 Now moving forward, I'd like to introduce you to our panelists for this discussion. Let me welcome Mr. G.B. Shreethar, Regional Director of India, Middle East and South Asia at Singapore Tourism Board. Also welcome Sagar Pushpa, CEO from Klan. Vivek Sharma, CMO at Piddy Light. Lakshmi Balasubramanyan co-founder, Green Room. Bahar Dhawan Rohatki, lawyer and artist who will join us shortly. And to check this session, I'd like to welcome Mr. Aju Mehta, Senior Vice President for Content at Mindshare. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming our panelists. Very warm welcome to all of you. Hi, thanks. Thanks, Khyati. Thanks for having us here. Thanks for inviting all of us and actually, you know, putting this together. I'd like to welcome Vivek Sharma, Shreethar Sagar and Lakshmi. There are some known faces who work with us quite regularly, but and of course, Vivek, so we know how your past and how much of great work you've done in the industry. I'm just going to directly jump into it and, you know, get into this topic of influencer marketing and what comes along with that. And it's been, you know, the last couple of years we've seen, you know, these whole influencer breed growing rapidly, you know, from a marketing standpoint. I'd like to take up the first question is Vivek, where I'd like to understand, you know, what's the role that you see of influencers in today's times and where does this stack up from a marketing-strobe-media mixed point of view? So good afternoon to everyone and thank you, Ajay, for having us here. First of all, I would like to say that please call me Vivek and not Vivek, sir, because I'm only 50 plus and I still have some here on my head. So having said that, I think the role of influencer marketing today is really important and that comes from the change in behavior of consumers as we see today and let me elaborate a little bit. See, in this digital age, for consumers, the main source of entertainment and news is social media. But yet, ironically, consumers are trusting brands and companies less and less. They are trusting in peer to peer, their friends and recommendations and reviews far more. The second thing which is happening is that consumers have created, have created and creating more and more what I call filter bubbles around them. Now, whether by pre-selection or by choice or by algorithms or by ad blockers, they choose what content and what they see, what they don't want to see. In fact, they don't appreciate push notifications, they don't appreciate push content, they don't want hard sell. So people decide what comes to them. Now, what is happening is it is very critical for brands and for anyone who wants to talk to these people to crack through these filter bubbles because the currency of influence in digital age is not reach and media spend. That those days are gone. It is more about relevance and engagement. Now, influencers offer a safe, fantastic means of offering this engagement. And the second point to elaborate upon the first point is you can't reach consumers by pushing content to them nowadays. Those days are gone when we used to make ad and forget even TV and digital debate that's gone. Even in digital, I can't create a content and push. They won't watch it unless they're interested. So we have to engage in conversations around with consumers, around the topic they are interested in. And that once we get into that conversation, and that is when brands can actually connect with consumers. And this is where influencers offer us a fantastic bridge between brands and those consumer conversations is how I would pay, I would say influencer marketing plays a deep role in actually connecting brand to consumers in this day and age. So in fact, it's absolutely right. I mean, whatever you said is bang on. In fact, what even the novel was mentioning in the last chat with bulky was that during COVID, we realized that the influencer actually became the creator. In the last six to eight months, we realized that due to constraints of production and other issues that we faced, we realized that these guys are actually not only about seeding content, but actually creating and seeding it for us. So that part of the business is fairly, it's grown a bit and the dependency on them has been fairly large in the last eight to nine months. I'd like to also understand from you that are there any challenges that you foresee working with these influencers because they're used to working with celebrities in a certain way. And this is absolutely a new breed, like we say micro, micro, nano influencers. Are there any challenges from a brand or from a marketing standpoint that you foresee in working with them, understanding their language, their tonality? Yes, and that's a huge topic. Of course, there are opportunities as well as there are challenges. Now, I think marketers have to realize that they and we all of us are living in a different world. And the marketing in this world is also very different. So the challenge in influencer marketing, first of all, is to select the right influencers. Let me use a harsh word. The days of lazy marketing of hiring a celebrity and then putting a message across as a continuum, cut and paste across different touch points are gone. So you have to work hard in actually communicating with this, what I call small, small cohorts of people because the segmentation is far more than we anticipate. So first challenge is for you is to select the right influencers. And this is not about selecting a celebrity saying this celebrity is suitable for me, etc., etc. You have to choose on the basis of two things because celebrities reach a select and a very focused target audience. And they carry two things with them. One is reach, which is quantifiable. Other is trust and engagement, which is qualitative in nature. And then what is the audience they are reaching? What is the kind of engagement they are having? What is the tonality and personality, which you rightly said is very, very important. That's the first challenge. Second challenge is when we deal with influencers, we're dealing with human beings. It's not about taking an ad and in a programmatic way, putting it across various time zones, etc., etc. Sometimes influencers forget to put your post, sometimes they forget to tag. So you have to deal with them on an ongoing basis. It needs far more active hands on involvement from the marketing team of a brand. It is not about push a button, leave it to the agency and do it. So it needs quite a continuous approach. And last but not the least, I would say the challenges marketers have to leave outside the door, their temptation to do hard sell through influencer marketing. Could that backfires? No, absolutely. I think the key is to actually let them create content that they normally do, the way they create their content in their tonality versus like you said, giving them a typical 30-second or 20-second and shoving it down and saying then put it out there and let 20 of them do the same thing, which is obviously going to backfire in some form or the other. My next question is to Mr. Sridhar. In this whole tourism industry and currently we know the way things are moving. I'm actually sitting in Goa right now. I came here to spend some time with family and I've been monitoring in the last one month. There's been a huge surge of influencer stroke, celebrity activity on Instagram and other platforms for hotels in Maldives here. So in fact, I was supposed to go there and then I changed my mind and came to Goa. But the word of mouth and influence is a large role in your industry. So my question to you is that how do you gauge who's the right person and what's the extent you will engage with them to actually speak about your brand? So if you can just throw some light on that. Sure. Thank you Ajay and a very good afternoon to all of you in India. I'm currently in Singapore. It's evening here. So good afternoon and good evening to those who are tuning in. I think for Singapore tourism it has always been very much a case of building trust, credibility and authentic communication of what Singapore stands for and what kind of value proposition Singapore offers. So you're right from a national tourism organization perspective. I think for us, as Mr Vivek said, it is no longer just a brand voice. I mean, STB can come out and say