 the first speaker for the session after lunch. Now bringing the laurels home is something our next speaker is talented at. And his idea, the unfiltered history, unfiltered history tour for vice world news, led India's stalling in what is now the country's most successful year at Cannes Lions. The campaign brought home three grand prikes, titanium lion, and for the first time, the coveted agency of the year title. He had also been recognized as Apex number one CCO by the one show earlier this year. Not resting on laurels and bitten by the entrepreneurial bug, he went on to start an independent creative agency. The now seven month old talented, put your hands together and welcome Mr. P.G. Aditya, co-founder and CCO, talented. His session topic is sneak peek into the talented employee handbook. And I request Mr. P.G. Aditya, wherever you are, please put your hands together for him, co-founder and CEO, talented. His session will be about a sneak peek into the talented employee handbook. All over to you. Thank you. I was spending about 10 minutes thinking of a nice post lunch joke to crack about how everyone is sleepy and I didn't get any jokes. So we're going to get straight into this session. I think from what we kind of told this idea of what it's going to take to create powerful brand stories, seems like a question that keeps a lot of us up at night. But it's also the reason for a lot of us to wake up in the morning and do what we do best. Earlier this year, so I think over the next 10, 12 minutes, I'm going to take you guys through two powerful-ish brand stories that I've been fortunate to be a part of along with some terrific teams. The first of which I was told that was already presented this morning, but it's a campaign so nice it has to be presented twice, which is what I think the gentleman earlier was also speaking about the unfiltered history tour. So I want to take you guys a little bit through that once again and show you all a little bit of a timeline of how those events happened and what it took to create that powerful brand story for VICE. And then I want to talk to you guys about yet another powerful brand story that just went live this morning on today's TOI. So if any of you all have that around, you all do take a look. I'm going to be playing what that is as well, and that one is for Clear Trip. And then I want to wind up the session a little bit by talking you all through, hopefully, some relevant Guyan from our eight-month-old outfit called Talented in terms of what we believe. One of the secret sources are in getting to do this more sustainably and more consistently. By that, I mean building powerful brand stories. So I want to start off with another edition of a campaign that feels like a gift that keeps on giving to all of us in Indian advertising, the Unfiltered History Tour. The British Museum is a public institution dedicated to human history, art, and culture. Come discover over 80,000 works from around the world here in London. You are now viewing the Gregal Shield. Captain James Cook was a British-speaking event. We're now looking at the Gregal Shield, which was taken from our people. The elections in the British museums are premised on a simple idea. I'm proud of what my grandfather stole from yours. The Rosetta Stone was not a discovery neither of the French, neither of the British. It was already discovered and reused in Egypt multiple times. For us, it's not just our well-carved rock. It is a living ancestor. This very important statue is on display in a museum thousands of miles away. I'd say the British Museum is the world's largest receiver of stolen goods. We're launching an interactive tour of some of its most contested artefacts, plus a podcast series featuring voices from the countries they were taken from. There is always a story behind every object that was made in the kingdom, and that is how we told our history. There were two foreign powers in rivaly over Egypt, one of them, one over the other, and they took the worst points of the other. I feel I've received a balanced narrative. For many a series, it was maybe the last time we could really stand up to people who were trying to bully us. We sort of went around the world and took what we wanted, and it makes me feel a deep level of shame. Museums around Europe are slowly realising that exhibiting items taken by force hundreds of years ago from other countries is kind of gross. And it's about time. We can't change the past, but we can change how we engage with it in the present. Now on record, the Unfiltered History Tour is the most awarded campaign from India and international creative festivals ever. It's brought home, like you said, three Grand Prixs at Titanium and the Agency of the Earth title, which I am also extra happy went to an agency from Bangalore. It kind of shows that there's too much creativity and too many opportunities in our country for only one or two cities to bear the burden of them all. And very, very pleasantly surprised by how big a creative force Bangalore is becoming in producing the best work out there. So I'm gonna spend a couple of minutes very quickly on how this all happened, what it took to tell this powerful grand story. First of all, I think it took some very unwarranted initiative from our end. I don't generally prefer the term proactive ideas because it kind of mirrors this implicit power equation that happens between a brand and an agency where our job is to be reactive, to be at the receiving end of questions. The phrase we prefer is briefing the brand back. When we feel we have an idea or a brief that we think would lead to a powerful brand story, it's perfectly fine to have that as an equal relationship and actually brief a brand back on this is what we think you should