 Okay, so let's move on. Next on our agenda is a panel discussion with four leading marketers in the industry. The topic of discussion will be marketing in a post-digital world. Everything that you know about marketing and advertising is based on yesterday's rules. New technologies, changes in consumer behavior and the rise of intelligent personal assistants throw those rules out of the window. If you want our brands to survive the revolution, we need to change how we think and need to start preparing now. Let's welcome our moderator. She's the director of marketing solutions at LinkedIn. Put your hands together for Virginia Sharma. Followed by our panel members Anuradha Agrawal, former chief marketing officer Mariko, Gauravjit Singh, general manager of media South Asia, Unilever, Tarun Garg, executive director, marketing Maruti Suzuki India Limited. A round of applause once again for all of them. Over to you, Ms. Sharma. How's everybody doing? I think this is the final part, so we're going to keep this quite lively. We've had a great opportunity, time to spend some time getting to know each other. So the first thing that I wanted to open up with, we just talked about everything that you know is obsolete. And one of the key sources of new trends that we get in addition to the report that we have is the next generation and our children. So I wanted to first go around and ask our panelists a little bit about something you've learned about digital from one or more of your children. So Anuradha, do we want to start with you? Sure, I don't think a day passes without my thinking that I know less than my children. But I must say that the one trend that I really picked up from my kids, which I must admit that I used in marketing, was the trend on Korean pop. I mean, I have a young daughter and I didn't realize how crazy girls of her age in her school and the environment were about Korean pop. And this is about a year and a half ago. So this is before Korean beauty became mainstream. So much so that she's watching Korean drama in Korean. She's learning Korean language by just watching and listening to music. And, you know, she wants to go there on a holiday over the US and anywhere in Europe. So I don't know whether this is just, it's not something I've learned about the digital world, but it's how almost a parallel world is being created for her because of the digital world, which has nothing to do with what we are influencing. So maybe next year's trend is not vertical or it's forward languages, maybe. So thanks so much, Lauren. Very interesting. In fact, I have identical twins and they're 21 years old. And one fight, which I've always had with them, you know, I'm that old school. I want to read the newspaper in the morning. And, you know, without that, the data didn't start. And last three years, I've been fighting with them. Why don't you read the newspaper? And they would say, Papa, why do I need to read the newspaper? I said, I mean, I mean, you need to be aware. Papa, you read Times of India, blah, blah, blah, you get only one perspective. You know, I am on digital. I read any news and I get five different perspectives. So you tell me, I'm ready for any debate, but don't tell me that why should I get a newspaper? So I think how children think and how we think it is very different. It also, I mean, puts this thought into my mind. I mean, if the young, this next generation actually starts kind of discarding the newspaper. I mean, I don't want to say, I don't know what's going to happen. So, so, yes, I think these people are really different and they have a mind of their own. Great. Gauravjit, anything to add? Am I audible? The big revelation for me was from my niece, she's 16 years old. And I, for my life, I couldn't understand why somebody, and it's early days of Instagram stories. I just couldn't get it that why would somebody spend so much time looking at that, creating a story when it won't stay for more than 24 hours, right? And for me, I just couldn't wrap my heads around it. And when I asked her this, that how, why do you really do it? Because what she said was pretty amazing for me as an answer, that you can make mistakes, you know, and they don't stay. So that for me was almost like a Nirvana movement for me in terms of how a teenager thinks about life. It's living for the day and you don't need to create permanent things. And as you, as I start seeing this around, you see that in how people look at ownership of cars, they look at ownership of homes. And I thought it was, it was just a very rough moment for me. Looking at the smiles in the audience, I see a lot of people completely agreeing with this. So thank you so much. We'll do one more question since it's very interesting. The presenting sponsor of this event is not sort of a traditional platform. It's all about OTT. So speaking of which, what are you watching on Netflix or Hot Star or Amazon Prime right now? This is crazy. Actually, I took a break from Netflix for three months, you know, because for me to start a Netflix kind of a serial and then to stop is very difficult. So I completed suits about three months back. And of course, because seven seasons multiplied by those 10, 12 episodes per season before that dexter, you know, so it became crazy. Just and coincidentally, just two days back, I started The Good Wife and of course, today, while on the on the flight itself again, you know, the hook is already there. So very intriguing, but I don't know. Very addictive. So Garfi, what are you watching? I'm watching the innocent man should finish it tonight. He can't wait to get out of here to finish what he's watching. I'm sure some of you guys feel that way. But stay with us rather. Yeah, I've been binging, so I've been watching a lot. But I must talk about this one show that I recently started. It's new on Netflix. It's for Netflix. It's called you. And why I'm mentioning it today is because it's basically about a about a young boy who is a stalker and he injects himself into the life of this really young girl on the basis of her social presence and her online presence only. So from everything to her banking from a banking information