 All right, it's now time for our next session, Advertising in the Era of Evolving Media. And our speaker leads corporate branding and marketing initiatives as part of marketing and corporate communications team across brand building, events and properties, business development, strategic alliances, product marketing, employer branding, et cetera. As a part of strategic marketing, he's also responsible for engaging with media for both media planning, buying and PR. He's responsible for development and execution of business strategies for the bank across wholesale and retail businesses and products. He spearheads strategic initiatives like banking advisory services, prop investments, strategic tie-ups, corporate branding, et cetera. He has expertise in executing growth-focused strategies within the regulatory ambit. Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together as I invite on stage the President and Country Head Yes Bank, Mr. Amit Shah. Good evening, all. Thanks, EFORM, for inviting me here. And thanks, Stibs, for getting the oxytocin and dopamine up. I think it was much needed. It was a brilliant presentation, I must say. So till my presentation comes up, I would like to thank Anurag for calling me here. And when he called me up, I asked him, so what do you want me to talk about? And he said, why don't you talk about digital and social media marketing? This is what everybody wants to hear about these days. This is the in thing. I'm like, yeah, of course, things have changed. And I look back and I reflected that my six-year-old son watches more content on YouTube than he does on TV these days. The other day, my eldest son, who is eight years old, springs a surprise on me and tells me, papa, show me your wallet. And he hands over to me my iPhone. And I'm like, wow, this is great. And being a banker and my son is already picking up about wallets and phones is like, super. Then I was reflecting more that I have a niece who's 15-year-old, lives in a tier two town in Gujarat. And she's the chief procurement officer at her home. I mean, she's only 15 years old in class 10. But they do so much of online buying that she's got the title of the CPO, right, for whatever it is worth. So things have changed and changed how. I mean, that's the power of how the digital natives are kind of taking over the way we think and communicate with each other. And I'm sure that every moment that we are here, there are more digital natives than people like us. Most of us in this room, I would assume are people who learn this on the job, who are still experimenting and still figuring out what the hell is this all about. So, and you know, just a few years ago, I would wonder that Twitter was all about the sound of a bird and Cloud was something that you saw in the sky. 4G was the parking lot where your driver would pick you up from a mall and so on and so forth, right? So things have really, really, really changed so fast. And like the previous presenters mentioned, it's not about when it's already here. So I'd just like to take a show of hands just to understand how many of us believe here that our jobs as marketers has become more challenging because you now no longer have to only figure out what to do with the TV and the print ads and the traditional forms of marketing, but you have digital, social, mobile. The democratization of media has gone around, right? So how many believe that it's simpler, better, or is it more complicated now? Yeah, I'm assuming I see a few hands there. Obviously, it's a little more complicated, I'm assuming. And I'm sure that some of us also believe that it is far more exciting now because it's far more targeted. It's far more fun to create content, to see it go viral at times, you know, to curate content and crowdsource it. For Yes Bank, you know, it's a very different field. I was seeing the list of speakers. Most of them are from very iconic and very big brands, you know, brands that most of us have admired through our childhood. And, you know, we are a fairly young brand. We're like a 12-year-old organization. So our attempts at social and digital media marketing started four or five years ago. But I think in the last four or five years, we've done a fairly decent job in terms of broadly speaking, if you were to go by just the engagement rates and the kind of followership that we've got Twitter. I think we're the largest bank right now in terms of followership, Facebook, couple of million of million fans and followers. And so on and so forth in terms of LinkedIn, Instagram and stuff like that. I think what I'm really proud about is in this short duration, particularly on LinkedIn, we've kind of managed to build a fairly decent SME engagement portal, which was one of our ideas. But numbers can only tell as much, right? I mean, it's all about engagement and responses and, you know, how do you engage with your fan base or follower base? So I think this is where we're doing fairly well and in terms of response times and a few awards here and there doesn't really harm us, so that's good. I think beyond anything else, what we managed to do in this short period of time is to build this whole mindset of thinking digital, right? It's no longer you do something on the traditional medium and then as an afterthought figure out what do I do about this now, right? So I have a task to also go digital, so what do I do now? So I think that's been a little bit of a transformation that we've kind of seen recently. But, you