes across as a very bold logo and that's what that's the message we want to give out to people that our journalism is also going to get bolder and braver so if if daryl can you join in i'll just check it in the meantime we get daryl connected i would be very happy to request you all to kindly use the hashtag that's e4m conclave and spread the word around you can tweet it on your social networks on instagram on facebook and let the world know that this conversation was happening today and i'm absolutely sure you've got a lot of value from the conversations that we've had the discussions that we've had so use the hashtag and let the world know that you were a part of this amazing amazing virtual event revenue may take one minute you want to run partner aves we still have any left or should be done in the meantime we're waiting for Mr. Lee to join in sg can we have some movies please uh the partner series are you okay with 80 crore 10 per cent to 50 lakhs so hello hello daryl good to see you it's to see you guys thank you daryl for joining oh you're taking out time thank you so much you're welcome whenever shashi asks me to do something i say yes thanks for that thank you very much thank you so we can unveil the now that daryl is here just before the conversation if you can unveil the new logo thanks again ashwini this looks uh you know vibrant colorful and brightens up uh our evening and uh with that let me uh let me uh welcome daryl on board daryl thank you for joining us as we were me and nazia were explaining to you the other day this is our new identity the new exchange for media logo uh that has been curated by india's uh one of india's premier design agencies called elephant design the founder is here ashwini dhishpande she's helped us do this uh let me uh hand it over to nazia if you want to say something nazia and then we i think we can uh continue with that before before i start the conversation mr sinai is here i'd like him to say something uh uh you know i'm going to do a conversation with daryl any cues for me what should i be asking him you're on your own novel you're on your own sir leave it to you oh thanks daryl thanks for coming into india you know you're the big fan of yours and the fact that you agreed to do this do this audience they run a very fine show exchange for media and they do this cosplay every year religiously so the fact that you were need to be the keynote speaker at the end the leadership thank you very much thank you thank you mr sinai thank you ashwini thank you nazia thank you for joining us uh i don't have to introduce uh you know today's uh keynote speaker our valedictory session uh but some of you who might not know what this accomplished gentleman uh has been doing past few years daryl Lee is currently the CEO of ipg media brands as you know ipg media brands is one of the largest uh media investment conglomerates across the world it's part of the interpublic group uh daryl has a very interesting sort of background he's worked across creative agencies for many years he was part of uh mccann erickson he was the global CEO of universal mccann from 2013 to 2019 he's been part of you know universal mccann for a good part of as i see 13 years before that daryl also worked with ogilvy and now as part of the ipg media brands he looks after significant investments in the media investment space thank you and welcome to the show daryl thank you no i'm very excited to be thank you so much for joining us it must be early morning in new york uh let me uh before we get into the conversation let me just you know contextualize it uh last 18 months the pandemic has been uh uh you know multi-faceted in in its impact on what's happening on consumers what's happening on the brand side what's happening in the agency ecosystem and what is subsequently happening on the media side of the ecosystem and all four of these ecosystems are kind of joined directly and indirectly what we'll do through this conversation over the next 30 minutes or so try to cover each bucket and see what is the impact of the pandemic pandemic on each of these uh uh you know ecosystems and then what is the collective impact and where uh the future is headed so to say especially uh where agencies stand today how can they compete better with uh agencies within their own ecosystem and companies outside consultancies at tech companies and so on so forth uh the other part of the conversation i'd like to do is about you know consumer behavior and the impact of that uh moving forward post pandemic and where it is headed and the third part which is also important for brands as well as agencies is what is happening on the media ecosystem side on one hand there is a lot of consolidation in legacy media and on the other hand there is fragmentation as well as consolidation in the digital media space and what will be the impact of that back on brands and agency ecosystem let me start by asking you Darryl you've been part of the advertising agency ecosystems for the last you know 20 odd years you've seen many waves of growth and degrowth in these last two uh two decades and a bit more how do you see this pandemic being different from the earlier boom and bust cycles what do you think this pandemic will leave behind which will fundamentally change the advertising and the brand ecosystem uh well thank you first of all i want to congratulate you on your amazing new logo and visual design i think it is very modern and very contemporary um and i think apple has got to run for its money now so just watch out i think the i think if i am is going to be a iconic logo and i end but i think it's also you know this is i suppose the sign of the pandemic which is very progressive marketers are using the opportunity to refresh and energize themselves so congratulations secondly before i answer your question i also want to correct you i do not run a conglomerate there are other of my peers who run conglomerates that i run a very agile marketing solutions company uh so uh as shashi will will attest uh