Singapore stands for this, Singapore is able to offer that kind of experiences. But at the end of the day, it is the word of mouth. It is people who have come here and enjoyed and who can then communicate about it. And therefore the role of influences has become very, very important. And just to draw back, Singapore has been in India for the last two and a half decades promoting Singapore. And through Bollywood movies and through a lot of other initiatives, Singapore has got a brand affinity in India. So I think the next step for us is to try and make sure that we are able to pick the right voices to bring the message and especially so that we have now adopted a brand identity, which is passion made possible, where we are actually communicating about Singapore, not through the buildings and infrastructure and the Merlion and Gardens by the way, it's not just that. It is about the passions of the Singaporean talents here and showcasing them and their voices. So therefore, on the other side, when we are communicating this with Indian consumers, it is important that we communicate in partnership with Indian influencers. So it is very important that we pick the right influencers and answering your question. What do we look out for? I think the key fundamental is about authenticity. We need authentic voices, influencers who have either experienced Singapore or they have some affinity towards Singapore. So that authenticity is very important. Then you look at of course the influencer, what kind of reach does he or she have and again in this space as you have rightly stated, there's macro influencers as micro and then there's nano. So we need to pick the right influencers for the right message we want to communicate. So we need to figure out which are the influencers able to talk to the different passion tribes that we have. So we've got about six passion tribes, hoodies, explorers and so on. So for the right audiences, for the right regional languages, we need to pick the right audiences. So that's the second most important thing and finally I think third is engagement. Again as Vivek has said, it is no longer enough for a celebrity voice to bring a big mass, in fact, statement about Singapore but we do not know who is being reached. We need to make sure that the engagement that is possible with the influencer is high and therefore engagement for us is very important. The ROI is no longer the number of views but it's also about the engagement that is important. Thank you. Now, thanks so much. In fact, bringing to the next point, I'd like to go to Lakshmi. Lakshmi, Mr. Sheetha spoke about engagement and the different kind of currencies we look at. I know two years back and you've been in the business for quite some time. Two years back when we used to do the regular campaigns with influencers, we used to depend on typical cost per post. So you pay somewhat of money and the influencer goes out there and posts whatever you give out or whatever they create. But if you see in the last one, one and a half year, a lot of the conversations are moving from a sort of cost per view, cost per impression to a cost per action sort of a domain. So my question is twofold. One is what kind of currencies and measurability is something that you bring to the table as an agency and do you see a trend of this whole cost per post and currency moving from just plain views and impressions into more actionable space in that sense? Hi, Ajay. Thank you and a big hello to all of the other panelists and the audience who've tuned in. You're right. So when influencer marketing started off, it was like you said, more for reach and visibility and seeding and a lot of amplification is what it was used for now. However, there has been even say about the last year or so, a lot of conversation about conversions and sales or more than even verifying whether they can convert, it's more about tracking whether influencer content is leading to conversion. So while there are, in some cases, there are some brands, some of them that we even work with you on, are having from a cost per post kind of a conversation, it's moving more in a cost per view kind of a conversation, cost per view and cost per impression. Having said that, influencers have a few roles, right? Like Mr. Vivek said, some of them, there is reach that some of them do can be extremely useful in creating brand awareness. So there's reach, there's engagement, there's relevance. And like you had also mentioned earlier in the conversation that a lot of them are content creators themselves. So they all actually create mini ads instead of creating one large ad for a brand or for a campaign. Here we are creating 10 different ads which are very, very specific to a region, to a certain kind of an audience and the people who are following that particular influencer. So there's a role of content creation, there's a role of reach and awareness that they also bring into the table. So while some of it can still be about the conversion and the action, which is still an important piece in the equation, a whole lot of it is still going to continue to be in the brand saliency and the brand awareness bit, because they do play a huge role in actually kind of influencing opinions about brands, about products, about educating how a product can be used or like even if you say a place like you mentioned, travel and tourism influencers are huge because all grades of influencers can create just simple blogs about the place, about a resort, they give some amount of reviews and these are taken very, very seriously. So these are not always necessarily quantifiable in terms of a direct conversion. Eventually they do lead to conversion. So having said that, I guess soon everybody is working on tools and measures and ways in which these can be quantified. So I guess maybe it's a global kind of a conversation. It's not just an India specific conversation. So how to kind of quantify these and measure influencers and conversion, eventually I think there'll be some kind of a solution for it. Veerika, I'd like to come back to you on this point that she mentioned. There's a lot of chatter around unlike the celebrities that we use for a larger campaigns and the brand ambassadors like we call them because the terminology we use is influencers are almost like quasi brand ambassadors. They're there for a short time and that leads to this conversation around exclusivity. Like we have a big brand ambassador locked in for a year, maybe three years, etc. Here it's only about a month, maybe two weeks, maybe even two months. So when you look at these guys, is there any scope or is there a time frame because we've had instances where you have a celebrity or an influencer talking about a particular brand in a particular month and the next month you see him talking about a similar category brand and that seems to be very, in terms of it's obviously conflicting but how do you see that given the dynamics on social and digital from using influencers for your brand today, who can be using or promoting a brand next month, which is your competition? I think it's a sticky area Ajay. It's not very easy to solve for because influencers have a deep following amongst their followers and followers believe them. That is the fundamental premise of the relationship. Now, if they see that influencer talking about one brand and next maybe after a gap of one month start espousing the cause of another brand, it is conflicting in the minds of consumers. So I think marketers would have to figure out some framework in which at least some kind of a cooling period or a gap is needed between what we call category exclusivity. That I think would be a very clean way of doing it. Locking what we call micro and middle influencers for long period is not possible because of the economics, then you have to pay a high cost and they become as costly. But I think we have to solve for this because we don't want to create conflict in the mind of consumers. I would like to just add one thing to what Lakshmi was and you were discussing about measurability and the ROI. I would like to bring in a perspective of B2B. We also used influencers for B2B and influencer marketing is not only done through Instagram and Twitter, it is also done through other mediums. So for example, for Dr. Fixit when the lockdown started, we did a series of webinars