where she lives, you know, and what she does, where she studies, who her friends are, what they do, every little piece of information he gleaned only from her social media presence and her digital presence. And I thought that was really real and very scary. Wow. So it's quite intriguing. And I'm a little realistic, isn't it? All right, great. So with a little bit of that warm up, I'm going to go into some of the harder questions. These are the easy ones. And the first one is around, and I'm going to, I'm going to censor this a little bit. It's bullish versus BS and you can translate what that is and complete. It sounds better in the full form. And so this event is about trends. And so for each of the panelists, there can answer one trend that you are bullish on from the last year and one trend that you call BS on. And we have about 86 years of marketing and sales experience on this panel collectively. So it's a fair bit. We've seen analog. We've seen digital. So I think this is pretty legitimate. Lauren. Okay. I believe that the voice is the is the next big thing. I already know that probably 30% of the searches in India are already voice, but and it's predicted that it will be 50% by 2020. But why I say voice is because, you know, today still it's very difficult to understand the customer sentiment, you know, when you are when you are on not on voice and or affinity. And I believe once you're able to guess that it will be so much easier to really engage with the customer to know in what mood he is. I have just been informed that and I was listening. Alexa has just kind of introduced a new feature where they say, Oh, you're sounding grumpy. Should I sing for you? I mean, this was a surprise for me. Today I just heard. So I think this is something which I believe will really help us to connect with customers. The other thing voice will do is that it will make it literacy agnostic today. Probably, you know, the whole chunk of people we are not able to reach because, you know, because of the, especially in India, because of the literacy levels or the language barriers. I believe a voice is going to really kind of help us, you know, overcome that. So I'm very, very bullish on those are those are really good points. So we can reach a broader audience, get outside the few hundred million that we've been reaching. Maybe this is the answer to us to grow more universal in terms of reach for digital. And this idea that that we're studying human sentiment, it takes sentiment analysis to a whole, whole other level. Great. Thank you. Corrupted. Two things. Well, one is that you bullish about what you're not. Yeah, I think I'm super bullish about the ability for us to be able to communicate to consumers in three to six seconds. The how do you really tell stories? I think there's a great opportunity, which data now supports that if you can land a brand message supremely well, first of all, you're interrupting consumers. Now you need to make sure that that interruption value is extraordinary. And you really land that messaging supremely well. Those three seconds don't mean saying Lux, Lux, Lux in three seconds. It means that you learn the proposition on Lux really well. I'm just taking that brand name as example. I think what I would say BS for the year is virtual reality that started off by saying it's going to change. I was there at MWC when Mark walked down the aisle and everybody had those headsets on. And people said this is going to change the face of marketing and human beings walking around with VR headsets around and you'll build car brands. You'll build FEC brands out of sheer VR. Then they said, no, no, actually it is a bit too much. We'll do demonstrations on VR. Then find this and the only thing is good for a spawn. So by the end of one year, the transition from something that's going to change the face of marketing all the way down to say, listen, it's just, it's just a fact. So I think that's not going anywhere for a long time. For me, these were the two big ones. That was the big one on last year. There's been a few years that ARVR was there. Avatar is a few years ago, we're a big one, right? The ones where you can create your own avatar in a state show. Yeah, Anuradha. So for me, I think trends become fads and then they tend to maybe move into being a little bit of BS. So I was really, really bullish about video advertising in general. I think what's happening in the digital world in the form of advertising, which is relevant for the medium itself, in the form of video, I'm really bullish about it. I think it brings back the very basic of advertising, which is interrupt the consumer, tell a quick and quick story, maybe in six seconds, maybe in 10 seconds. Tell your brand message while they still want to watch what they're watching and then make sure that you reach as many number of consumers you can. So get as much reach as you can. And I'm still very bullish about the basics of media planning and media delivery that happens through there. But what I would call BS on is what we are getting really excited about is marketers, which is branded content. And I just I think that I'm saying I'm just as guilty of falling prey, but you know, I don't think we know how to entertain people for long format. I don't think we know how to keep having consumers come back to watch the content we create. I mean, we're marketers. We sell soap, we sell shampoo, we sell cars. And I don't think we know how to tell stories which will make people come back again and again to watch the story and not come back for the brand. So I think we should just stick to what we know best, which is, you know, maybe selling stuff and making advertising to sell stuff, as opposed to just creating content which you then have to spend more effort in trying to get consumers to watch and not effort in trying to sell your product, which is really what we're here for. I think Ashish, we've spoken about let agencies do what agencies do best and maybe getting into the content business is not really a marketer's forte and so the idea of this is why we have an ecosystem. We bring the best of the ecosystem to bear and maybe content is something we can