we we you know we're never we're not the biggest we don't aspire to be the biggest but we aspire to be the best uh as a as a media and marketing solutions company and uh and i you've already said that i'm old i don't want to be part of a conglomerate i'm not uh but but i am i am a person and we are a company that works with our clients and their brands to understand how consumer behavior is going to change is driving marketing and and driving growth i think um i mean the pandemic has been quite an unprecedented experience in our lifetime so it's it's not like um a typical boom and bust cycle in the sense that it's not financially driven it has not been because of some economic crisis that we um that we've faced this extreme behavior shift it is a health crisis and the global health crisis happening at the same time that has all led people to um change their work patterns and change their life patterns and so when i think when you change your life patterns uh that's a change that doesn't go away right so sometimes in economic hardship you spend less uh you might lose your home you might lose a car you might lose your you might you may have to scale back your expenses but this is a fundamental shift in life patterns where we have begun to understand what we can do in traditional work environments and what we can do outside of traditional work environments and technology has been the key differentiator in allowing us to do that so so in that sense you know the pandemic is obviously a disruption as opposed to just a flip um but the question is what is it disrupting uh or rather what is it accelerating and i know that uh i know that i know that the india marketplace is very exciting from a digital perspective um we just released our magna ad spend forecast and we're showing a 15 growth in the india marketplace but a 19 growth in digital spend in in in the media marketplace and that is a reaction to consumer behavior where i'm where smartphone adoption smartphone use all online channels um have obviously become more important as people spend time at home but still crave the connection right the thing we the thing we we now understand again about human beings is we crave connection even when we are in our own bedroom for a year and a half well you know i think i've seen shashi in that room in that one little office that he has for the last 18 months so but i know he's a very social and gregarious and connected man so how do you maintain this deep desire for human beings to be connected and at the same time we've got this you know this lockdown these lockdowns or at least you know a much much more constrained activity in terms of our behavior so digital acceleration is the obvious it is not a trend it is now i think um the way in which human beings will behave which doesn't mean that everything we do will be digital it means that everything we do will be digitally mediated we will have a digital component to absolutely everything in our lives because in the pandemic we saw that there was not just possible that it was preferable and that we were able to use digital to make a whole range of areas in our lives better whether it is ordering groceries and food which i think we had a sense that this was possible but now we see it's absolutely possible and convenient to healthcare to online education to and i think to that being widespread right so in the past digital was for early adopters for either the elite or for the avon god of a culture the millennials gen z people who you know teenagers who were early adopters now i think all of that digital convenience has now become apparent to widespread consumer base regardless of income regardless of geography and regardless of age and i think that's a really really exciting trend and then of course the big trend underneath all the digital acceleration is connected commerce which is you know not e-commerce is obviously the big boom you know we have amazon as a client so i'm not just saying that because we have amazon as a client um the the e-commerce boom is now is now a loud shout it's no longer a boom um but the thing that's interesting is the connection around e-commerce right so what i we talk about connected commerce at ipg media brands which is all the all the uh shopping behaviors the personalization that comes from those behaviors and the physical distribution and delivery system how that all connects together to create experiences for brands and the brands that can connect all of those experiences are the ones that are winning today in the pandemic and will win even more as we come out yes very uh rightly described uh uh if i may add uh you know one of the uh dictionary meanings of conglomerate that i just looked up as things a thing consisting of a number of different and distinct parts or items that are grouped together in many ways agencies are doing that even more so having to do that with you know so much explosion of digital now so it is not just about size and you know being around gorilla but also being nimble and connecting various parts together uh let me ask you a follow-up question on you know all the digital boom that you described that uh agencies uh you know both media and creative and 20 years back it all used to be part of a single group before it split uh separate went separate ways into media services and creative do agencies have it in them uh to kind of uh you know take advantage of this opportunity what are the challenges that agencies are facing in terms of you know uh revamping and sort of you know uh refocusing their efforts and energies and where are the areas that agencies need to focus on to be future ready for their brands for their clients to kind of be uh be in step with time uh with you know the consumer habit changes that are happening well that's a good that's a good big question um it's a good big question i i you know that the deal the deal breaker for all agencies will be do you have strategic intelligence about consumers um which is not just data data is the fuel for that but do