 Good afternoon everyone. I mean really kudos to all of you for braving the Bombay weather and the Bombay rains to honestly be here It wasn't easy. It took me one hour 15 minutes to get here. So yeah Thanks for being with us and thanks for the panel. So yeah, let's kick start the discussion So placing better bets with digital media, you know, that was that was a thought process And you know, we were all racking our brains together how to go about it and it essentially boiled down to you know understanding how the digital marketing domain has transformed over the last five years how it has evolved and You know, we are here to assess essentially about What is the depth and the pace of how digital marketing has grown? So I have a very very esteemed panel here I mean if you are having this discussion five years ago where I mean by digital marketing was strong But growing and evolving versus right now. It's a huge difference and I think It has impacted most Abrams business. So, you know, the pre-covid the post-covid digital marketing era So I'd like Brian to kick start his thoughts. How do you think that, you know, digital marketing has transformed and evolved over the last five years? What's like your take especially pre-covid post-covid? How do you see the things going? Thanks, Raghav. That's a motherhood question. So I'll let him to brief answer As probably the oldest marketer on this panel representing the oldest brand for sure I represent Thomas Cook, which has been in business for 145 years in India. So no question that we are the oldest So, yeah, it's a it's an interesting question I think for a long while now everybody's talked about digital as sort of breathing down the network traditional media. I think that face Went by in a whoosh, especially after the pandemic The pandemic accelerated the whole digital revolution in any case India was leapfrogging over a lot of the typical evolutionary cycles of the I think My mandate when I came into Thomas Cook about 12 years ago was to really try to bridge the traditional to digital Domain from marketing standpoint because typically the brand used to appeal to older Customers more packaged to us and that kind of stuff and we were going into a Individual traveler more experiential kind of environment in obviously the youngest Demography in the world and the fastest growing economy in the world What we've done and I probably am unique in that We do a bit of both Today actually were probably poised equally within traditional and digital and a lot of what we're doing had you know has really moved from about a hundred percent traditional as recently as five six years ago to you know from a Impact point of view probably being about 70 30 70 digital and and that's really coming from the fact that especially post pandemic we've seen a big growth in individual customers versus group customers and Also the average age of our customers actually come down by 10 years Which I think is a telling testimony to what we wanted to do and digital's ability to do that Today, I think nobody colors digital with just one single brush. There's so many layers to it I think we are at the danger of sort of categorizing digital as one Universal thing and I think that's really the complexity of it, but I don't want to take everybody's time So shabu satish awake. I mean you guys have seen hundreds and thousands of brands You don't make that journey and make that transition. You know love to hear your take on it. So, you know, I'll just Just go slightly behind if you look at the entire digital population in India, right? It still stands at about 45% So when I put a lens to that and and see the opportunity I still feel that we still have a 50% opportunity lying in India and that's what we are experiencing in the last few years COVID had its own course and a bliss while we all saw and experienced the course of it. The other side of the story was it actually gave birth to a lot of platforms Which typically might or would have actually grown slower. For example, you know, how fast the entire audio or App Flags, Spotify, Ghana, everything burst right How the entertainment utility segment actually grew? How gaming sector grew? Traditionally when we used to look at planning it used to be Google, Facebook, programmatic and some, you know, top 15 vendors and then some RTB audience while going Now post COVID that entire audience segment has changed. Now we know that, you know, right from a 13 year old to a 25 year old to a 55 to 60 year old as well There is some digital asset which is, which has been accessed probably in the last about three years where there is an opportunity for a market year to go and trap the audience Or probably not trap the wrong word to, you know, at least get it to the audience and serve them the relevant ads. That is the kind of shift that we are seeing of how planning has changed from a four segment to a 25 segment With the birth of new platforms with audience really engaging the time spent on mobile devices and smart TVs, connected TVs are actually increased. So, and then I feel that we are still 55% away from where we should be. That's how I see it. Yeah, I think pretty much summed up by Shibu and but I would just add that when you see a cement brand running ads on digital, you know, it kind of tells you where the world has come from a single digit Percentages that we used to track when I was at Komli to then getting into 20 and 30% to finally crossing the 50% and interestingly 2019 was the first year globally when digital was larger than non digital And that point has just come in India just three years later means that there has been a substantial acceleration that we've seen in India too. Coming to planning, I mean, we kind of see that on digital planning has also become much more dynamic as opposed to a plan that's cast in stone. And like Shibu, you were saying, I mean, going down to hundreds of micro cohorts that you