about need for waterproofing and how relevant Dr. Fixit plays in it with leading architects, opinion makers and civil engineers. And those events were recorded, they were retweeted, they were shared. Now in that B2B cycle, I do not see immediate conversion of my brand into any sale. But they are building a reputation where my brand will be specified in projects as times go ahead. So sometimes lead time is high. But I think we have lost the art of actually building what I call qualitative equity of the brand which leads to specification or recommendation of the brand in the future. And I believe influencers play far greater role in this than driving sales. If I would drive sales, I have performance marketing tools, I have various other means to do it. Of course, like any other digital medium, of course, we can link influencer marketing campaigns if you have a link to e-com or for example, after awareness and consideration, we can measure preference through live, share, retweets, etc. But I think the right balance of what they bring on the table in terms of qualitative engagement and trust and quantitative reach and perhaps some sales would be a better approach than to go only after numbers. They seem to have lost Ajay. Yeah, I think. Yeah, can you see me now? Sorry. Yes. What about the hotels? I'm sorry, I'm not at home. I was just talking about the point you made about performance and performance marketing angle. And we keep discussing this at times that typically in performance marketing, we use a lot of brand creatives, brand posts or videos to push it through to the kind of audiences we want to target. There's a very sort of a point that what if you actually do the same performance marketing or push behind an influencer post? Because one is that the whole organic, inorganic sort of reach that an influencer can get you because depending on his followers. But if you had to put extra money, media money or a boosting, like they call it in that domain, behind influencer posts or a plan being influencer marketing plans, do you really believe that it would work from a beyond awareness and even into conversion? Because for me, when I look at a regular performance campaign and a separate campaign for like a brand post versus an influencer post, definitely the engagement is higher on the influencer post. So do you believe that it will have the same impact when you put media monies behind and that's where the world is moving. If you really want to scale this up and take it into multiple mediums, reach the right audience and find higher engagement than just putting on a brand post, do you believe that an influencer post will work better than just a brand typical social post or a video? Yes, there are a couple of considerations here, your spot on actually and there's no one single answer to this and let me elaborate. See, for example, yes, we should put some money behind to put if the influencer is able to reach a specific sharply defined target audience with high engagement, of course, it makes marketing sense for me to put monies behind. But at the same time, I'm also paying money to the influencer to reach an already existed curated audience cohort for which the influencer is following. The second aspect is the content. Now, if the influencer is creating a content for me, a video or a blog or something, then if the content is, that depends on the content, the content is original, then I would like to put money and say, let's reach more people. Or if I may start with organic initially and as I see it gaining traction, I put money behind that, that's the approach all of us actually follow. There are no set rules here. Or I may give the celebrity my own content and say, this is the content and you just post it, put it with your comments and likes, etc, etc. So it all depends upon brand objectives and where we are. But I think we will move towards a place where judiciously judgment based, we should put money behind the right content and if the audience is difficult to reach, I think we should do that. That will increase our ROI on our investments. Sagar, I'm just going to come to you before that. Sheetha sir, what's your point of view on that in terms of, because I know your industry does a lot of performance-led campaigns and targeted campaigns. Do you believe that pushing the right influencer like Vivek said and even I'm sure Lakshmi will agree that when we see the engagement out of 10 influencers, three or four of them actually derive for a brand, isn't it sensible enough to put media monies to reach a larger set of audiences more targeted with their content created by them? Yeah. So I think I want to just offer a sort of a reimagining of how the influencer strategy is for Singapore tourism bought. So I agree with Vivek that in many ways, when we are directly engaging influencers and through them, their friends, there's one approach. But increasingly, we have also realized working with another partner. So whether it's Zomato for a Zomaland event or this weekend, in fact, just on this weekend, we're going to launch with book, my show, a series of influencer-led campaigns and we are putting partnership dollars. So it is partnership dollars. So A is a content creation, which is very important. So we have very good authentic, realistic content by the influencers in their own voices. But B, the content distribution is increasingly very important for us as well. So we pick the right platforms, whether it's Zomato and therefore they have got their own fan base and added to that, you know, you've got the influencers. So we need to expand the space of how do we reach the influencers audiences, but again, a platform like a book, my show or a Zomato allows us or a triple two, right, allows us a reach, which is far wider than just the influencer. So in many ways, it is, it is making sure that it is expanded space that we are going into the influencers have got their own reach, but we also need to then work with other partners and amplify the reach. So that's how we are now re-looking at this. And that is why now it is a very important strategy for us to use to have the influencers, but we add on a platform or a partner that brings us amplification. Thanks. True. Sagar, you know, they're a month, I mean, you're a, I think you're one month, two month old in this business, you've been on the digital side, you've done a lot of performance marketing. So I know your background and we've worked together. The question for you is that it's quite competitive, right? In the last two years, we've seen a host of agencies and, you know, influencer setups that have come into the business, each of them bringing their own platform tech, you know, right from selection, planning, buying, seeding, pricing, all built into the kind of tech that you guys are putting together. So how does that make a difference for a brand or for a, from a marketer's point of view? What's the kind of advantage you bring to the table? Because there are tons of them. And today if you talk to the big platform like YouTube and Instagram, even they are talking about influencer marketing, right? So with you guys being there, what's the expertise that you all bring to the table? And how can a brand actually benefit from what you have to offer here? Yeah. So Ajay, largely you're right, there are a lot of players in the market today who are maybe offering the same solution. I would not really comment on what they are offering. In, at the heart of what we have designed and what we have built essentially is the four, five problems that when I used to work with you together, I could, you know, feel those and see that discoveries of an influencer is a big problem. How do you find the right influencer? If you find one, how do you reach out to those influencers? If you're able to reach out to them, are you, is there a, you know, tool that can actually give you the right metric about their influencer, you know, understanding how many followers are actually genuine, how many are suspicious, so on and so forth. And then the entire execution of the campaign and before that very importantly is the transaction very, very transparent. And while you're right, I've been in this industry for the last two, three months since the time I've taken over, but I do realize that transparency also is a big problem here because there are a lot of middlemen, a