you use that data to create intelligence about audience segments growth segments and then real people within them and then are you able to use that intelligence strategically i i've always believed that there that the two kinds of agencies in the world are not creative and media they're strategic agencies and execution agencies and some agencies are strategic and look across look at a consumer build integrated strategies around that consumer and then look to partner either within your system or outside of your system to execute then there's some agencies creative or media that just do the one thing that they're supposed to do and do that well from an execution perspective and i think the strategic agencies are going to be the ones that win because as you say you you you know that there aren't channels anymore they're just opportunities to connect with people right and there are we know we look at media in terms of channel types but really that is an unlimited amount of opportunity to connect with people so agencies that can put within themselves one they have to be based on data which makes which makes it which is challenging for creative agencies because creative agencies are usually based on uh intuition but you've got to read all agencies have to rebuild themselves around data use that data to create intelligence and use that intelligence to create strategy and ideas and uh and then partner you know the thing that we're learning to do as agencies as you said there's a big ecosystem now with consultants production companies experiential companies um creators influences the ability for an agency to have a clear strategic insight built on intelligence and then to partner with tech companies and influences and that's the key um and i think that's the thing that clients are looking for somebody who can orchestrate for them versus just execute yeah interesting you say that you know i do think the media agencies are in a better position there i mean i know i don't i want to be more provocative here which is to tell you what i i think media agencies are five years ahead of creative agencies not just in the access to data and understanding how to turn data into intelligence but in ability to partner i think creative agencies look inside for all the ideas and execution whereas i think media agencies are used to working with snap and instagram and tiktok and google to build creative ideas to come up with them and to build them um and i think and you know with tv and with tv properties and out of home and i think that partnership power is what's going to be the difference it's interesting you say that darryl uh you know uh creative agencies uh uh have always been uh the sort of company at the forefront when it uh when it came to creating brand communication in fact 20 years back before the businesses were split uh you know media agency slides used to be towards the end mostly about five minutes at the end how much how much money will be spent before it came back to uh the forefront and it got equal prominence but now as we see a lot of media agencies are leading innovation with the clients because you're more connected to what's happening in the media ecosystem so whether you know a 32nd ad is now supposed to be a five-seconder uh whether a you know newspaper full page ad is supposed to become a social media post i think media agencies are significantly very deeply connected with what's happening on the media side side of the space nothing to take away from creative agencies but i think more innovation a lot more innovation is these days happening in media agency offices and you know shashi is here mr sena is here he can vouch for you know a lot of the work that ipg companies are doing in india do you see you know having worked uh on uh you know across both sides of the aisle you see uh the media and the creative ecosystem now kind of reemerging uh going back to its pre uh you know uh 2000 avatar or coming back together in some other shape and form and there's a reason i asked this question also is that if you look at you know how uh legacy media transactions used to happen you know there were three players or four players in the entire ecosystem there is a media company there's a creative and a media agency and then there is a brand so primarily four players today before uh the brand money hits the uh you know bank account of a media platform let's say a facebook or a google there are at least eight to ten players involved in middle there is a digital agency which is doing creatives there is a creative agencies which is curating perhaps content there's a media agency which is buying there could be an influencer marketing agency somewhere there is a data analytics company there is another company which is doing programmatic advertising so there are eight ten players in the entire ecosystem and media agencies creative agencies which have sort of grown in the legacy media world how do they equip themselves to kind of compete with these new age startups you know we had this news last year of Accenture buying Broga file a very interesting development where you have a primarily a consultant turned analytics company now buying the creative agencies do creative agencies or media agencies also need to do the same thing which is go and buy nimble startups or create some of these companies ground up well i mean i do think you know to my earlier point we need to partner we need to have partner structures so we have we we have a couple of things at ipg we do have venture funds that we do look at taking stakes in very small add add tech or more tech or add execution companies just to see where you know where where innovation is being driven but mostly what we do is from a partnership perspective i don't think i mean we don't want to go back right no looking back no looking back the 21st century is not about looking back unless it is to learn a lesson and the lesson in the past was when when you had a media department that was the last three minutes of your creative presentation