leverage expertise. Okay, the next question is really around pay to play. You know, I was recently at a conference, I was very excited about this. We were launching a new product at LinkedIn or relaunching pages for companies. And I was talking about free LinkedIn, organic LinkedIn. You know, everybody has a LinkedIn profile. Yeah, so that's free, right? And then if you create a page for a company, that's free, use the inside stack, that's free. And I thought people would be like, yeah, the free stuff is awesome. And I got an interesting reaction from the audience and they said, we don't believe you. We believe you're going to get us hooked and then you're going to somehow charge us for that, which led me to believe that people don't believe that organic exists anymore, organic research. So, and that everything is pay to play. So I wanted to get your reactions as marketers, especially from a media perspective, is there still an opportunity for brands to do organic well on their own owned or through earned, or is it really a pay to play world? And it's a one way street. So, Karachi, do you want to go first and then? You're on the panel, so I need to say organic works, but no, I am very clear. So I'll tell you what really depends on the size of the brand and the kind of consumer you're really trying to go for. If you're talking with extremely, what should I say, niche audiences that can only be reached through, and that also extreme premium audiences, where it's worth reaching that niche audience. So their niche is always, right? They're also niches which buy a very small, very specific part of a one rupee sachet, but it's not worth your while to really create an organic market for them. But if there's a consumer set which buys sets of really super premium, or even regular premium cars, can I get organic reach that is good enough for me to build a business? Perhaps yes. But I would say the real answer to that is, what's the cost to do that versus the return that you get? And at any day, for the kind of brand reach that you need, invariably, any platform worth it while, we lock it away behind a pay wall, if not today, tomorrow. And LinkedIn is unique because it has a massive subscription base which makes it completely unique. And we play with platforms which give us free reach for some time, and we, when you do it at scale, but almost, and you've tested this, platform of platform, organic reach, is just a one or two percent of what you can get. And on all known content platforms, it's a very hard drive and we want one of the biggest beauty platforms in the country is Be Beautiful. And I know what it takes to drive that metric. Just in terms of the number of people and effort. So it is costing you, even though it's organic. It's supremely costly. And though it looks organic, the fact remains that we start putting a portioning cost to it. It'll even out at some place. But why we play with it is that we don't want to be ever in a situation where that's the only way to get to consumers through somebody who's a gatekeeper in that conversation. Got it. So if you add in not so much the media costs, but the talent and content costs, it evens out. That's a great perspective. Dharan? Okay. I have already kind of tried and tested answer for this. And I believe it's all about content. So I don't think it's organic or inorganic. I mean, if the content is good, if it's engaging, if it is keeping the customer in mind, I think anything would work. To give you an example, I mean, a very, very simple example of, suppose like I'm in a business selling cars and a customer has a flat tire. I mean, he would want to know that how can he, how can he change that tire? And you know, rather than a manual, going to a manual and doing it, I mean, if he can really get it online, it will be very, very convenient to him. So whether it's organic or inorganic, it will be consumed by the customer. So I still believe that it's all about the, it's all about the content. As simple as that. That's really great. Just a tip that I think is very useful. I think Quora is something that people don't talk about very much, but what we're seeing more and more is that following conversations and questions on Quora give you great hints, and I don't work for Quora, but I'm a marketer at heart, so gives you great hints of the type of questions your consumers are asking. We recently worked with a cement brand and their assumption where people were asking questions about pricing. And what we discovered is that more of the questions on Quora, because we discovered there was a lot of conversation, was around duplicate versus real cement. So, you know, as they think about the kind of content they create, it's really informing of, hey, you know, be useful, answer the question that needs to be answered. I think we as marketers sometimes tend to make assumptions about the customers, you know. And I think that is our biggest fallacy that we, oh, I think like that, so maybe the consumers also think like that. I think that, that whatever we call it, database or research or whatever, but I believe to get into the mind of the customer and to actually know what he wants, I think that is the crux. So, otherwise, whether platform or whether organic, whether, I think it should be agnostic. Anything different for you? I just, just to, sorry. So, I think the two things that, this is a classic VR logic, right? So, invariably it starts with saying that listen, we are going to build business for a brand, you creating this content website. I started that for our, some of our brands and really passionately believe that this was a, I wouldn't need any single piece of advertising to build a business out of that. And after six months you realize, listen, actually the total conversion is just about 20 odd people who come in, who searched and then converted at 1% and got in. They say, listen, we need to do some kind of YouTube advertising to get people to know. And before you know it, that itself becomes a big, big part of our expense to get that content discovered, to search apart. And you're spending a lot of effort and time doing. So, the second piece is that the big selling