know, the way I look at it, it's not so much about the platform, right? We need to take a step back and understand that it's how you communicate with your stakeholders, right? And the communication comes from your inherent business strategy. So I'm gonna spend a few minutes sharing with you my perspectives on how business strategy and communication need to kind of go hand in hand. I think for the longest time, you know, most business plans are built around getting the larger wallet share of your customer, right? Even today we would hope that, you know, we can get 100% of their wallet share. The food brand would think that, you know, I just don't want to be their breakfast item, but I also want to be their lunch item, right? You are trying to get a larger wallet share of your customer. And hence, quite often, the communication exercise driven around the benefits and, you know, the product attributes and so on and so forth, whether one took an emotional route or a, you know, a tactical route or a rational route was really the secondary item, but the core focus was wallet share. But quite often when one figures, one chases only wallet share of a customer, I think, you know, some of you would relate to, you know, this caricature here, right? When you go to a client and I'm really not talking so much as a consumer brand, but let us say as a B2B brand, I'm sure B2B guys here would relate more to this. You go to a client and you tell him that, look, I have this beautiful thing here. He's, in all likelihood, is going to say, are you crazy? Dude, I'm very busy, yeah? So don't bother me with your sales pitch. I have a lot to go on and fight. And that happens because somewhere in the scheme of things, we missed the mind share, right? So there was this time, and I know, eight, 10 years back when the whole focus was on the knowledge economy and people said that, look, wallet share will come. First, get the mind share of your client, right? So does your client think about you when he has his biggest problems? Does your client think about you when he's losing sleep over some of his issues? Or is he only entertaining you for his regular transactional businesses, right? So getting mind share was the main thing. And somewhere people said, don't sell, right? Sell less to sell more, right? Don't be in the face. I think in the last few years, and this is where I go back to the whole change in the way new media is impacting us, the focus has really shifted a step further, right? It's not wallet share any longer, which is very important. It's not just mind share, but I think it is about creating shared value. Most consumers in a lot of videos that we saw and the AVs that we saw, I think the inherent message was, am I able to relate to my consumer at a more spiritual, cerebral, emotional level, which is beyond just having the top of his mind thoughts about me, right? Does my consumer relate to my persona as a brand? Because if the consumer likes what I do, if the consumer believes that I'm a responsible company, if I'm producing responsible products, he's more likely to pick me up, whether you're talking of a detergent, whether you're talking of a bike, whether you're talking of any product for that matter, right? Somewhere at the back of the mind, you want to know what is the larger persona of this brand behind just the product attributes, right? So I think this is where we are today, where human values and where shared values are equally or more important than just the core attributes of your brand or your product. We've heard a lot of great B2C brands, consumer brands, but today I represent the part of the organization, the bank, which is the larger B2B space, right? At the end of the day, banks engage with a lot of corporates, large-sized, mid-sized, multinationals, government organizations, so on and so forth. So it's a very different world. Yeah, we cannot talk of millions of views on our portals. Our stakeholders are far and few, right? As a B2B organization, my corporate CRM, for example, would be all of 10,000 people, right? 10,000 organizations. Even if I take reasonably mid-sized organizations, I'm keeping the 3.7 or 4 crore SMEs aside for the time being, but it's a very handful of CRM. Each corporate, you would have three, four, five important people that you want to engage with, right? It could be the CEO, CAO, his team, a few influencers in the procurement department, and so on and so forth, right? These are the people that, at the end of the day, are going to decide whether they bank with me or they don't bank with me, right? So these are my targets, said. So what the hell do I do with them as far as this whole new media is concerned? Should I continue to do what we've been doing in terms of the age-old way of engaging B2B clients, or is there a way that one can write this whole new powerful tool? And I think somewhere we faced with this challenge for a while, this was like the proverbial four-minute mile for us, you know, where some of you may know what four-minute mile is. Essentially, I think till around 1950s, people believed that you can't break the four-minute barrier to run a mile, right? And there was nobody who really achieved that. Sometime in 1954, I think there was one runner who kind of managed to do this, right? It managed it around 3.9 or whatever. Surprisingly, in the next two months, there are 22 other guys who actually broke that four-minute barrier. So it was all about in your mind, right? So as soon as people figured