you were doing advertising i don't think we're living in the age of advertising we're living in the age of brand experiences and so in the world of brand experiences what what we used to do in that old advertising model is no longer interesting or even powerful so how do we build a model where one you deliver brand experiences for a client but two you have this ability to use audience intelligence and audience information to design it so much of what we used to do in the past to say here's what the brand wants to say and here's how we broadcast it versus today where it's here's what we're listening to in terms of audiences here's what they're saying their interests are and here's how our brand can can participate in that conversation so all we know i don't want to talk too much about democracy but it is a democratic marketing people people are we start as a media agency as media agencies both initiative and um we start with what are people what are audiences what are real people saying in the category and therefore what do our brands of our of our clients need to say to participate in that conversation and so yeah we're not going to we're not going to recombine media and creative uh agencies that's the old model what we are going to do is partner closely with everybody in that ecosystem and that includes brand you know the big brand communications agencies and i think we have a very you know we have an open architecture system at ipg we partner really well with our creative agency partners but as you say we partner with rga as well as with mccant you know we we partner with a digital shop just as well as we partner with a branch up because the entirety of that experience is something that we need to bring together now the question is who is the conductor of the orchestra and um typically that is the that has been the mccans and the oglebies of the world but i don't think that is anymore it's certainly an ipg with you know with our new ceo with philly krikowski who used to be the ceo of media brands we have a truly agnostic approach to that so whoever is the best placed to be the orchestra orchestrator the best experienced that's what we do that's the person who does it so i think that is the big shift which is you know the the old aristocracy of the advertising agency is over and now we're in the democracy of marketing um and i don't you know to your point about acquisitions um i think that i think that you know there's a lot of money in the in the venture capital marketplace i think most of our most of the startups that we work with wants too much money and will get too much money but they should get that money from the marketplace i mean we you know we have this thing where we have to make profit every quarter so that's the thing but um but it doesn't stop us from working with them and uh we have a very very uh you know we have an ipg media lab within uh media brands we have a kind of a relationship with rga ventures we are constantly in the marketplace looking to to test not to partner but to test with different startups um how how we can bring new experiences to our two clients and their brands yes and uh democracy this this democracy in the advertising ecosystem is you know good for media agencies there i say uh let me ask you about the you know other side of the sort of ecosystem which is media companies and we've all grown up in a legacy media world you know where television and print ruled and there have been uh fundamental shifts in that space in the last five seven years india is a very interesting market in that sense globally especially in the western markets also in countries large economies like china digital advertising is now more than 50 percent of the spend india is a sort of outlier in that sense where uh television is continuing to hold its you know share of pie newspaper readership is certainly not falling if you look at language newspapers at least that was the trend until you know covid hit the shores digital as it is happening across the globe is growing very fast uh how do you see this entire ecosystem of legacy legacy media shaping up you know if you look at some of the advertising reports you know tv continues to constitute 35 40 percent of the ad spend if you look at large uh properties in india for example you know large format tv shows you look at big sporting properties like the ipl tv continues to attract uh big bucks brand building you have interesting cases where you know a lot of digital companies actually launch on tv what's your view on how you know the media ecosystem will shape up in india say three years out that's funny i i said i sometimes have to represent ipg on investor calls with wall street and i always get a question you know why why is tv advertising even in the us why is it so strong um and who's who's going to be the brand that buys the last tv ad i get that question and i say the brand that'll buy the last tv ad is a brand called facebook because they are spending they're the fastest growing spender on television in the united states um you know there's there's i'm a i'm a big believe first of all i think the india marketplace is incredibly healthy i i do love that there's a newspaper there's a newspaper uh industry and that is so competitive um and it's so vibrant and so punchy um and i think that's a very that's a that's a good sign for a country frankly um and we're seeing growth right we see growth uh in india 15 percent which is above uh above the region fact it's above global above the global average so we see a lot of vibrancy in in the media marketplace i mean i think there are two big trends the growth in digital such an it's such an obvious point that i hate making it of course digital is growing you know across all formats social search video display commerce so yes that is but but what is but what is also happening is two other things one is um the digitization of all media right so what what we in the u.s what we're having to do and i know in india you will need to do this is to look at news