 on marketing technologies. Industry leaders speaking at today's session include Sharad Dhal, Chief Operating Officer Policy Bazaar, Manu Lavanya, Director and Chief Operating Operations Officer, Max Life Insurance, Scott Brinkel, B.P. Platform Ecosystem HubSpot Editor, chiefmartech.com, Program Chair Martek, Paran Thiruvangadam, CTO Medlife, Yash Dayal, CTO Zivame, Sandeep Koramaveli, Director of International Growth, Spotify. No, sorry, Shopify. Now, before we begin, if you have any questions, please put them on the Zoom chat box. We are also live on Facebook, Instagram, as well as Twitter. You can use the hashtag martechindia to post any queries, comments, insights, or a piece of information that you may want to convey. So if there is anything that you want to speak to us, please feel free to drop in your queries. We now begin with the first session of the day. We have an expert talk with Sharad Del, COO, Quality Bazaar. To give you a little brief about Sharad, he has 20 years of experience running businesses in the internet as well as FMCG spaces. He successfully handled teams as large as 1,000 people, as well as worked in small 10 member startup situations too. He is also an advisory board member at Credit Enable India. As a managing director of TripAdvisor India, he launched the Indian business and grew it up to a top notch of free travel websites in India within two years of its launch. Before that, he was the MD at Expedia and was responsible for launching the brand in India too. Welcome, Sharad. We will kindly start. Thank you so much, Sonakshi. Just to put things in context, that last four days have been amazing. We had some great speakers from India abroad. So this conversation continues and today is the final day. And as Sonakshi said, this is the precursor of the big event that we will be hosting in September. Welcome, Mr. Dal. Great to have you here and let me likewise. So we see that 90 days especially has been a period of innovation, adjustment, alignment. I want to first understand from you your story of these 90 days to begin with. So I think the pandemic has been a completely unprecedented and tragic kind of situation, which I hope never gets repeated. One of the things that has happened during the course of these last two, three months is that in our category, what it has resulted in is that the need and relevance of insurance as a product in a person's life has come to the fore for many, many people. And it started out with a lot of people querying and searching for life insurance. But over the last few months, the last couple of months, it's been more about the health insurance space as people are fearing the rising medical costs associated with the illness. So from a business perspective, it has been fairly, it has been a, we've had a good time in this period. We've grown at about 70% to 80%. In what is typically a very, very lean period for insurance as a category. And actually, interestingly, insurance was a product that was typically bought at the end of the financial year as a tax investment. And I think this is the first time that it has gained in terms of people's consciousness as a product that's actually there to secure your family's future by paying a small sum of money. And I think a lot of people are realizing that insurance is actually a beautiful thing. So and we've seen that the demand has come from not only the metros and the larger cities, but also from tier two and tier three cities whose contribution has actually gone up to almost about 15% now from earlier being 5% to 7%. So it's been a fairly, there's been a lot of surge in terms of the demand that has come in. People have obviously it's anxious times, and hence we have seen that this has gone up. As far as what we've done to try and make it as seamless as possible is that we have worked hard with our partners, the insurance companies to actually enable people to do telemedicals and video medicals rather than have to go out for a physical medical tour medical center. And that's something that has also helped in terms of ensuring that people were able to buy insurance during this period of time. And that's made the whole experience much more seamless. And the digital channel, obviously at this time has been the one that has been most unaffected. So that's also the reason why there's been a surge in terms of online buying of insurance as a category, which on an overall basis is a very under penetrated category in the country. Right, yeah, absolutely. I think that perception shift, you know, that it is tax saving to something which is essential. I think that has taken place definitely. And at the same time, you know, I think this surge has posed other challenges. One is that the backend part of the tech part of it, especially the marketing side of it. When you prepare to kind of adjust quickly to the growing demand, did you have to go through certain new features? What has been the tech, mark tech journey side of it, of these 90 days, the search that you said. Right. I think one is that, you know, as a company, we had a lot of people who were insurance advisors helping people buy insurance over the phone. And very quickly, we had to move all of these people to a work from home situation, which was something that fortunately, because we have all our tech in-house, we were able to actually move the entire force of over 6,000 people to start working from home, fairly seamlessly. And that was a great first mover advantage in that sense for us, because we didn't have any teething issues in this regard. As far as the marketing side was concerned, what we quickly realized was that, both on the online side, the consumption of digital, mobile, and app was going through the roof. And similarly, as far as TV was concerned, day viewing was going up as more and more people were sitting at home. And so one of the things that we had to do was to quickly reorganize the way we spent our money, focusing primarily on TV, and which typically we would advertise in only the peak hours, you know, in the evening slots. But we were able to, we moved our media spends across, you know, day paths, so as to reach a wider audience. And also another thing we realized was from an audience point of view that genres like news, you know, really went up as people were seeking more and more information about what was going on with regard to COVID. And so we had to move our money there. And so as a brand one had to be agile about it. And on the digital side, it was really about, you know, expanding our reach through a lot of programmatic buying, which we did, you know, implemented fairly effectively and quickly. So Sharif, what are the changes that you have seen in the consumer behavior lately? Has there been like a little difference? Have you seen some extra attraction in the last few months? Yeah, so it's very interesting. I think consumer behavior, so insurance as a category has typically been a category where the consumer behavior is one of procrastination. So when you talk to somebody, everybody realizes that, yes, it makes sense to buy insurance. But at the same time, it's something that the gratification is, you know, so far out. And typically the person who insures, takes out the insurance, never gets the gratification. That's the way the product really is. And so it often results in people pushing out this decision. But what has happened and what has happened during this period is that because there has been heightened levels of anxiety around, you know, what's going on, people have gone out and actively, you know, searched out for insurance as a category. So what we've seen is that the talk times that we had with people has gone up tremendously. The amount of time they spent on the website has increased. We are able to get through to customers far more easily than we were able to earlier. And all of that has resulted in increased conversion for us on the website as well. The other thing that we've seen is that a lot of younger customers have also taken out insurance. And that's something that possibly we've seen people in their first jobs shifting from making an investment decision to taking an insurance, you know, decision in terms of their financial planning for their futures. So that's the other thing that we've seen. And like I was saying earlier that typically it was, okay, you know, I can save some tax at the end of the year by buying an insurance policy. That's what I do. Now it's, you know, April and May, June were typically the complete off season as far as insurance was concerned. But for the first time we've seen people buy insurance in April, May, June. And that's primarily because they're finally buying it for the right reasons, which is really about protection from death disease and disability, which is really what this product is all about. I should, I must also add that policy bizarre, you know, it has, you have evangelized this space in a way, you know, it has been a whole lot of things maybe they are coming together now and that's one of the reasons. So my next point is that, you know, what has also happened is why consumers are coming to you and they want to get, look for the best policy and everything else. However, you know, selling is for marketers, you know, especially selling in this sensitive time is also an issue. Is it different from what it used to be? How are you using this tonality, emotional tonality in your tech part of the tech facing side, the marketing tech side to make it more kind of acceptable? Right, so I think, you know, as a brand, one of the things that we've always focused on is trying to expand the category. So just to give you a bit of, you know, background on the category, insurance is a fairly under penetrated category in India. And even the people who have insurance are typically very under insured. So what we've really believed in is that our growth will come from growing the category. And that's what our focus has been, which has been in terms of communication, it has been really about heightening the need and the relevance of insurance as a product. And at the same time emphasizing the accessibility of it. So letting people know that it's not as expensive as they possibly think it is. And why they really need it. So as a brand, it's always been about being straightforward, being direct. And at the same time, offering a solution. And I think that has held us in very good stead in these uncertain times where people are looking for solutions. I think, you know, it's an unfortunate truth that the future is uncertain. And I think stating it upfront might seem insensitive, but at the same time, people are able to realize that there is a solution for it, which is by taking out an insurance policy. And I think that straightforward and direct approach has resonated extremely well with consumers. And we followed this across the board in both our TV advertising, which is our prime media channel or a media device. And also in our digital marketing strategies, where we've looked to expand our reach across various platforms, so that we are visible and backing up all our TV advertising as well. So there's another point. 