 We'll have, in fact, with us Mr. Nawal Ahuja, who's the co-founder and director of Exchange for Media Group, who will be spearheading this exciting session for all of us. So, on that note, ladies and gentlemen, firstly, if you can please help me welcome on stage Mr. Nawal Ahuja, the co-founder and director of Exchange for Media Group. Thank you, Gavya. Thank you for staying back on such a rainy day. And I hope over the next 30, 40 minutes or so, you'll find it worthwhile that you all stayed back. I have a very special guest with me who needs no introduction. I'm sure you've seen his name on the agenda already. Please give a very big round of applause to none other than Prasoon Joshi, who's with us today, the current chairman of CBFC and a fantastic creative genius of our country. Thank you, Prasoon Bhai, for being here. Of course, you won't be surprised if I told you it took two hours for him to come from BKC to this venue. He's been on the road last two and a half hours. He got delayed. His session was originally scheduled to start at 3 o'clock. I know he does not need any introduction, but just to contextualize our talk, I'd like to read out a few nuggets about Prasoon Bhai's life's journey and what he's done so far. As a lot of you would know already, he's a national award winner and acclaimed industry leader. Prasoon exemplifies the rare breed of creativity and leadership. And I don't know how many of you actually know this. Prasoon Joshi went to IMT in Ghaziabad. He studied MBA there, and we will talk about that later as the chat goes on. And he also, I was reading on his website yesterday. He wrote his first poetry book when he was 17, and I don't know. I don't even remember what I was doing when I was 17. Most likely, you know, video gaming with a friend or chasing girls. And advertising and communication icon who's built mega brands, a writer who's been honored with prestigious national award by the president of India. He also has garnered glory at the international awards like Cannes, DNAD and Plethora of others. I'm sure many of you still remember that in 2015, his very famous, happy and creative was awarded as the top global ad of all time, top 20 global ads of all time by the gun report. And that, I mean, that itself is a huge achievement if you don't count the others. As a chairman of McCann World Group, Asia Pacific, he's credited with marrying creativity with scale and giving McCann's work in India a distinct cultural edge, making it a power house that has had the pulse of the market and the consumer. His work for mainstream brands like Coca-Cola, MasterCard, Johnson & Johnson, Puffetti, Nestle, Maggie and national ones like Dabur, Britannia and more is well-recognized. Current campaigns that bear prasoon's indelible mark are Dettol, Banega, Swatch, India, Incredible India, UP Tourism Branding and Mission Pani for Reket bin Kizer. Content creation for brands in the music space for Coca-Cola or social projects like malnutrition, nutrition, polio eradication, women empowerment, ministry of tourism, Swatch, Bharat, Avyaan have all won accolades and found deep and powerful consumer connect. His creativity as a writer poet permeates the arena of celebrated Indian feature films where he's celebrated an award-winning song and screenwriter. Through his writing and films like Tarez Amipur, Rangde Basanti, Bhagmil Ka Bhaag, Nirja and Manikarnika, he has rekindled the faith that one can give constructive direction to the society through high-caliber work in popular genre. His poems in various issues have found unique connection with the consciousness of the country. Prasoon is also a columnist writing on branding and social issues and leading business and daily publications. He has authored five books. Now I did not know that. As I said, the first one was at 17 and his latest thinking allowed, released recently in January this year. Designated a young global reader by the World Economic Forum, Prasoon has also been conferred the prestigious Padma Award by the President of India. Through his multi-faceted pursuits and content creation across the fields of poetry, cinema, advertising and music, he has positively impacted the public consciousness and has emerged as an iconic socio-cultural voice that resonates across the limits. So again, a very big round. Please give a big round round of hand to Prasoon for being here on a day like today. Prasoon, let me start with the basics. We have gathered here today to discuss content and content curation and you being in that domain, that industry, that business for over two decades now. The shape of content from when you started as a creative person and you continue to be a creative person, today what it is, it has significantly changed. Today you talk to content guys and they will tell you what data and analytics is. When you started young in the creative business, creativity meant something else. We know the differences. What are the common things that creativity and content still have today? Thank you for being here and thank you for that embarrassing introduction. While you were talking, I certainly started thinking about the ads we used to do, and even before my time in Durdarshan era, you could easily call those ads content because people looked forward to those ads as a piece of entertainment. They were perceived something other than ads. They were not out and out ads. People used to actually wait. Some of the people felt that the ads were more entertaining than the actual programs. So they were short stories, jingles, jokes. People consumed them as piece of entertainment, not merely piece of information. Because there was a scarcity of entertainment at that time. Very little was available, especially in audiovisual. Very little was available. So even Bhulla jana isi balb lana, child also sang with it. Or a joke which you saw on television in form of a... And when I got attracted, see I was writing much earlier than, you know, I was writing poetry, I was writing short stories, and then I happened to do, you know, I realized it was a 17-year, I realized very early that, you know, I didn't, my father, normally families, parents have to drill it in your head that listen, your guitar will not give you, you know, your living. You won't be able to earn from it. But I didn't need that. So I ended up doing my management and realized that there is something called advertising. What attracted me to this profession at the time, that we were writing short stories. We were writing content. Actually, when you say content, it's how you define content. The question is how you define content. If