brands and go what portion of the new news of that news brand inventory is print versus digital look at radio brands what portion of them is linear radio versus digital audio um the same with out of home and the digitization of out of home so many many all media is getting digitized which means you can do uh real-time customization around content around location around targeting across all media which is super exciting do i think that india will get to a 50-50 marketplace in terms of digital and traditional yes um i think i think the market that's the right equilibrium i think in the u.s we're over 50 percent now and we we can all feel that the equilibrium is not right um and there is a lot of a lot of demand for tv in the u.s because of that and live events i mean this goes back to my connection point there is still nothing more exciting than than a shared experience and a live event now i would have preferred if the cricket world cup had ended with a final between india and south africa who were of course the best teams in that world cup and for a bunch of osseys not to win it again because they're disastrous awful people but uh no i have many australian friends but um but uh but there is nothing like that there's a shared experience we're all having at the same time we will you know much of much of our culture is so personal and intimate i can be watching a show on amazon prime or netflix that's from 20 years ago you're watching you know money high store something so there's there isn't that same on the same moments for shared connection as they were in media and what live events give us is that shared moment um and obviously festivals and media so i i think that there is going to be the same digitization in india um but i think the that does that doesn't just mean that digital is going to become 100 of the market there will be still a 50 50 split we still want to feel some of our media and experience it in the traditional way the thing that is interesting in in india um as is the ot explosion so i think that i think the streaming wars in any category are giving marketer something new to think about right because there are two kinds of streaming platforms there's advertising supported streaming platforms and then there's a subscription supported like the netflix and the and the and the amazon prime video and i think in the ad supported uh streaming properties obviously there's an opportunity for advertising but the the subscription driven models i think give brands also an opportunity which is to start building brand films to produce films you know we are doing this for for several clients including big clients like j and j where we make a long-form film you make a documentary or we make a scripted film an hour and a half film that is sponsored by the brand but isn't about the product is about the brand that's right and then we and then we sell them to streaming platforms um so it's never been my experience ever as long as i've been in this industry that you could sell a piece of advertising and get money for it but now we're doing that instead of paying people to run advertising they're paying us to run long-form advertising on netflix or on hulu in the u.s so i think there's there's having brands embrace the opportunity around content is and not just content for advertising but content for telling your brand story is incredibly powerful and incredibly exciting because you can tell a real story uh in these long-form films yes and uh you know one of the interesting parts of this digital explosion is now you know in a way everybody's trying to do everything right there are no chinese laws there are i mean media agencies are doing uh content creative agencies are trying to figure out you know digital agencies are buying media uh brands are curating you know uh you know multiple multifaceted teams in house let me ask you about you know the other facet of this growth of digital media and uh you've described the consumer journey you've described you know what is the impact of all of that on the media and the agency ecosystem what is the other side of uh you know the impact of digital in our lives you know digital has become ubiquitous in terms of usage there are now digital behemoths who sort of control the narrative in many ways you know digital is uh like you described earlier in one of the conversations to me tv and you know other media will continue to grow or be at least significantly relevant is because it is publicly it is public media it is shared media yes digital is very private in nature having said that digital will continue to grow what are the challenges that you know this growth will bring upon us for consumers and brands for agencies i mean i think for consumers it's going to be uh um mostly good that you know we're seeing in the us some of the some of the facebook whistleblower leaks where um their concerns around instagram and the effect of instagram on teenage girls and their body image and suicide and some very alarming research obviously there's you know a lot of a lot of talk around media um responsibility and content um that is offensive or inflammatory or gets or gives or via or creates violence so we do need to take um we need to take stock of the good and the the good and the bad and digital you know i go back to i do believe that digital you know is this private experience and is mostly a good experience but our approach to it as marketers needs to be sensible so when we think of digital as a two-horse race between facebook and google we're we're we're we're doing ourselves and our clients and our brands of the service it is not a two-horse race it's nobody's interest for to think of it as a two-horse race but it is just not true you know and i'd say that the digital universe is wide and varied and constantly expanding and if you're a client and your agency is coming back to you with a social plan that includes facebook and instagram and nothing else you should call them lazy kick them out of your office and tell them to come back with