 Our next session, ladies and gentlemen, our next session is a report launch and here I'm going to invite Mr. Kunal Kishore, Vice President, PRCAI for the report launch of PRCAI. And can we have him on screen please? Very warm welcome to you, Mr. Kishore. Good afternoon, Hyati. Good afternoon. So, sir, I'd leave the screen to you to take the proceedings forward. Sure. Good afternoon, everyone. So, as we proceed with our session of report launch, and generally this used to be a session where we used to launch a specific report where we used to study our industry. This time, since the last year was not normal for any one of us, so we do not have a specific report to talk about, but we largely will capture the journey that industry went through in the last 10 months and what has been the learning during this journey. So, it has been over 10 months that we went through the lockdown and during this 10 months we were on an accelerated path of learning and as an industry what was a big respite for all of us was coming of the industry together and while we, all of us as a leader, we got together during this crisis which was uncertain and which was unseen for, we what really helped us was we coming together and sharing and exchanging the solutions and ideas that worked for our businesses and which eventually helped each one of us to actually reorient ourselves during this pandemic. The entire journey started with a mixed emotion of anxiety, uncertainty and confusion while all these emotions were beginning of the journey. What turned out as an economic crisis in the beginning of this journey and what seemed as an economic crisis in the beginning of the journey turned out to be a boon in disguise because it took a pandemic for businesses to realize how critical communication industry is for their, for meeting their business KPIs and we clearly saw that how businesses aggressively used public relations and communication department in a whole to actually keep their multi-stakeholder engagement going on and in return what we saw was a huge chunk of learning that the industry went through and I would say that we were on almost a treadmill running to learn, reorient and get ready for the changing environment and today if we look back and see and reflect on the understanding that we can actually grab from our last 10 years of journey, last 10 months of our journey, we could clearly address that the communication has seen a change and that change is going to stay and it is only going to evolve further. So the model of unbought and own media is here to stay. I remember clearly when I entered this industry what RIF, what PR effectively was known for was the unmedia that it effectively could generate for the businesses but today when we look back and see what happened during these 10 months, businesses looked at not only unmedia but also creating content around their own platforms, building conversation, looking at creating webinars, discussion forums to actually start creating meaningful dialogues and discussion around the industry to help different stakeholders to contribute to this particular conversation and we also saw emergence of bot media where the entire nation was consuming content digitally from home and while they were doing that, we saw that brands were more aggressively looking at engaging with people who are creating digital content. I would like to mention here influencers how brand actually actively started to engage with influencers to reach to the end consumer. So while all these transitions happened in the last 10 months during our pandemic and we're still going through and fighting through to come out of the pandemic, what has changed is the industry and what is going to be seen as a new change in the industry is that this model is going to only evolve and become more prevalent and as the industry is changing as part of the new man-come of BRCAI, it is our responsibility to actually enable the industry to go through this transition effectively and as part of our first go-to market strategy was to actually assess the need and understand what is required by the industry and by the people to bring in and help the industry to bring those changes and as part of our overall strategy that we are building in what we realized is and this is part of two surveys that was done during COVID where we started to ask questions from different businesses and agencies in terms of what is the kind of need of communication that we see today and we saw that a large number of large number of contribution on business was coming in from some of the very very underserved category in the communication side of it which was internal communication to a lot of businesses engaged their communication partner for doing a very very effective internal communication and this internal communication was not limited to their employees but also trade partners, dealers, distributors and other stakeholders so similarly we saw entire the advocacy piece was hugely seen into play when the entire pandemic came and what largely it does reflect is that today we are we are here to actually see that with the same partner or the same brand we will be able to enable more services to them and we'll be able to farm them further so while this is happening it is very very important that we need to actually invest and focus on talent and at PRCI we are actually working to build a very very focused approach in terms of learning and development and accreditation where there is a huge chunk of work that is happening in terms of bringing that into play while this is happening I think the industry is moving towards data and analytics and measurement is going to be a very very important play here and while we work on the measurement bit we also do realize that the measurement is not standardized in the industry right now and when it comes to valuing the work that you're doing for your client today there is no standardized parameter of measurement that has been defined here so at as a current PRCI focus we're also focusing on in defining standardized measurement matrix which could possibly bring in more standardization in the measurement of the outcome or ROI that the public relation is driving for the businesses while that's a very important element we also realize