are able to track and tune and change the communication and the Frequencies of communication depending on what stage of the fun of the audience is. I think it finally feels like digital branding is mainstream digital media is mainstream. And we are seeing advertisers drafting it across verticals. We are seeing Offline agencies finally opening up, you know, the ones that were really the laggards, finally having their digital presence, partnering and first of all, building their own digital presence, the Bikaji's of the world getting stronger on digital. I think these are exciting times. I actually have a slightly tangential take on this whole thing, right, which is who's not digital. And I don't think that making digital or celebrating digital the way we are celebrating is doing justice to how well permeated it is in the fabric of society today. And I think post pandemic, though, the major shift that I've seen across brands and, and I'm very new to this space, right? I mean, I've worked in a large agency network for 12 years. I'm a very late entrant to this elite group of founders. I'm only I'm probably the only non founder here, but late entered nonetheless. But I've seen that across the spectrum that now it's all about understanding how at each stage of the brand consumer interaction, we can have an intervention, right? It's no longer about I'm going to first show an ad on TV, build some awareness and then expect them to act on digital, so on and so forth. I think we've been talking about complex journeys for a very long time. I think the journeys are really simple. The idea is that do you know your consumer? If you know your consumer, do you know where they are? And if you know where they are, are you there with the right message at the right time? As simple as that, right? So one thing that has changed post pandemic and Abraham and I were talking about this earlier this morning is that a lot of organizations that were not data aware or were not data sensitive have started to become that, right? I think the role of CMOs have changed. We see new designations like chief growth officer and not just new designations, new responsibilities, right? Where CMOs are not just responsible for how the brand is seen or placed or priced, but also the growth of the business and penetration and expansion and so on and so forth, right? And that puts a greater responsibility on agencies as well. That we don't look at digital as just another medium, but a vehicle to drive business and growth for our clients. I think that's the biggest shift that has happened. The importance of digital in that sense has really gotten elevated. Of course, MaTeC data adoption is still at a very nascent stage in India as compared to many other parts of the world, but at least people have started to ask those questions, right? At least us as agencies have started to feel challenged to do more homework, to learn more, to be able to advise our clients better. That's the biggest shift for me. That's very well put. And coming to your point on marketing officer's growth, role evolving to more of a growth role. How would you rate, because you are interacting with folks every day, the digital maturity of a marketing officer or the marketing teams? If you have to rate it, you see that also has significant, but how open are they to new innovations? You know, in digital, we have things changing left, right and center. You have new innovations, new technologies, new platforms. What is the digital maturity in experimenting that? What is the digital maturity in adopting that? If I can go, yeah. I think CMOs are in a very tricky spot right now, especially if you look at the way the economy is behaving. Yeah, I mean, India is probably a light in a larger canvas of darkness, but that still doesn't mean that the market is not challenging for us. It's very challenging. So even if you had the saviness and the digital maturity, every small decision that you take is about how the business is going to grow or sustain, right? So that's what makes it tricky for a CMO today. The fact that even after two decades of doing digital marketing in India, we still don't have robust end to end measurement of how digital contributes to everyday sales of products getting picked off the shelf or on the website. That's the biggest challenge that a CMO faces, right? A lot of times, that's where the digital saviness and maturity sort of comes into play because there your gut comes onto the table rather than all the signs, right? If you have the in-depth understanding of how digital behaves, if you've done enough experimentation at small scale to see the success and if you build that robust data set and learning, you're able to make that decision far more confidently. I have a slightly different thought. It is not that the maturity in the market is not there. It's the acceptance of probably brand and market years to actually invest in that. For example, I'll just give you very small examples, right? Things like, you know, tracking fraud, right? Things like programmatic or things like automation. I see a reluctance in brands paying the additional cost. They will tell an agency, you guys are charging an agency, the tool cost should actually be a part of that. It will not ever make a difference. It will never stack up. We've done that to ourselves. You realize that, right? I'm sure that everybody would be doing some part of the other in their own way. But I believe that, you know, that is where the maturity is there. The willingness and the openness to actually invest slightly more into these platforms is very, very critical. Having said that, one big change which is also coming in, even when we talk to CMOs or offline guys, they want to understand digital. They want to learn digital because they understand that at some point in time, only mainline or only being a specific platform level might shun their growth. Digitally soon or probably