lot of times you're not able to reach out to the influencer directly. And, you know, that's where the whole problem is because I have spoken to multiple brands about this and they have said that at times they have reached out to two different people for the same influencer and the cost that they get is totally different. Why? Because the guy who's basically enabling that is maybe marking up that fees. As one of the things, you know, that you said, I'm from the paid marketing side, I've done programmatic and performance marketing for the longest time. And I felt that the entire reason, the biggest reason why it became very popular was because it could bring about a lot of transparency in this entire transaction because digital 10 years back also were the same problem, right? You never knew if you're paying the right CPM to the publisher or not. And that's what programmatic or perhaps Facebook and YouTube eventually built in because they became sell-sell platforms. So I think that's where we are trying to bring about a differentiation. We are ensuring that we are building ancillary tools around this entire ecosystem, not just for the brand side or the demand side, but also for the supply side, essentially for the micro-influencers, the smaller ones, how do they can come on the platform? How can they can maybe generate and invoice things to take care of? Because these are small influences. They don't have people to manage their finances or make their life easier. Maybe if you could build in a content management system, a seeding system where they can actually take content live with a certain calendar. So there are these things that we're working upon. Of course, you have to find a niche in the offering which is there and you have to bring about your own element in this entire offering. So I think that's where we are trying to be different. Lakshmi, on the transparency bid and the pricing and Vivek is here and even Shreeter is, I'm sure they get a lot of proposals and plans for their teams coming in from multiple sources. How do you actually determine, because it's strange, like I was talking to someone yesterday, three months back their price to put out a post was a lack of rupees and three months later they're saying they're three lakhs. So how do you determine what's the right price? How much should be paid? What's the kind of delivery, accountability, reach? How do you calculate that and how do you propose that at times where there's no science behind pricing in this sort of a domain? How do you manage that? So I mean, unfortunately, it's still somewhat manual in that sense. So we do have some kind of an understanding of having done this over the last many years. So we know a person is worth so much, basically a couple of factors, one is their following. So if their cost has increased over a few months, it's mostly a merit of their following. Sometimes it's also a demand supply kind of thing. So a person is trending because of how much they've been in the news and so on, or an actor's cost could increase, who's also an actor and influencer whose cost could increase because a movie is releasing. So there is a lot of PR attached to those kind of things that happen. But largely, I wouldn't call it a science, but there is some amount of quantification people in agencies like us do, which is there should be some amount of engagement, there should be some amount of organic views in terms of videos. There should be some amount of certain following that each of them should have to charge a certain amount. So somebody with a 10K following, for example, wants to charge 75,000 or 1 lakh, that is a very high amount. So there are some benchmarks that we have formulated over the course of time where we know, be on our own. So sometimes if the brand comes to us and says they want X person, but we believe that X person is charging an exorbitant amount, we kind of go back and advise the brand to drop them because one, their engagement could be low and they're not worth that kind of money too. Their following or the reach that they could kind of bring about for that campaign would not possibly be worth it. So it's some amount of qualitative, quantitative kind of a check that as an agency, we should kind of take the responsibility to do and which we do in almost all cases. Lakshmi, Vivek spoke about measurability. I mean, I just like to understand that when you work with brands and a lot of marketing managers and brand managers, what are the expectations? I mean, I understand that there are certain parameters we can check because we have access. So you have access to a particular influence. So you can look at the views and the basic numbers that they see on their dashboard. But beyond that, what is the kind of stuff that they ask you? Is it about where is the impact on brand? Stuff like that and how do you address that? Because at times that control you guys don't have as an agency. Neither does the influencer. For him, it's very simple. You're writing on my popularity, my following. I understand your brand. I've got the tonality. Here goes the post. You guys approve it and we move forward. But in reality, if I need to or if the brand needs to measure the impact on brand, then what is that? What are the kinds of stuff that they ask in? How do you address that from a marketing standpoint? So the most common question that brands end up asking us is and it's like I said, it's a conversation that's been going on for a long time is beyond awareness and engagement and buzz that influencers and content tend to create. How much of it leads to conversion is a question a lot of brand managers still end up asking because I believe that's an internal question that gets asked as well. So because most others are somewhat getting quantified, whether it's Google ads or at least in the digital economy, most others are getting quantified in some fashion. But a good amount of the questions we actually hear in terms of how much conversion it does it actually lead to, which like I said is a problem that is yet to be solved. But like Mr. Vivek said, it's best of times, it's just the lead time that it's a time gap that it actually takes before it becomes a sale. Use best of cases and influence the content that has worked well does end up in becoming a conversion or a sale of some sort. It's just that it's not necessarily always immediate. It's not always a swipe up link to an e-commerce website or so on. It's a mix of awareness plus saliency, plus education about how to use or what to use or when to use. Again, like Mr. Vivek said about for the brand to build some kind of thought leadership in that category, saying for X, I'm the right person kind of a thing and which eventually kind of converts to sale. So in terms of measurability, I mean, we're still in the quantitative metrics, which is your reach, views, engagement, impressions. In some cases, clicks, but again, influencers as of now may not be the best method to drive clicks at all. It's best to go for a performance campaign in that case. Lakshmi, one thing I would look definitely for is shareability of the content. Because once the content is shared, I'm sure then I'm confident that my brand mentioned in the content is likely to reach more people and it'll have some influence on the preference for the brand. So that is one thing I would look at additional to what all Lakshmi has said. One question in addition to what Lakshmi had mentioned that do you encourage at your end we do so many sort of studies, brand list studies, etc. Do you ever think of something like this should be put together by, I mean, we're talking a big platform like Facebook and Star, the monies are going there, we're literally deploying a huge amount of sums to promote those platforms also in a way. But do you encourage them at your end in terms of having a basic brand list study, especially when there's a substantial amount of money is going behind the campaign and they're slightly more long drawn than just a 10 day or a two week period? Of course, they do brand list survey studies and you can do your own studies. We've often done our own studies amongst the target audience through a research agency. Let me do a big campaign like we did for Fevicol 60 years last year, we did three point study and three points in time and measured the impact of all the digital spend on the