that tech is going to play a big role and we at PRCI we understand that and we are trying to adopt our association to become more tech savvy we are going to do a huge chunk of investment in terms of building the right kind of tech solution which will make all our assets whether it's online or offline being more accessible to our members and which will actually enable a better seamless learning process for the member firms and their employees while technology is very very important it is also important to actually bring in right kind of understanding in some of the practices which are going to be an important practices in times to come and we're seeing that there will be a focused approach in terms of some of the stakeholder engagement that as an industry body we need to do and we are working very very closely in terms of building a right kind of engagement with government bodies to actually help them understand the needs of the industry as well as what is required for for them to effectively start utilizing and start preparing the right kind of engagement model with PR industry and for which we already have set in a committee to actually work on that while we are working on these aspects what was very very critical for us to also understand the new new age solution that are emerging right now and at the new age solution emergence we're also looking at actually focusing a lot in terms of building the entire communities to bring those practices into a standardized learning module and that is something that we are actually very aggressively arriving on. Beyond the learning and development and stakeholder engagement we're also right now in terms of our overall focus we're also focusing on some of the important subjects on the subjects which needs attention from the industry side of it and we are very closely collaborating in terms of bringing on the some of the very key focus subjects and help that to make it a mainstream conversation so right from subject of diversity to even social consciousness and there will be a refocus there in terms of building and investing on that and that's on the PR CAI as what our key focus is going to be but coming back to the entire topic of our conversation which is unlocking the great potential and in the morning today Madan righty said that looking at the size of our industry a lot of global player might be making fun that the entire business size of Indian PR industry might be equivalent to one of the biggest agency size so I would like to leave a note here and a note which would be a note on the fact that what is the opportunity that lies ahead with us is the opportunity that consumer tech is going to bring in and for the opportunities that you're talking about we're talking about opportunities which are multimillion where you have to start looking at understanding and like I said that the industry had changed from being unfocused to unbought and own approach and when we are talking about the bought media largely a lot of these bought media is going to actually help us in terms of growing the entire market of PR because these bought media are going to actually scale the entire operation of PR where your revenues are not limited to the retainers that you are actually making and I would strongly believe that however however good a man we do I think the industry will keep fighting on to improve their retainers and improve their revenues from the businesses and as leaders we are actually focused in terms of also creating a right kind of connect with the communication corporate communication teams we also have committee inside which is actually going to actually work very very closely with the the corporate communication team to actually bring in the right kind of understanding that is required for improving the kind of revenue that has been driven towards the communication practice and while we're doing that I'll come back to the entire industry size and I have a I'm a strong believer that the industry size in next five years is going to be very very different to what it is today because today our industry size is largely limited to what annual retainers that you can actually drive from the businesses or even some amount of professional service work that you could possibly do beyond your retainer which is the project that you could possibly get having said that like I have a strong belief that this is just the tip of the iceberg what change we saw in last 10 months digital is going to change everything and with this change what is very very critical is that we have to start investing in being relevant and at PRCI it would be our responsibility and and it would be our our responsibility as a man come as well to actually keep us relevant for the changing time and for being relevant what is very very critical and it is very scary thought for you to actually even reflect imagine organization who has invested on a resource for 20 years and he's one of the most promising resource with the maximum and when I say investment I'm not talking about financial investment definitely financial is one investment that you're looking at but many other investments that you do on that resource and imagine that resource becomes irrelevant because the entire ecosystem has changed around the communication and that is a scary thought just think of your best guy in the company and he is unable to understand the entire game game of communication which has actually changed through the evolution that is happening and that is why it is very very critical that we start to reorient our talent start to focus on reorienting our organization and start to understand that what we are seeing today five years later it will be completely a sea change because a lot of things are going under paywall a lot of communication is going through a change where there are all paid integration that is happening native content for matters coming in so we need to actually the change is happening here and now and we need to actually build bring in and be ready to explore that potential that we see coming through our way and as PRCA we are going to actually join our forces and work towards making this transition seamless for the industry thank you Cathy over to you thank you so much for sharing these insights thank you very much