out that it's possible to do it, a lot more other people started doing it. So it was nothing to do with their physical limitations or the limitations of human physiology and so on and so forth. So I think this is the kind of, you know, learning and unlearning that we had to kind of do to figure out how do we engage with our B2B clients using new media. So the way we went about it was, you know, I asked myself, I'm a corporate client, I'm a B2B client for a whole lot of other brands, but somewhere I'm also a B2C guy, right? Between 8 p.m. and 8 a.m. in the morning, I'm a consumer of various kinds of content, right? The moment I get into my car, I start checking my WhatsApp, a few videos here and there. I go to my Facebook, I check what's happening. Obviously, the kind of content that I would love to consume may be a little different from a traditional consumer of various other consumer brands, but still there are a whole lot of commonalities that exist there, right? So if I were to be marketing to myself, how would I go about it, right? How would I get my, you know, mind share, my human value share and creating of shared value and so on and so forth? Second, you know, we also did a little bit of a research and survey and figured out that a whole lot of CXOs actually consume a lot of digital medium when they are at the workplace, right? Even if you keep aside the emails, a lot of content is actually not consumed on TV or print anymore, you know? Most channels are on mute in our offices these days, right? People are just watching the tickers and maybe only putting on the sound when they want to really watch something on the TV. So, you know, at the end of the day, they are using, they may not be digital natives or pilgrims or whatever terminology, but they are consuming a whole lot of digital content. So I'm not going to sell to somebody who's not attuned to consuming content in this fashion. So, you know, this is where I think what we do and what we saw in the previous presentation kind of converges, which is, you know, I was thrilled to see that because somewhere I thought that content-driven marketing is something that, you know, works very well, obviously for consumer brands, but we are doing it for B2B brand and so on and so forth. But it was interesting to see, you know, the connotations and the comparisons between what I have to present and what was shown a little while earlier. But, you know, content can be also fairly confusing, right? Because there's so much happening and the moment you talk of content, the first thing that comes to your mind is, can I get a viral video made, right? So every time you meet your agency, you tell them, you are a viral idea, Samjaya. How do I get, like, thousands and millions of views going on what I have to talk? But that's not really the end of it, right? And at the other extreme, you also don't want to be in a situation where you are spamming your stakeholder with content that he really does not want to, you know, kind of consume at that point of time. So I think it's a little bit of a science and art as well on how do you go about engaging meaningfully with your, you know, B2B stakeholder. And I have a little bit of, you know, schematic here, which on one axis, which is your y-axis, is your level of engagement in terms of easy surfing or easy looking at you from a casual serving perspective or way down is when he's kind of getting positively engaged. And on your x-axis, the three pillars are which level of, you know, buying decision is yet. And if you notice the third pillar, I've said initiation because, you know, as a bank, as a banker, as a bank, the moment you acquire a client, you actually initiate a relationship, right? It's not the other way around where you close a deal, right? And, you know, we tried to figure out from all the kind of different content that goes around, how do we make sense out of it? And I kind of bucketed this into, you know, five broad baskets right from things which are low engagement in terms of videos and blogs and so on and so forth to slightly more engaging stuff like, you know, you present case studies and you curate contents and you create demo videos, right? And no client is going to look at your product demo unless he's really interested in kind of initiating a business with you, right? And of course, if all of us have come here, which is a physical event, right, we obviously are convinced about something. So it's a proof of the pudding that people are attending your, you know, in-person meetings and in-person engagements. So this is what we've done and I have a couple of case studies to relate how we've gone about merging the old school and the new school in order to engage with our stakeholders. So the first story that I would like to speak about is the CFO forum, right? So for us as banks, CFOs are most important, right? They're the finance guys, they decide how much loan, how much deposit and what cash management solutions they want. So how do I engage the CFO meaningfully using all the five buckets of content that we spoke of in order to derive meaningful conclusions out of it and slowly and steadily nudge him towards, you know, starting something with me, right? And getting his mind share and shared values and stuff like that. So what began, you know, and when you think of CFOs, the first thing one comes across is, let's create an award property, right? Let's recognize the best CFOs in the country, which is a great thing to do because if