brand. So yes, that is advisable but it's good not to get lost in numbers. Ironically, digital is measurable, so everyone want 10 parameters to be measured but tell, we spend crores on television, all we measure is reach frequency. I think marketers have to be careful not to really lose the art of brand making and brand building and the art still lies in the softer aspects as well and building preference and equity for the future and that is where I think we should not look at digital marketing also as a special animal. Fundamentalism marketing are the same, it is just that it offers you more control and opportunities and touch points. So we have Bahad who's joined us. Hi Bahad, this is Ajay here. Hi Ajay, how are you? We have Sagar, Vivek, Sheetal sir and Lakshmi who are there. I think you just joined us. I have a couple of questions, I was waiting for you to come in actually. We've spoken a lot about how marketers and brands look at influencer marketing and the role they play in today's time and both Sagar and Lakshmi touched upon the fact that how do they go about engaging with influencers, selecting them and providing those kinds of plans that we would need for a particular brief for a brand. But I would like to understand from you that this is one part where we don't get to hear directly because we deal a lot with the influencer agencies but when you are approached by a particular brand or an agency, what is there in your head in terms of what are the factors that determine your choices that I would like to work with a particular brand or a particular type of brief? How do you go about deciding? I mean like I understand a beauty blogger or a chef would like to talk about certain brands and food etc but is there a certain judgment or a gut that comes into play and how do you go about that? Of course you know first of all I would just want to make clear. I have not just been a default influencer like what you call as of today I've been a practicing lawyer. I was with Amarjan Mangadas for five years and Facebook was one of my clients. So before I came ahead in front of the screen creating content I was busy drafting their policies and also gauging all the engagements and adverts. So I do understand that while a lot of brands go for the numbers, honestly that's not the money. You have to understand the quality of the following that people command. It's all about the kind of however small is the following significance. Is it important to your brand? With this if you don't have that approach, no matter who you go for, you may go for an entertainer who are also loosely termed as influencers today on Instagram. An entertainer finally mentions a Prouty brand or some other brand that they're trying to promote or a skin brand right after speaking for one minute and promoting themselves. I don't think that really connects with the audience or converts. People often just go and watch their profile because they look good in what they wear or they manage to entertain you. That necessarily does not translate into a conversion for you whereas you may be putting in the funds. So you have to also be a little altruistic and have a more I don't know you can't have such a myopic approach of just having an objective standard of engagement. Yes people are commenting on it but they are really inquiring how does that product taste, whatever the calories have you seen. You know like people don't end up researching that much so it's not just about the numbers. And often I mean as a brand I just straight away jump into this. I'm also aware and so should you. Even when you're doing an engagement analysis it's not just a straight targeted formula. There are agencies sitting and there are interns sitting who are creating this comment for the if you see the quality of the engagement also out of the 200 comments that you see how many are really relevant to your product. Probably 10 if at all because they have literally 10 comments and the rest are just following like oh I admire you so much you look so good you are you end up making a staff so much you make our day. Is that really relevant to your product. So as a brand it's not just a short circuited formula that you know somebody has a number of followers X number of comments and you go this is the person you have to go for. No the idea is always to identify someone who's probably I mean I'm no disrespect to the bloggers person because I know that main source of income is the internet, social media, YouTube, Instagram or any other profile. You have to kind of understand if that is their only bread and butter they will promote anything that comes to them. Unless they have loss of exclusivity and as a lawyer I do understand that unless mentioned they will promote everything that is in the same bracket. Now what as a brand would you want to get lost in a page which just looks like I don't know what you want to resonate with somebody who has a personality of their own. They have a path of their own a journey of their own they have managed with the passage of time to generate a certain amount of trust and respect amongst those number of followers which may not be very high but it is a significant following. Like for instance I know for a fact that I being in the position I am I would probably not promote because not because I'm against it but I may not promote a large brand. It may not go with my profiling it does not mean that I don't wear it okay or I'm going to speak about it but in my position I know I will not inspire any trust for people to actually follow me for a certain reason. However for instance in some a new mother and I told us why we sold and I do put up you know my trust with law and art and how I'm trying to raise funds through art you know and I enjoy my skincare I enjoy my fashion but I would only do it if I enjoy it I will not do it for money because this is not my main profession this is not my only source of income so why would I do something which I can't even relate to because then instead of the respect that I may have the money to fight people even they would start distrusting me. So there is a certain amount of trust. Before you came in there was a question that I asked was and since you've been on the other side you've seen all the documents like you said you've seen all the policies you know unlike the celebrity world where we have. I was drafting them. Yeah so yeah so it depends you have to put it in a contract otherwise it all depends on the contract. I personally because brands don't really come ahead with agreements typically brand approach a PR agency. PR agency tells them these are the five influences in your bracket okay and none of the influences per se are experts. None of them are skincare experts mostly bloggers or they enjoy a product or they enjoy a certain genre and they talk about it. So it's very difficult to point out only a fashion influencer in fact that's the broadest category. So having said that I think it's very important to understand your target audience your niche and then go for the person who does not does not promote everything and I mean brands are not always mindful of tweaking in the fact that there should be exclusivity. I think it should be read into every document because a blogger ends up promoting five cell phone brands in two months how would you trust them they have made their money how can you apart from the pics that you've got as you've asked for the engagement and you know the insights of a given post but do you really know if the sales happened you don't maybe then the model that we've seen that works is when you give those the sound coupon of 10 percent through a certain influencer that is something that actually we've seen you can gauge the conversions if at all because you would be surprised but even when brand is asking for insights everything gets photoshopped because we are part of a committee that is on the crackdown because nothing that algorithms and their inside numbers don't match these people like it doesn't they talk excited to watch all these information. So I think it is very very important to do a little homework at your end also it's not objective standard. Yeah coming back to the point you made and I'd like to go to Vivek and Sridhar sir and ask them that so you know in the recent time we are hearing a lot of the you know this whole thing of shifting towards