you define advertising as a very narrowly, then you would be able to distinguish between the two and differentiate. But if you don't narrowly define, then I don't find anything, you know, unusual about it. Because I've been doing it. I've been doing songs like Coke Studio. What do you call it? Content? Advertising? I mean, being part of Coke Studio for some time. And it's, for me, content. So I think very easily we, if you compartmentalize them, you start saying that this is content, this is advertising, this is traditional advertising. What is traditional advertising? What is modern advertising? Whatever is working today is advertising. You are supposed to, how you define the profession is also important. Tell me, that's a very good point. I remember reading somewhere that last year you said that you've never seen ads and ads, but as short form content. And today content is also being built as advertising. You go to a client. The client wants you to do content as an agency and not just create 30 seconds for them. What does this do to the creative business? For somebody like you who's grown up doing short stories and curating content, it might come naturally. But for a young creative director, a young copywriter who was taught in his creative school to write 30 second ads, who is now being told by the client to create 30 minute fiction shows. Is it pitting the content industry against the people in the creative industry? Is the creative industry geared up to curate content the way clients are expecting? You're forgetting one thing. Even if you have a great content, you will need to advertise the content. So after advertising, you will need it for content itself. Today you are saying content is in contradiction with advertising. But content itself would require advertising. So how will you take content to people? So what you call advertising is a 30 second commercial. Because if you narrowly define advertising, then content will become segregated. But if you do not narrowly define it, then even product placement in films which you used to do earlier, that was also advertising. I never saw it differently. I never saw a song like Banega Swachh India when we were doing that. The anthem which I wrote. I wrote three different anthems for different people. One I wrote is Swachh Bharat Kairadha, which is all Kudewali Gharia Mabhastha. That's for the government. And then I did this Banega Swachh India which with Indian Ocean did for it all. Now what you call it? You call it content, call it ad. For me, I never define ads like Thanna Matlab, Coca-Cola series of ads. We never looked at the time and the client was very kind to tell us that whatever time you require, whether it's 30 seconds, 40 seconds, 80 seconds, doesn't matter. So as far as you know, narrowly defined it, I would not find that content is in contradiction with advertising and I do not find that segregation. The biggest thing you see, look at the film star today. There was a mystique to the film star earlier. And I'm drawing a parallel between a film star and a brand here just to make you understand. There was a mystique to the film star. You never saw your film star other than the film you watched. You went there, you didn't know what his life would be like, how he would be in everyday life. You saw the person larger than life on the screen in awe. You used to look up to that. Now you have a small screen and you're looking down. Now this changed the equation. Looking up like that in awe versus looking down. Now also the opportunities this film star has with you to interact. There is a stick talk video has come. There is some YouTube videos going on, some television news happening. Suddenly the mystique has ended, a relationship has got redefined. Brands also had very much this kind of relationship with the consumer. Brands only talked through ads. Once they would come to talk to you and they would talk through ads. And that is the representation of the old world. Where there was an active performer, active advertiser and a passive audience. What the reality of today is, you've got an active performer and an active audience. Now this active performer and active audience is possible because of the connectivity we have. The internet, the social media. You have active performer and active audience. Immediately you start getting feedback. So it's like a live performance. It's more like the tribal age earlier we had. Where nobody performed for nobody. It was a collective always if you look at tribal dances. And please go in case if you can find some videos of tribal dances. There is not one condescending performer out there. This is somewhere in between it happened that condescension entered art. Where you said I am better than you, you better listen to me. I'm better performer than you, you sit, I will dance. This is not how humans behaved earlier. Human by basic nature create art collectively. The tribal dances and folk art has a lot of collective participation. On this spot creation happens, lines are written, dance steps are done. Two people will sit, two people will get up. Now that's exactly what is getting replicated today. You see in performance through social media and today's stars are facing that. That they have to be ready to be all the time watched in their various mudras and various avatars. They are always available there as our brand is. The brand is similar. Brand is out for scrutiny. Brand is coming out in various avatars and forms. If you are not comfortable with this reality, you will not be able to embrace content. You will have to embrace content because there are various. So don't be scared that I will lose my mystique. Yes, you will lose your mystique, but you will develop a very good relationship. You have to know how to present yourself in various avatars of yours. Those are understood well if you have understanding of content. That's a good point. I want to ask you from the brand side. There was an era when 60-second commercials used to be quite common. Then it came down to 30 seconds. That 30 seconds gradually, thanks to YouTube, became 10 seconds. And then that further got filtered down to 6 seconds. The commercials, I mean. Today we live in an era where TikTok content videos are 6 seconds. And the ad videos, God knows, are becoming 2 seconds and 3 seconds and so on and so forth. What does it do to brand building? Because the traditional theories of brand building are all being kind of torn apart by this increasing short duration, attention span, social media. And brands have to write that, you know, bandwagon, there is no choice. But is it