 Amanda is our global client and brand president responsible for Eye Prospect globally. She works very closely with the leadership and teams in over 90 markets to deliver digital first end-to-end media solutions for our client. Skilled at leading through change, Amanda teams with both local markets and specialists to globally lead Eye Prospect. Bringing together the science of performance marketing and the art of brand building. An absolute champion for local nuance and culture. Amanda has instilled a supportive and collaborative infrastructure of experts and teams across the globe who work together at a pace and scale to accelerate both the domestic and the international client growth. Having said that, Amanda relaunched Eye Prospect as a brand new global agency in 2021 with a new proposition, enhanced capabilities and brand new identity. Amanda is also the global president at Visium which currently still operates in some markets across the globe. Today, we are privileged to have Amanda with us. All yours, Amanda. Welcome. Thanks, Divya. Can you hear me? Yes. Brilliant. Awesome. Thank you. Now let's test the technology of sharing screen. That's always the best one, isn't it? Let's see if this works. Can you see my screen? Yes. Awesome. Hello everybody. Really lovely to be here. Thank you for that introduction, Divya. I hope that I live up to all those wonderful things that you've said about me, so thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here with you at the launch of this digital advertising report. As we said earlier, I heard some of the other speakers say it would be lovely to be in person. I was going to say but maybe next year, but after hearing a beak, maybe in the metaverse, is the place we meet with our avatars next time we all come together. I've been asked in this keynote to talk about a global perspective of convergence. As Divya said, I spend my time looking around the world at how we can find commonalities, but really trying to help deliver that nuance in local markets. So I'll talk to you a little bit about global convergence. I know that's sort of the high level theme of this event, but it's also a subject as you will see very close to my heart. So hopefully you'll find some high level inspiration because I know you're going to dig a little deeper into some of these topics as you go through the rest of this event. What I wanted to start to say was convergence actually isn't new. In fact, I feel like we've been talking about it for quite a long time. In fact, over 10 years, every time I hear the term media convergence, I kind of think, oh my goodness, we've been talking about this forever. And part of the problem with media convergence is it hasn't really managed to stick. So we've had lots of experiments, lots of things have shift and changed. Sort of trying to come to an era where things really stick in consumers lives, not in the technology world. And what the pandemic has really brought us is actually a fundamental step change. And so what's really significant from post-pandemic or during the pandemic is the sheer velocity of convergence that we have seen, the sheer breadth of opportunities that that convergence is bringing with it. And actually more importantly, like I said, the consumer adoption, the fact that it's actually sticking. So globally, when I think about what's driving that sort of adoption or that accelerated conversion post-pandemic, the types of things that we're seeing is not just a changing consumer behaviour because we've seen that before, but actually it's the changing consumer concerns, the things that consumers are now worried about, the things that they prioritise, the lens through which they see the world is fundamentally changed and they go backwards and will continue to change the way they make decisions moving forwards. The other part of that and linked to that is what we've seen is the advent of new technology that historically would have taken years to drive adoption and actually consumers are adopting that in a matter of months, again sticking behaviour that we have not seen previously. We've seen new ways of interacting with experiences such as kind of brands and entertainment experiences. And we've also seen a change in the way that media operates and entertainment gets delivered. So as Vinod and Abique said, the lines are fundamentally blurring. So what does that mean for us when we think about sort of the media world and the way we talk to consumers? Well, first off, it means that we can't think about offline and online as separate journeys because they're intertwined, they're linked, and they are actually not... And we've also seen a change in the way that media... Did that go? Sorry. So we can't talk about online and offline as separate journeys. We can't think about brand and performance as separate objectives because they're linked. And increasingly, our digital and virtual worlds are blurring and sometimes even replacing our physical worlds. So fundamental shift change in what we're seeing happening right in front of us and the pace is not slowing down. So when we think about this at Dentsu, we kind of think how do brands really set themselves up for success in this massively converging world? And we know that when we think about conversion, it's how does computing and content and communications collide together to create new ways of doing things in a more efficient and effective and entertaining way? Well, for us, the brands that are going to be really successful, in the future, are those brands that can really operate at the intersection of culture, content and commerce and do all of that powered by data. If they can operate at this intersection, they can pivot and have agility to really be ahead of consumer behavior and not be responding to what is happening in front of them. So linked to that, it's not only brands that can operate at that intersection. It's also brands that can deliver today because we've all got business objectives that we need to achieve but fundamentally help deliver a better tomorrow simultaneously. We