you do it, meaningfully, if you do it reasonably well and if you create a lot of credibility about your property, the CFOs are obviously going to take notice, right? Who doesn't like to be, who doesn't like to get awarded, right? It's mass laws, hierarchy of needs, CFOs are obviously at the top of the peak and, you know, in case you award them and you create a vow around it, they're going to be excited. This is where, you know, we kind of created this property which, you know, is very well recognized and people are interested in, it's actually going on right now and a whole lot of CFOs have been querying us, saying what's happening, when are the events, when are the awards, have I made it to the shortlist and so on and so forth, right? So obviously a whole lot of buzz has just, has got initiated even before the awards, you know, event has hit the ground. But we said that look, I can't be satisfied engaging with my CFO just once a year, right? It's like a flash in the pan. You create an award, at best you can stretch it on both sides by 15 days before the event and after the event. So what do I do with him for the rest of the year, right? How do I ensure that he does not remember me only when he is looking forward to the award? So this is where we decided that let's engage him through CFO forums, right? This was the in-person engagement where we would meet CFOs across the country, hold panel discussions and, you know, engagement activities. What started off in 2000, I think it was nine or 10, has actually now become a very large movement, right? I mean, there are thousands of CFOs who are active members of the CFO forum. They regularly participate. In fact, I keep getting calls, right? I saw a CFO forum happening in Bangalore and are you coming to Pune and things like that, right? So there's a whole lot of community that's coming together. And the beauty of this is that, you know, even if I were to step behind and let the CFO forum take the center stage, the CFOs are now talking to each other, right? So there's a peer-to-peer engagement that started and they don't need a sutradar called S-Bank to make this happen for them, right? So that I think was really heartening that the properties in a critical fusion or fusion state that it's kind of going on on its own. Now we said, let's go a step further, right? Whole lot of CFOs, in fact, create best of the content. I don't need to preach them, right? I may be a money doctor, or I like to call myself as a money doctor, but I think the CFOs know what they do best. And a whole lot of CFOs said that, look, we engage with you guys during the CFO summits, but can we contribute some of the best case studies and stuff that we do, right? And in the last six, eight months, we've kind of come up with this bimonthly kind of periodical or, you know, we call it CFO insights, which again is very well-read. And it's again catering to the, you know, the top of the mass loss needs of the CFO that they are writing, they are talking about. The best part is in the last magazine that we're going to release later this month, CEOs have started writing, right? Because they believe that they can contribute. So promoters, CEOs, CEOs, you know, the other stakeholders that are important to me are writing for the CFOs. So it's kind of gathering pace and, you know, somewhere we become a small publishing house internally, which is good in my opinion because a recent survey by Forbes said 90% of CMOs are actually evaluating, creating their own publishing house internally because content has become so critical for them. And obviously, how do you take it further? How do you ensure that this is not a yearly or a quarterly or a bi-monthly engagement? Is when you take it online, it becomes 365 days a year. And here, my aspiration is to make it the exchange for media for the CFO community. What they have done in the advertising fraternity is great. A whole lot of people actually are hooked on to their news, their content, they contribute on E4M. I'm hoping that sooner than later, you know, our property on the CFO engagement portal, which is fairly, you know, kind of becomes like an E4M. So this was the first thought process on how for the CFO community, which is fairly handful, very erudite, very well read, very learned, has a very sharp opinion about most of the things, how do I engage with them, yet also get them to engage with each other on a core pillar of Yes Bank, which is knowledge banking, right? We have always stood for knowledge banking as one of our brand pillars. I think this somewhere exemplifies this thought process. The second thought process was, the second case or the story that I want to narrate is, you know, what we've done with our employer branding related focus. For us, young graduates from MBA colleges are a very important stakeholder. And obviously, they're alumni and so on and so forth. And engaging with them meaningfully in a way that they appreciate is very important. So we used to run this transformation series, which is like a B-School case study and, you know, competition and a challenge. But what started off a few years ago as a traditional B-School competition, we realized for the last couple of years that most of the students are actually now holding smartphones, right? They're all hooked on to YouTube and so on and so forth. Most campuses are now Wi-Fi enabled, right? There is 3G in most campuses. And they're spending so much time on social media. So if I were to do a challenge for them