anyways is overtaking. So it's important for them to understand how digital is also going to play a complementary role. And now when we, I am a part of the network group, so I see that it is not a digital war or it is not a, you know, mainline war. It is an integrated war, like he rightly said, right? What is the user journey? What touch point? What platforms are actually going to be the right mix to use? That is what is going to change. One indicator of that maturity that we see is a few years back, branding and performance were looked at as two different things in discontinuity. Branding would be largely offline first and digital would be largely performance. To now, relatively more and more market years evolving to accept that it is a continuum, a brand performance continuum and therefore also the way to look at it as digital as the center stage of the strategy that is driving that brand performance continuum. And somewhere we are using that or we see that as a measure of that maturity of the market here that we see in front of us. If I can just add to sort of build on a lot of points that all of you have made. I think part of the problem is marketers, the big attraction of digital versus traditional and as an older marketer we have seen both, has been or at least in principle was that there is more data and it is more clean and you understand what you are getting for what you are investing. Unfortunately, and I am saying this with some level of responsibility here, a lot of the digital ecosystem and providers and agencies and creators like you unfortunately have not created to marketers like me the kind of transparency or even putting your money where your mouth is from a performance and return on investment point of view. In the traditional world it was fairly easy for a marketer because there were very few choices. There were big ticket choices, you had the money or you didn't have the money and there were very few avenues to put that money in and the response if you will nobody judged you on because it was spray and prayer, right? Today and the whole principle of digital was listen we are giving you accuracy more and more cohorts you know exactly who you are targeting the right mind space you know the right point in time, the right behavior and so on and so forth but unfortunately to my mind maybe I am meeting the wrong people I yet have not met an agency partner who is able to give you the kind of clarity in terms of this is what you are investing, this is what this plan is doing and I am willing to stick my neck out and saying this is the kind of response you are going to get and I think that's a bit sad because I think the whole theory of digital fundamentally was that you knew what you were getting, it was not going to be spray and pray it was going to be the right kind of customer, the right kind of mindset and you know your conversions etc would be a lot more accurate in measurement and today the expectation because of the data driven marketing environment is really that your CEOs and board expects that level of investment and accuracy in terms of reporting what you are getting and I am sorry I am still saying that we still don't have that level of responsibility and clarity not doing a marketing pick but you know when you look at digital end performance the challenge is how are you also tracking the or how are you also doing the measurement while a lot of platforms could be end of the funnel this is also one traditional challenge that you know when brands look at conversion they look at elastic model whereas you would be running your campaigns on about five different platforms and there could be an assisted conversion that is leading to your direct or your organic where brand should ideally do is understand where are we spending what is the attribution which is coming on each of them and look at a like we typically try and explain the concept of e-business ROAS instead of a platform level ROAS while the platform level ROAS can go up and down traditionally what you have to look at is how is basically we have a planning principle of say about a 60, 30, 20 and 10 where 60 would be performance about 20 would be always on kind of a it could be brand it could be performance or it could be higher so we campaigns then there is a 10% which is pure pure campaigns that are experimental so the last 10% is absolutely something new which actually gives probably an opportunity for the brand and the agency to try out at least an experimental platform and see what is the impact of that All in all what I'm coming to is measurement and attribution has to be looked at that is when you will be able to make sense of the whole marketing spend that you are doing again not an fetch but happy to look at it I mean there is no simple answer to that exactly what Shivu said right and I've personally worked with brands of all scales from startups from e-commerce to the Unilevers and PNGs of the world the debate is constant Abram right and the fact that I started my journey 20 years ago I've seen the sort of the nascent digital era as well and I've been fortunate to work with a lot of big brands in the traditional space as well what brands used to do by default is pay a lot of attention to product pricing placement and looked at media purely from a media lens at one point of time right now when digital came we said oh yeah all touch points available everything is measurable everything is cheaper that's where we started killing it sort of stay with me for a bit that's where we started killing it because we never talked about measurement at all right we don't have the nielsen's of the world tracking sales for example that's part of what I'm referring to it has to develop a way to credibly measure value for money invested and put a credible bet and as a provider service provider be willing to put your money away more you know 50 here, 20 here, 30 here and I think you'll get