90 days has also given us a certain new insight into how marketing technology works. If you have to build the next level of stack, the marketing technology stack, what would be some of the learnings from here from these 90 days, that could be part of that. Also, the world is opening up gradually, which would also stay relevant in that kind of a world, which is a mix of the two. What would be those elements that could become part of that stack, marketing tech stack? Right. So I think one of the things that we are constantly endeavoring to do is to try to make it easier and simpler for consumers to find the right product for themselves. As an aggregator, we present the customer with all possible choices that are available in the market. But at the same time, our endeavor is to build out personalization and customization to a level which makes it much, much more easier for people. And typically for people who are in the middle of, you know, the middle class of India, because that's really what we see as the TG for ourselves. And for this customer, often insurance is a little bit of a, it's a complex category where they aren't really sure as to what exactly they are buying. And we are trying to make sure that we are able to present benefits to them of each product in a manner that makes it easier for them to make choices to their benefit. As a company, one of the things that's really clear and we really strongly believe in is the whole customer-first approach to it. And a lot of our tech development is focused in terms of driving a level of personalization and customization which is able to understand where this customer is coming from, what kind of salary bracket the customer is at, what age bracket they are at, what are their circumstances in life in terms of how healthy they are, do they have a pre-existing illness. Therefore, what's the best product that would work for them? And I think that is really the challenge that every day kind of keeps our engineers and our product people going. That's really what we look to do. So before Sanakshi comes with a question, I have a quick announcement that we are live on Facebook and on Zoom, you can post your questions. We will be glad to ask them and pose them to Mr. Darul. Yes, Sanakshi? Yeah. So actually I wanted to understand what are the key learnings that you and your organizations has kind of read out of the current situation? There are a lot of, I mean, because insurance has taken a break, they profit it if that's the way of putting it out. But what are the key learnings? What is something that you would want to do better for your people? Even a cultural shift maybe, a cultural shift at the workplace and all of that. Yeah, absolutely. I think I was just going to say that that one of the key learnings for us as an organization has been that the whole work from home has really been something that has been a revelation for us. As I said, we have about 6,000 telecollars who were taking calls of customers inquiring about insurance and advising them about products. Now these are young people who typically one thought was not so self-motivated and driven and responsible and committed. But it has been a tremendous revelation for us in terms of looking at the kind of performance that we've seen and the kind of productivity that we've seen from this workforce. And that's what's led us to believe that going forward as well, we probably will always have 30, 40% of our workforce working from home. Because we think that a lot of people are showing that they are far more productive at home when they don't have to travel an hour and a half or two hours to reach there. Many of them have gone back to their native places and are working from there. And that's worked out well. So I think it's been a tremendous learning on the cultural front. And people are extremely happy about the situation in that sense. I think the learnings from a brand in terms of on the marketing side, I think have been really about having your year to the ground and being agile. And I'll give you the example of on the media side particularly. One of the things that happened as soon as the lockdown happened was that we realized very quickly that one, people were watching more TV, people were watching TV during the day. And two, they were watching news more than, you know, as some of the GEC content went away, it was really a lot of people watching news. And we were able to move our money around very, very quickly. Dur Darshan, you know, came back with Ramayana. And we made a buy on that. That turned out to be a tremendous buy for us because it was, we got IPL like audiences at the fraction of the cost. So I think it was really about being agile, having your year to the ground, understanding what's going on with the consumer and where the consumer really is at and making quick decisions in terms of changing things. Right. Mr. Dal, what has also happened is that while there is a lot of traffic coming your way, is this a perennial scenario? Of course not. When it settles down and you know, you have a kind of a balanced spread of this traffic. How is your marketing tech gonna adjust to it? I mean, from a high spike to a low spike. I mean, what are the features or re-adjustments in that kind of a scenario? Have you taken that into account? I'm sure, I mean, that's part of your strategy, but what is that? What would be the features then, now? I mean, how do you future-proofing it? Right. So I think one of the things that, you know, we do very carefully is there are two things that we're really, really very, very, very careful about. One is that we measure our marketing spend and the returns from it very, very, you know, closely. And in that sense, we really look at what kind of delivery we get in terms of actual queries that come back from customers. So even TV advertising, we evaluate very, we correlate it with the kind of leads that we are getting on a daily basis and evaluate channels in terms of whether they're working for us or not. So what that also enables us to do is to modulate the amount of media that we are putting out and where that media should be so that we're able to, you know, smoothen the peaks and the troughs and not get into a situation where we get so many queries that we are not able to handle it because then at the end of the day, you're only wasting your marketing dollars out there. So I think that's something that we are very, very careful about and we balance TV and digital spends in a manner that, you know, we're able to smoothen out these kind of peaks and troughs. Right. Tell me about, I mean, this category has been growing, of course, during this pandemic and you have been advertising, especially news channels and all. If you ever tell me about how the two have behaved differently, the two platforms, the digital and the TV for you. Right. Especially in the last 90 days, if you could give us a sense of, you know, how it worked for you and what was the impact. Right. So I think, you know, as far as digital is concerned, there are, you know, we are always on search because we really do believe that it works really well for us because we're talking to people who are contextually looking for insurance as a category. And that's something that we then measure back down to leads and conversions and so on and, you know, CPLs and all the numbers that you have. And what's also worked well for us during this period is on the digital display side, where we've actually expanded our reach by doing a lot of programmatic ads and being able to expand our reach through digital, which would supplement the TV reach that we were already driving. So I think in that sense, I would say that as a category, it's a category which requires a bit of persuasion. And hence we find that audio visual message like TV is extremely important for us. So that's why TV is our primary medium of advertising. But at the same time, we find that digital works really well as a support and ensures that it's a reminder and gets people back. People who have probably come to the site, who've seen the TV ad, et cetera, you know, realize that, okay, oh yeah, that was the message. This is a reminder. I'm back on the side. So we tend to use the two very, fairly closely, work closely on the TV side as well as the digital side. So Sharath, how do you think Matic is really going to change the game after current scenario? Let's say in the six months, let's not even keep it to COVID, but let's just say like, you know, not just for you, I mean for the entire industry, overall industry, not just your industry overall. Yeah. So I think, you know, this is a period that is kind of, like I said, absolutely unprecedented and hopefully not never repeated. I think that one of the things that clearly is happening is that customers want messages that are far more personalized. And I think it's very, very important for a brand to ensure that they're able to understand where their customers are coming from and what stage of life their customers are in. And hence, what kind of needs they have. That's the only way that they're able to enable the brand to offer suitable solutions. I think that's something that's really important and that is something that, you know, can't happen without you being fairly evolved as far as your marketing tech is concerned. Because you really need to be understanding where your visitors, having a 360 degree view of people who are visiting your site or engaging with you to understand which platforms they're coming in from. Have that person seen a TV ad before they've come in and visited your site through your mobile website or made a call to the call center. I need to be able to connect all of these things. And I think those are the challenges that one has as a brand in terms of building out a strong personalization engine which then provides a much, much better experience for consumers. Right. Actually, yeah, that's going to be the, sorry, Ray. No, no, please, please, Maulani, yes. That was going to be the next question. I mean, is there a particular solution that you wish existed a certain machine or program that could actually take care of all these things? Well, there are tools and we're working on some of them. Some of the stuff that we do is in-house in terms of actually looking at all the, so we have hundreds of thousands of calls and conversations with consumers. And we do a lot of data analytics on that to really understand what consumers are saying to us and what consumers want. So there's a team of AI and machine learning team that actually works constantly in terms of understanding what's the, what are the messages that people are telling us in the course of their conversations and what's the sentiment that is emerging on every call so that we're in a better position to understand that after every conversation we have with the customer, has that customer moved ahead in their purchase decision or has actually gone backwards? So that's something that then feeds into hard training and hard working on the tele-calling bit as well. All right, see another factor here is that everything is moved online, everything. And the expectations online have also kind of not higher. So in this kind of a scenario, you'll experience that customers get with your app or any front-facing platform they expect it's much more easier, seamless. Absolutely. One is if you can tell me how much have you made it possible closer to the actual touch and feel kind of, though not actual, but very close to it. Second is bots and what's the role of bots? What's the role of talent