possible to build a brand today when you're doing 2, 2, 3, 3 seconds commercials and on top of that, given so much fragmentation? You know, I was watching in the morning, Pam Moore spoke. She's the owner of marketing nuts. She was talking about how daily YouTube is serving some 1.7 billion minutes of content worldwide. What does it do to brand building? If you do a 3-second commercial and you are one out of, you know, what, 300 or so? Look, it's badazmi. A mother says to her son, today I'm making chola, come quickly. Make your favorite chola. That used to happen in the olden times. I would quickly pack up from the office and reach home early. Mom made chola, eat quickly. I was very hungry. I skipped lunch from the day. Today, the guy has snacked all through. You've been snacking. He's had wada pao, he's had pizza, he's had burger. He's had swiggy, ordered three times. By the time he reached home, he opened the door. Mom says, I'm going to eat chola tomorrow. Don't listen to me today. I'm going to take him to the fridge. I'll keep him in the fridge. Let's see him tomorrow morning. I'll have him for breakfast. Now, this is what is an overdose of content today. That Friday, waiting for a film. Friday, we remember that any movie we watched, if there were only one or two theaters, we would have to watch any movie. You don't know which film it is, but moving picture with dialogues and songs is a novelty. Now, that chola and parallel to that, the Friday movie now is competing with the whole day of snacking. Now, the snacking which is happening with content is creating indigestion. Yes, there are challenges. Of course, there are challenges. Yes, the wiring of the human mind has also changed. I think today's generation wants things faster, the way they write it. But let's not forget. We also had haiku's earlier. It's not that haiku was not an art form. In India, where there were... In Hindi, there is a long poem. There is a whole book on one thing. There is only one poem. There is only one thing. Look at the tears of Jai Shankar Prasad, look at the earnings. In this way, you know, there were various writers. But at the same time, there were Raheem's Dhoe too. There were Kabir's Dhoe too. Two lines. In two lines, there was essence and they were fabulous and very powerful pieces of poetry. A lot of people wrote in that era, Dhoa. Dhoa was a form of short form of writing. So, can't there be brand-building in short form? I don't believe that. It is possible. What they are saying is very important. And what that thought is, is it suitable to be delivered in that form, in the capsule form? Not everything can be delivered. Certain thoughts which would require that kind of emotion. For example, a relationship between a mom and son or a romantic moment which requires a certain portrayal, a certain, a song which is, you know, a little lingering, has a lingering effect. Its beats are slower. The song I wrote in your hand is my hand. It can be said in the same way. It can't be said as a part of fun. So, if I write a part of fun, I remember we debated a lot whether it was understood or not, but that capsule of fun became very popular after I wrote that. Nobody thought I would become contemporary, but it became contemporary after that. So, that one coinage can deliver that. But if I stay in your hand, what is in your hand? My hand. Then what? All the heaven is with me. This is its need. It is the need for that emotion that you write it like that. And that's why the form would be required like that. So, can things be said in... So, cut a long chase. In a small form, can you build brands? Yes. Can you deliver information? Yes. Of a certain kind. Of a certain kind of emotion. Yes, you can build that. Yes, for something, still, while we are talking about and being in advertising agency, I can tell you so many long films we are doing today. We never had an opportunity. Our creative guys are having a ball these days because the digital media releases cheaper than television programming. So, they are films which are four-minutes, three-minutes, which we never saw in advertising. You know, maybe in countries where media is cheaper like Sri Lanka and all. When I go and work there and I see, yes, they are making one-and-a-half, two-minutes films there. But in India, everything was 30 seconds. In the West also, 30 seconds. But today, digital media is also allowing you to tell short stories. And those are required to deliver certain emotions and to build certain brands. Because, see, if you narrowly will see, again I am saying, you will have to deploy your forces. You will have to. Today, agility is very important. If you are looking for a formula, if you are looking for an algorithm which will crack it for you, that algorithm will also have to constantly update itself. AI will also have to be... See, AI is the future. A lot of AI will be done. Even in the world of script writing where I dabbled into. You know the recent phenomena is this AI software called Benjamin which has been registered as a writer. Now Benjamin has already delivered two scripts. So in the future, you will see a lot of AI scripts which will come out. Again, what kind of scripts will come from AI? When you have a formulaic solution, it will come out. But I give you an example. I go to attend a funeral of someone and tell you a difference between AI's creativity and the human creativity. Now you go to attend a funeral and I stand next to the funeral pyre of somebody, some relative or some friend's family. I can see what is happening around me. I can smell the flesh and the burning smell of the flesh also. Not that I am going to share how I feel about this burning smell but something that smell is there in my subconscious. It might even smell like some burning flesh or some roasted meat. Those things are happening in me. Those are called first-hand experiences. I come back and I write a poem about this experience. This poem is available to AI too as a data. But my multiple and minute nuanced experiences which have gone into my every cell, they are not. See, this experience is not responsible for producing one piece of poem or one piece of song or one piece of story. It is capable of producing multiple stories because this is sensorially being consumed by me. So that sensorial consumption which has happened to me, which happens to a human anatomy and human mind, is not available. Its production in the second-hand information is available. So that difference will always be there between the way AI will approach creativity and the way humans will approach creativity. That's a good point. In