this that's the way the traditional media planning was I'm sorry meaning I'm outnumbered here I recognize that I'm saying it therefore with some level of responsibility like I said it's good to have this back and forth I think it's important there's a second part to it right which is the moment we started shifting to a digital ecosystem the responsibility on the brand side also multiplied which is my website functioning correctly do I have the entire analytics in place to ensure that I'm able to optimize the entire user journey and therefore to Shibu's point am I able to actually measure attribution accurately now all of that is an added investment which used to happen like I said by default saying how is my retail placement going to be how am I going to do all of that that used to be a task that the brands took upon themselves now it's just about largely I'm not brushing the entire industry with one brush stroke but it's largely about oh I've got a nice functional website and that's good enough why aren't you able to generate leads for me but there are a lot of cases like that but I think there's a lot of time and resource investment that's required to ensure that that measurement is effective that's one part of it the second is yes I completely agree with you that there are the largest digital platforms today till today have not taken steps to make data and measurement available transparently and that's a common challenge that agencies and clients both face I think the problem is there's still effort to sell a plan rather than sell the result I'm saying finally what is the marketer looking for the marketer is saying hey listen I've got X resource and I want Y result finally you want a partner who is saying hey listen I'll help you achieve Y result and I'll tell you the way to do it and I'm willing to give you a certain amount of confidence by sticking my neck out with you because there's no question the CMO's neck is on the block and because that's what the CEO of MD is going to do but you still don't have that level of resonance or confidence or accuracy or measurement for that kind of decision making and I think that's really where a partnership opportunity lies in the ability to be able to you know present the data in a convincing way fix the attribution because typically what happens is any agency or partner that comes in will say everything that the previous partner did was wrong the first three months are going to be about fixing that right but that's you know that's one quarter of results you can't afford that No fairly, Satish please I think the challenge is definitely there I mean I think the challenge is for real but I think it's also a function of how open the market is to investing in certain experiments to try out those experiments and then say that looks like this thing is working before I scale it up sometimes we see that I mean there is definitely a segment of marketers that are much more open much more experimental to give it a test first and then say that yeah looks like this is working and also investing in the measurement and modeling around it and so we see that the methodologies exist whether it's about measuring incrementality as opposed to last touch attribution which I think is the bane of the industry last touch has really killed you know for a long period of time the real impact that's coming through and so marketers who are much more open are looking at alternative methodologies around incrementality match market testing looking at a more holistic way of attribution and sometimes just testing it out in a few test markets first and then we have seen such marketers then seeing the benefits of it and actually becoming the ones who are endorsing the investments in digital even if it was not messily entirely measurable in the traditional context of last touch I think that's very fair I think two three points coming out from the discussion very clearly obviously there's no single universal tracking platform that can work across the board I think a lot of people are working on it still preliminary results some small test trial but yeah I don't think I think we are very far away from that dream stage across web desktop app everything might be going further away from it because of the post IDFA work yeah exactly exactly Google and Facebook have their own thoughts to it so really I don't see it happening in the immediate future and second is that on the digital maturity point is that yes people are getting mature in terms of they understand it in digital they want to spend on digital and coming to your point we make that investment in analytics if that's not supported that investment in tracking that investment in optimization if that's not supported definitely it will be a challenge but it runs to your point I think fairly put I mean and obviously bearing part of the responsibility as part of the group that definitely need to stick our necks more out so definitely we're there I think it's almost there and we go on a lot of results we go on a lot of things but yeah definitely I think more needs to be done if folks are still not fully convinced really understand that so just moving on from here so definitely this traditional on which investment is going take Thomas Cook's example 70-30 you're still doing offline you're still doing online but how are you convincing the advertisers or how are you as an advertiser convinced that I am able to follow the user offline to online or online to offline how are you bridging that journey that all my spends or all my planning or all my bets that I'm going to place are actually in correlation and it's not like two independent plans working together actually the last few years we've actually taken the journey from some digital to digital first to only digital so today most of our large campaigns are only digital they're being planned digital from inception so and that's a good thing and like I said I