point that starts coming is let's start listening to consumers out here. Now, again, if I really truly put value to social listening and a full, full-fledged insights team within, who's 24-7 job is to get to insights, doesn't somehow balance out. And hence, I think I'm completely with what is being said that actually the, we should be clear on the objective that we're going with. If the objective of our content platform is to know what consumers are saying and doing, hence you need to own it, absolutely, completely. But if the core objective is to build a brand using a content website, I think it's an extremely difficult thing to do. And I have not seen many examples of that happening. I think that's great advice. A lot of people here are evaluating that as an investment and it's good advice. Anuradha, anything to add? Actually, the only thing I wanted to add was an example of, I think this is a good example of the fact that the digital world is ever-changing. And I don't think I can say today that, oh, you know what, organic is the right way to go, inorganic is the right way to go. And I'll give you an example. I used to manage the Vodafone brand a few years ago. And that was the time that Facebook was still organic. And, you know, we spent a huge amount of effort in time trying to get becoming the largest branded page in the country. We were 15 million subscribers. It was a very, very large number. 15% of all Facebook traffic was coming to the Vodafone page. And then one fell swoop. Suddenly we were, you know, there was no organic. It was suddenly wallgarden. It was suddenly only 15% of your audience could be reached. What you're posting is reaching only 15% of the audience and now we're dwindling smaller and smaller number. Now, we had two choices. We had the choice of saying, okay, we give up. We had so much money. Or to say, all right, this is a difference, a different way of looking at stuff and what do I do with it now? So how do I engage with the people that I already have? What do I do? So as I was speaking to Facebook, try to find different solutions. So for me, I think it is about being as flexible as you can in an ever-changing world. So yesterday it feels like an organic is the right way. And I think consumers will find a way to make organic relevant because finally they are looking for uncurated, unbranded experiences. So they will find ways of finding that content which is not necessarily branded or not necessarily promoted. And there will always be another part of the digital world which is not necessarily curated by brands and where brands will have to go and again engage. So to me, I think it's like an infinity loop to more branding, to less branding, to more organic, to less organic. It'll keep going back forth. I think it's great because it's a search for excellence. Either way, it pushes marketers to do more better and more valuable. Okay, the next question and then we'll kind of wrap up. We've got two more questions. And this one is around the three trends, voice, vernacular and video. And we know that there's metrics around video. Many of us know views and completion rates. But vernacular and voice. You know, I'm a business person now. I used to report into a GM. When I go make the case from my marketing budgets and I say, you know, we got to do something for vernacular. We need to do something for voice. How do I make the business case? How do I measure the impact and demonstrate we should go do this thing? Make it beyond the charts to what are we going to do about this and how much are we going to move towards this? Why don't we start with, actually start with Tharn. Look, I think that's interesting. But like I mentioned, if I see voice, I think it allows me to go to places which it would not have normally. Like I said, literacy. So especially when I talk about India and when I talk about cars. So I can go to the hinterland and tier four towns. And so that I think is a very, very clear brand metric. So as far as vernacular is concerned, you see the IRS. I mean, if you see the latest IRS, you would see that, I mean, it's the vernacular which is really going up. So it's like, yes, it's a given that it has to be there. At the same time, there are still, I believe, the big gap there is the platform. In fact, I was having a meeting with Google. I think that the biggest challenge for them also is do you create a content in English and then translate it into vernacular? Or do you have a local creator doing it vernacular? You know, if you really translate an English ad into vernacular, the consequences can be disastrous. Because the context could really change dramatically. Number two, even if the context is same and you're able to do a good job, still is it the best that you can do? I'm sure a local person doing a Telugu or a Tamil or a Kannada or a Bengali will be able to do a much better job rather than just plain conversion. It's like this, about one and a half, two years back, we used to make an ad for TV and then convert it into digital. But today, I have to make separate ads for TV, separate ads for digital, all those aspect ratios and verticals, all those things which we never thought of, we're doing. I think the same thing will have to be done for vernacular to really do justice to vernacular. That's a really great point of view. And the idea is that what you're hearing and what I'm hearing as a platform is, marketers are really ready to invest and go there with vernacular as an opportunity to reach more of the country. But if the platforms don't actually create those capabilities, that's going to become a challenge. Any points of view on selling to the business voice vernacular video? So, you know, I've been in an industry where vernacular has been relevant from the get-go, right? I mean, we've been selling hair oil or, you know... Back to the future a little bit, isn't it? Exactly. So, we've always known that you have to be vernacular in order to sell in the vernacular or in the hinterland. I think what's happening is the digital world and it's largely because a lot of the platforms are international, are realizing what it is to survive and thrive in a vernacularly diverse