macro to micro and nano apparently you know the kind of reports we're seeing and you know whatever pilot tests we've done across the board we also tend to realize that the engagement to them is fairly high you know and a lot of these new platforms especially Ecom platforms are offering the affiliate marketing sort of you know the influencers sort of model to brands directly. I just want to understand do you really believe that there is scope to actually go down the road and use micro influencers both from a brand safety standpoint and from a business standpoint to actually to move from just plain saliency awareness to actually conversion because that's where the world is moving and like I mentioned earlier as well for CPV is moving to CPA you know a lot of the brands are asking that can you create long drawn annual sort of you know deals or long term deals where we can use micro influencers to create or drive business for us so Vivek if you can just throw some light on that and then we can reach and ask Sridhar as well. I think this time Sridhar should go first okay I think I think Ajay is an interesting question right okay A first of all what is the definition of micro micro it is typically the kind of fan reach the influencer has determines whether it's a micro micro nano but I also have another layer of thinking and and this is something that we are trying to understand right because the influencer also is what kind of communications can we use that influencer for the narrower it is for me he's a micro influencer in also a certain way because there's a certain so for example we have been working with a lot of influencers and we pick so if it is a comedian who is a stand-up comedian there's a certain reach he has if it is a chef there's a certain reach he has so it is passion driven right so I think for us is increasingly very important that we look at those kind of passion passion bridge right where it is in connect with what we want to look at so for example in the book my show launch that's coming up so we've got a comedian we've got a film director we've got a chef we've got a single songwriter so along that line so I think that's one that's one important area the second is when you come to micro and nano influencers it is also about what kind of regional language platforms that they may allow us to get into okay in no small way in no small way this is a micro or micro influencer so when I'm just giving an example it's a wrong example perhaps but so when we wanted to get into communicating to the South Indian audience the Tamil Nadu audience we leverage an opportunity Maistri Ele Raja was in town in 2018 the late Dr. S.P. Balasubramanir was in town last year together with Dr. K.J. Jesus but it was a Tamil language oriented activation and we were very clear it is going to be only in that medium it is going to be only to that audience and we had that activity so if I bring that down to a micro influencer now who can allow us to talk to somebody in Malayalam in Kerala or somebody in Gujarati in you know I will go for that so I think it is important how do we pick and why do we pick them and then as as Bahir and then Vivek all have talked about and Lakshmi has talked about it is an engagement it is authenticity of the voice and it's a kind of a reach that they allow us and then we go from then and one final point we are not in a zero sum game it is not a win-lose or it is a win-win game we are also very clear that when somebody associates with Singapore Tourism Board they also get to benefit when I associate with them I benefit from them because of their reach so we want to mutually grow we want to mutually benefit from this relationship so yeah mutual benefit is very important over to Vivek I would stick my neck out and say I would not really go for quantities and large number of micro influencers and I'll give you my reason because influencer marketing is not about giving same or similar message to everyone and say propagate influencer marketing is the conference of three things what is the brand message okay what do the audience want to listen what do they want to have conversations around and the unique personality and the perspective is the influencer carry so you have to deeply work and join all three and then work with influencer to say how will you create the message for me okay I can't control if I have so many large number of micro influencers I would not take name of brands but I've often seen on my feed you know 25 30 influencers feed coming and they're all giving the same cut base message now that is a really good influencer marketing yeah so I think influencer marketing is hard work you have to carefully craft a message because why should give them to the accommodate the unique personality of the influencers you also have to look about the brand message the boundaries you don't want to cross you know there is this challenge over there so I think because of this I would go step by step and I would be with you you know few influencers than large number of micro influencers because large number of micro influencers are similar to TV mass marketing which is not what influencer marketing is all about true sorry I think all depends on what is your purpose is it a saturated base then you know you have to have a mask base but if you want to curate a space you know you want to create a niche then you have to obviously go for someone who has a personality that will create a market for you and in that case it all depends on the you know next segment you're looking at so yes in that case you have to limit yourself to those three four influential people who will reach out to say a bigger space because they're creating a message for you if it's a saturated space say a fashion brand like you just try to sell a scarf that doesn't people to do it then you may meet a different kind of approach and that's when you probably would take in the number so that they can just pervade the space and each are more people because that's a direct conversion but creating like entering the market with a new product does mean that you have to be able to curate that product and also that has to be with a person who has the ability to create communities on their own so I think the approach depends and earlier the distinction between micro and macro used to be depending on the platform that they operate on macro influencers used to be your typical celebrities for people but with the OTB platforms and social media they've been with immediate search in their popularity and everyone being engaged and like on their phones there has been a very you know like I won't say graduate of then like a tidal shift of you know people also the consumer sitting on your phones so that's the reason why the micro influencers have seen a better performance in terms of conversion so it all depends on what are you trying to sell and give out in the market. Yes so I would also tell one thing we always tend to you know correlate engagement with micro influencers we feel we should also understand that when the numbers of followers are less the engagement rate is always very high it is it was it is inversely proportional to to the fact that when your followers increase your engagement would also come down so it is not really a right comparison it's it's a simple digital media metric it always happens with with every kind of campaign so that shouldn't really be the first parameter for anyone to basically just say that okay this is what is working I would agree to what what Vivek said and what Bhar also said it is more like horses for courses you need to be very clear about what is the objective that you want to drive and that is what should define the kind of influencer that you want to have for your campaign that's that's it's very clear. I'm just giving you my personal experience a lot of engagement with my Instagram happens on my DMs a lot of it people don't openly share about their experience with respect to transcending borders or you know like my shift from law to art and creating a space for new artists and people to follow their passion and talking about whatever they enjoy what everyone does it openly publicly in the comments section so often I turn off my comments but then with the branch they know the number of sales that have happened because the queries and the long passages that come to me not