 Welcome to Exchange for Media. With me today is one of the most proficient media planner, media professional who took up a new role in October 2021 and has not spoken much about it. So with me today is Preeti Moorthy, President, Group and Services India. Thanks Preeti for doing this interview with us and we are very curious to understand how has these 8-10 months, 9 months, what exactly is the new role? Since I haven't spoken about it, can I call it the Secret Service of Group and Media? So when I joined it was of course Group of Media Services and now it's called Nexus. This is one of the big transformation agent of Group and Media. To bring in more intelligence into the way we work and manage the media business. So it's like this, fund managers manage various funds, right? And you bring in a lot of specialization in the different type of funds, small-cap fund, mid-cap fund. There will be analysts sitting and doing each hand with that. Imagine that kind of new ecosystem and bring that into media planning. So it's non-vittable and visible, within non-vittable there's TV print, radio, digital buys that are directly bought in. And in visible, all the visible platforms, whether it's social, programmatic comes in before it. And each of these specialized fields bringing their value to the client and the integration bringing value. What Group and Dev was, look at the agencies and allow them to thrive on their design thinking and focus on demand generation, which is bringing in more clients and with better value for clients. And what Group and Nexus is delivering to the agencies is ensuring the funds bring in the ROI, which means right media plans are delivered, right optimizations are done. And it's a team of specialists doing that job and taking away the generalist conversations in these fields. So what allows for agencies is to say that, okay, if I want to expand my e-commerce business, there's an e-com team. Already with all the knowledge, all the technology, all the deliverables needed. But there would be an e-com team with that agency also, right? So all that has got coming to Nexus. So what the e-com team and the agency will do is designing, what is the narrative for the market and creating and going and pitching for new clients and doing the demand generation. So there will be two teams, one which that agency will have in-house and one which would be with Group and Dev. So they'll make the first plan and perhaps for the final plan and for enhancement and other things, they'll come to you. So we're not even joining us. So what I'm trying to understand is, if you can give me a specific example, whether you don't want, you cannot, you can skip, you can name the client, you can skip. But how it has changed things on ground? So for the client, nothing has changed. Okay. If this like I said is the secret service, which means what? It's a engine of Group. What we have ensured is client deliverables are enhanced and not compromised. So for the agency, it is the same thing, the same phase, same planners at the backend. It's just that the way the backend works has transformed. So if all your each agency has the implementation team, all the implementation team has come together, not compromising on trying various commitments. If the aims are seen, please remember that. There's no compromising on that. We are addressing each client, each agency delivers to their business design. And if I've understood it right, every delivery team can eventually go through you. Yes. Yes. So we are like this from whichever agency, who savers the client. So we work with, we work for all the agencies. That is not what it is, isn't it? Yeah. It's because I'm in Group M and WPB, so many agencies, so many clients and every agency, like every client coming, going, everything going to you. Yes. Must be like, how big is the Nexus team? So almost a thousand this year. Next year obviously there will be much more. And the good part is because we are part of Group M, infrastructure, capacity building, technology solutions, AIML solutions are built into this team, which allows for non-replication of work, which allows for efficiency in execution, timeline management. Because we have today a lot of B2C clients, we have today a lot of clients which need two hours' tax, one hour' tax. How do we make ourselves ready for that? I want to understand, where did the need for something like this come from? So frankly, and this is a conversation we were having yesterday in the system was, I think somewhere the vision was set out in 2008. At that time, visual was not so big, right? And that time, the scale was not so big. From then till now, there were different experiments, learnings that we had in the system. And Mindshade had led it through their CMP for the television side of the business, which is the central media planning team, and all media planning work came to one team and it went through that. So there was a lot of learnings there and a lot of AI development there. Wavemaker, I remember, had started when I had put that time. And at that time, we created an AI tool for doing time. All this came together now, the learnings of the process, the learnings of the technology, and we have now enhanced it. The other need is very clearly for the client. We want to give better efficiencies. And that's what Groupon stands for, right? Efficiency, effectiveness. How do we make our system smarter and more intelligent? And this nexus as an engine is talking about that. So one of the things that I keep telling the employees who join is that this is an invincible engine for Groupon and for the agencies. We have created for the agencies. Something like this existed in other countries before? It's rolled out across the globe now. Okay. At the same time. At the same time. Okay. So I also