and tell them that, look, I'll come to your campus and we'll do all of this in your auditorium and then I'll take you to a TV studio, it really does not excite them as much as if I were to tell them that, look, you continue to do what you're doing. You stay on social media where you spend a lot of your time. I'll come there, right? So I will run the entire engagement for you on a social platform. So you no longer need to write a 2000-word essay. You please create a video blog, right? Because you love to do this. You have your mobile phones and you have your Wi-Fi's in your campuses. Please just create a blog for me with your solution and you send it to us, right? Next, when the jury engagement started and this is a typical process that you would do with B-school competitions, we said, can I get my jury on Twitter and get these guys on Twitter as well, right? So most of the students were obviously hooked to Facebook but only some of them were on Twitter. So we got them introduced to Twitter and we said that, look, why don't we engage with the jury members here? Because every time you ask a question, everybody else is also benefited with the same question, right? So we kind of got them engaged on Twitter and we chatted with them on issues regarding the case and any other questions that they had. And this kind of generated a whole lot of engagement for us as a bank and the community as well. Finally, when we had to do their final round of evaluation and stuff, again, we said let's try and do it digitally rather than the old way. I think the feedback that we received, obviously, one part of it was the case study and the winners obviously felt much better than the people who did not win. But one thing that ran consciously across the feedback that we got, and here we were sticking our neck out because we were doing all of this on Twitter which is highly unforgiving as a platform, was that there was fairly large amount of positive feedback and very encouraging feedback that we received on Twitter, as compared to obviously the few guys who are not so happy as well. But I think this kind of went off very well for us. The numbers obviously were very encouraging. We reached out to like three lakh students and 10,000 guys kind of teams participated. We had 1,000 odd completely filled forms and so on. These are like humongous numbers by our comparison because every year we hire around 150 people from 15 odd campuses but this touched over 1,000 campuses across the country. The third story that I would like to share is about the S community. Since the bank started, the bank said that look, we will try to do things a little differently as far as the bank branches are concerned. We will treat our bank branches as community centers like the Good Old Medieval Church where you would have engagement happening weekly or fortnightly where people would come just to engage, not to sell, not to buy. And this has been a fairly successful program running for many, many years now where each of our larger branches, so we have the hub branches across the country. We mandated the branch manager to do a program with the community. It could be a resident welfare association. It could be the chemical traders association or wherever your branch is situated. Just call them to your branch. Let them experience the brand. Let them come and visit you. Don't sell anything. Talk on a subject matter that really engages them. So if it's an IWA and they're facing solid waste management problem in that area, you call a BMC guy and you call the IWA representatives and you as a bank, you'll be there and you try and figure out what to do. At the same time, share with them a few things that they would want to do in terms of society accounts or whatever it is, right? But don't be in the face in this process. Next time when he wants to do something with any part of banking, he is more likely to consider you as a banker, as a vis-a-vis anybody else. This was a thought process in order to not do what most branches would do. Every time a new bank branch is launched, they typically put an insert in your newspaper or do some kind of a local activation to tell that, look, we opened a branch here, please come and visit us. We said, let's not try and do that. Let's do something different. But this is what we did in the first seven, eight, nine years of the bank. Off late in the last, and this is one of those engagements that we did it in, I think, a school or one of our larger branches, where this was a student and college-related engagement. But we said now, look, we have 2.5 million fans on Facebook, right? I mean, that represents the entire country and the TG that you would kind of engage with and their uncles and their aunts and all of them are there. Very well segmented, right? So I really need, I don't really need to break my head around it. Why can't I take this whole experience on Facebook? We started off this project with around eight branches, where we've created communities in and around my branch-serving area, right? Targeted to people whose residences are there. And we are engaging them on areas of their interest on the community, on Facebook. So these are some visuals, I don't know how visible they are, but these are some engagement activities that we do on Facebook. So the whole objective now is to get people, so first four, five years it was to take people on your Facebook page and get them to like you and get them to reach stuff around you. Now it's the other way