here? I mean, if you can throw a bit of light on this. Yeah, so I think that's a good point that you make about bots. I think there's a lot of work that we do again on the service side, particularly with bots. Both as far as chat bots are concerned and we are also working, experimenting with the voice bots as well on the service side because we feel that there is a tremendous opportunity to actually optimize and make more seamless the entire service experience by enabling the customer to have service on the go. Maybe like for example, on the mobile app the customer might want to have an endorsement on his policy and needs to talk to somebody and it's at 2 a.m. at night. Like I was saying, we have younger and younger audiences. A lot of them spend a lot of time awake at night and want to be served at that time. Now I may not have a telecaller in at that time but my bot may be able to answer those questions. So there's a lot of stuff that's happening on the service end of things with regard to the bot. On the front end bit, I think what you're saying again is absolutely bang on. Customers are far more, their expectations are going up every day and they do expect a very, very seamless experience. And so one of the things, as an aggregator we sell various kinds of insurance all the way from life insurance to health to motor and two wheeler and home insurance and corporate insurance. So there are a whole plethora of products that are there. But one of the things that we endeavor to do for example is to say that, okay, if you bought a motor policy with me for example and you come and looking for a life insurance policy a month later or six months later, I should be able to identify that this is Rohail. And not ask you for the same details that probably you gave me six months back even though it's a completely different line of business and a completely different stream. So things like that which try to make it far more seamless. So I think it's a constant endeavor to try to make it more seamless, more personalized, more customized in terms of what offerings to show to you when you come to the website based on your, the credentials or the things that you have already told me about yourself. So Sharad, there's something that I would like to ask you given the fact that we're talking about CX right now, customer experience. We're talking about millennials mostly who are a part of your company and the people who are actually purchasing insurance on your platform. So how is it that you take care of grievances and complaints for example, what kind of technology are you using to, get to them faster because their attention span is much shorter and they need solutions ASAP because then otherwise people tend to run out and move out. So what is it that you're going to retain them and take care of them on the spot? Right, so I think one of the things that has worked really well for us is the whole WhatsApp, the service experience through WhatsApp through either the chat. So there's some, we've got a bot as well as the regular chat which is there on the WhatsApp. And we find that that is something that customers really engage with and we're able to service their needs better and close out issues much, much faster because there's a very quick up and down which happens between the customer and us on a platform like WhatsApp. So that's something that has really worked well and we've seen that the number of people who are engaging with us on WhatsApp that percentage share also is increasing day by day. So I think it's all about staying in tune with what's happening on the tech side and taking advantage of all the new platforms that come in and platforms which people are on. I think that's the most important thing. You need to go where the customer is at the end of the day. Great, thank you Mr. Dalramayen. It's been a wonderful session. I think we're out of time, so actually is it? Yes, we are, I was just going to say it. Over to you. Thank you, thank you. Thank you very much for your time. Thanks for talking, bye. Thanks, bye. Thank you. All right, now we move on to the next session for the day. We have with us Mr. Manu Lavanya. He is the director and COO of Max Life Insurance. He's already here. Manu, I won't take much of your time, but let me just do a quick introduction. Manu has more than two decades of valuable experience and successfully creating, transforming and scaling IT businesses across multiple industry domains and geographies, including the US, Latin America, Eastern Europe, UK and India. He also leads the fulfillment group that comprises operations, information technology, underwriting claims, digital transformation and quality, innovation and service excellence. As the COO, Manu plays an instrumental role in enhancing the operations value chain, leading our digital transformation agenda and strengthening the quality culture thereby helping them craft the previous customer experiences. So Manu, welcome on board. You can begin your presentation now. Good evening. Thank you so much. Good evening, everyone. Good evening, Martak team, for this invitation and really looking forward to this interaction today. But very strange times indeed to have this interaction completely virtually. So I think as the businesses are reinventing, so are these forums on how do we engage virtually on these platforms to provide the same connect and the same learning and sharing that we did do in the erstwhile, the pre-COVID world. So thank you so much. And I have a brief presentation that I would like to go ahead with. Let me know if the presentation is visible and then I can take it forward. Yes, we can see it, Manu. We can see it. Perfect, perfect, perfect. So when we talk about the topic on presentation, digital transformation, the new muscle. I think it's less about it being new as a concept but more about why it is the permanent muscle post-COVID. And today in the conversation, I would like to really stress upon the max life response to this entire reality of COVID that has surrounded us and how has digital transformation been a vehicle for building permanent long-term muscle, right? In our organization. If I look at the response curves and you look at Gartner, Gartner comes up with this beautiful three wave model of how businesses have typically responded to COVID. If you see the first line of response, it was really, hey, save the business. Sustain, protect. It was all about BCP execution. How do we drive work from home? How do we drive the interactions to really go from in-person, human touch to digital? And then a brace for the new normal. We don't know what the new normal is gonna be. Nobody knows the future, how long, how deep the impact is gonna be. Just brace for it, right? And as we settled down in the first quarter, the thinking was then more shifting towards efficiency. Hey, you know what? Yes, we figured out how to work from home. We challenged some of our very basic assumptions on how to execute business, how to reach our customers. But then we started looking at, hey, how do we become more efficient in the new way of working, right? So hence, what is a new customer persona? How do we hone the way of working in this new world? What is the meaning of distributed governance and leadership when everybody's working from home? If you look at the idea of governance, it has a very different meaning as far as the post-COVID world is concerned. Infrastructure has a very different meaning as far as post-COVID world is concerned. Do we need offices? Do we need people to be getting to a physical facility or it can be a new normal? So phase two, if I call it the efficiency phase, it was all about adopting the new normal. And then what the organizations are now going forward into is more redefining the new normal. Really redefining, hey, I have looked at the immediate response, the businesses to a similar level of efficiency, but you know what? We need to question some of the very fundamentals that COVID question for us, right? How do we then transform the business processes to ingrain the new muscle permanently? How do we keep on refining the new customer persona? How do we keep on redefining the digital persona of new customer that we'll go after? And then how do we write the new normal, right? So if those were the three secular phases of how firms were responding to the discontinuity of COVID, there was also a customer view or a customer behavior aspect that was also transforming in the pre and post-COVID world. Exactly as Sharad was sharing in the initial presentation, the digital maturity of customers also has undergone a change because of COVID. The acceptance of inputs across a very diverse set of channels, be it social media, be it television, has gone up multi-fold, has gone up significantly in the post-COVID world. There is an automatic preference because of apprehension of physical touch, right? There's a lot of readiness to adopt the digital means over physical means, which means if you talk about payments, if you talk about submitting documents for insurance applications online, if you talk about my ability to online transactions on my policy vis-a-vis walking into an office and trying to get the service for my policies, that behavior is undergoing a change. The distributors, the partners, they are trying to drive digital ways of connecting with the customers. They are asking for more and more digital enablement. Hey, initially I was only limited with the skill that is available in my office or in my branch, but with digital, can I get the next expert from wherever it is required on the call, along with my end customer, so I can have better conversion? And the customers were really experiencing that's very strong need for convenience. When we talk about customization, we talk about convenience, that need has gone up significantly and that's where the tools of artificial intelligence, machine learning, analytics are really coming to bear very strongly to drive the customization and enhanced experience in the times of COVID. So what were the challenges that as insurance industry COVID actually came in and challenged some very fundamental status goals of how the insurance practices were executed in the past. First, the physical infrastructure, the offices, walk-ins, the custom branches, daily business operations being executed out of those physical branches. There was a need for physical documents and I must comment even the electricity and the speed at which even regulation, even idea as a governing body has completely transformed the need for physical documentation, the amount of agility we see in regulation, the agility we see in transforming the business processes to avoid these need of physical documents, but that was the reality before COVID. If you look at the need for in-person interactions, whole of customer servicing, new business sales, it was truly, truly a behavior mindset that it's a very high-contact sale. It's a very in-person sale. Some of those very fundamental assumptions of business have been questioned significantly post-COVID. And finally, insurance being a very complex part, right? The whole mindset, the whole idea that it requires a physical person to be there, to coach, to mentor the customer through the purchase because insurance is a very complex product is something that has also been questioned very significantly in the