do. That's precisely how unfiltered kind of happened. It was a moment after seeing this series called Empires of Dirt, which is a show about European colonization on vice. But it wasn't an easy idea to execute even from then. Right from the get-go, you could see that the initiative that the team took to not present the idea, simple things, not present an idea like this as a simple PPT, but actually go ahead and make an entire case film to kind of show how that would come out. That was the way in which the first impression of something like this was made. Secondly, we knew for a fact that there were neither experts on our end nor vice's end about the accuracy, the historical accuracy of the kind of stories that we're seeing. So the real creative director on this in terms of accuracy was a cultural historian called Shalini Vadwana who was brought on board. And you had creative teams who were almost seeking approvals and edits from an actual cultural historian. And that's how those illustrations and those stories got to be kind of told. As we've, and this campaign overall took about 18 months to make happen through different, different cycles of lockdowns both in the UK and in India and our very tragic second wave as well. But despite all of that, some of the stories that were completely unable to forget in terms of the kind of audacity that it took to make the story happen. For instance, just to give you guys an example, lots of museums have done, what do you say, these kind of interactive tech-enabled tours of their collection, but it's done with the permission of the museum, with the approval of the museum using their own money. So if you need it, if you're working on it and if you think that what this artifact needs to be moved from here to here in order for this experience to be made better, that could happen. What do you do when the museum has no idea you're actually doing something? What if you're doing the entire thing under their nose? So there were actually moments where, for instance, one of the artifacts which are called, let's call the Gwegel shield was kind of moved from one location to the other, arbitrarily at the British Museum. And our teams discovered that because they were using Google Earth from India to try to track where different pieces in the museum are, none of us have actually stepped into the British Museum till date. And at that point while it was happening, one of our team members, his name is Kushal Lalvani, he's a brave soul for this, he calls up and we didn't know where this artifact had been moved and therefore we couldn't figure an experience for it. So he called up the British Museum posing as a incoming visitor and he asked them, hey, I'm told the Gwegel shield is moved from here to here, can you tell me where it is? And the people at the help desk, very unassumingly said, yeah, it's in the ground floor and boom, we went into the ground floor to check where it was. So it took efforts like this, of course. I think by the end of it, one of the things that we're definitely happy with is the British Museum obviously has an incredible amount of wherewithal to kind of work through bad PR and not be too frazzled about it, but we've seen humongous number of smaller institutions, private collectors actually start returning their artifacts ever since this campaign went live. Till date, I think over 10,000 artifacts have been returned from around the world to their, from around places in Europe and America to their homelands and we'd like to think that this little piece had something to do with that. Now, I told y'all this took 18 months so one of the things that also happened in those 18 months was as you see on the left bottom that little blue icon. A bunch of us who came up with the campaign and who led the execution, the core team unfiltered, a bunch of us kind of decided at that point that it was time to move on from our agency and we set up an independent creative agency called Talented where we continued work along with our ex-colleagues at Denso on the case study, et cetera and we've seen what it's done in the award circuit since. So I wanna talk to you guys a little bit about what, how we've been continuing, hopefully telling these powerful brand stories in our new adventure as well. Just this morning, those of y'all who subscribe to the TOI, if y'all saw the paper this morning, you would have kind of noticed, I hope, an ambush marketing campaign by Clear Trip against all the e-commerce offers that are kind of going on. It's there on today's TOI, check it out whenever y'all get the time, I'm gonna play a video to illustrate what this idea actually is. Little context that Clear Trip obviously is positioned itself as a challenger brand in the travel ecosystem. I think the almost like the self-image of the Burger King of the travel industry almost. So we knew that we had everyone out there, especially in this time of the year, we are David, the Goliaths, our e-commerce brands that are looking for your share of wallet to be put into things, into things from new TVs, new smartphones, so on and so forth. But imagine if that, instead of buying a new smartphone if you could travel somewhere instead. And we wanted to figure a way to get users to kind of switch their mindset from using your money, using your budget on things, to using it to travel instead. And this was an ambush marketing campaign in today's print edition of TOI, which we kind of went ahead with. This should give you guys a demo of what it is. Okay, so this is the Times of India, today's Times of India. This whole week, it's gonna be filled with e-commerce ads for the first 10 pages. It's just gonna have more and more and more offers and offers and offers until you get to Clear Trip's ad on this page. All you need to