 Welcome to exchange for media. As the real world continues to struggle with the ongoing COVID pandemic, we all have been pushed even more into the digital world. From shopping to schooling, to even weddings, everything is now on your screen. In these times, marketers have no choice but to sell their brands digitally, bringing brand safety back into the center of every debate. With me today is someone I can surely address as an expert on the subject. Please welcome Mr. John Montgomery, Group M Global EVP Brand Safety. Welcome to the show, Mr. John. Thank you very much. And thanks for inviting me. Yeah. To begin with, I want to understand from you what kind of conversations are marketers engaging in now after the pandemic about the brand safety that? Yeah, the pandemic has affected almost every area of our advertising. As you're probably aware, marketers weren't sure exactly how to advertise in the pandemic. I think that they want to be sensitive to the pain that people are going through. And so sending advertising messages that are the normal kind of advertising during the pandemic wasn't a good idea. So a lot of advertisers paused their advertising whilst they reassessed their strategies So I think that the media companies saw a reduction in advertising. That was the first area. Then our clients thought, what is the best way for us to advertise? How can we add value to people's lives? How can we help them? And I think a lot of advertisers jumped in on the social issues, like making sure that you wash your hands properly, making sure that you social distance wear masks, behave responsibly, messages of support for families. And I think a lot of that sort of social reinforcement found its way into advertising. And that was really more from the creative side. But then on the media side, we started having conversations with clients about, well, what about being adjacent to bad news or grim news about the death toll and about, and I'm sure that you've had similar kind of news coverage in India that we've had here in the US. And our clients said, is that a bad thing for us to be adjacent to that content? And a number of clients in the US drew their advertising from news or otherwise used a technology called Keyword Avoidance. That was my next question. OK, so we'll segue into that. But so I think that was the big change in the pandemic was, can we advertise safely? And then we can talk about that later in the conversation too, of course. But then there's the area of disinformation and fake news that is rife in a crisis like this, where there's so much bad information about drinking bleachers and some stuff that's really dangerous that can come from even senior people in the government. You were in India a lot, you understand India market also. So India is a very cost-conscious market. And ensuring brand safety comes at a price. So are Indian brands ready to bear that cost? Yeah, it's interesting. This would be, I've been to India three times from a brand safety perspective. And every time I come, I think that marketers understand the risk more. And it's not just adjacency to inappropriate content, but it's making sure that your advertising is aimed at the right demographic, that it avoids invalid traffic or fraud, that you have the right privacy controls in place. So brand safety is sort of an umbrella term for any risk in the digital supply chain. I think that our clients are becoming more and more aware. And every time I visit India, we have more clients using that technology. But I would say that the international brands are still the ones that are investing in brand safety and high-quality content. The local Indian brands are still a little circumspect about the costs. And unfortunately, the costs of verification tend to be more or less the same around the world. So the dollar costs to a US advertiser would seem lower. Whereas the media costs in India tend to be a little lower so that the verification costs appear higher or a higher proportion of the media spend. And so it's a more difficult financial decision for Indian advertisers to make. Particularly in these times where the economy is going through a difficult phase. So do you still believe that marketers and advertisers will go for brand safety? They'll be investing in this technology? So obviously, my job revolves around brand safety. And I see the dangers of inappropriate content and fraudulent content. And in times like these, the fraudsters exploit the situation because they understand it. So the malware attacks have gone up around the world. Several fold. And so the risks are higher in this time. So I guess it would be my job to recommend to advertisers to do this. Having said that, if you can't afford to do that, then there are several things that you could do. For instance, dealing with vendors and suppliers that you know, buying from preferred transparent lists on in programmatic supply chain. So in other words, don't buy the cheapest long tail inventory in programmatic supply, but buy from preferred lists and buy through supply side and demand side partners who are as trustworthy and as transparent as possible. Even if you can't do work with vendors like Double Verify Integral Oracle, then there are ways of ensuring or making sure that you are in what we call euphemistically well-lit areas. So areas that you know and that you can see and that particularly your media agency recommends are reliable and transparent. And where we have a relationship. So it may mean that the inventory cost would be slightly higher, but we absolutely believe that it's worth it, particularly if you're concerned about your brand reputation in the market. Maybe bigger brands surely will invest. Smaller brands might have to, I hope they do consider it, because it is the need of our. Yes, that's true. And I think we have to be sensitive to the fact that not everybody can afford it, but you can be smart about what you buy. The cheaper the inventory, the more you pursue the low cost per thousand at your primary optimization, the more dangerous it becomes, the more risk you expose your brand to. Coming back to news, because I wanted to quote from your last year's