fact, I wanted to ask you a follow-up question. Tell us practically how is data analytics changing the role of a creative director? Somebody who's writing scripts, somebody who's writing advertising. And then on the other hand, you have platforms like YouTube where so much of AI, data analytics is also doing that. So for a creative director today, how is his life changing? How is his or her life changing? Given that there is so much data and analytics around us. Oh, it helps. In fact, it helps precision. It's like... I want to give you a poem. So generally, I'll judge my audience. I'll say what kind of people are sitting here. How much Hindi they know. How much they understand the commuter. What kind of things they will understand. And I will choose a poem like that. Now I will choose the poem. I will take the decision based on this so that everyone understands it. Okay? It's possible that I use a little more difficult language in which I understand the nuance. Don't listen. I feel that I need to appeal to everyone here. Some people would know the language less. Some people will learn more into it. But suddenly I've been told, you're sitting with five budding poets who all write well. My choice will change. The selection I will make will change. That's what data does to you as a creative person. You know what? If you can target, you can be more nuanced in your writing and your creation. If you know your target audience well, you're not trying to appeal to everyone. It's not a mass you're going. You're going selective. And if you're going selective, your nuance will increase. Your approach will become more intricate. And that's what a creative person should understand from data. You should not fear data. You should befriend it. You should not fear AI. You should defend it. Because eventually I think the human mind has immense capability. As far as technology is your slave, the world will be fine. The fear is when you fall slave to the technology. So human mind does not have to become lazy to always understand. You have to proceed. You have to lead the AI and technology in a direction which is for human good. Because human good, see AI's problem would always be what is the anchoring of AI? See the human civilization is anchored in some human good. We are anchored in a value system. When you are faced with a situation, what decision should I take? We say listen to your conscience. So where is the conscience of AI? AI does not have a conscience. AI is very ruthless. AI is dry. Humans have conscience. If you have to take a decision in the morning, your mother is not well and there is a presentation. I'm sure that everybody in this room will say there's no question of debate. I'm going to take my mother to the hospital to help with everything else. Where does this power come from? This power comes from conscience. AI will always have the problem. When the decision is left to AI, where is AI anchored will always be a question. Humans are anchored spiritually, emotionally, in a society, in a human good, and that collective anchoring is what gives us the direction. So as far as that human is leading AI or leading technology, we are in good hands. Absolutely. No denial about that. I mean, there's no choice but not to fear technology. Tell me, let me move to a slightly different topic. Over the last few years, you've also been very deeply involved with a lot of political advertising that's been going around. How do you see political advertising as the role content has played in that? And I say this because if you look at the current incumbent, look at, for example, our prime minister who's himself such an important and popular face of the party and the government, what do you do when you sit down and create advertising for a party like that, which on the sheer force of a personality is able to steamroll opposition, win elections. So where does the role of political advertising come in and what is the role of content within that piece? Good thing about the current regime and current people is that they don't have a baggage. So they very clearly are ready to listen to anything which works. So it's an open source thing for them. It could be a song, it could be a joke, it could be anything. So the understanding of what content world is instinctively understood very well because you don't have a X number of campaigns to fall back and say, oh, in that election that worked and that election, so we should go that way. See, sometimes what happens is you have to unlearn. A lot of successful brands have to unlearn and reinvent. That baggage not being there, I think their understanding of the content and how content works has been pretty much there. So they have used content from open source beautifully and in this entire world which is open source and you're going to allow, and I'm sure you're going to ask me this question where do advertising agencies see themselves tomorrow in this? See, as far as advertising agencies are ready to collaborate. See, tomorrow's model is collaborative model. A lot of things will simultaneously happen and you understand what your brand, see today consumer wants, consumer is changing their preferences very fast. They are evaluating things themselves and they are deciding, no, last time I used this, this time I'm going to use that. They are very experimental. They are very experimentative. There are also a lot of information available. So they are changing their mind very fast. Companies are also redefining themselves. From Apple you become Apple Inc. You've seen that how companies have redefined their domain where they function. They are broad basing themselves. They are assimilating. In that, I think more than the brand, I think it's the company which breaks that brand responsible. The company's raison d'artre, the company's philosophy is very, very important. What do you see yourself as? Your principles are very, very important. See, tomorrow's world is so much crowded with so many brands together. Only the ones which have a deeper connect with the consumer, deeper connect, which they might not be able to articulate but instinctively go towards other brands which will work. So what will an agency do? Agency would truly be a custodian of that brand. So that deeper connect is ensured. You might go and play in the world. You play openly in the world. But somewhere, you fly like a kite whose door is in someone's hand. Don't fly like a bird who sometimes sits on someone's roof. So like a kite, you have to fly a kite. And we have very good examples of what you're trying to say in some of the campaigns you've done with Rekid