think very much about that at Dentsu as the team have already talked about. We're often thinking about what infrastructure and stones and foundations do we lay now to really set our clients and brands up for the future. So that's what I'm going to give you a bit of a glimpse into the rest of this presentation today is how do we think about tomorrow today? Because we think in a converging world, that's the big step change that we need to make. So before I dive into that, a little bit of background about the global perspective and kind of how we're coming here. You're here specifically to talk about India today. From a global perspective, what me and my team do is look at the sort of velocity of change all around the world in every single country. Where are they in their digital maturity? What are the key step changes that we see are happening? How are consumers behaving and responding? What are the levers for growth and the levers for success? What are the best practice that we are seeing and how can we scale that and the brilliant ideas that go with that around the world so that every single brand in every single country can stay ahead of the curve. So it's that real global view. I guess a convergence of global and local. How do we take the global view, take the learning, but then really centre on in what we see in local countries to make them fit and like I say, ahead of that curve. I live in the UK just to give you an example of some of the different things we're seeing around the world. I live in the UK and one of the things that really exploded last year was the fast delivery of groceries makes my life easy because I've got four kids. But what that means is if you run out of yoga, rice or baby food, you can get it delivered to your door in less than 10 minutes. I mean, that is just mind-blowing. And in the UK fast delivery grew by over 125% in H2 2021. So all brand new, but the explosive growth is crazy. But at the same time, physical retail spend went down 22%. So what this convergence of local convenience stores and delivery services for food gives us is a whole new retail media opportunity for CPG brands to be direct to consumer an opportunity that they just never had before and really want to capitalise on in the future. Similarly in the US, the IAB did some research which predicted some consumer behaviour trends post pandemic and they're saying that most of the things that consumers buy in North America will be bought online post pandemic, will be mainly bought online post pandemic. Now, given the influence, the global influence that the US market has and the scale of that, that is just ridiculous to think that in the future more things will be bought online than in physical stores in the US. And there's nowhere more so where that's the case than in China. So we often look for China, certainly when we're looking at digital activities and what's happening there and what do we see coming down the pipe for other countries around the world. Our MD in China often says everything leads to commerce here. Everything is a shopping opportunity in China. In 2020, so just at the start of the pandemic over 45% of all purchases were made online. And when you start to think about that compared to the UK which I just talked about which is around about 27% and the US where we talked about this dramatic change that's about to happen is only at 14.5%. So it just shows you the size and scale in China of the online purchasing behavior and retail environment. But the interesting thing about China is that it's not just because of the speed of digitization of the market, it's actually the consumers. And it's the fact that the consumers in China are remarkably receptive to new technologies and new ways of doing things. So this inventiveness, this openness to embrace new things has really helped drive that sort of adoption and pace of change moving forwards. So when I think globally about kind of what all of this means to us and how can we think about this in a way that can really help brands in different countries. I really love this quote from one of our clients actually from Cedric Charbit who is the Balenciaga CEO. And he says, his constant thing is about the future and how does he get the organization to sort of think about the future? And he says we need to set ourselves up to anticipate the change rather than process the change when it's too late. And I think if we're all really honest with ourselves as marketers, five years ago we probably were in that place where we were seeing things happening around us and we were really rushing to try and make sure that we could get ahead of that curve and now the big step change in this phase of convergence for us is about anticipation, is really looking to the future to make sure that we are a future fit when we need to be. Sorry, my laptop then stopped working. And Dentsu's done just that. So Divya talked about some of the transformation work that we've been doing at Dentsu. And in 2021, as Divya said, we created a brand new agency that lives up that intersection of culture, content and commerce that we talked about earlier that brings brand and performance marketing together and is actually setting up consultancies to help clients look at 2025 and how do they position themselves to get in shape today to be ready for what is to become in the future. So we've reorganized ourselves as well as Dentsu around this converging future. So if I think about what Cedric says and how do we anticipate the changes for the future and also what we're thinking about is how do you sort of deliver tomorrow today. What I wanted to talk to you about today is some of the key themes that we are thinking about as an organization and sort of the conversations that we are having with some of our clients. There are six of those key themes so I'll skip through them quite quickly. The first of which links to what Abik and Vinod were saying earlier which is not only are we buying more stuff online but actually in the future everything will be shoppable. The technology and the signals available