India. And in that world, it's affecting both voice and video. I mean, you know, we've always had... We have a huge content world down south. I mean, it's one of the largest film industries in the world. And yet we are talking about vernacular video as if it's new. It's just that our platforms aren't designed for discovery in vernacular. So, as voice... As the platform becomes more language friendly and voice friendly, you'll be able to search for a Telugu video, speaking Telugu and reading Telugu. And then that's it. You've got voice vernacular and video happening at the same time. The metrics will follow because the platforms can measure efficacy. They can measure everything in English, so it's not complicated to measure them with Telugu. It's just that you need to have the technical ability to manage the accents, the dialects, the, you know, and all the other complexity that comes with having such a multilingual country. So, I think the key takeaway on that is that for the trends to take hold, the three Vs, it's really important for a great partnership between brands, the platforms, to actually have the platforms evolve. And so it's going to, you know, co-create the future or the back of the future to actually build that in because it's currently not vernacular first or in parallel. Any other points to add over there, Gauravji? I think on... I'd start with a knack. I think the core piece is not a demand side problem. We know that it's more a supply side problem in terms of the kind of content that... First of all, why it's so critical to create that content in terms of, and it's very difficult to get across, you know, people who can really create and think like that in the native language. That's one. I think the second piece is how do we measure impact. I think a firm believer in studies like a brand lift or a cross-media study. And also, actually, if I see just the sheer number of... And we did this experiment and now a large part of our communication moved to a knack for obvious reasons because post-Geo, the penetration of digital at what it is could about 40, 45% give or take two or three percentage points depending who we are speaking to. And English penetration in India is 10%. The 35% of people who are coming onto the Internet who don't know the language of the global Internet, which is English. Now, what happens is that the moment we put in the same creative, it's a published Google Coke published study which we did on Lakme colors and we put in a piece of communication which was in a different Indian language, in this case Hindi, and we had the same creative in English. It was a organic... I'll do the video on YouTube. The one in Hindi had views in millions compared to around 12,000, 30,000 views for the English creative. So the measurement is very clear what consumers are really like to watch. That's what you could do. I think on voice, I think it's a long journey. I think it's a... First of all, whether it is home assistance or Google search, voice, I think, has not got cracked in terms of how it plays out for brands. So you can do a search, but how do you place voice search is a big, big skill. I don't see any experts on that area right now. And with a lot of search, also getting into e-com, basically, and I'm talking about not elixir-based search but actually search inside, which is not voice-led currently, but once it gets to it, the platforms start playing that critical role. But I think it's more a not answered problem on how you place voice. But brand-news will be a good study to really go after. Yeah, I mean, it seems like Vernacular has that obvious AB testing opportunity to be able to show lift, which is great and easy to make the case, as long as the brand is willing to do AB testing. But voice seems like... So if you all have ideas about this, there's a hashtag, it's an interesting discussion about how do we measure the efficacy of voice in marketing. So that leads me to my last question. I'm so glad you have a drink in your hands for this one, because this is around the death of the digital marketing manager. So how many of you all are digital marketing managers? Some of you guys? Okay, a few. So, you know, when you think about it, we don't have email marketing managers anymore. We don't have direct marketing managers anymore. There used to be specialist titles. And given the fact that the way we've talked about digital, it's really come a long way in becoming part of everybody's job. So the question is, aren't digital marketing managers just marketing managers? And is there really a need for a specialist team in your organization to manage digital? And or should it not be built into pretty much the base requirement of every marketing job? LinkedIn released a skills report with the Skills Ministry for India, if you haven't seen it, it's free. It's on LinkedIn. And it basically said digital marketing is one of the hottest skills, in-demand skills in the industry across all industries. So, you know, there's the demand for it across functions. So I wanted to ask the panel a question. How are your teams organized? Do you have a specialist marketing team or individuals who do digital? If so, why do you still have them around? Yeah, I don't know. Let me give you an anecdote. About eight years ago, there was a person I was trying to move in from direct marketing into a broader role. And you know, she came back to me. She said, I really like what you're giving me. But can you take this digital thing away from me? I don't understand it. So I'll do everything else. I'll do direct marketing. I'll do PR. I'll do everything. But can you just take that away? And I told her that, you know, I can take it away. But you have to realize I'm taking away the next 20 years of your career. And then I had to literally convince her that it's something that she must invest in her career and in her life. So at a very fundamental place, I do believe that every market you're today needs to be a digital marketer. Just like every marketer is a radio marketer. Every marketer is TV marketer. You need to be, you need to understand the medium. That's where your consumer is. That's where the consumer insights