bin Keezer for brands like Dital and some of those brands and you know how... I wrote this line called Dital ka Dhula. Now, coming from the cultural insight. So when I was presenting to the client, I said that, can we be the last word? Last word. What do you think of yourself as? Dital ka Dhula? We say... What do you think of yourself as? XYZ. Raja Harishant. Everything has a last word. Can we be the last word in hygiene? And that's where Dital ka Dhula came and we started working. It's not only about pronouncing that line. See, in Thanda Matlab Kokala, it's the same thing. Not trying to pronounce it again and again. It's about living up to it. Nothing else is Thanda Matlab Kokala. Dital ka Dhula is being the last word in that category. So how do we become the last word? You have to live up to it. So we went to the social. We saw honorable prime ministers campaign on Swachh Bharat. We thought it's right up our alley. Why shouldn't we also be part of this campaign? And Dital became very much part of this campaign. We went to Kumbh where we did not talk about why we are here but very clearly which is the ultimate place for cleansing, for purity. We had stalls there which people were using. So you are subliminally associating yourself being the last word. And that's how you have to work. And that's what a brand custodian will do. That cannot be done by ad hoc creators which will come and contribute. They can tell you beautiful stories. They can tell you how to use medium. I have a lot of respect for the content creators but the anchoring of it, not that they can't do it. It's just that somebody has to dedicate himself or herself or the company has to take the custodianship. I think tomorrow advertising agencies will have to take the custodianships very seriously. As far as they do that, I don't see anything wrong in tomorrow's advertising future. I think that's a very excellent point because you see a lot of brands these days gravitating more and more towards content curators. They're like new shining girlfriends and the hand is still with the wife but they are going more and more towards those content curators and a lot of them are doing hidden trials which are working out, not working out. Some of the content curation companies have raised among us money at good valuations which is fantastic. But what you're saying makes so much sense in terms of agencies. As long as they understand they are the original brand custodians and they don't try to compete with the content curators but compliment what they're doing they will keep their relevance. The more you try and compete with them then in some cases you will lose out because you cannot match. You look at what is happening on platforms like TikTok, like consumer itself. You've got a huge amount of talent there. Sometimes it's impossible to beat. I asked my creative directors and copywriters to look at this piece of creation. It's done by some housewife somewhere and it's lost so many hits and it's making sort of, it's so viral. And they happily accept the defeat. They say, this I would never have thought of. Now that's possible because human mind is amazing. Somewhere deep down, it's not that It can occur to anyone. I think we will have to understand that you will get a lot of these contributions coming from various parts. But as far as we have the intelligence we have the acceptance for all this we will be able to assimilate. We will be able to collaborate. And I think we are still condescending. I'm not bothered about traditional advertising versus modern advertising or digital world or content. It actually never occurred to me. I constantly explored various facets of creativity myself. So it never sort of this compartmentalization never worried me. What worries me is condescension. What worries me is that you are condescending towards that I know better. Hey, I am the creative director. I've gone to this particular college school or I have facility with the lexicon. I am better. No, today's world does not, success can come from anywhere. So there is no prerequisite to it. So as far as you have humility and tomorrow's world is going to bet on the horse, not on the jockey. So as far as you know how to bet on the horse you would win. Well made point. I want to ask you about the movie business. You've done a seamless transition from being a lyricist, a poet to an advertising person, a creative person to the movie industry. What are the few things that, and a lot of the last few years if you see the journey in the last few years you actually started this trend of writing for patriotic movies. Starting from Bhag Milka Bhag now going on to Manikarnika this year and you've done quite a few of them in between. Tell us what are the things, a few key things that the movie business can teach brand builders. People have also made the transition from advertising to the movie business as directors and so on and so forth. But what are the things that the movie business can teach the brands? See movie business broadly defines things. So when I was doing Rangde Basanti I called it a patriotic film. Khoon Chala I think was a patriotic song. But when I come to say Manikarnika where a different kind of patriotism of that time I was depicting of Rani Lakshmi Bhai's time ki mai rahu ya na rahu bharat ya rahe na chahi. Desh te hai pyaar to har pal ya kya na chahi. Now that is a different kind of patriotism. That's like love for your country. Sometime questioning that mujhe khut ko bhi hai, I wrote a song called Satyav Jayate for Satyav Jayate series. Amir did. And I'd written four lines, mujhe khut ko bhi hai tatole na, kahin daag hai to chupa hai kyun hum sach se nazre hata hai kyun. So khut ko badal na hai agar badlunga mai tere liye sholon ba chal na hai agar chal dunga mai tere liye. Ye bhi ek tar hai ka patriotism. All kinds there are different expressions of it. Sometime you are questioning that's also patriotism. Sometime you are absolutely in love with your country and you are looking your eyes have swelled up with pride seeing a Chandrayaan that's also patriotism. But there is, in the film as you can see they are not narrowly defined. They have all kinds of because there are a lot of open source happening there. That's what we need to learn. Also I think what we need to learn is they call it spade as spade and if something does not work yes it is tough yes there are heartbreaks there on a Friday the fates decided as they say. But they are very quick to accept that it doesn't work it didn't work. In advertising what happens at time we are not, their egos are bigger and we do not we want