COVID era because now the customers are distanced. How do you convince the customers of a similar sale or similar purchase of such a complex product? But virtually. So COVID did come across and really put a question to some of very long-standing beliefs and long-standing practices that the industry had. So there was an immediate response to it, which was, hey, let's take the existing business and make it digital, right? And when I say that immediate response, it was more about interactions becoming digital than the entire end-to-end business becoming digital, right? So the first response really was, how do I make all my processes at least digitally enabled end-to-end right from prospecting to an application of a policy down to policy issuance, down to servicing, right? How do we make this entire end-to-end process digital so that we can avoid physical paper, physical meeting and the entire idea of a human-less intervention in the end-to-end process? The second dimension that the business has really responded to was more around acceleration of digital sales. And I think of digital sales as more digital interactions and digital platforms and digital assets that are brought to bear in converting approximate. And this led to a lot of quote-unquote simplification but also led to a lot of reinventing because now you've had digital sales processes where you have multiple people on the same call and the same interaction. You need to tell your sales force about digital etiquettes even about how to have a great Zoom call, how to have a great virtual connect with the end customers. How do you bring about great collaterals? How do you bring about great content as a part of the digital interaction that can help you convert? How do you get enabled through excellence across the organization when it's brought into that one single digital connect with the end customer? That really, really became a very secular agenda for us. I think within a period of three weeks, MaxLive as an organization completely rewired themselves into the digital mode of selling, right? And that also led to a lot of learning and breaking a lot of mental barriers that how much really a physical interaction or a physical impresence is truly required for converging some of those beliefs for challenge. At the same time, as the sales teams grew a lot more and more traction around digital selling, we saw more and more belief that indeed the amount of tools that can be brought to bear, the amount of collaterals that can be brought to bear, the thinking that can be brought to bear in the last mile interaction of a sale can be far, far superior. So when we are talking about digital sales as a process, we are really talking about it as a permanent muscle. We do expect that in the end, the best practice will somewhere lie as a hybrid in the post-COVID era, but some of this new muscle around digital sales that we have developed is here to stay. The whole idea of process digitization and innovation, right? We talked about, hey, if you can't see the life assured to begin with, you can't meet that person. How do you then drive underwriting? How do you drive that physical due diligence that used to happen with a life assured, right? How do you drive digital collection of documents? How do you drive alternatives to physical documents? How do you drive alternatives to medical testing? In fact, one of the biggest, I would say, change that is happening with COVID as the medicals did drop down significantly, was surrogates of medicals started coming up significantly, telemedicals, tele-MER, video-MERs, but technology really coming to rescue as far as developing new surrogates for risk underwriting, right? And that's another big impact that was immediately leveraged in the post-COVID era as far as digital interventions were concerned. And finally, but what a small element, virtual work from home. In my view, this idea has both a physical process implication, but also a cultural implication. So we suddenly came up with all the infrastructure that was required, all those desktops, all the connectivity tools, bandwidth increments that had to happen with our distributed workforce. I think in a period of about five days, we were able to enable pretty much everybody who was critical for operations to be working from home. But the real question that came is in the post-COVID world, as people are distributed, how do you drive governance? What does being a leader mean? What does governing a team mean in the context of a distributed virtual workplace? And some of those have formed an immediate response for MaxLive to really deal with the secular change that COVID brought about. And if you could drill down a little deeper into how it implied for the various proprietary channel, the banker channel as well online, you will see that both in terms of the purchase, the customer interaction or our internal employee and agent engagement, multiple immediate steps that were required, that were put in place, be it digital sales journeys, be it complete transformation of learning through video learning modules, through e-learning platforms, driving more and more self-service options, right? Driving more and more solutions, driving more and more capability for customers not only self-serve their policies, but also self-serve the buying process itself. Significant amount of transformations happened in the last quarter, as far as enabling all the three constituent channels, online, banker, as well as proprietary channels, with our digital interventions. Now, what I've shared till now is truly the immediate response, but the whole idea of today's conversation is also to see digital as a permanent muscle. So what COVID did do was really, it set us into a view that we have to develop a much broader and a holistic view of digital transformation. If I could truly, truly look at COVID in the post-COVID world, that being a permanent muscle, right? And when we talk about the six dimensions of digital transformation on very, very often within that slide, and a lot of the levers that you see here, empowerment, emotional connect, responsiveness, a lot of this is to do with the change customer experience expectation and also a change in persona of customer. I think Mr. Shah talked about the millennial mindset. I want to be empowered. I want to feel that I'm in control of the process. I want to feel emotionally connected once I go through a buying process, even if it is completely online. There is a huge propensity for instant gratification. I want it now. I want to give a feedback to you right away when I consume the service. I can't wait for my policy documents to come to me in three weeks. Sorry, it's not done. I want it now. I want my policy to get to me no more than an hour from when I put the last click for submitting my documents. So there are secular consumer behaviors that are truly driving the three levers of transformation that I call intelligence, speed, and experience. When you look at what COVID is going to do for our processes internally, we are going to leverage extensively the use of machine learning, artificial intelligence, even for figuring out how do you do risk management, how do you do underwriting, how do you do intent prediction for people to pay their renewals, right? So there is a lot of behavior change that is happening as far as need for personalization and for ways that when ubiquitous experience need that is coming from a cousin's human personas to drive the intelligence portion of our processes. So what does that framework mean on how max life is trying to build that permanent new muscle? When you look at intelligence, truly when you look at the segment of one, right? First, how do I really discover new segments of customers, of digital native customers who can be better targeted, for example, using online channels? How do I drive better surrogates of financial or medical data for what I call as distant underwriting, right? Where we don't need to meet the life short, it's a question of applying analytics, machine learning, even from a video, getting to know whether what is it expected, life expectancy of a person, whether a person is a smoker, there are amazing tool sets available today in leveraging AI that can do a lot of surrogates as far as underwriting is concerned. What are the next best actions that can be recommended through machine learning when you try to do cross cells, especially doing renewals in these days, right? How do we drive that sort of an intelligence into our self-service models, into our renewals teams so they can actually drive an uplift through a cross cell while these renewals are being made in these days? Frictionless journeys, I talked about the whole need for an amazing customer experience that is emanating from the post-COVID experience. How do we really leverage digitization, OCRs to the extent where the onboarding journey of my customers becomes completely seamless, right? How do I do us faith through underwriting? We have actually started an initiative called InstaSix on figuring out what portion of our policies can actually be issued in six minutes without any human intervention end-to-end. That is a type of play technology and especially digital transformation overall can play in completely rewiring, completely rewriting the issuance process. As we discussed in the previous presentation, scaling WhatsApp document chairs for faster document collections. How do we use hyper interactive platforms like WhatsApp for doing self-servicing, enterprise servicing, digital delivery of policy documents, automation, right? If you look at the whole document flow in terms of this analytics for underwriting, if you look at the whole customer service column, right? How can we seamlessly drive what I call as a digital hybrid human experience because not everything can be 100% digital. There's also a big human component and I do very frankly believe that COVID puts up in a world where only digital is not the response. It has to be the right hybrid of emotion and the hybrid of efficiency both brought together in this human digital hybrid interaction if you would say, right? And how does that drive better servicing, better customer connect and better customer intent prediction be it payments, be it collections and so on and so forth. And finally, all that needs a very much a digital core around how we do look at our systems internally, cloud first, mobile first, digitally empowering our employees and our agents, training the whole data strategy, all these parameters, all these dimensions come to play in fully setting up a foundation that is required for building up for a higher experience or intelligence power. And hence what strategic choices that MaxLife is driving today has taken today. One, fluid architecture. We are moving to open source technology. We are putting the idea of cloud, API application, responsive design in all our architectures to be driving a unified customer platform, a unified interaction platform where you can really develop a 360 degree view but also you can take all the transactions for customer while onboarding in one single window, to give that seamless experience to somebody who's getting on board. A very, very clear strategy on build versus buy. We believe that COVID has really raised a great question around what will cause or what will drive competitive