do is scan this code on this ad and it will turn any other e-commerce deal that you see in any of these pages into a travel deal instead. I'm gonna show you guys how it works. Okay, so you scan the code here in the Clear Trip ad, go to any other e-commerce offer on any of the previous pages, taking this Samsung Galaxy 9,499 and instead I'll get a travel deal. Butterfly mixer grinder offer and instead of that mixer grinder, I could be traveling to Bangkok instead. So the rest of the brands clearly had no idea this was happening to them. So no points for guessing a pattern between the unfiltered history tour and this one. Looks like a lot of us love, we love challenger brands, we love kind of figuring unique creative ways to give them that slight unfair advantage in doing things that are subversive and ambush related. That's of course because it makes complete sense for Clear Trip right now. So in our minds just wanted to tell you guys how we as an agency and as a team, as a creative team and I'm sure a lot of creative teams either on the agency side, on the brand side, wherever, what is the secret sauce to actually building these kind of powerful brand stories? Where exactly do we usually fall short? Those are questions we kind of wanted to ask ourselves before we started up once again and tried doing what we believed was a much, much better version of our industry and our jobs. One of the things we did was, instead of keeping it in the air too much, we wanted to codify a lot of the ways in which we wanted to go about work and what you're seeing in a slightly blurred out version right now is the contents of our agency's employee handbook which will become a public document very soon. But just for this audience, wanted to take you all through one part of this handbook called How We Want To Work With Our Clients. A large, large part of what it takes to build brand, powerful brand stories comes from the relationship that let's say in this case an external creative partner has with the brand team. And while there's a lot of extremely inspiring talk about what that story ought to be, a lot of times human stuff kind of comes in the way. A lot of times, how many of us can genuinely raise our hands that by the time we actually took a piece of work live, it was exactly the same way in which we imagined it when we first thought of it. Any hands who felt like we have had zero creative compromise or any kind of compromise from the beginning point of an idea to the point it's taken live. Then think so. What are the things that actually get in the way? More often than not, it's just stuff that's kind of human, that's very, very psychological. And those are the points that we wanted to kind of write down and codify about the agency-client relationship which in my heart I believe is a beautiful partnership that brought us most of the great advertising that we know. It is not in its best shape in a significant part of our industry right now. So what is it gonna take to actually fix it? Hopefully this document would give us a slight start. So this deck is supposed to be a self-read so the most I'm gonna be able to do is a dramatic reading of the points that you'll see on the slide but hopefully it's gonna make it worthwhile. Over the last decade or two, there've been massive changes to the agency-client relationship. Right from remuneration models to profiles of individuals who occupy client-side marketing teams and we've seen the influx of in-housing, et cetera. It can be argued that over the recent past, agencies haven't moved at the same speed as our counterparts on the client side have. At Talented, we wanna be as fast as our clients. We wanna attract clients that are into the type of work that we do. There will be brands with brave marketing teams that are ready to get in the dirt with us. When a client chooses us, we want them to know that we are committed to putting the smartest and most creative people in the room to get their money's worth. In our line of work, every day these marketing teams are choosing to be our client or not. Do not let a client relationship feel like a subscription that you renew every year. A relationship by itself does not secure a client anymore. Consistently delivering great work does. So how are we gonna go about that? A few points. In terms of simple stuff from getting started, we will view every client as their own special snowflake with immense potential for our work to impact their organization. There will be no one-size-fits-all team structures, cost proposals, or SOPs. While starting out with any new client, we will leave behind the baggage that we may have courtesy of our experience with another client. All clients are the same. That word should not repeat. In return, we will expect clients to not punish us courtesy of a bad experience they might have had with the previous agency. Oh, all agencies are the same. Therefore, I'm going to punish you for a bad experience I've had with someone else. Forming the dream team. This is a point where I think largely creative agencies kind of try to play it under fast and loose, shouldn't be that way. We're happy to be trusted blindly for creative quality, but we believe it's important for every client to judge the aptitude of those working on their brand firsthand. To this end, we will encourage clients to request and view portfolios of talent that we are proposing for their mandate. We encourage passionate debate between core members of the team and the client during cases of disagreement. Let's say when you think a particular talent is the right fit for a brand, despite the client sensing an inadequacy in their portfolio. Getting briefed, very, very small point once again, but different clients go about briefing in different ways. We encourage