to repeat the campaign. See template everybody wants to crack. So franchise always happens. Everybody would want to crack a template which can give you easy money. That's a human nature. A formula to great entertainment. The thing is where to stop when to call it a day where to draw a line is something which we need to learn from them. Because the stakes are higher people are quick to move on. I think we need to quickly move on to something. And today's world things don't live for too long. So you have to make sure you're moving on you're reinventing yourself and that should become almost part of your being. Rather than somebody telling you reinvent yourself. Reinventing yourself should become you should be in rhythm with it. And that's the need of the R today in advertising. Tell me, I'm sure you come across dozens of ideas of content on a weekly basis. Prasoon also chaired the jury for our Indian content marketing awards two years back and he had very significant nuggets to share. What is your secret formula when you evaluate content when you look at a piece of content what is your formula of judging it and seeing whether it is worthy of being executed or not. One thing is of course being a brand builder a brand custodian I feel it has to do justice and live up to the brand's promise. It has to be in sync with it. That's very very important that we are expressing the DNA of it. Then something which is called andaze baya how is it being said what and how. What it should be in sync with the DNA and how is where the craft comes in. And I think I am a sucker for craft. I feel same thing like you know the old poem it says what is love you know it is a thousand times the time passed here. It is something new it is still you. This is a trick yet it is still you. It is a thousand times the time passed here. It is still you. Why is it still you? Because the idea is there. Same two people have fallen in love again and again. So many times I have written love songs written in your hands meaning tell me, take me somewhere. Just love between two people how many times can it be said? That's where the art of and the craft comes in. And I think in the the new era and the new world we need to pay more emphasis to craft. Craft is like Basuri in the sound of dhol we have to keep in mind this. I tell my creative guys yes sometimes idea is the amusement is very high. The app is very exciting but don't forget the craft don't forget the design don't forget the nitty gritties of it. I got just relaunched the certificate design for CBFC you would have seen that just launched a few days back I sort of tried to recreate the certificate you will see a very different film certificate in a few months from now and tried to incorporate interaction in it. The certificate you can even watch a trailer through a certificate you just have to take your phone and it will show you the trailer so made it very interactive the new certificate design. But in that design the thing is that things in the technology is very powerful it amuses you so where does the craft go and the craft has longevity that has to be there that's what the combination of what and how I look for to answer your question. Last two questions and then we will throw the house open where do you see this content advertising industry headed in the next three five years given all the proliferation of data morphing of platforms television merging into digital digital becoming something so where do you see this how do you see this entire thing play out over the next three to five years and what are the implications of this as for a creative person. The chaos will be less today we are overwhelmed with it but whichever forum I go to I meet the students, I meet the marketeers I meet the advertising people, the creative fraternity I feel we are overwhelmed with what is happening in technology how so many multiple mediums and the consumer behavior on the touch points we are overwhelmed I think that will settle down I feel the chaos will be less we would have come to terms with the new world much more than what we are today so you will see much more sanity in the room I can tell you that why do you think chaos will be less because everything is at nascent stage right now see time tells so many things sound very promising but there are few things that can stay under time everything does not stay a lot of things end some trees that were bent some branches that were bent you can see after the storm something broke and fell so after it is a stormy times we are living in but this will settle and humans have a huge amount of adaptability I look at my mother who is 80 years old she is a great diplomat she deals with the technology my father does not he is an analog person so I can see both very clearly for him a button is a switch for touch screen so he touches the screen like this he touches an app like this on the same time I have seen my mom who is very very she has two ipads she is communicating with her family she is communicating with her friends so you will see adaptability of human mind also coming into picture some people will not be able to adapt some will adapt and that will create a world which probably change happen see cinema also came cinema also redefined the way we looked at advertising in fact I do not want to get into the details of it but people who have watched madmen would know that how they have also depicted that advertising agencies tried to have even filmmakers inside their agency earlier then they realized this is not our job this should be done third party so then it was left to the third party but in the beginning it confused people I remember when earlier days when advertising even a telly cine which nobody even talks tell my creative guys that telly cine used to be discussed telly cine hona ja raha hai picture ka singapur ja na hai bhai koon ja aega ispa braha discussion hotata aaj when the telly cine happen whether it happens or it does not happen whether he is shooting a digital format that is not discussed so I think certain things will become irrelevant certain jargons I fear the creative people who drop too many jargons today I fear the digital people, creative people who come and tell you they scare you with so much of jargon anybody somebody who is coming from a business school drops lot of Venn diagrams and lot of jargons at you fear that person person is not talking a sense the sense wala baat that comes on the topic because in jargons that person who doesn't know his work jargons are not for you the tools are for you tools are not to be flaunted so if somebody is flaunting