just wish there was a lot more clarity in terms of how to plan those campaigns because today a lot of it's still being taken on the basis of some data and some gut it's not that marketers aren't using their guts we've been doing it for years and stuff like that but you sort of expect and the boardroom expects as well that when you present a marketing plan today you're saying digital plan is going to have that level of accuracy so that's one point I won't belabor it because I made that point I think the other parts also today are seeing a growing and I was just on a panel a few days ago on connected TV and could that be the next big thing I think theoretically it could be especially for a category like ours because co-viewing is critical for the purchase of our category family viewing definitely behaviorally increases the opportunity of sale of course large screen you know good audio etc helps sell the travel experience as well but unfortunately the result in terms of response we still don't have that bridge of how do you get a response rate from connected TV so I think in every digital subset of digital media I think there is an opportunity to sort of straddle the one weakness that aspect has and I'm just using connected TV as an example great advantages big screen, big audio co-viewing etc and that ownership is growing and from a high value category like ours that's the only audience I'm interested in but you know there's still a technology slash content cap of capturing response and getting being able to measure it so I think what would be useful for this audience is to really think about each of these aspects of digital media and marketing and what's that one weakness that is a marketer you know people like us are facing that you can address because if you can come to me the solution like that I'd be with you right I'd invest with you and that's one sort of need so I see it in three on three tracks but before that so there is an online jewellery brand that sells 90% offline and online is primarily like a showroom and 10% sales happen through online but they have been always on player investing in the entire full funnel paradigm and measuring and seeing those results and we see it in three you know there are three things that I want to add here number one for brands that are offline as well so long as there is certain online touch point that they have one way is to look at and do the audience analysis audience intelligence without necessarily having to buy media that's one of the powers that technology offers today where you can do audience discovery understand who your audiences really are so long as you have some digital touch points of that audience it could even be their offline data phone number, email IDs as well or it could be the digital touch points that you may have that's the audience discovery bit and that then influence the media planning that you would be doing or media buying that you would be doing the second part is when one is actually running media investments and running campaigns looking at those at a very granular cohort level to understand which cohorts are really responding how to which campaign and at what stage of the funnel that today is achievable online by not looking at that one media plan in monolith but breaking it down into hundreds and thousands of possibilities number three is the measurement part which is which the way we see it is at like four different sections in terms of the brand lift that you see in terms of how that translated into the search lift for the brand both in relative and absolute terms how it translated to the traffic that came to the website or audio digital touch points you had and measuring the quality of that and finally looking at how that translated into the overall conversion lift even if your entire conversion was offline irrespective of that so I would say that these three prongs have become the cornerstone of how we are seeing market is adopting on digital just like to add a few points rather than starting a parallel track being a part of the network company now we I definitely see a change of congratulations now we are also seeing that like how they started right of how the audience planning happens now the audience planning is not thought from a digital or from a traditional media it is looked up as audience as a whole and their patterns their behaviors well it could be on digital or it could be on mainline as well that is how I think brand should approach it right now now since we are an integrated agency we look at that holistically now this is the audience, this is the persona this is what they would be doing on a TV this is what they would be doing on a digital this is what they would be doing probably on a connected TV that's how the audience discovery happens and again when you come to the planning there are brands which are like digital first there are brands which are 70, 30, 60, 40 and then there are brands which are also 90, 10 how do you measure each of them we are working on a brand something similar like what you just mentioned where the sales primarily happens offline because there is always a touch and feel to it there the measurement is completely different we actually look at a footfall there there are platforms where it actually helps you measure online to offline and there are integrated ways to also do it right you put on a coupon code, you do a QR code you just track that audience and it's all about building that measurability of how are you able to connect all the channels together that's why you look at the question that is how I would be also looking at how are probably traditional brands are also looking at digital and how digital plus integrated or probably digital plus traditional outcomes can be measured I completely echo that Shabu in fact CX or customer experience is the core of our framework as well and online to offline to online or offline to online to