interview, where you mentioned that before earlier the brands often tend to move money from news because they're controversial in nature. There are chances of data being out to be fake. But that scenario has changed now, considering that news has become the most viewed category, particularly in India. I'm sure it's everywhere because of COVID. A lot of people are watching news on television, on digital, on mobile. So has your view changed? Would you now tell marketers to continue to invest in this particular category? Yes, and it's something that we feel very strongly about. So if you think about newspapers and everything we said in India last year is absolutely true, is that newspapers or news organizations and publishers online, in video and in online print, have been demonetized for a number of reasons. But mainly the social networks are so powerful. There's so much reach in the social networks that that has led to some of the demonetization over a period of time. What's added to it is advertisers that are concerned about controversial content. And so a lot of those news organizations, particularly the ones in the local newspapers and the local news publishers in smaller towns, which are critical in terms of supplying people with advice in during a crisis like a pandemic. Or the first place you go to is your local newspaper for advice. Where is it safe for me to be? Where can I get tested? That's all, you go to your local newspaper. And so the newspapers were already on their knees. Some of them were absolutely in critical situations where they really didn't have the revenue to continue and then COVID hit. So you can imagine, as those organizations being vulnerable to the extreme, and then COVID came along. And one of the commentators in the US put it well, this is an extension event for local newspapers because local stores have shut. There's no longer that advertising. National advertisers were worried about, you know, big brands were worried about the adjacency to grim news. They reduced their advertising. And so it became a real crisis for news. And so what we've done, what we've done as an industry, but particularly group A&M, is we've raised the awareness of the situation to marketers. And there are two things that we want marketers to understand. And this is true around the world, by the way. It's not a US centric, it's absolutely true in India. It's firstly, advertising in the news is highly effective. If you think about your own behavior, when you're reading a news article, your dwell time, the amount of time that you spend on an article is generally more than you would on a social news post posting. So the advertising gets a longer exposure to the consumer. The other thing is that consumers tend to, or readers tend to trust their local newspapers and their favorite newspapers more. So that trust rubs off on brands. And that's been supported by research. So we know that advertising in news organizations or news publications is already more effective. And so, and then the second part of that is there's evidence that even if you're advertising is adjacent to controversial or hard news, it doesn't have a negative effect on your brands. In fact, in some cases, it has a better effect because people are more absorbed in that article. And so that was the one part of that. And so we went to the industry and said, you're really killing newspapers at a very, very critical time. Firstly, a good marketing vehicle, but secondly, for democracy, for free press, we really need to support newspapers so that they can afford to have journalists with feet on the ground in the areas reporting properly, keeping corruption down, making sure that we call politicians to order. And that I think helped enormously. So one of the verification companies or integral ad science is they noticed that there was an 80%, 80% drop in the number of advertisers who were blocking the name coronavirus in their advertising, which is really positive. And so I think we'll hopefully see investment moving back into newspapers. What we've also done in partnership with some large news organizations around the world and through an organization called Internews, which is a nonprofit that focuses on the sustainability of news and making sure that as many people around the world have access to reliable news. We've started assembling lists of, if you like, safe lists of news public publications that take programmatic advertising around the world, we're up to 22 countries around the world. And very soon we'll start launching a campaign where we make those lists available to marketers around the world for free so that they can add those lists to their programmatic or insert them into the programmatic supply chain so we can start remanitizing those. We were particularly concerned about local newspapers because those are the ones that were suffering most from the demonetization. Also the distribution has been hit in India. I mean, I'm not aware of you as, but in India, the distribution not stopped. So they also had to re-circulate the digital versions. So would you suggest the same similar solutions for Indian print market as well? Yes, and in fact, India is part of those 22 countries. India would be part of those. We've collected through WANAFRA, which is the Worldwide Association of Newspapers, a list of reputable, safe kind of newspapers from a journalistic integrity perspective, which I think is important. And we're gonna try and encourage marketers to shift some of their spending into those publications. So it was a sort of a two-faced thing. One of them was raise awareness for the damage that's being done to news organizations. But the second phase was let's take action and give them a marketing plan, which they can use to remanitize news. And we're hoping that that will start getting money investment flowing back into newspapers. We really hope that it helps the print industry, which was sinking even before COVID-19 came in. And after COVID-19, it's really been a very bad lane in there. I'm not aware of your part of the voice. My next question was around the new policies GDPR and CCPA. So what I wanted to understand from you is, has