tools doubt that there is something wrong out there tell me I am sure you have been asked this question very very often I mentioned the happy and creative when I introduced you and you must have answered this question dozens of time just to recall for us what gave you inspiration for that idea happy then will always always stay special and special for various reasons if I tell you the history of that that product is an Italian product Profetti is an Italian company I have been working on building that brand a very small office to be in a house in south of Delhi there was a marketing manager at the top of the house I have been working on that and happy then was a brand which was given to us as something which is worked in Italy and in the Europe market and they had given us an ad which was about a girl who is supposed to go on a date and since this gum brightens your teeth so she looks at her teeth in the mirror and then decides not to brush the teeth but have the gum and she gets on a date so we said this doesn't work in India nobody takes the teeth so seriously because of the teeth I have selected the boy or the girl the teeth were amazing we are a puncturing nation ok he will see our teeth in the end that there will be something wrong something will get stuck I think the girl will also ignore that the boy will also ignore that so do you get into the minds of the people here so let's have a little fun let's not take them so seriously can we have fun with it so the first commercial and so what happened the client said that no but this has worked in the other markets you have to do it I said ok that will dump and parallelly I went ahead with my own money I went to the film director I said so Dadu was the black magic production he was very kind and he came forward and we shot the commercial I know whether you have seen that that was the first happy dent commercial where there is this photographer who is basically using his assistant as a flash bulb ok you don't know where the flash bulb is coming from actually he eats gum uses the flash bulb and we researched both and there was no comparison Indians loved the photographer so 2 vs 9 that scored 9 out of 10 and that other one 2 so of course they ran it and the impact of that started they started seeing this product originally was supposed to be sold from the chemist shop very limited ambition product today it sells in every pawn shop and then later on I did that can we take this metaphor even higher and start thinking of a world where every bulb is a human and I remember telling this story to the client that he is employed as a bulb in a palace and he is getting late for his work and on the way he meets all his friends street lamp bulb swimming pool bulb are you serious I am serious and it was complete the faith that the last one had worked we got that license and my friend Ram Madhvani executed it so well and we had a great historical commercial which became an epic people started reading a lot people talk about slavery in that that's true later on I thought that can a world be where everyone can employ a bulb yes it is possible because in the olden times the kings used to keep treasure behind to dig a pit they used to say that they used to dig a pit so it was possible in this country that a bulb if would light up the room would be employed the humans will be employed so the chandelier which was we got Mulkham artists fabulously who created that chandelier and it is not that none of that is done on a special effect everything is done real today you know you can mount these things but those days we didn't we just you know shot it and later on of course we won in Cannes and everywhere and it became most awarded commercial in the world in the only Indian commercial ever so we have the highest number of awards among the top 20 ads of world all time voted by the gun report with that thank you so much another big round of applause for Prasoon I see the clock has run out of time if you have any questions we can pass some mics around you can raise your hand up before you ask any questions I see Dharmendra raising his hand can we get a mic to him do introduce yourself while you ask the question please train on subjects like mind mapping and brain literacy and invisible selling, behavioral economics. My question was, there's a lot of data to prove that the average intelligence of a human being on the planet is reducing. And content has a lot to do with it. For example, the cinema franchise with the greatest revenues is the Avengers series. Now it may be great commercially, but in terms of content, it's infantile content. So I just wanted to use on that. I mean, what kind of planet are we creating? See, if I become politically correct, I'll say, no, no, these days, children are very stupid. If you really ask me, I feel audio-visual actually dumps you down. See, how audio-visual consumption is. Look at the face of that person. His face is open, his eyes are open. He doesn't have a very intelligent look. That's not a very intelligent look. Look at someone who's reading a book. It's a very nice look. I mean, not I'm talking about the old world, but that's how it is. Audio-visual is actually dishing out everything. Once in Gulzar, we were in Jaipur Literature Festival and there was a session we were doing with kids. So we started talking, we said, what are you talking about today, Mr. Prasoon? I said, let's talk about churail. Yes, there was a time that everybody had a churail, a witch, because he used to read in the book or used to tell stories about a witch. So he used to think of his own churail. Who would be a churail? How would he be? He had a thought in his mind. There was his own witch. The symbols work all out of his or her life. Later on, everybody had a jhadoo churail. So it's all different when you leave room for imagination. So more imagination, you will kill. The aak man kar ke sochna, is liye introspection ko itna, isk land mein, looking inside. Sab kuch andar hai, yeh bola gaya. I wrote a song called Maula, Muraamad Mukaddar ki kardo maula. I wrote a song. Ek khushbu aati thi, main batakta jaata tha. Reshmi si maaya thi aur main takta jaata tha. Jab teri gali aaya, sach tabhi nazar aaya. Mujme hi wo khushbu thi, isse tu ne milwaya. Now this looking inside, that is introspection. I think so much of content to come to your point, so much of content is actually making you look all the time outside. You're not introspecting, you're not closing your eyes, you're not looking and touching things which are tactile. You're not looking at this bottle, you've decided that you're looking at