wanted to understand from you that in the last few years, we've heard so much about it started from late American Resignation and then now it is great Indian Resignation. And we know a lot of senior people. Maybe not a lot, but a few senior people left. Thank you for that. Group PEM, the WBP Group also. So, you know, how can something like this contribute to this whole movement of reservations and yes, how do you retain people? So I think I'm part of that, right? I will say, okay, I couldn't join that. But what excited me taking up this role, I'll start with you and come into work others is a transformation agenda. Right. If leaders feel stagnated in their transformation agenda is when they move or move in whichever way we look at it. But at the same time, I don't think one should get hustled. I think we as an industry have a fantastic talent sitting here across, not just group them across. The other reality is that instead of worrying about, oh, this team and enjoying this agency and that agency, I don't get hustled. Why? Because I'm building the capabilities. This year we hired 200 people at an entry level. Next year we'll hire 350 people. I'm building capability infrastructure. These are not pure play, resignation countermeasures. No, it is looking ahead of the curve and looking at how do I train specialization mindset in the agencies? How do I really possess mindset in the agencies? How do we transform our business models? And a lot of other digital ecosystems have done that. A lot of startups have done that. Hence we have enough learnings from there too. So for me it's a non-conversation today. I have to be very frank because it has shown results. Of course. Like your attrition is fast. Of course, of course. Of course. Any numbers that you can get with a percentage? Not yet. But I'm hoping that by next year I can talk very strongly. But the reason I'm not sharing the numbers is I don't want it to be a platform. Because we are attributing too much to this whole resignation and we are forgetting those with 60,000, 50,000, and stay back. So if I understood it right, now your role is more about building the organization and within the organization and that meeting clients and all is no more part of your current profile. Do you miss it? Actually I don't miss it because I keep meeting them any which way on my own clients. The challenges are redefined and I guess I'm fine with it because the excitement of pitching something and the waiting for the result. So waiting for the result is still exciting because we do it together. I'm not running these operations alone. All the agency heads are stakeholders whether it's Amini, Ajay, Sonali, Moshmi, Naveen and the trading hand, Siddharth Prasad is moving out, Ashwin. We are all partners in Karan, right? So we are not alone or isolated. What our roles are very different. It's a joint success and a combined excitement. After doing pitches for so many years, I wouldn't complain. It's an ice break. I would say it's an ice break but it's a different challenge because instead of a pitch and creating a technology solution that's never been addressed or done before. So that result is the excitement that I get, right? And then how do we land it for a client? That's the excitement that we have. So it's a different excitement. And the pitch language, if I'm working with the agencies to change the pitch language or the way we are delivering it to clients, I think that's good enough. This is the last question. I remember speaking to some of your colleagues and they told me that it's become a very big problem for this dire industry to retain talent in the industry because a lot of people are not interested in doing television. Everyone wants to do only digital because digital has grown by 60%. But television is still a reality and it exists. So would you agree with it? And how do you resolve that? Because we lie our younger lot, the 200 people that you hire or whatever. So these younger people are not interested in doing television at all. 50% of them are on television because we have transformed the way we look at it as well. There's also addressable TV, right? Like Fine Custard is one of our solutions for that. And the way you plan for the television has now, at one end, you have the target audience, the demographic conversation. But now it's moving into audience planning. How do we get both these audiences together? How does that layer up? How does each conversation change? And the truth is this generation, like you said, is the gaming generation. Everything is about a technology solution, platform solution. And that's what exactly we have done in the television world. We have created an AI solution where the planner is not seeing it as how it used to be when I did plan. It's an AI product. It's an intelligent product. You work with the tool or the platform to bring out TV plans. A planner who used to take two days to make a plan can do eight plans in half a day. So life is different. So you focus your energies on learning newer skills and audience understanding and technology solution. Now you've been working, this is actually last year. So now that you've been working so closely with all these WPB agencies, what are some of the key things that excite you about the future of this industry? I think the fact that the pace of transformation and adoption is so good and so fast. And we are now sitting with the lords of the past. I think that's what excites me. Second is investment into technology. That's quite aggressive. And the third is the kind of acquisitions that's happening, which allows us to leapfrog ahead faster. I want to talk about the acquisitions. If you would have seen in the audience and that they're more coming. Thank you Preeti. Thank you so much for talking to us. Thank you so much.