advantage going forward. And we believe that it is this intelligence built into our processes. It is this experience built into our processes that will be the sustainable competitive advantage going forward rather than just the product itself or rather than just the placement itself or selection itself. Truly building a cognitive enterprise, there is extensive amount of strategy shift in MaxLife towards driving intelligence, automation, AI and really questioning each and every workflow and seeing how the workbook can become more cognitive. How it can become more simple, intuitive but yet drive intelligence at each point of the customer journey. How do you drive and finally, how do you drive and modernize the entire legacy that is there because it's not easy for firms of this particular segment to really just do away with legacy, right? So it's also a question of, yes, there will be legacy, there will be legacy systems that are the core by more engines but then how do you drive or create a fluid service wrapper around those legacy so that the end customer experience or end business and employee experience when consuming those legacy applications is still very modern, is still very contemporary even though the applications themselves may be legacy in architecture, right? So the four pillars that we have tried to use leverage at MaxLife extensively. That was a very quick view from my side in terms of the MaxLife response to building the new muscle. Love to get any questions. Thank you, Mr. Lavanya. Yes, wonderful presentation and we do have a lot of questions. We have around four minutes so we'll try to back in a couple of them. One of the questions is that, if you see your category, what has worked when I talk about advertising, for example, we have played on the fear factor a lot in our communication always. One is that, why has it been that way? Second is in the last 90 days, if you haven't told me about digital and other mediums, where is it most effective? What is the way it is working? Which way is it working? Great questions, Rohil. And let me respond to the first one. See, I will not say fear factor as such because if I see the strategy of MaxLife in terms of our disposition towards protection as a strategy, right? That disposition was there almost even two years ago, very early because of severe under-penetration of protection in our country, right? We almost felt a sense of obligation to engage, to bring about a better education in a customer base. There is a need, there is a need for us to be protected, right? So it has been less been driven by the fear of COVID than as a secular strategy on the importance of being protected in the context of India, in the context of the lesser amount of penetration, right? That's the first question. On the second question around the last quarter, if I look around and say digital, these segments have taken really well. See, definitely my online business for sure is seeing a much, much significant higher traction as compared to, you know, comparatively in the pre-COVID, as compared to pre-COVID. Significant higher traction. There's a significant amount of traction in the protection term business itself. In fact, we are almost writing 300% more policies and term in pure protection as we were writing, let's say, in the pre-COVID world, right? So there is a significant change in the persona as well. And I'm gonna look at persona of online behavior, online customers. The digital natives are definitely finding it more compelling now to use online mediums of insurance purchase. Okay. Well, I have a question. Let's go beyond machines for a minute and talk about, you know, what do you think is happening with the customer's mind right now? Are they like anxious and fearful or are they optimistic about things that are really going to happen or they're gonna change soon? Is it something that companies basically focusing on and, you know, changing for the people? Great question, Sunakshi, and to be very candid. See, we do see there was a lot of anxiety for sure in the month of April, right? One good measure of consumer anxiety that we see is what do you hear when you make that call for collection, right? If you look at the word, word clouds over the last three months, they have significantly changed, right? The first day was, hey, don't call me. Hey, by the time I'm not even thinking about insurance, don't bother me, please, right? Slowly, as the reality of permanence of this issue came in people's hearts, right? Hey, I was trying to wish it away. Not gonna wish it away, it's gonna stay in my life. Maybe for a year, maybe for 18 months, we don't know. That has slowly started switching our consumer mindset from the first shock and off phase to more of, hey, so now what do I do phase, right? And that's when I've seen my collection rates coming back, we have seen our renewals coming back. And today, yes, there is a lot of anxiety still. It's not that my customer is waiting out there with a check in the end and saying, hey, you know what? I'll spend the first thing I'll spend is on insurance. That's not right, right? But I see a far more weighted and a far more deliberate effort from my consumers to really persist on their journey of protection, to persist on their journey of life insurance as a basket of their spending, right? So that behavior is gradually changing over the last three months. But I can tell you the first few days were very challenging. Right, right. Thank you, Mr. Lavendia. Do we have time, Sonakshi? Sorry, your audio is muted. We have one more question. Just last one, what is your process of adding new marketing vendors, examples? What can vendors who are good in healthcare prediction partner with Max Life? It's a question by Vikram Kumar. Sure, see, when we look at partners for driving or messaging, I think the first, one of the few idea or few paradigms that he uses is the partner able to get the strategic intent and the essence of the positioning that we want to do, right? What is the idea that we are after, right? And how, because in the context of marketing insurance in India, it is not an easy marketing concept, right? Because we are talking about a fairly complex interaction that happens, right? So the first is the agency or is the partner able to visualize how we see protection and insurance in the context of our Indian customers, right? That's one, number one. Number two, we have a very, very broad channel spectrum and we want the partner to understand the nuances of building a campaign that is equally appealing to all those channels. We don't want to prioritize one channel or the other, right? Although we have a great strategy towards proprietary channels, but the messaging, the marketing messaging that is built has to be relevant and appealing to customers across all those channels, right? So that understanding of channel behavior is also a big, big plus in terms of choosing marketing partners. Thank you, Mr. Labanya. I think we're out of time. It has been a wonderful presentation and a lot of learnings for everyone who joined in. Thank you again for your time. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. All right, ladies and gentlemen, now we move on to the keynote session of the day. We have with us Scott Brinker. He will be talking about the new rules of marketing technology and operations. And of course, I do not really need to introduce him because the name is synonymous with Martek, the name that the world looks up to for insights and advise on Martek. We have with us Scott Brinker. Scott, just a short introduction for you. He requires no introduction really, but I'll really do that briefly. He's the editor of Chief Martek, Chief Martek Marketing Technology's blog, author of best-selling book, Hacking Marketing, the conference chair for the Martek conference in the US, the HubSpot VP, Platform Ecosystem, and most importantly, the brains behind the annual marketing technology landscape, SuperGraphic, a monumental visualization of the global Martek vendors. This year, this yearly release has grown exponentially from a humble 150 inclusions in 2011 to a massive to 8,000 in the current scenario in 2020, and it's still counting. Over to you, Scott. Thank you. Wow, the very kind introduction. It is a pleasure to be with all of you here. Let me share a presentation. I apologize, I am not on video. I'm a technical difficulty there on my end, but I promise we'll make the slides themselves quite exciting. All right. Should be good. The new rules of marketing technology and operations. So I won't rehash the introduction. Thank you very much. I think, yeah, I could summarize it as just say, yeah, I've been living, breathing, eating, sleeping, marketing technology here for well over a couple of decades, and yeah, for better and worse, I'm known as the person behind this crazy landscape of all these different marketing technologies. And so maybe this is a good place to start because, you know, there's been so much change and transformation in marketing over the, oops, hang on, let me just make sure. Yeah, there's been so much change in marketing over the past 10 years in particular, but it's actually somewhat hard to quantify the change, right? We know we've been living through this incredible amount of disruption, but yeah, how do you actually quantify that? And I think that's one of the interesting things about the Mar-Tech landscape. Well, it only represents a sliver of the change that we have gone through to have seen this progression from, yeah, a couple hundred tools, you know, 10 years ago to now over 8,000. It really does give you a sense of just the magnitude of how much digital technology has exploded within the marketing domain. I mean, if we go back from 2011 up to this year, we're talking about 5,233% growth. I mean, you mentioned in the intro, exponential growth. This is exponential growth, orders of magnitude, really incredible. You know, and if we just take, you know, this year's landscape and some of the stats, it hit an actual even 8,000, which was 13.6% growth from 2019. People always tell me about consolidation in the industry. You know, why does this keep growing? Aren't companies being acquired? Are some companies go out of business? And the answer is, of course they get acquired. Of course they go out of business. We had like 615 companies that were removed from the previous year's landscape in this one. But the thing is, there are just no barriers to entry in the software world anymore, right? I mean, anyone leveraging, you know, cloud technologies, you know, from like AWS and Microsoft and Google, open source libraries, you know, distributed talent all over the world. I mean, anyone can launch a software idea at this point. And so you keep seeing this incredible churning forward of new technology and new innovation. Just to give you a sense, I mean, another question I often get asked is like, okay, well, which category is growing? And the truth is they're all growing. You know, there hasn't been one where there hasn't been innovative growth the year over year. You know, some grow more than others. You know, for instance, it's just a tremendous amount of entrepreneurial energy and creativity being applied to the challenges of data. If we drill into like the most, the fastest growing category within each one of those. Yeah, like in data, all the