policy shifts such as GDPR and CCPA even rise to healthier customer databases with a better understanding of customers and their behavior for brands? So that's an interesting and quite a difficult question to answer. So I think it's in two parts. One of them is, has it resulted in better quality databases for consumers? And then the second part of that question is, do we have a better sense of consumer's behavior as a result of that? There's almost a dichotomy because the more privacy controls that we place on data, the more difficult it is for us to get behavioral advertising in that we did in the old way. So for instance, the deprivation of cookies makes it harder for us to understand the consumers journey across the web and we're going to look at other ways of doing that. The positive part of this is that the industry is now treating consumer data with more responsibility and respect as a result of GDPR. We started doing this in 2018 with GDPR. A lot of that work had already been done by the time CCPA is coming to that, I believe that. And for your viewers, CCPA is the California Consumer Privacy, which has sort of been adopted fairly widely in the US because there isn't federal legislation here yet, but I think that there probably will be. And I think it's a good thing for consumers because they were starting to mistrust the internet as a whole because they were lumping together things like data breaches and fraud with advertising, with malware, with advertising data collection, just because it's a complex area. And it was reducing trust in the web and it was reducing the ability for us to use that data in a responsible way. So I think the good part of it is that it will manage the frequency, it will manage the data safety around overall digital advertising. The second part of your question is it is now, and it will be in the future, more difficult for us to understand that consumers, measure that consumers journey across the web. And it will also put more power into the hands of the people who own the data. And that generally is the large data platforms and large media publishers. And so we're gonna have to rely on data from them. And that's not necessarily a bad thing because Google and Facebook are very large sophisticated organizations that have built very powerful databases to understand consumer behavior. But it means we've got to get the data from them as first parties rather than measure it as third parties, which is for us from a governance perspective, more reliable. When somebody is offering you their data, I've got casting aspersions or suspicions on anybody who's owned the data, but I would rather have it verified by my own research. But now it makes it more difficult because third party advertising far more difficult in terms of consent and measurement than it has been in the past. And it was really very insightful. I mean, I wish I can meet you someday and understand this more in detail. This is one very interesting subject that I want to understand from you. So John's last question is about the loss that this entire thing has caused to our economy. How long do you think will it take for brands and marketers to get closer to the normalcy? Because right now addicts in India is almost dropped by 70, 75% Where do you see hope? And what would you suggest in general as somebody who's so senior, somebody who understands this entire industry? What would you suggest to the marketers at this point in time? So I'm sure that you read all of the opinions about this. And there are many smarter people than me who have added their voice to what should be happening next. I think that there are probably two things. One of them is what we as marketers think is right and good. And then the second thing, what will actually happen? So we know from a broad marketing perspective that if consumers see marketers messaging and if it's the appropriate messaging, if it's sensitive messaging at this time, but if they remain in the minds of consumers during this time, they'll come out of any form of recession stronger. Every time that there's a recession, we see research that shows that those advertisers that have remained in the consumers' minds through advertising messaging have come out of the stronger. We've seen, we saw a very rapid drop in advertising in April, sort of at the end of Q1 and in Q2. We're starting to see advertisers book advertising now more than they were before. However, I'm sure you read yesterday, it was official that the US has gone into a recession. The old stories, when the US sneezes, the rest of the world catches a cold, I think that's not gonna be good news economically for the rest of the world. And so it's gonna mean that there's less advertising revenue to spend. But the reality is, I think most marketers would like to spend money and I think that they understand that they should be spending money during times like this. But I think that we're going to go into a time for the next, gosh, I don't know how long it is, but I would imagine it would be more than a year where advertising revenues will be under pressure because I think sales will be under pressure. As you know, there are a number of people who are unemployed production, all of those, all of the things that happen in the recession, reduced production, reduced demand, and higher joblessness will influence advertising revenue. I think that there won't be a normal, there'll be a new normal. What that will look like, I'm not sure, but I think that the sort of everybody's priorities have changed, every person has changed. This has changed every person in the most fundamental ways and it's really difficult for us to be able to estimate what that might look like. But as marketers and as behavioral, the people who study behaviors, it's a very, very interesting time. But we're also mindful of the pain that people are going through in this time, too. John, thank you so much for speaking to Exchange for Media. We wish you good health, please be safe, stay at home right now and take care of yourself. Thanks a lot. Thank you very much and I hope that you all stay safe and well, insane as well. Thank you, thank you very much.