a new plan because um and if you're an agency and you think facebook and instagram are the only two options for social you should get it you know you you should look better and look look look more clearly at the marketplace maybe you need some new glasses maybe you need some snap snapchat glasses because because there is you know there is there are we we need to create diversity of experience brands need to deliver diversity of experience for consumers and for audiences and we as marketers need to help facilitate that and that means looking at all the innovation that is happening in digital whether it's ar lenses with snap or uh audio spaces with twitter i know tiktok is not formally yet allowed back into india although i'm hopeful um i saw something that they're going to change their name to tiktik talk to you know 11 other companies which are doing what tiktok does in india so yeah exactly there you go significant proliferation and the entire market don't significant so that's so that's good and all of them i think will be chasing the social commerce opportunity which tiktok is is perfecting uh and i you know i know that we chat and and there's all kinds of super apps being promised promised in the marketplace so i think all of that is to say we have an obligation to not be lazy and digital i don't know how it is possible you know we were we were so active and agile in all other media we're looking for the best tv source the best radio source the best print publication we choose at the program level sometimes at the you know in the us we do targeting where we choose the spot level the spot level i remember when cricket matches used to be you know even bigger people used to sit and choose what spot to play and mr sinai is here he will tell us in world cup there used to be a demand that my ad has to be the first one to play in the break or the last one to play before the break gets over because that's where when audience is the highest and we haven't in innovation in one of the ipel matches or the early seasons of ipel when there used to be ads between you know two balls being bold so that was like you know different level no and we did all that and now and at the same time we go oh and then google and facebook you know we we suddenly all that precision all that careful thinking just it's too easy and i think um and when something's too easy you know it's not right because it should be hard to get people to be excited by brands so i think i and i think it's interesting you know we talk a lot about media responsibility at ipg media brands and holding facebook in particular accountable for the content that's on that's on their platform that is causing a lot of harm particularly around the pandemic with vaccine hesitancy misinformation disinformation blatant lies crazy talk about about how vaccines are putting microchips in your blood and changing your dna which a large proportion of the u.s population believes because of social media and particularly because of facebook and and and its controls and then you know when you talk to consumers you go what will will you stop using facebook of course not do you want brands to do something about it yes so that you know consumers are consumers want and get a lot of value and connection from facebook they don't want to be sitting there fighting these fights but they expect brands to be taking steps because they know it's ad funded so they expect brands to be doing something about the bad that is happening on social media that is obscuring and negating the good which there's a lot of so we you know we as as a media agency and as a holding company are taking a very strong stand against this because holding facebook accountable forcing them to deliver some advertiser control so you can stop your brands from running against content that you find objectionable or offensive and all of the facebook still hasn't created those advertising controls but they are creating them and we're putting the pressure on them because that's our response yes let me take you back to one of the interesting points you mentioned about you know how we are not investing enough in kind of being innovative on digital media do you think somewhere it is connected to sort of the dearth of talent in the advertising ecosystem and I say that because if you look at the growth of advertising in the last 20 years and I'm saying this from Indian experience advertising agencies have lost a lot of talent to brands a lot of talent to the media side of the business you know digital companies you know you have a situation today where you know youngsters in digital agencies want to kind of become instagram influencers instead of working on media plans so how do you kind of deal with the issue of talent in the industry and do you think that's also partly responsible for the fact that you know there is enough there isn't enough innovation happening because you know there is growth clients are spending money so you sit back and kind of you know let it flow that's a great question we are very focused on we call it the fight for talent because it is a fight and you're right it's not a fight between different holding companies or agencies it's a fight for why would you want to career in the media agency that's that's the fight what's the what's the excitement for there and that's you know that's our opportunity I mean I think the you know the the reason why people come to our agencies are still the brands that we work with the power that those brands have to shape culture and to drive economies and the people that they get to work with so those are always the those are the reasons and so it's our job and Shashi will agree with me that you know we want to work with the worlds and the markets best brands the brands that are taking risks the best brands that are driving innovation because that's why people join people join because they want to work with amazon they want to work with spotify they want to work with clients that are doing something interesting and shifting