challenges around governance and compliance and privacy, there's a tremendous amount of innovation happening there as well too. You know, like social relationships, we know that conversational marketing and chat and voice and yeah, all these new modes of interacting with our customers, our audience has just, yeah, been growing at a tremendous rate. So I wanna pull back from that a bit though, because while the technology landscape is fascinating and we could spend easily 45 minutes and barely scratch the surface of all the technologies that are out there, I wanna shift a little bit more into the transformation that's happening within the marketing department itself. And it certainly starts with this technology, right? You know, when senior marketers first started being presented with this idea of a marketing stack, you know, the reaction was really like, okay, we're a marketing, we don't need to think about a stack of software. And then when the conversation kept coming up and people kept showing my crazy graphic, you know, it would provoke anger. In fact, even today it provokes anger in some people of like, would you just stop showing us that? You know, it freaks us out. Okay, so fair enough. Then there's the bargaining stage where, you know, certainly, you know, some vendors will try and help support this mode of thinking of like, oh, okay. Yes, yes, it's a crazy landscape out there. But if I just buy everything from one vendor, I'll be all set. Of course, then that stage tends not to last long because yeah, there was just too much happening in the world at this point. There was too much innovation in marketing. No one vendor can do it all, you know. And so people then have to go back to thinking about this heterogeneous landscape. And yeah, it's, you know, if you feel frustrated or depressed sometimes, you know, adapting to that, it's a very natural feeling. This is a lot of change. But the good news is, I've seen this again and again, companies get through to the other side. Marketing teams get to this stage of acceptance where they realize actually, hey, this is the state of marketing today. And as you start to get, you know, embrace it, it turns out it's actually pretty cool. This is a wonderful time to be a marketer. You know, you have all these companies who are investing all this energy and brain power and creativity all to create, you know, like better tools to put in your hands for you to create these masterpieces. This is very much the golden age of marketing. You know, and it's not just about technology. I mean, the role of marketing has really been growing over these past few years, right? It's no longer just someone once said the arts and crafts department, right? You know, marketers are taking the lead with customer experience. They're stepping up to the lead and being able to prove return on investment for marketing activities. And so this is actually the context in which we think about marketing technology is how does it help us achieve these very large missions? So how do we do that? It's a great question. There's a friend of mine on Twitter who, you know, was asked, yeah, you know, like, what's the difference between, you know, companies, marketing departments that succeed at this, you know, and those who don't? And his really short response was, oh, well, it really just comes down to two things, focus and plumbing. You know, plumbing kind of being the operations and technology side of this. And I like the clarity of this statement. I'm not entirely sure that I like the metaphor of plumbing. It sort of implies maybe what we're delivering through marketing isn't necessarily what we would like to aspire to deliver through marketing. So I'd like to give you a different framework. I would like to share with you the new rules of marketing technology and operations. How does a marketing company succeed in this environment? And it really comes down, I think, to five simple rules. If you're leading marketing ops, marketing technology, first you wanna do is centralize everything you can, right, data systems. Based on that centralization, you then wanna be able to automate everything you can. They don't call it marketing automation for no reason, right? Tremendous amount of automation innovation happening. Now things get tricky because you also wanna be able to decentralize everything you can and start to push things out to the edge of the organization and empower a much wider set of participants. You wanna humanize everything you can. The human dimension of marketing and connecting with an audience and your customers can be understated. And as you're wrestling with that, yeah, you have to just embrace that we live in a world now of continuous change and you really need to design for that. Now I know if you're thinking of those five and maybe scratching your head, you're not alone. Augie Ray, who is one of the most distinguished analysts at Gartner, when I shared this framework, he said, you just put automate everything you can and humanize everything you can to places from each other. I can't decide if that's funny or sad. So thank you, Augie. To which I responded, the test of a first grade intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. So let's talk about holding some of these ideas, opposing ideas in mind at the same time. Are they really opposing? So centralized versus decentralized, right? We think more of one is less of the other. That's a very natural assumption. But it turns out, particularly with marketing technology, there's a whole bunch of examples where we are doing both simultaneously. I'll give you some concrete examples. Let's start with the oldest marketing technology on the planet, content management systems, right? Everyone has to have a website. That's where this all began. When you think about CMS, or as they're more fancily called these days, digital experience platforms, it's a big centralization capability, right? You centralize this content repository, you have brand approved templates, the workflow is controlled, according to whatever rules and processes, the central marketing organization needs. But at the same time, putting that structure and guardrails in place also tends to empower a tremendous number of other people throughout the marketing organization to be able to contribute content and blogs or to leverage landing pages and campaigns, to be able to run AB tests on their very localized campaigns and programs. And so a great CMS is both helping you with centralization and helping you with decentralization. And we see this pattern throughout a lot of marketing technology, customer data platforms, right? One of the hot topics these days, right? It's about centralizing customer data, being able to align it among a common customer identity. But at the same time, one of the big features of CDPs is how they integrate with so many disparate tools that are either generating data or wanting to use data. So while it's a centralized data platform, it's also actually empowering more decentralized use of other marketing technology tools. I mean, you see this with things as simple as like Google Sheets, right? You know, I mean, if a company standardizes on, you know, Google G Suite, then great, okay, there's a certain benefit of that standardization, being able to share this among all the participants within the company. But at the same time, it's all about empowering individuals and teams to create their own sheets, you know, their own documents and to collaborate without having to get all sorts of centralized coordination or approval. There's even a really fascinating category of things called APAS, application platform as a service, low code, no code tools. We'll talk about that a little bit later, but it's the same pattern, a centralized platform that's empowering a lot of individuals to be able to do more things on their own. All right, so let's look at this other, so you're with me, right? Like centralization, decentralization, you can actually do both at the same time and that's kind of cool. So what about automation and bringing the human dimension to marketing? Can we do these at the same time too? So one of the things about automation I find fascinating is there's an old Disney movie back from like the 1940s, Fantasia. And in one of the skits in that animated movie, Mickey Mouse is this apprentice of a sorcerer. The sorcerer goes out, Mickey Mouse gets the master's wand and magically starts having the brooms do his chores for him. And he's like, oh wow, this is great. Automation is so good. But then what happens is the same automation keeps repeating again and again at scale and suddenly all these brooms just mindlessly doing the same automation end up like destroying the wizard's tower. Same automation, but it instantly went from good to bad. Now, if you're wondering, listening to me, well, I mean, yeah, that's a cartoon. It's not like we in marketing would ever have these like mindless automations that would like go badly. Then you've never been on the wrong end of like a email nurturing campaign that's gone awry. It is very easy to leverage automation to create bad outcomes inadvertently. But that's not to say that automation is bad and that we should turn away from that. No, it's just we have to work harder at finding the human in highly efficient automation. And it's there, you just have to look closely. So I want to give you one example. This is my daughter, Jordan, from a couple of years ago actually. We took her to her first concert, a Taylor Swift concert. So don't hold it against me, you know? I mean, you want to talk about influencer marketing. I mean, I assure you, like, you know, 10 year old girl's highly powerful influence marketers. So we purchased tickets like months in advance, had to like mortgage the house to purchase tickets to this concert, it's crazy. Anyways, so I got a note when I first purchased them and email like, okay, you're set, you know, concerts in a few months. So the day of the concert, I go to the email, I click through the link to get the tickets and something goes wrong. It says now your tickets aren't available here. So I then try and call them up on the phone. I end up in some voicemail system, a voice, you know, a response system. It's funny, I actually go through all that process and then they asked me for my credit card that I used to purchase the tickets in an automated fashion. Unfortunately, the credit card I'd used to purchase the tickets was one of the credit cards that had been like, you know, leaked in some data breach. So the bank had destroyed that credit card months ago and given me a new one. So I no longer had the original credit card number for this. So I'm trying to like get through this voice, you know, response system and it won't accept any number I give it. I try and ask for an operator. It tells me to just please enter the number. Please enter number. So I give up on that. I go to the website, you know, luckily there's a chat bot on the website. I'm like, okay, great. Maybe, you know, I know chat bots. This is what I do for a living. So, you know, I go into the chat bot and I'm like number 60 in the queue. You know, meanwhile, my daughter's like, so dad, when are we gonna be leaving for the concert here? Any minute now. So after like waiting a really long time, finally I get through to someone on the chat bot. They're