to us now mean that every medium, every channel and every piece of content will be shoppable. From AR filters to out of home to video to social posts all forms of entertainment will be shoppable anywhere, anytime. So what does that mean for us? So the digital economy as we all know is demand led and the interaction is actually initiated and driven by consumers whose expectations are super high. They're really, really demanding. So how do our brands think about this? How do they not only meet those high expectations of consumers when consumers want them to but also how do they figure out how to start marketing at people which is a muscle memory that brands and marketers have learned and start to matter to people. And that's a really important shift in the way we think about relationships between brands and consumers. And in this highly shoppable world they need to live at this intersection a brand building which is all about building trust and transparency and being useful and relevant and sales. How do I drive conversion and optimization in order to be able to deliver consistent, seamless and frictionless experiences across every interaction point. So how do we work with brands to ensure that they are really at the forefront of making this the most of but delivering in the right way this hugely shoppable environment that we're about to move into. So if everything's shoppable and if the world is becoming more digitized and media is becoming more addressable this gives us more opportunities to target messages, to drive efficiencies and actually meet business outcomes much more succinctly. But to be able to do that we need to think differently about media. We need to think about media as a form of performance lens because years ago brand management, I remember brand management strategies were five years ahead then there were three years ahead and then there were one and that was amazing and now it's about immediacy. So we need to be able to plan media in that way. Brands need to be able to evaluate and benchmark each of their investment choices in the same way whether they're thinking about traditional. I will have to go in a minute. We need to think about traditional channels like TV or performance channels. So at Dentsu we are developing a series of tools to enable brands that we work with to understand audiences, plan channels optimising real time to give us the agility and media planning that we need for this brave new world. So as well as everything being shoppable and thinking about how we plan and buy media in new ways in this massively converged world we also need to think about new environments and we talked about the metaverse earlier. Nobody really knows how the metaverse is going to play out yet. It's still very early days, not even meta could have just changed their name and the big question at CES this year was is the hype of the metaverse going to live up to its hype or will it just end in disappointment? Who knows? What we do know is there is a rush to buy virtual real estate. We do know, and certainly some of the brands that I work for, there's a lot of testing of selling virtual products in virtual environments and actually some of those products are going for more money than the actual product would in real life. So some really crazy things happening and being tested in the metaverse but it's happening in pockets of innovation and isn't fully connected to the overall brand experience and we haven't really had time to think about how brands should behave in this new meta virtual environment but one thing that is for sure it will further the convergence of online and offline it will blurl the worlds of gaming and cryptocurrencies and NFTs so lots of opportunity but also lots of risks and unknowns that go with the metaverse. We're looking at a number of very specific things when we're talking to our clients. One is metamedia so what does media look like in the metaverse? What will it look like? How do we turn every single signal into an invitation for a consumer to know every facet of a brand in this new virtual environment and linked to that how do we link in real life IRL to virtual? What does that connectivity really mean? How do we connect real life experiences with digital experiences with virtual experiences so we're looking at that in the ecosystem planning to really make sure that we can get those seamless linkages from all of our conversations that our brands are starting in this very blurred and blended world and what about things that we can take from the physical world to the metaverse so things like the spatial internet and haptic suits how can we start to get those senses of touch and feel into a very digital and automated world and finally how can we take currencies out of the virtual world and bring them into the real life world again a big talk about NFTs and one of our clients has been experimenting with how you can sort of gift or NFTs in a loyalty program to then be spent in the real world in terms of products and services so this sort of exchange I guess and convergence of assets and currencies that exist in both worlds and blending them between the virtual and the physical world moving forward so we've got a lot of experiments going on with the metaverse we've set up specific teams for some of our clients to really help them shape and get under the skin of what this will mean for them as brands in the future and linked to all of that more shoppable different ways of looking at media and metaverse there is this real dichotomy that we're seeing and we think will continue which is what the pandemic or the biggest adoption during the pandemic was for this contactless environment so consumers were paying with contactless payment methods they were using contactless experiences they were using contactless checkout services and that was making them feel really comfortable about going back into retail during the pandemic I think contactless payments went up 250% from 2019 87% of shoppers prefer a touchless checkout to a physical checkout and actually over three quarters