categories and culture do we are we are very good at marketing ourselves no because we spend a lot of time marketing our clients brands yes and we and we for the first time and I was just this just today I'm looking at we are doing recruitment marketing for the first time we are starting to do as an agency and as a media holding company thinking about how we position ourselves in the ecosystem and how do we attract people right because we're not actually recruiting them we're attracting them it's like they're going into this department store and they can go to any part of that department store why would they come to your section right why would they come to a mall why would they come to your store so we're doing a lot more thinking we're doing a lot of thinking around diversity and inclusion because there it is it is the case that we are more progressive as as agencies have to be progressive there's nobody we don't have enough people for there to be a hierarchy for there to be oh you just go and do your tactical job and I'll do the strategic one we need everybody to be strategic and all in we don't have enough people we never get paid enough by clients we always have to do with more with less and so we need women we need people who are in any way different or other to all feel empowered to be people in our cultures and I know this is a passion of Shashi and myself a woman you know we've got significant amount of women leaders at IPG media brands and at IPG but particularly at media brands so all of that I think begins to make us more attractive we're not going to we're not going to offer people equity and you know shares that quadruple but we're also going to not offer the offer them the opportunity of being a company that fails and then they have to look for a job tomorrow we're going to give them the stability of a of a company that is growing we have double digit growth year over year even in the pandemic we were flat you know in the worst year of 2022 2020 we were flat as a company so we have stability and innovation and it's our job to keep that innovation high and frankly to change the way we think you know Shashi and I are from a different generation people are not looking for careers they're looking for impact and we spend a lot of time at at media brands going where can we stream people into projects that give that help them get impact whether it's in sustainability initiatives diversity initiatives media responsibility organizing global exchange programs all of that is how we deliver on and being a more attractive place to work but it's and we watch our you know our internal scores around two people recommend us to their friends and we keep that as a as a key driver of our executive performance it's a big it is the thing that keeps me up at night we do have people moving to tiktok and snap and um facebook but we also have people coming back this because you're a big you know you're you can be that the impact you can have in agencies is really powerful you can influence what amazon does in india you can influence what spotify does in india through working for initiative or um whereas i think in many times in these particularly these big digital platforms your influence is small so if anybody that's right i think i think very very very well put darryl let me come to your india business now and you have fantastic leadership very stable leadership for many years your india business has grown multi-fold both in the legacy media part as well as the digital part and you have many clients who work with you globally as well as you know who work with you in india what are the specific opportunities you see in india you know india is a large growing market it always has been and you know one of the famous indians ruchi sharma who worked with goldman sacks for many years famously said india is a market that disappoints both the pessimists and the optimists very regularly right what's your take on the india market how how do you see the opportunity here what are the learnings which are important for the indian market which are very different from uh some of the you know evolved markets or the western markets you work working globally well i mean i think the thing that makes india different is um you know the depths of the the depths of cities the layers and layers of cities you have in the in the india market and how they're how rich the regional differences are and how much opportunity there is um to do really vibrant what we call hyper local marketing around the world but in in in india i think it just be called marketing like like how do you really speak i mean i know we were talking earlier about how all this you know there's streaming platforms that are in all the in all the regional languages in india uh there's newspapers in all the regional languages india i think digital allow us to do even more depth of that so i think the hyper local experience in india is going to be uh radio or it's going to be uh extraordinary and be a rich richer opportunity um than in other markets where where there's much more of a national footprint and much less local less local nuance um anything about india which uh which is similar to other markets but richer in india is the live event you know there's there there is still the these cultural moments moments i know that there's the festival season i know there's also a wedding season which i love i love a country that has wedding season um so there's still these moments in culture where the whole culture looks at the same things and those are very powerful moments i know they're very competitive moments for brands but they're also very powerful moments for brands to be about something more than just the products they sell and then i think finally this is my big play i know you're going to smile and say this is obviously the media agency would say this but i'm going to say i'm going to say it anyway creativity is everyone's business creativity is everyone's business the opportunity in 2022 will be to to create content that people