offline are happening all the time at a very fundamental level I think the discoverability of the brand has to be ensured before you start spending money on media and start expecting results like the point that I made earlier as well I mean I've got a store front but am I discoverable in the right way across platforms as well am I out there with the right message am I when I'm communicating a certain ad on TV are all of my other touch points coherent or am I incoherent because the moment that happens whether it is somebody watching an ad on television and they happen to go on to your website and they can't connect with what they saw there and what they see on the website and they walk into the store and they have they have a completely different experience every experience is broken I mean there are measurement solutions that are everywhere but I think the most challenge is that they're all distinct data sets they're not a common data set which tells you that the same person TV is the same person who's responding on digital and so on and so forth there are a lot of indirect correlations happening but in the absence of nothing there is something but all of those measures and solutions are in place not going to make a pitch here but there is a product coming up very soon which is very different from audio printer, fingerprinting, watermarking etc which will also solve that TV to digital sort of a behavior a globally patented product which would all be hearing about that very soon but until that happens let's at least ensure that that small percentage of media investment that needs to go behind measurement we are all able to do that and to Satish's point earlier conduct small experiments it has never been done for your brand conduct small experiments, take out 5%, 10% try it out for a month 2 months, sorry not a month 2 months, you don't get anything in a month try it out for 2 months establish some data and then start scaling it up Fair point, fair point I think we are starting our last 5 minutes of discussion and I am pretty sure the audience is also very keen in understanding some journeys that you personally guided and you have been part of that journey, I mean your company was in business before there was marketing forget digital marketing I really want to understand from your experiences some brand stories where we have guided the traditional what were the issues, some roadblocks how did the brands take it what was their take when they started versus what is their take right now the best case study I can talk about from the category in the brand that I represent is dealing with a 2.5 year period called the pandemic travel was down to zero category itself forget brand and you obviously had to keep the brand present, people engaged obviously we had taken money for people to travel when the lockdown happened so we had to use marketing in a way to build confidence because this was on the heels of one of our competitors called Cox and Kings going under our erstwhile parent Thomas Koch which we had a brand name in the UK going bankrupt and so on so on the heels of that the pandemic happened so we had to reassure those customers that they were going bankrupt and the money was safe and keeping them engaged keeping our partners engaged our vendors engaged everybody engaged a very very different kind of experience from marketer like me because typically it's about assuming some level of category demand and building brand demand this was the first time when you had zero category demand forget brand demand so I think digital was really crucial in terms of keeping not just employees engaged customers confidence up and being able to bounce back the way we have with the best profits we've had in a decade coming out of the pandemic within a year of the pandemic so I think meaning I'm a believer looking forward to doing a lot more I'll tell you in the case of one of the clients that we work with we work with Bislari as a brand and I remember when we started speaking to them in Covid they had just developed a website and their idea was to move the additionally water buying journey into online so you would ideally call a retailer and you would ask for a Bislari they wanted to change that pattern they wanted to build the subscription model and we have actually seen and we have lived the journey with them while we spoke about media we spoke about audiences something that we really missed out was also the customer engagement it is not only about acquiring and building your first conversion it is also about how do you influence the repeat conversions how do you influence people who have come experience the product they have probably done an atto card but they have not converted so what we also did for them was right from changing or adding inputs to the UX in terms of where the customer is coming what are the hot spots on the website, where are they clicking where are they not clicking, how to do the product placement to actually actively tracking the entire journey running modeling campaigns on paid on acquisition helping them in the user retention there was also we went a little extra mile to also help them optimize the ERP in terms of when there are say probably three trucks which are going out how do you optimize to make sure that they are delivering best what are the best routes that they are taking so when you look at a client and look at it from a complete 360 degree while you could be solving some of the problems which is not under your scope eventually what it will help you in is to probably help you better in terms of media spends get better add your scope additionally we have seen that transformation happening for them right from where they were about three years back to where they are right now the entire company believes that digital is going to is driving better results every single year and so the story that I would want to end up with is media audiences media