are. That's where the shopping is getting done. That's where your kids are. So you need to be conversant and really well-versed with the medium. But just like in the case of other media, you know, we have specialized media people. And I think we will always have the need for specialized people who will manage the metrics, manage the money, manage the minute and the detail because there is so much data and information available that if we leave it to the people who are making decisions on large marketing tasks, then we will miss, you know, this, and big data is this buzzword. But it's true around the amount of information now that we have around consumers and buying and media. If we leave it to generalists, I think we're going to miss a trick. So I think the new age organization requires everyone to know digital marketing. But we do need a few people who are digital media managers, digital data managers. And not, I mean, you need big teams who will manage analytics, who will manage the buying, and who will manage the inciting, which will come back to the big guys so that they can take the big decisions. I think it's not very different from traditional media. It's a little bit the same way. Yeah, it's strange. If it asked me this question two years back, I would have, and that's how I started my role, was to really, you know, just took away silos. Some people left, some new people joined, but essentially what everybody was doing, everything. And this was my thought till 2019 started, right, that you need people who can, who have really solid basic media understanding. What I miss invariably in digital marketing is that some of the kids who come in for an interview is that I know how to optimize one platform. I know one part of it, but they don't have a rigorous solid media background. So when they don't have that, they don't understand what reach is, what frequency is, why is it important, how do I build reach, how do I do multi-media reach, what is random duplication, very basics, or what's the duplication factor, the very basics on which a good media profession would have built a skill on over the years. I think I'm on a pace where now, I believe that you need a mix of two, and I'm completely with Anu on that, that actually what you need is a really solid, robust backbone guys who really understand media, this totality, who understand what's the role of TV in the mix, what does audiovisual planning, what does print play as a role, why is it so critical, what does all these factors do in building multimedia reach, and then you need very specific platform specialists who are doing nothing else, but really looking at the future and saying that, okay guys, for example, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter to a great extent, a part of our media mixes has given, because depending on penetration of each of those platforms, you will factor in reach, depending on what's the objective on a brand, but there are so many new consumer moments, rather so many new consumer usage on digital that is completely missed today, and you need very specialist and not, and those should be a small bit of the total team who's really telling and pushing people on, for example, it took me three years to really discover the power of a look-alike audience on Facebook or the power of in-market audiences on Google, for FMCG brand, and to use it at scale, we would have possibly added a few crores to our top line if we had discovered this earlier. Wow. Right, so I think you need some kids who are really deep into it, but they're a minority who need to really look at how the future is evolving and bring these themes together and especially data part of it. It's a wild, wild world, and real solid data analytics guys who really know how to stitch a thought together is, I think, critical. So... Data scientists, disruptive thinkers, a lot of those are also competencies, right, which is... Built on a baseline, on a base of really solid media professionals. Yeah, that's a need of the hour. Let's bring it home. Yeah, I can't agree more with my co-panelists. But just one or two points I'd like to add, and like you were talking about a girl who did not want to do digital. So we started this digital about four years back, and then that time we were spending maybe four, five percent of our media spend. And today, you know, if I receive 20 applications in a year for a transfer, 19 of them are to get into digital. So... And of course, the spends have increased. I think one very important thing is, I believe that this big transition is still happening. Yes, from whether you call it offline to online. In our case, in fact, we always say that both will exist. But this big transition is still happening, one. So you need both. So you need a specific focus. Number two, digital itself, I believe, is still evolving. Look, it took the TV industry when we talk about, you know, we're already 35, 40 years. But if I talk about India digital, I mean, it's not more than maybe eight, 10 years. So maybe that learning curve is still evolving, and there is still so much more to happen there. So for somebody to believe that a brand manager can do all the job of our digital is still too early, I believe. Yes, I agree fully with Anuradha, when she says that everybody has to know digital. I mean, you can't survive without that. But things are changing so fast that you need to be really aware. Everybody knows that, yes. Oh, I'm doing digital. It's a fact. Everybody claims that he's... But then, you know, I mean, it's still scratching the surface. We are still, I believe, becoming slaves to whatever data has been provided to us. I mean, when you read the fine prints, I see all this data about 87% of the customers said that, you know, before they breathe, they say Google. And then you read the fine print that the sample size is 220, people who spend maybe 15 hours a day on digital online. You understand? So I think it's all also led by, you know, obviously... So we have to have our own mind. We still don't know, you know, how much of it is still to be unearthed. And that is why we need people who can have a balanced view and also keep abreast