of global consumers are now saying that they would prefer to continue with contactless payment and contactless experiences even when we can go back into physical retail but what this is bringing with it is a real dichotomy you've got this very technical automated digital world and the real thing that we're craving is the human element how can we bring that human element into that digital world and what role do brands play in that how can they bring human empathy and engagement into this more digital contactless environment I saw this crazy stat which basically said that emotion is going to take charge again emotion will come to the forefront the more digitized, converged the more accessible technology gets and this stat that I saw said that emotion will become an even more powerful way of asserting truth than objectivity or critical thinking so consumers will make decisions based on guts rather than necessarily the amount of data that they've got in front of them so this real dichotomy of it's be easier and more fluid, simple and seamless but consumers will rely more and more on their gut instinct when they're actually making decisions decisions and choices so what can brands do about that and how can they get at the forefront of that well I think they're very well placed actually to be able to do that I think they should really focus on being transparent to substantiate any claim that they make about their products and services because everything they say can now be seen I think they should be at the forefront of the appeal of sustainable and social purpose led experiences that consumers are really craving for also provides brands a new opportunity to be curators for online and offline human experiences so really an area that brands can capitalise on and bring that human empathy into the very virtual world that we are moving into these last two that I wanted to talk about are actually mainly based on the concerns I talked about earlier the priorities that we're seeing in what is worrying consumers and what they are thinking about in the future we're seeing increasingly that consumers want more control over every aspect of their lives and healthcare is right at the forefront of that there are predictions that by 2030 securing long-term health and well-being will be an increasingly central goal in purchase decision-making for many consumers and nearly half of the people globally that believe that in the next five to ten years they'll use technology to predict what will happen with their physical health and with that the home will become an increasingly important domain for that self-care for that new way of looking after yourselves so what we're predicting and what we're talking to brands about is that brands will be expected to help consumers enhance their well-being through their products and services so they'll need to think differently about the impact that their products and services has on the consumers lives and with the massive explosion of innovation in this area from biowarables to skin tech to smart health monitoring households brands are able to help consumers make more control they're able to make experiences more personal and they're able to enable the consumers to make the better choices both for their well-being and for their health and also able to predict and help add value to consumers everyday lives in the way that they want to live their lives in the future so really thinking of all brands as healthcare brands and finally if healthcare is pervasive then sustainability really is putting ethics at the heart of decision making is now a consumer demand it's not a nice to have it's not something that companies do on the side so what that means is that brands need to think more carefully about how do they deliver the growth that they need to for their business but in an environmental way within the constraints of our planet and the world that we are growing up into so how do brands integrate ethical principles of good growth into the business of their fabric of their business operations and in this highly converged world as we said earlier consumers can see absolutely everything that brands do from supply chains to the company that brands keep and so when we're talking to clients about kind of moving this more pervasive sustainable world and behaviors that they need to illustrate of brands we're asking them to think about kind of do the services and solutions and products that they deliver and require extra effort from consumers or actually do they provide consumers with peace of mind do they help consumers create a better world and in a lot of instances we're talking to clients about what are the adjacent areas to your products and what partnerships could you be linking up with so that your brand can help consumers to sustainability on a more global scale so securing the future and building long-lasting consumer relationships we think requires a new kind of thinking and actually a new kind of brand we believe and this is a journey and it's only the beginning so the journey starts here which is why your conference today is very well timed in terms of you know kind of how do we get ahead of and what are the key things we're seeing on this journey so we sort of pull together a few tips and things that we talk to some of our clients about and what we think about during the future and how best to prepare ourselves for that future one is a bias for action act now tomorrow will come very very quickly and tomorrow in many instances as we've said earlier it is definitely here today winning in this highly converged world needs superior consumer understanding now lots of brands we talk to talk to also that they put consumer at the heart of everything they do but often that's challenged by clunky internal architecture and legacy issues and we're working with lots of the brands and our clients to make sure that we make that much more seamless and useful and relevant information so that we can deliver better service and experiences to clients in this more converged environment in the future