around. Can I get those guys into my branch, right? Can I get those guys to talk about stuff and hopefully also come into my branch? So I'm taking my online community, hopefully into my physical engagement community. This is the last of my stories and something that I'm personally very proud of. And the whole organization is very proud of and this relates to the third block of communication and strategy that I was alluding to a while ago, which is on engaging with your stakeholders at a human value and shared value creation perspective. We were thinking that, what do we do? This country has so much youth, so much energy, but a whole lot of it needs to be channelized positively, right? Youth are also my target audience in terms of their first accounts, their first salaries and their first loans. So they are like brilliant community, but I need to engage with them in a way that I don't sound that I'm preaching to them, right? Youth hate to be preached. They've had enough of it during their teenage. They don't want to be preached anymore. Yet I want to engage them very meaningfully in a socially relevant format. So we came up with this thought process. We started this initiative called Yes, I am the change, right? Where we said, every youth has a camera. Can you make a short film, two minute, three minute, five minute film of any interesting initiative that you see in your locality? It could be a random act of kindness. It could be about, you know, roadwheeler who is taking care of dogs and stray dogs and stuff. It could be about a rag picker and her life story and how she is trying to make a living and also support a few of the people. It could be anything that you really love doing. To add to this, we also identified 101 NGOs across the country. Across NGOs focused on different end goods or end uses, focus areas. And we mapped 101 semi-professional filmmakers with these 101 NGOs. So there were crowdsourced films from amateurs, complete amateurs who don't have sophisticated movie-making tools. But, you know, they would form teams and they actually did a good job there. But we also got semi-professional filmmakers, agencies, filmmakers, so on and so forth to make good films on 101 NGOs. And we gave them 101 hours to do this. We launched this during, you know, just before August 15th, right? We gave them this time to make these films. They were given a topic just 101 hours before they were allowed to make a film. And they kind of make films on these social issues. It was beneficial because the NGOs were doing some great job, but there was nobody to tell their story, right? The creative guys also found a venue to do something nice. And usually around August 15th, you do have long weekends and stuff like that and holidays, so it's not really taxing on their normal workouts. But what really excited us was the number of films and engagement we got from common people across the country. Year one, it was a very modest kind of output, right? We got 8,000 odd people and so on and so forth. Year two, the numbers increased. We got like 70, 80,000 participating on this platform. Year three, which was the recently concluded edition. And we kind of had the awards and you know the Gala night and stuff very recently. We had five lakh people who kind of positively engaged with this. Of course, the numbers of impressions and views and so on and so forth are in millions, but I'm talking of positive engagement, meaningful engagement, but around five lakh. And we got like hundreds and thousands of good films through this. So I think this is one area where we said that, look, I need to engage with my consumer, but I don't want to push a product. I want to engage with him on a meaningful platform. These are some actual grabs of people trying to make a film, you know, on the spot. This is not for the Photoshop or for the ads, but these are actual films that we took, you know, of teams and people making films. This year, in fact, we had movies coming from Andaman's and Nicobar Islands and, you know, all the, I think 28 states in the country and nine union treaties, if I'm not mistaken, but everywhere across the country, right? And that was really heartening as a bank through our traditional medium, through our traditional processes, we may not have ever reached to such interiors and such depths. So I think I would like to conclude it all. My timer also says that time is more or less up and I would like to restrict it to the given time. I think till a couple of years ago, for most of us, digital was an afterthought where you would do the stuff that you do for a, you know, as part of a daily course of action and then you would say, hello, let's take it online or let's try and create a YouTube version of this. But I think today, most of us, if not all of us, are thinking how do we start from there and supplement it with, you know, the other engagement efforts, depending on what you're talking of. It's not because it's nice to do, but I think that's the way the whole environment is moving. So if you're not here, then you're kind of missing out on the action. Thank you. Thank you so much, Mr. Shah. I'd request that you please stay with me on stage as I invite Mr. Ashish Paseen, Chairman and CEO of South Asia Densu Ages Network and Chairman, Post-Ascope NPS Live Asia Pacific to please give away the momentum. Ladies and gentlemen, let's give a generous round of applause for Mr. Shah for taking us through the Yes Bank story. Thank you very much. Thank you, sirs.