like, no, no, no, we can't help you. You need to use call this other phone number. I call this other phone number, you know, I could actually go on to this story for another 10 minutes. I went through every single technological touch point. Their website, their mobile app, their chat bot, their voice system and none of these things were connected together. None of them were able to help me. I mean, I ultimately got in because I ended up like pleading with someone in person at the box office. You know, but to me, this was a perfect example of all this incredible marketing technology that somehow the way it got put together did not have mechanisms for the humanity to escape this automation loop. And so I was thinking about this like framework between when we think about automating things. Are we automating things to make them efficient for the customer or are we automating them to make them efficient for the company? And these are two very different things, right? So if we have things that aren't efficient for the customer or the company, the technical term for that is crappy. There's a lot of crappy experiences in business. We know this. Obviously what we want to be is in the upper right, right? We want an experience that's delightful for the customer and efficient for the company. That would be fantastic. In some cases, I would argue, there are things that can be delightful and efficient for the customer that might not actually be efficient for the company, but there are cases when we want to do that anyway, because those are those magic moments where you can build brand loyalty. You can help someone in an exception and really, yeah, win a customer for life. The one that is scary, and we see this exploding all over business these days, is this implementation of technology that creates efficiencies for the company without actually improving the experience for the customer. In fact, actually, right, given my Taylor Swift concert example, it actually makes it much less efficient for the customer to be able to get things done. And it's so easy in implementing technology to fall into this trap, because the metrics we measure the most are these internal efficiency metrics. And I really believe this is one of the primary missions of marketing technology and operations leaders is to champion the customer in the implementation of this technology to make sure we do not fall into this dangerously efficient trap. There's a saying among, you know, like scouts, you know, the map is not the train, just because something is printed on the map doesn't actually mean that's what's physically there. I would modify that and say in marketing, the marketing automation platform, the map is not the customer. What you're seeing in your marketing automation platform is not actually the human being on the other side. And just as the scouts will tell you, like when the map and the train disagree, trust the train, right? Don't just keep walking off the cliff because the map said it was fine. We really need to have this human dimension in the marketing or broadly, so that when the map, the marketing automation platform and the customer disagree, you can trust the customer. I'll give you one quick example. So one of the telecommunications companies here in the US, T-Mobile, actually did a campaign about a year or so ago where, I love this, the promise they were making was there would be a phone number and you as a customer could call this phone number and all right, hang on, a human being would answer the phone, not a voice response system, a human being and they promised that human being would not transfer you to some other place. So that human being would stay with you to actually do whatever needed to be taken to resolve the problem. I mean, when you think about it, right? I mean, this is not exactly like state-of-the-art, technology, but in a way it is, right? Because it's not like those operators weren't leveraging marketing technology. I assure you, they were leveraging state-of-the-art customer relationship management technology on their side, but they were presenting it through a human interface and they were really speaking to what they knew the pain point was for the customer. That is how you balance this automation technology and the human side of things. So we have about 20 minutes or so. What I'd like to do is dig a little bit deeper into this. I'd like to share with you a framework I've worked on with some people for what does this actually mean for a marketing operations, marketing technology leader? You know, so we'll take these two axes of centralized and decentralized, automate and humanize, and we'll put them up against each other. You know, centralized is about scale, decentralized is about agility, automation is how we harness technology, humanize is, you know, how we work with people. And if you look at the four quadrants that we get from this two by two, I would say, right, the upper left is really about efficiency. The upper right is about innovation. The lower left is about brand, and the lower right is about authenticity on that brand. And so we'll walk through a bunch of very specific examples of what people are doing in each of those categories. Let's start with the upper left, because when we think about marketing technology and operations, this is probably the quadrant that we most naturally think of, right? Okay, well, you're centralizing these systems, you're leveraging automation. And indeed, there's a lot of great work to be done here, right? This is where we standardize on common tools. This is sometimes called rationalizing your marketing stack. So all the tools you need, none of the tools you don't. One of the things I do every year is run a kind of a contest called the stackies, where I invite marketers to send in a slide that illustrates how they think of their marketing tech stack, the different tools that use and the way they work together. Over the years, we've had, yeah, hundreds of submissions, some really great companies. I'll share a few in the presentation here, but like Cisco has entered the stackies three years in a row. And it's great to actually see how they think, it's not just what tools do they use, but it's how do they think about leveraging those tools in different stages of the customer journey, how they think about it mapping the different capabilities for the organization. And if you Google martech stackies, all these things are up on SlideShare. You can get a really, yeah. Yeah, there's a lot to learn from there. So we standardize on tools. We also standardize on data, right? Most important thing is identity. We need to be able to recognize the customer regardless of the touch point that they happen. You know, in marketing operations, we think a lot about standardizing processes. We even think a little bit about, almost how do we platformize the marketing department? Where things start to get more interesting, I think, is when we're like, okay, so all this technology is great from a centralization perspective, but how do we start to decentralize some of these capabilities? How do we empower teams for local experiments and workflows, things that are not global? How do we make it okay for certain teams who are doing specialized work to bring their own tools for that specialized work? And in doing so, how do we think about, okay, if you bring your own tools for something, how do we make sure that we're sharing the right amount of data between those tools and the centralized systems to keep things alive? One category I'm absolutely fascinated with is this rise of what has been called citizen developers, citizen data scientists, citizen integrators, which it's kind of a fascinating thing. It's not like a government thing. It's this idea of non-technical professionals, like marketers, being able to do things that previously required a technical professional, right? Like you needed a software developer, you needed a data scientist. How much of this can you put in the hands of ordinary business people? Another favorite Disney Pixar movie, like Rat Tattoo, anyone can cook. Well, I'm gonna try and prove to you that anyone can develop, integrate, analyze. And if you're a little bit skeptical of this, that's fine. I'm gonna walk you through it, and I'm gonna try and convince you that pretty much every single one of you is a software developer today. You just might not know it. All right, so let's look at over time the amount of app-like functionality, the ability to create app-like functionality that are spent in marketers' hands. We'll start with Excel. If I was doing this presentation in person, I would ask you to raise your hand. How many of you know how to use Excel? And I pretty much guarantee you, even without being able to see you through the video screen here, I know pretty much all of you would raise your hand. Everybody knows how to use Excel, right? This was marketing technology before there was marketing technology. Well, something interesting happened in the past decade, right? All these spreadsheets that used to be isolated on your desktop have ended up in the cloud. So like say Google Sheets is one example. And one of the things that's interesting about Google Sheets is not only can people collaborate on the same sheet at the same time, but like Google hooked this up to something called Google Forms. And Google Forms lets you publish a form out on the web to collect some data and then pipe that data directly into a Google Sheet. And when you think about it, that is a crude and simple app, right? It's so I have a little interface. I collect some data, I put it into my little database and spreadsheet, right? Interesting, limited, but interesting. Well, then along comes a whole nother category of tools called integration platform as a service, iPass. And there's about a hundred of these tools out there now. One of the most popular ones is something called Zapier. And the idea of Zapier is it connects to all like 2,000 different cloud applications. And in Zapier, without being a programmer, without being a technician, you can say, oh, well, when this trigger happens in this tool, like somebody fills out like a form on an email, I then wanna trigger that information and route it into some other cloud app. Maybe my marketing automation system or my CRM or Slack. In fact, one of the things you can route this to is Google Sheets. So you can pipe data from any cloud app into Google Sheets. And for that matter, you can take data from Google Sheets and pipe it into any other cloud app. And none of this you need a software engineer for. So all of a sudden, now any marketer, frankly, can like trigger the way data and actions are happening all across their stack. And we have only been leaning into this as an industry. There's a whole collection of tools like Airtable and AppSheet, and AppSheet was actually just recently acquired by Google. Smartsheet, Salesforce, Lightning Object, created all these like spreadsheet interfaces that if you can use a spreadsheet, you can create an app. In fact, actually one example, you love this, there's a product called Glide, Glide.app, that literally you fill out a spreadsheet, it turns it into a native iOS or a native Android app for you. So I'm just saying, as I said at the beginning, if you know how to use Excel, and I think all of you do, congratulations, you are all