we think any companies need to be much more organic in their operating mode and create space for curiosity to pick at where we think consumers going and try and understand it a little bit more even if it's only tiny pockets of consumers so to create that space to be curious it's really about ecosystem thinking no longer can we think about single channel we have to think about the entire ecosystem the fluid conversation between different channels also thinking about creating a space earlier something like an innovation engine it doesn't have to be a team or a location but a way of thinking an innovation engine that's always looking at the future of new technology things that are happening and how we think consumers will behave this will stop us from playing catch up from consumer behavior and enable us to get ahead of what we think the predictive discernible changes will be in the future of the way consumers behave and this means that we need to think differently about how we test things we need to learn by doing try things we need to learn in scale we need to experiment create hypothesis and experiment with this and in this newly converged world I think one of things that we would say is that everything's new and very different and so you know what we're not all experts in it and so we need to be quite brave and to recruit new people and new experts into our organization to help us develop and adapt our thinking so that's my whistle stock tour of globally how we're able to do that and convergence but I would finish by saying that one of the things that we do with our clients which I find a fascinating exercise is we ask them to envisage what their consumer will look like in 2030 and what experiences will those consumers expect from them as brands and then what do those consumers think of that brand as it exists today and then we spend the next few years making sure that we bridge that gap. Thank you so much Amanda for your lovely presentation and you laid out all the details before us and we do have a couple of questions for you in the chat box coming so I would like you to take those questions for us. The first question is that what will this convergence mean for the Indian consumer especially at the grass root level. I think that's a really interesting question and what I find often is we think about convergence more than what we see in India and what we see in India is this sort of massive explosion of mobile phone usage and much improved internet so I think those two things combined if I think of it at its most simplest level it means that more experiences and more information more education will be more accessible because it will be more mobile and so that accessibility at a mobile level is a really big step to change from a consumer angle. I also think actually when we talk about commerce, the explosion of commerce I think it was and I heard talking about it earlier on when you think about things like conversational commerce, social commerce, video commerce or more sentiment driven commerce because India is becoming so much more mobile I think we'll see that sort of commerce explosion through social and that will be really interesting because it will make it more wireless to the consumers it will make it hyper local because as geolocation services get better so I think it will really open up the sort of purchase world in India as well. Beautifully answered Amanda I have another question for you and that is will the digital age brands have an inherent advantage over the legacy brands in the convergence era? How should the legacy brands adapt to this convergence? Yeah we work with both it's really interesting we work with a lot of digital first brands and obviously a lot of big traditional brands and I think it's less of a question of where you come from and more about your ability to be able to pivot and to be able to keep up and failure to adopt because everything is changing so much means you'll get left behind. So I think that's the critical thing rather than where you've grown up from it's more about kind of your mindset and your ability to really adapt and adopt really quickly. When I think about the work we do with the more digitally inherent brands so brands born in this area they will definitely have better consumer intelligence because that's what they do there's essentially mainly directed consumer brands so they will definitely have better consumer intelligence they'll have undoubtedly more sophisticated data and analysis capabilities and they will be able to react quickly because they're so close to the consumer but the flip of that is that they'll also focus on the lower funnel so they'll really be focusing on conversion and short-term ROI and when I think about the blend and some of the more traditional brands that we work with they have got in their favor emotional attachment so some of the brands that we're working with who've come from the digital era and now thinking about TV how do I bring my backfield to my brand how do I create saliency to create a choice so that's what more traditional brands actually have they have that emotional attachment the ability to build trust to build empathy and transparency and that creates the emotional engagement that we need for long-term sustainable growth I think so my view is it's less about where your brand has grown up from and more about the ability that we talked earlier about to live at this intersection of culture content and data organizing yourself to be able to pivot to that sort of intersection points and on the back of that continue to create big ideas and enduring campaigns and then you'll set up long-term sustainable growth no matter how converged our media world becomes I can't hear you can you hear me Thank you so much Amanda for answering those questions so beautifully you know and you've shared some really amazing insights on how this road to convergence is looking like for the digital advertising world and media for today and of course for the years to come thank you so much for sharing your wonderful insights with us