a bottle. Now this gaze, this gaze which is dying, this introspection which is dying, is costing us in intelligence for sure. I feel that. There will be a lot of scientists, and I don't want to refute them, they will have their own study to tell you that maybe we have become quicker, faster, our processing has become faster. They would be, of course, those points there. But to me what I feel, yes, there is too much of content is giving you sab kuch paros rahe aap. You're giving every solution, you're not allowing the mind's fertility to produce solutions. Thank you. Any other questions? Yeah, Kavya. Okay, there's a gentleman right next to it, then we'll come to you after that. Right there, Krishna. Okay, my name is Ahmed Jain and I'm from Volvo Cars. My question to you, sir, is you travel to a lot of other countries and work in different countries. What is the basic difference in creative process that you see that we do in India and how it is done in other countries? See, depends on which country you are in. And if you say the western world, it's, I would say, really, really more organized than us, more structured. We are more fluid than them, I would say, and they are more structured. So even for a presentation, I see the way they work. You know, we are working till the very last moment, and we are allowing that to happen. They would not. They will call it a day, one day, and they'll say, okay, now we are having a dry run and this is it. So they are more structured. So in terms of process, much better. China also is much better in process. We, in many of our presentations with our clients, I think I would not be, you know, I'm not being condescending or anything, but I think I find Indians fairly more intellectual than most of the parts in the world I travel to. Our thought is much more powerful. I think our rigor to detailing is less than many countries. To detailing my pain, the amount of pain and detailing many countries take, India doesn't take. But India really enjoys the thought process. Our thoughts are fine and beautiful, but our execution and detailing needs to be much more, you know, we need to have much more rigor in it. Thank you, sir. Hi. Great. Am I audible? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Kavya, can we get a mic here? Kavya. All right. I can't see from here. Yeah, yeah, go ahead. Yeah, am I audible? Yes, yes. Okay, hi. My name is Deeksha. I'm from Starr. I look after content marketing with the distribution team. I'm picking up three things from what Prasoon said before I ask my question. So first thing you said is, you should always be rooted in some way or the other. The second thing you said was that today, the consumer preferences are changing at a very, very rapid pace, which is very true. And the third thing is that we are going through a very, very transient phase, which is going to probably calm down in a few, in times to come. So the question is what should brands do in this scenario? Should brands define and redefine themselves according to the change in consumer preferences? Or should we kind of wait for the pace to hold on and then define their strategies to target consumers because there's so much chaos in the market. And if you look at the chaos, the previous conventional marketing modes like radio, ATL, hoarding, et cetera, they're dying down. They're not capturing the attention as they used to because there's so much content available towards you. So what should be the right way to engage the consumers today? What should brands do? First of all, understand the reality. I think not closing your eyes and thinking that this is not the world we are living in. The reality is that's the truth. You know, like, look at parenting. I mean, today's parenting and the time our parents brought us up is very different. We listen to our parents and like to the... Yes, of course, we deviated a little bit, but they could pretty much control us. Look at the parenting today. How challenging parenting is. The child is exposed to not only the do's and don'ts which the mother or father tells, but to the videos they are watching, the social media they are interacting with. They're interacting with so much in the world that so much is beamed at them that you need to understand that counseling them is much... Counseling is very, very important. Sitting with them is very, very important. Constantly reassuring them about the world because such rapid change also impacts the human mind. A lot of child psychologists have told me that, you know, children are losing faith. Where did they anchor themselves? What is that? Where can they rely on? Everything is changing. Everything is transient. So the faith in that we are there. The mom's saying that I am there. You see, look, I did a campaign on suicide around the examination time. And that time I wrote a phrase which Dr. Harish Shetty, who was an expert, he really liked. I said, there was a time when, if I have not scored good marks and knew my result is coming, I'll run away to my grandmother's room and hide myself there. And my grandmother was least concerned about... They were concerned about more laughing and happily enjoying life with you than your marks. She would shield me. No one would say anything to her. Okay? That's it. Now she's the eldest more in the family so nobody's saying, so I'm shielded by that. So where is she? That child today requires that. And then please keep drawing a parallel between this and the consumer today. And that child today requires reassurance that I am there because if that is there, the suicide rate we were talking about will come down. Because somebody out there is unconditionally loving me. Not loving me because I've got good marks or not. So that grandmother or that mom's role, don't take the mother's lap. As long as she is there, the reassurance is there. So in the consumer's mind, brands have to comfort you. Brands have to hold hands. Brands have to... Everything is a phrase Nasir Kazmi, a poet, Manus Ajnabi. A known stranger. So you have to surprise the consumer yet comfort them. You have to surprise them because otherwise they will say, you've been taken for granted. What are you doing for me? Oh, you think I'll always be there? So you have to keep on surprising the consumer and yet comfort them. That's what they require. They don't want to run away. They just don't want to be taken for granted. So hand hold your consumer. Tiptoe into their subconscious and stay there. Fantastic nugget. Emotional bonds are the only real bonds that last. Big round of applause to Prasoon Joshi for spending time on such a rainy day.