of, okay, this is what Mr. A is saying, but I really need to ratify because the problem, unlike TV, where there are 30 channels and here is that you are only limited to two or three big daddies. So how do you... So it's so easy to get carried away. So I think we need to have a... So we need to have a balance and it is not the death of a digital manager. It's not the death of Digital Matter who is actually the person keeping the checks and balances of making sure that they're grounded in the business reality. So that comes the end of our formal section of our panel. And we have about five minutes for questions. But while you are thinking about your questions, let me kind of wrap up a little bit of my takeaways from this. And of course, please take to the hashtag to share your thoughts on how this panel went. You know, when you actually look at the report that was just released, FMCG, Auto are some of the largest contributors to the digital advertising spend of the country, as we saw, as Alexa actually shared with us. And what you have over here is straight validation from the leaders in these industries that indeed voice, vernacular, and video are on their radar to varying degrees. Certainly vernacular is a little bit back to the future for FMCG. So it's just about taking it to the next level, working with the platforms to be able to bring this to life and how to measure it and make the case. And also when we think about voice and the inclusion that it will bring in on reaching new audiences that have so far been difficult to reach for other brands, but still more work to be done to be able to create the right kind of content that is not just a straight translate. So the validation is real. The digital marketing manager still has a very vital job in our rather nascent digital ecosystem. There's a huge value of agencies on creating quality branded content, something that they could do for brands while brands go back to the basics of what they're trying to do in terms of consumer value proposition, listening to customers, understanding their sentiment. And finally what you also heard is that there's still a huge amount of accountability by the marketers that you see over here about earning the attention of their consumer and recognizing that even three seconds of their time is earned and valuable and not to ever take that for granted because that's where our bread and butter comes from. So that's what I took away from this panel. I hope you took away something. So if there's a... We have about five minutes for one or two questions and cheers to everybody. We are waiting for ours as well. Hi, my name is Naval. I have a question which is perhaps more suited to publishers but since there are marketers on the panel. Elephants in the room are Facebook and Google, right? Globally publishing companies are struggling with these two companies taking the entire 85 person, whatever the estimates are, of advertising share away and possibly that's also true in India, broadly give and take. Some global companies have figured out a way of earning money through subscription in at least the developed markets but that is not the case in India. So what is the future of digital publishing in India if you leave aside these two companies? Large companies, Virginia also is part of a set of which is doing fairly well but in terms of size, of course, Google and Facebook take the larger share of the pie. So what do Indian digital publishers need to do to stay relevant three years down the line because there's too many of them trying for the same share of the pie? I mean, I'm sure you have, I've heard HUL have a strong point of view about this so let's start there. I think the problem is that when you're an ant and you want to be like the elephant in the room, right? So that's the starting of the issue. The core piece is that if you have a two million reach, sorry, if you have a two million reach as a platform, five million reach as a platform and you want to play by the rules of a game which is 300 million monthly actives, you will never be able to win it. The way to win it is very simple. Get behind a common measurement platform and give a consolidated reach construct for a multi-platform piece which can rival literally the reach that you have from any of the other platforms, the top two, three that you talked about but I think the answer lies in consolidation. It does not lie in subscription. Remember, especially India, because the moment you go below the 10 million households on the top, nobody's going to pay 50 bucks, 60 bucks, 100 bucks, $19.99 which I pay for my LinkedIn account but I think a lot of people are not going to start, they just can't do that. If you look at the ARPU of TV has not moved in all these years, top households reached but have ARPU has gone up by 10, 12% over the last seven years on... So ARPU of mobility is going down? Yeah, and our mobility ARPU is going down. So no consumer is going to ever say that, listen to read content, I'm going to pay the bill. What are you going to get money from? India will be a realising supported play. Within that, I think the publishers are missing out, smaller publishers are missing out an opportunity to really come together behind a single ads serving platform at scale. A bit of programmatic helps that but that again has got issues because 80% of ads serving happens on Google which is your DBM, most small partners or any substantive OTT would have an issue to go behind DBM. The only way that is left in my mind is a platform like Bach measuring reach and that itself, I think OTTs need to really come to the party with really saying, listen, let's forget what rules of the game are for Facebook and Google, we want to get into measurement quickly and let's sort it out because that consolidated reach is substantively equivalent to any of the other platforms. And it's a missed opportunity, I say that's all the time and a lot of these small publishers are missing out on media investments just because they want to be like Facebook and Google. And when they're that big, please play that game but not right now, it's an ego trip, I think. Just a perspective on that from a publishing