great but also look at the second segment consumer from a retention perspective find out channels which will actually convert when you are there is no point in just bombarding them with messages right a lot of actually brands do that there are three point notification that is being sent every time they don't track how many people are actually opening the notification which platforms and how do we adapt to that those are the things that marketers should also change so this is a case study about Holodok which is Indonesia's largest health tech company today but sometime in 2021 around May June that when we were asked to work with them prior to that they had built like a market leadership over a year's time frame but just around June 21 they were losing that leadership to the number two player which was a distant number two but that was now closing in and there was of course the benefit of timing where the market years data science team had figured out that an unfortunate Covid Delta wave was going to hit Indonesia 25 days later so of course an unfortunate but great timing from a marketing standpoint and at that point in fact Holodok was running a TV campaign and that was a not driving lift either because as a brand it's still it has its own niche audience right it's a health tech app at the end of the day and you're trying to alter people's behavior to order medicines online and also pharma consultation and stuff like that and so TV was paused it came to digital it was planned at an extremely granular cohort level to really understand which cohorts are the ones that are likely to change their behavior or that are responding better and so it's not like planned in advance it's like everything being dynamic and when the Covid wave did hit Indonesia over those eight weeks they had a hockey curve growth massive growth in the new customer activations, transactions became the number one app on the app store or Facebook, WhatsApp and just about anything else and for the Covid alone even the other competition would have got benefited which was not the case and the best part was the sustainance the campaign then continued even later had a fractional spend and what was earlier being done when the third Covid wave hit Indonesia this brand had a natural peak coming in while the competition was nowhere and post Covid all these three waves the brand has established a steady new baseline completely that's far higher than wherever the competition exists in fact the competition is almost like decimated so this is a very interesting case study of digital planned it was executed at a very granular level of course a great timing but somewhere really beating TV for a brand like RADOT I'll actually talk about two categories one from my past experience which is FMCG brands that are amorphous impulse driven so on and so forth where the whole investment on digital is under question mark perpetually so till date I'm grateful to the marketing leaders who sat in those organizations and had the vision that if my audience is out there that's where I need to be and I will start investing in that it started with a simple very simple objective of if I have my own first party data can I drive media more efficiently it literally started with something that simple and yes multi-touch attribution analytics modeling all of that was done throughout the consistent efforts for about almost a year to the extent that owning the first party data not only led to 30 to 40% efficiency in media but multiple times growth in their engagement levels the overall correlation to when brand communicated online to when sales uplifted at a retail all of those were established and some of those case studies are available because they won awards in a lot of places talking about my current agency and the work we're doing with a brand called a water purifier brand called AO Smith now again we've woven the digital touch points across now this is also a category which is heavily trade dependent so there is an entire intervention that happens with trade every time a new product is put out there they also have they're also on the journey of that entire full end to end integration between retail and e-commerce so they have the challenge of different SKUs being available in retail and different SKUs being available online so trade has to be educated differently for responding to both because people who are exposed to the brand online will look for something else people who walk in the store will see something else so all of those aspects of the entire customer experience have been woven into it all those data points collated analyzed fed back into the system fed into media to start optimizing for every aspect of the campaign whether it's something we're driving for e-commerce something we're driving towards retail in fact on e-commerce AO Smith despite being a challenge of brand one of the leading e-commerce platforms has called it as the best performing brand because of the work we've been able to do with all these data points bringing customers from outside counter to what e-commerce platforms ask you to do bringing customers from outside the platform to drive conversions on the platform that's pretty amazing and thanks for sharing those insights and those examples I think that was really enriching for me personally also so guys yeah in the interest of time we don't want to delay everyone's lunch so we'll be wrapping up pretty soon but just in concluding thoughts I think the evolution from traditional to digital has been just amazing I've been personally in the industry for the last 10 years what I used to do 10 years ago 7 years ago 5 years ago 3 years ago and today it's very different I mean if Charles Darwin was alive he would have been proud of us how crazily that we have evolved I mean that's what I would like to say and yeah thanks a lot for the panel thanks a lot for the audience being very patient thank you thank you