everyone comfortable with exposing unless they're just praising you you know just saying great you look great or you know the shallow comments are on the comment section DMs have some serious engagement so I think there are actually Facebook is working on that so that Instagram can also have a feature where DM do not with the keywords if that is relevant to the brand can all those insights can also be shared because a lot of this information is masked yeah just one last question because we have other audience questions that we need to take so I can obviously you've got into this business like you said recently been funded and you're almost a new player in the market what's your sense from now to another couple of years a two-year view of where do you see into marketing do you think the spends are going to go up I mean there are a lot of numbers floating around saying that it's a 400 crores 700 crores you know sort of a business but do you see really brands and you know the top market is sitting around on the panel you really see them actually you know going 2x or 3x because the spend they're very large compared to the the spend they do on digital but do you see that as a as a as a huge growth sort of a thing in the next couple of years what's your sense given that you've seen one and a half year have you been through it yes so I would not really put some astronomical number to to to what the growth is going to be but I definitely feel that it's going to grow much much bigger than what it is right now and I have a few you know valid points that I've seen in my journey across across how digital media has also evolved and I always tell this to everyone that it is at a stage where I would say it is at infancy stage a lot of things that we are learning eventually there is some consolidation that is going to happen we would you know then arrive at the currencies that one should have to evaluate influencer marketing if you remember 10 years back the digital marketing ecosystem was going through the same transformation you you know initially people were just happy with having a cpm kind of a buy it eventually started moving to engagement then programmatic came in then consolidation of media then controlling frequency then ensuring that you're not wasting media so I think that's all in a way is going to also evolve in this ecosystem also and and of course during the way we are going to learn a lot of you know course corrections in terms of how we are going to do influencer marketing also you know the the machine learning and AI are very very important tools which are going to build the entire decision making process for influencer marketing very easy for brands and that's also one thing because it is all going to happen through a lot of machine learning I personally feel that the more number of campaigns that I do on clan is eventually going to help plan to learn a lot of machine learning and eventually give a lot of smart recommendations in terms of not just you know like Bahar said it should not really matter if if you have a very huge number of followers base or perhaps slightly lesser because it is eventually you know it is reflective of the the cost that you're charging is reflective of of the kind of engagement that you can draw and then perhaps the engine over a period of time should be able to learn and that's what we are also trying to build whether that the money that influencer the cost that influencer is asking for is actually should directly be proportional to the number of followers that in most of the cases brands generally just say okay 1.1 million plus there should be a cost 100k less there should be a cost it it is not really like that because you know a lot of comments a lot of things are like okay you're looking very good I'm a huge fan is it really driving anything not really right so I think it is it is going to definitely become bigger it is going to become a certain part of the media mix like digital and it will not be something you know like digital marketing it's it's going to be a separate part of the of the overall media planning mix there has to be a way to also look at influencer marketing a lot of brands ask me today is my cpv or is my cpe cost per engagement or cpv cost per view going to be equivalent to youtube it is not because you know you you're you're comparing two different mediums at one point you have a 30 second a video and the other point you have a perhaps a three second or sorry three minute or five minute video where the completion rate is more than 90 percent so you're anyway getting a lot of ROI on top of it so for you to expect that you get 80 plus a cost per view wrong that's where you know I feel that we should not very loosely connect influencer marketing with overall digital paid media marketing it has a niche of its own it is going to grow and become much more smarter as we as we move on yes and like you said I'm in this business so it is it should definitely become much much bigger I also want to quickly add a jc while I believe you know branded content is a big deal there's amplification that influencers do like you've been you know saying influencers in the future will also definitely be used to kind of drive sales and commerce I believe that's also going to be a part that's going to grow parallely you know as we speak there are many of them who are you know building courses with influencers because they are becoming experts in their own you know domains there are games that are being built you know for with influencers so influencers are kind of you know it's a fairly loosely used term people who have a lot of following and some amount of influencer influence in the domain they are in so it's expanding to you know multiple domains so while branded content marketing is one there are multiple so while gaming also through games there are you know different forms of engagement that brands or others could kind of reach out courses like I said so overall I believe you know like Sagar also mentioned it's it's fairly in the niche early to mid kind of stages and it's it's definitely going to grow globally and definitely in India because we're still early here so yeah I believe it is one last I'll come back to you about one second okay keeping aside business brand you know mistakes and what we normally chase do you really believe that influences can actually bring fame and when I say fame I mean fame from you know awards perspective as well in terms of good quality well produced content as well did you really believe it can because a lot of the new sort of you know the awards etc you see these new categories coming in so do you really believe that one can actually produce great work with with influencers as well yeah so my answer remains the same so first of all you know take brand life every call we I mean they'll be this brand don't chase awards you know whether we work with influencer or do not work with influencers or have celebrity you know do not have celebrity you know so it's all about and I'm again saying it's all about content and that needs hard work marketing to work with influencers whether it wins awards or not it doesn't matter but you know since you were talking about future with Sagar I would like to say only one thing as we are evolving and marketing through influencers to consumers consumers are also evolving they're not in the same place so now they've gotten on to you know authenticity and the push content and brand isn't promoted very easily and they don't buy that very very very going in the future it will be all about not about putting your brand next to influencers it will be all about how we can solve an issue or a problem in the life of consumer and that is Bahar rightly said a lot of impressions it will come through maybe direct messaging whether the interaction so I think we as marketers should actually measure not the reach approach but about a deeper engagement approach we shall come at a higher cost but I think it is the value which it brings to a brand which will be far more so we have to I think evolve a kind of a different mechanism to put value to influencer marketing and what it does to the brand Bahar yeah I'm thinking segregated authentic and unauthentic self how will you even tell because you know a lot of times these macro influences that you go for the celebrities they're often pursue