perspective, small publisher that's sort of somewhere in between the two worlds. If the starting point of a digital publisher is to make money on content, the strategy is not audience-focused, right? It's monetization-focused. So if you focus on audience value, so we for many years did not monetize the platform actually. I mean, you guys are now being premium but our premium business is as big as our media business but our largest business is subscription for recruiters, et cetera, because very early on the platform decided that members look for jobs. You know, we were talking earlier, which is I think Rajin was saying, there's what 12 million people entering the workforce, they need jobs. And finding what is that audience and what's that gap in the need set, why do they come to the platform? People come to LinkedIn to become more productive and successful. As a subset of that, they look for a job, they look for content to be more effective at their current job or to prep for an interview or to be more informed or they look for business contacts for sales leads, right? They want to make their number, that's it. Being clear on what you do for the audience then allows you to figure out a monetization model off the back of that, which is somewhere in the middle of that if 80% of the time I'm on LinkedIn, I'm able to get a job, get content that helps me do my job better, I'm willing to tolerate the advertising or I'm willing to pay the value of doing that. But the journey of that was much longer than how do I find a brand to pay for this or how do I find somebody to pay for this? So my stance is that they need to figure out a funding model, much like startups have, that allow them to stay afloat, to build audiences and communities to a critical mass, generate value for those audiences before they try to monetize that audience through advertising. We jump to advertising almost as the answer instead of audience value. And that's why they die very quickly because suddenly a user, a woman on a woman-oriented platform suddenly sees the advertising and they see the gimmick. So yes, you have a question at the back. Hi, my name is Kalpana Madhyani and I've traveled all the way from Pune to attend this event. My question is very simple. I'm asking from a member's viewpoint because I'm a member of different social networking sites and I have faced this issue of getting my account deleted from LinkedIn to restart my account. So whenever I kind of surf my own name, I have this old account of LinkedIn coming up and I want to restart. I want to give a new lease to my life. So do you have something which will clean the virtual world? Because right now in only three worlds, the land, the ocean, and the third is the virtual world. So what are you doing to clean the virtual world? So I think your digital footprint is unfortunately the ghost that will haunt you, I do not want it to ask me. So two answers. The easy answer is very simple. You'll email me and I'll have your account deleted. So that's the easy answer. The bigger... And I want to restart. I'm not just talking about, you know, because we want to come up with something new, right? We just don't want to go in with the old starting of the account. We want something new to be added. Therefore, this delete, you know, like Nike also had several names changed before it finally arrived on Nike. If you know the history. So I think what I'm hearing from you and keep me honest on the question, your question is as individuals. Yes, from the member's viewpoint. We want to be able to refresh our digital identity on any social network. Yes. Have you tried to delete Facebook? Yes, I have. I have. Did it work? I don't know how is it working because, you know, when you type the name for FB, probably it works. It doesn't work. And I just want to say something. You know, when you say Gmail is intuitive, I understand. When you open the account, it's intuitive. And why isn't deleting it intuitive? Right. And I think that... So Eloqua has written an amazing article called your digital footprint. I think first and foremost, my biggest advice to everybody that's concerned about the digital footprint they have is be very conscious that every profile you create out there, every photograph you put out there, is there for posterity. You know, it is. It's the reality of digital. Your kids, they are out there. It's an issue. Now the interesting thing is the new generation doesn't have a problem with having their old identity, new identity, three identities. I'm a blogger at night. I'm an emphasis worker at daytime. So the reality is you can try to start fresh, but the reality is if you've ever put anything online, it's still out there. Photographs, et cetera. So the first thing I would really encourage people is not focus on deleting, but focusing on building up who you want to be known for and letting organic and letting that relevancy score push you up, right? So if you've got 15 profiles, just make sure the one that's the top one is the one you really want to be. But I think cleansing is very important. You know, cleanliness is next to godliness. I'm sorry? Cleansing is very important. This is my thing. As a member of just requesting you, if you could do that for me, I would really appreciate it. I think this is a classic example of... There's always... I think that there should be features that help you make it easier for sure, but the reality is your ownership of your digital footprint has to reside with you because only you know what you're putting out there. So a lot of it is making sure that you are extremely judicious about what you're doing before you do it, and a lot of people are a little thoughtless, early, and then regret it later. And I think that that's... I don't regret it at all, and I also belong to the new generation and I'm a newborn, right? So I just want to say, do something about cleaning up the virtual world. Fair feedback. Yeah, fair feedback. Thank you so much. So on that note, cheers, everybody. We are in the red over here on time. We are around for drinks, and so thank you so much to our panelists. A round of applause for them, please. Thank you. Thank you so much.