want to listen to and and that means not just being part of social conversations and responding and also not being afraid of somebody says something bad about your brand and social media just taking it on the nose being authentic answering them if you think it's wrong just being normal and human in social it also means creating stories about your brand that are big i think there is a and look at the bollywood i look at how the power of bollywood the power of content and culture music poetry india is this rich you know cultural content producer and i think it should also be a bigger player in terms of brand content and it isn't it's it compared compared to how rich that cultural context is indian brands i think have been quiet on the content space and so i think that that is going to be a big play for us you're going to see the media brands content studio really stepping out more in india we have very strong assets ready and very amazing creative thinker creative thinkers and interactive avenues and other parts of media brands ecosystem but we will also be creating a content studio that the sole focus is to help brands create content that people want to watch fantastic i think very well put about you know india being culturally strong and a lot of cultural relevant content being created and how that can sort of you know show itself in terms of the kind of work agencies are doing before we go darryl i'm told we are we're out of time let me ask you as an individual where do you draw your motivation where do you draw inspiration from what are the what are your sources of learning where does kind of the you know drive to run this business keep it relevant on a daily basis in this sort of hyper competitive environment comes from well uh two things one is i'm a very competitive person very competitive i'm compulsively competitive i cannot lose one card game i cannot i get physically ill when i'm south african i grew up south i get physically ill in well south africa in south africa loses anything although i you get an opportunity to see that india's family you will you will have an opportunity to experience that soon that is well we'll see we'll see as long as we beat the australians up and fine um and the other thing is you know there's a picture of nelson mandela behind me on the new yorker um when he was released i i come from south africa and i was a student during the partate era and then while i was a student the partate was dismantled and mandela was released and the whole world changed and everything i'd ever dreamed happened came true and so i'm an idealist i wake up every morning thinking the world is going to get better uh i'm optimistic i even in a pandemic people think i'm a little crazy but i'm like no no it's amazing we found these vaccines so quickly and people have adopted the vaccines and we've we've yes we had tragedy and we you know i'm in new york city we had tragedy for you for months and months of ambulances and and refrigerated morgues trucks next to but still we came through it and we're stronger and i know you had your own suffering in india and i you know shashi and i my heart broke for some of the pain we all felt but i know i know we get better as a as a as a as a group of people and as an industry and i'm amazed at what we do how weak brands are these incredibly powerful positive experiences people's lives it gives them access to things they need and also give them spiritual and nourishment when they're really good and brands are really good so that's what gets it gets me up in the morning is the idea that i'm doing good fantastic that's great to hear darryl and such a positive note for us to end the day this session before we go i mr sinai is here i'd like him to say something he's worked with you you know eight years now uh he will have first hand you know stories to tell us about how it has been part of i mean like to be part of ipg media brands under your leadership and uh what's in store for us when it comes to ipg media brands in india i don't know more than i mean i think darryl is and i'm not saying it because it's a workshop but darryl is a fabulous leader the rare person who's strategically very inclined as you know he started in the consultancy company before he came in but never you know one day you must catch him over a beer and get the story out of the parathan movement he talks about you know changes it is a remarkable story i was privileged to hear it uh and you know from there he went to oxford so i was privileged to hear the story with him and he revisited oxford with us so i think but that's not for this forum really thrilled i mean as darryl says and he goes with all our teams it's all about strategies it's all about quality scale comes scale you know in just a few markets where we're largely number two but as it always reminds me it's not about scale it's always about quality and that's why i tell our team it's finally getting the act together so thank you so a lot darryl for taking time out for india i'm sure with html media and us would love this interaction which has happened thank you very much it is about being the new age conglomerate and not being the old age conglomerate let me let me thank you again darryl for joining us have a good day raven back to you thank you now mr hoja uh what a wonderful conversation uh mr lee thank you so much once again we could we could not have thanked you enough for your valuable time we truly appreciate you being here with us and it was an experience that is going to stay with us for a very long time some thought-provoking answers this and a lot more to look for the future thank you so much once again mr lee thank you you're welcome thank you shashi sir thank you darryl absolutely welcome so fun great great questions thank you thank you very much and i mean we'll see south african india who knows one of us will be happy there you have it once again thank you so much mr lee mr ahuja of course as always it was a pleasure to 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