your character so it is it actually works in small towns but people like if you your product means that you have to try and sell it in the cities and you know the metropolitan you need to have people who will actually be engaging in respect to your product beyond social media also so you're not just looking at people who are popular or celebrities on that one post because in a flicker it will be it will come and go but unless and like Vivek mentioned that you need to create something it is a lot of hard work if you're not able to create something novel that catches somebody's attention it will not leave any anything in the mind of the viewer because they're digesting that much more content on social media just they're flipping so it's like if you unless you create something novel your human mind is trained to watch something that's different in a novel it's like we will be attracted to light like a moth or a baby to a phone you have to give us something new and if you keep going to a person who's just showing how to wear a skirt or scarf or a blouse in 10 ways there is a certain you will have the numbers because fashion is that much easier to spread but not that easy to consume so you'll have more teenagers watching your product but is that your consumer that's the question to ask you know you know brands have to make their own effort to work with influencers to give them content also I'll give an example we have a fabric real range of art materials brand right and we often engage with you know hobby teachers and hobbyists who are not famous but actually they are very well known amongst those you know consumers and what they do is that is they don't just say buy fabric real they give them art recipes to create art and craft so they do that on their own but we also have a studio in our own company we have a set of 810 people who are creating art and craft and recipes different ways of using to create art and craft using our product then the influencer content which is the hobby content from our studios combined to create a policy approach to influencer marketing so brands have to actually invest in creating content on their own also no it's a great point Vivek and we're running out of time but you know the point you made is actually linking back to communities right I mean a lot of brands today like whether it's a micro community like you said you know mothers you know publishing platforms and brands who are actually latching on and creating their own so to say tribe all communities can leverage I'm sure it's the same even in the tourism industry so we have very little time I think there are only two minutes and Kathy has been pinging me on the side so thanks everyone thanks for your time thanks for all the great points you made a lot of learnings out there for me as well Kathy over to you if there are any questions we can ask them and make it from you yeah absolutely firstly thank you Mr. Metha for steering and you know driving this whole conversation and thank you to our panelists we do have a lot of questions but because of the possibility of time I'm gonna ask just the two of them here one is specifically I think for Sagar and Lakshmi if you one of you would like to take this up which says what is your point on brands who are unable to recognize real creators in the large scale of micro and mini influencers and the engagement is not really valued on Instagram with the new algorithm coming in so you know your points on this I mean if I could so that's right you know agencies actually do it's hard work all the way right so even agencies have to good agencies have to put in a lot of effort to keep identifying new people literally every single day across categories categories are expanding influencer basis are expanding influencers literally anybody who has a loyal set of audience who engage with them and they're good at something that they do so we do constantly agencies are supposed to and we do constantly keep looking out for newer people who create really good content there are all kinds of content creators with numbers are an important factor but there are a lot of brands so in a plan of say 15, 10, 15 people we always do try to position or put in a couple of smaller influencers as well because we've discussed the engagement with smaller influencers are higher so that's something we anyway keep doing from time I would I would just like to add like for 30 seconds here that it is very important also for the brands to understand the kind of association they're looking for you know and while manual understanding or analysis of anything is important I think you should always have a unbiased machine you know that that will always give you a better and more objective analysis and that's what we endeavor at doing second also is of course association and you know the objective that you're looking at I would still say taking a celebrity who doesn't know about a mobile phone and asking him to just you know do that is of course not of any use I would much rather have a key opinion leader talking about a product in a more you know subtle manner where there is a education being done instead of you know using the brand power or the follower or the following of a big celebrity it does not I in my opinion doesn't work at all so it is it's it's that how it's it is going to work okay there are three things I just wanted to add that quickly three things are for ourselves versus urgency scarcity curd is related ability if the influence that's when the influencer comes in if somebody cannot lead to the influencer and your product it will not send and this is such a nebulous market it's subjective so I'll give you an example I had to sell an alcohol brand they actually married art into it we created a lot we created full facade so that we can sell into a different audience altogether so it's all about being creative on how you sell product it's not just about standing with a bottle you have to create value and that's where the influencers come in absolutely so Sagar just wondering on the same point that you made so the question says that how do you see this influencer community will be growing in the future in comparison to the digital brand media marketing and also because of the pandemic how do you see this working in the coming months it is already taken like another spiral altogether it has become too big right now and one of the few things I would I mean pandemic has been bad for all of us but I think that's one area which is which has become very very important and very very big for brands they realize that while they cannot do go out and do shoots for their brands or their advertisements it is essentially the community which is helping them you know garner that extended reach that they want to have it is very important it is going to you know become much bigger going on from here and like all of panelists said before Vivek Shreeter they also mentioned it is very very important to basically cognizant of how you're going to use influencer marketing and not really confuse that with any other form of digital advertising they are different things the objective the the the relevancy that the drive is different it is for brands to understand how to use influencer marketing the best possible manner absolutely so one quick last one and here is a fun one Vivek this is for you which says pretty light has been promoting brand the biggest influencer which is the elephant and the concept has been working wonderfully does it plan to change the influencer in the future that's the question from our audience no actually yes we have used our elephant which is part of a brand identity and logo and we have used elephant creatively to drive various messages in covid times and non-covid times and it has got huge engagement so yes in a way we can say elephants are not only a brand ambassador but also influencers and the person behind this huge pande and he's the one who'd activate all those engaging piece of work for us so you know that only illustrates that the value of content cannot be underrated you know it is the most important thing whether influencer or not influencer absolutely once again thank you to all our panelists thank you all to everyone for joining and taking out the time and speaking to us sure the viewers have taken a lot of takeaways from this conversation so thank you once again