them to be over-vulnerable and to over-share more news is always good news. Of course, good writing is valued, so written briefs are loved. I'm sure most of us would agree, but we never say no to an inspiring conversation as a substitute. Because some prefer deeply articulating the problems instead. You're encouraged to debate passionately and settle on a briefing process for both teams. Again, very, very, very small point, but let's honestly ask ourselves how much time do we spend on things like this before getting the work started. Our promise, and this is something which I personally had a very hard time dealing with, but do believe it'll be very valuable. In the agency business, our modest operandi and our Achilles heel both happen to be the things that we do in the name of impressing the client. It always works when it's honest. I think all of us want to impress people who we think are naturally smarter than us, but we often also act dumb to just generally get our way, which we shouldn't. We will aid each one of our talent to form the vocabulary for confrontation and giving clients tough feedback when needed. Next point, again, fairly interesting, fairly recent, working with in-house teams. In recent years, we believe a lot of great agency folks have done some of their best work with clients who are ex-agency or in partnership with their in-house creative teams. We found this growing breed prefers leaner teams since they're creative people themselves, usually, and prefer interfacing directly with other creators. Our team structures need to become more flexible to what serves the best outcome, and your place in a team will only be decided based on the value that you add, not legacy structures. We've also seen this breed of relationships working directly with in-house teams, littered, however, with creative insecurities, duplication of work, confusion in credit culture. As ground rules, it's important to always understand why are we as an external partner in the room? And what specific skills as an external partner are we meant to add? Creative bandwidth alone will no longer be good enough. Poaching from our clients, sensitive topic, but important still. If we believe that a member of our clients team can be a good fit for a role that we're hiring for, we discourage our employees from speaking with them directly or asking our HR team to get in touch. We all kind of work in high-trust environments. Most of us in media and marketing work in high-trust environments, and backdoor poaching can leave a bitter aftertaste. This is a psychological thing. Instead, we're encouraged to write a JD, give our client context, and request them to simply pass their JD on to the member in their team instead. Our bet is that we will be respected for being upfront, and that team member can, this is the most important one, that team member can be sure about not burning a bridge internally if they decide to pursue the role. We encourage our clients also to pursue the same orders of Randy if a similar scenario happened from their end. And finally, the last three points, valuing our own time. This is specifically important to companies that are younger, think, and take a client building seriously. This is one point that we personally feel is what agencies need to do way, way more off in order to create powerful brand stories. Most of us in our founding team right now have a track record of making our clients shine within their organizations and across the industry. Ever so often, we've helped them overcome internal organizational obstacles, strategize how to sell work that we believe in, or desell work that we don't believe in to their bosses, celebrated them in the press, party together when they got promoted, and sulk together when they didn't. Even help set up interviews for their next job. This is how real a good relationship can be. So while we talk about brand building and brand stories so much, we don't talk enough about client building, which is actually what I think external partners are really, really good at. Client building happens and it can't be faked. It happens after you believe in your client's potential as rare marketing talent and root for them to do well in the real world. We believe great marketers make great brands, not the other way around. So we will always want to work with great marketing talent, even if they're not in swanky offices or with the most popular brand. Our ambition is to eventually extend the talent density that we believe our organization internally should have as a staffing metric to our client teams as well. I wanna end this session with a little shout out to the CMO of ClearTrip, Kunal Dubey, who I believe is one of these rare marketing talents, and he's the one who made this ClearTrip ambush hack happen this morning. There are lots of people like Kunal, there are lots of CMOs, brand managers, who are brave, who are rare marketing talent, and if creative partners, external creative partners, especially, look at them and building them as much a part of the charter as building their brands. I think telling powerful brand stories is going to be a cakewalk for all of us put together over the coming years. Thank you so much. You know, there was good lunch, and there was dessert, and there's Nogaditya, good one, refreshing one. You were like an energy drink for everyone. Very good presenter. Please put your hands together for him. And if you have any questions, you can shoot. We have time for him as well. If not, thank you. Please be there, please be there. I request Mr. Varun Papneja, GMN business director, be served to walk up to the stage and thank our speaker, Mr. Aditya. Mr. Varun, thank you so much. And can you all put your hands together please? Thank you Varun, thank you Aditya.