software developers. You can all go publishing apps in the App Store at this point. This transformation is incredible, right? We're taking things that used to be in the hands solely of discipline experts like IT and software development. We've slowly extended that capability to domain experts like marketing technology, marketing operations leaders. But now we're getting into the realm where power users and eventually almost any business user can harness this. And so this has been this transformation specifically in the marketing department of control moving from just the IT department to increasingly a blend of IT and marketing, and again, giving more and more individual marketers this capability. And this is kind of where you get, in my view of the citizen developer movement, this is where that overlays in the marketing world. And so I spent 10 years talking about the transition of power from IT to marketing operations. And that was a big transformation. I'm telling you, we are now starting a second transition from things that went marketing technology specialists to increasingly anyone in marketing being able to leverage much more of this capability. And this is gonna be huge. All right, let me back up to this framework here. Let's talk about the human side of things. So on the de-separalization side, this really isn't about technology, it's about empowerment. It's about giving individuals the ability to do the right thing. When we talk about marketing empowerment, I think it's also important to recognize this isn't just like the marketing department because anything that touches the customer in sales or customer service or the product and service we're offering, that impacts marketing with a lower case M. It's the perception people have of us in our market. And so empowering people on the frontline of not just marketing, but sales and customer service to have these levers for empathy and intuition and to be able to, as we said earlier, like when the marketing automation system and the customer disagree, trust the customer. And for marketing operations and marketing technology leaders, I think one of the things you can do is lean into getting out from behind your stack and going to visit customers, really understand the way they engage with you anthropologically in their natural environment because that will help you think about how you support that with your technology implementations. And there is some technology that's coming out in this area that's very exciting, the ability to leverage machine learning to help detect customer experience anomalies throughout digital journeys, some cool stuff there. But again, I really think what this comes down to is empowering humans. And so then when we start to think about centralizing the human dimension to this, we realize, okay, how do we empower humans at scale? Well, one of them is marketing enablement. Now, you all know sales enablement, right? Anyone in marketing has been in the business of creating content and materials to help salespeople sell, right? Sales enablement. Marketing enablement is about creating content and training and materials to help people throughout the organization be able to leverage this marketing technology stack. I mean, this is a challenge. We did a survey about a year or so ago where two thirds of the companies we talked to said they didn't believe they had the skills or talent to make the most use of marketing technology, two thirds. And if I'm being honest, I think the other third was just a little bit delusional, right? I mean, there's a lot out here. There's a lot to learn. Anyone who thinks they've mastered this, yeah, come and teach the rest of us. So companies are leaning into this. One example is Airbnb. So one of the things Airbnb did was they built this incredible data decision-making infrastructure. So they pull in all this data. They have all these tools to be able to analyze the data and they really empowered everyone in the organization to leverage those tools to make data-driven decisions. Well, then they realized actually, because as they were growing, they were hiring all these people, they realized actually most of the people they were hiring didn't know how to make good data-driven decisions. And it wasn't just about how to use the tool. It was how to think about what you wanted the tool to do for you. And so they created a data university inside Airbnb to teach everyone as they came in, how do you do really great data-driven decision-making? This is marketing enablement. And Airbnb actually shared a bunch of the stories of this on the medium. So yeah, if you Google them, you can learn a lot about how they approach that. So it's not just about marketing enablement. It's again, we're talking about empowering people which comes down to, listen, you can't just tell people they can do whatever they want, right? You need some sort of guardrails. You need some sort of governance. But it's this idea about enlightening governance is how do you give people as much empowerment while still keeping the coherence to the organization? And this gets you into things like your customer code and your culture code, like the foundations of how the principles by which you live and operate your business internally and externally. And the reason I put them here is because this is part of what marketing operations and marketing technology leadership needs to concern itself with. Understanding the customer code and the culture code, contributing to it and then finding ways to make sure that our marketing operations infrastructure is supporting those values. All right, so the last piece of this actually kind of glossed over this earlier is, right at the center of this two by two was this infinite loop of change. I said earlier, I mean, this is, I mean, we all know this, right? We're all experiencing just, I mean, this year in 2020, more than ever, we're like, okay, yeah, wow, yeah, change comes at you and it comes at you fast. We've wrestled with this for a while. There's always been this gap that's been growing between the speed by which technology changes, which is arguably exponentially like war's law and the rate by which organizations change and people change, which is not exponentially, right? Change is hard. And so, I mean, the big management challenge we're all struggling with is how do you balance these two? And the truth is, there's really only two things you can do. You can be very deliberate about which changes you embrace because you can't embrace them all. There's just too many. So you have to be really strategic about which ones are most relevant to your business, your customers. And then, well, you can't change at the rate of technology. You can't change faster than your competitors. And this is this whole idea of becoming a more agile organization. You don't have to outrun the bear. You just have to outrun like the person next to you and leave them to the bear. And so this is one of the most important missions of marketing operations and technology leadership is designing the marketing operations, infrastructure and organization for change. There was a survey a couple of years ago. I love there was actually by an IT group that they asked what the average duration was for a technical initiative between a business request to deployment. You ask for something, how long does it take before IT gets it to you? And a third, more than a third said, okay, well, it's more than a year or even more than two years. And this probably doesn't come as a surprise to you because we've had decades of, yeah, this was just how technology change happened. Put in the request, it takes a really long time to implement. But we kind of have come to this realization more and more at that rate, like in today's world, like when COVID hit and businesses were having to adapt to COVID, it was just not an option to say like, yeah, I'll figure out how we get to that next year. It's like, no, you actually need to change now or we're just out of business. I particularly love the 3% who said they don't know. I somehow picture this person in the organization who's like, yeah, I made that request for the change to the website, I was years ago and then I retired, I now spend time with my grandchildren. I wonder if they'll ever get to that someday. Right, we can't operate in that mode in today's world. We need the ability to change much faster. And so with marketing operations leadership, you really want to start looking at ways that you can enable that sort of rapid change. And it's using things like this framework from Gartner for the pace layering to not treating all the technology in your marketing stack the same way, but being able to distinguish between like foundational systems of record that shouldn't change very frequently, while at the same time being able to have a set of technology where you actually embrace these rapid pilot projects, systems of innovation. And I promised I'd show you at least one more of a stacky slide. And this was one that Microsoft sent in a couple of years ago. One of the reasons I loved it, a bunch of reasons. One was because yeah, they've mapped this to the customer journey as an infinite loop. But the other is the three shades of blue here are actually mapped to that Gartner pace layering model. Systems of record, systems of differentiation, systems of innovation. In the interest of time, I won't dig into this deeply right now, but yeah, you can get this whole slide deck and definitely recommend, I'll leave this as an exercise to the listener. So part of this design for change is embracing the use of open platforms. I mean, in marketing, like years ago, we used to be in this debate between sweet versus best of breed. You know, do I get everything from one vendor? Do I assemble everything from, you know, the best ones in each category? And this was kind of a really painful choice because the truth is you really wanted both. And the good news is this is where the industry seems to be headed. Moving from sweet versus best of breed to increasingly looking at this as platform ecosystems, having these foundational systems, you know, like Adobe, like Salesforce, like Oracle, like HubSpot, I'll get a plug for HubSpot in here too, and then being able to extend capabilities around that. Because, you know, when people look at my crazy Martek map and they say, oh, you know, marketing really needs to consolidate its technology. The truth is it actually is consolidating, is it's not really clear from the Martek landscape, but when you dig into the data, it's actually a long tail. You know, out of all those 8,000 companies, there's a relatively small number that are major primary platforms. When you start getting down into a few hundred category leaders, and then you increase on the end to this realm of thousands of specialist apps and components in the long tail. And where things get really, really interesting is as those major platforms at the head open up and make it easier for the specialist apps to plug in, you're able to give customers the best of both worlds. It is sweet and best of great. You know, when we think about things integrating, I just wanna say, I mean, there is a lot of opportunity for integrations to get better between these tools, right? It's not just about data, which we can think of as like the nouns, you know, oh yeah, we wanna sync up the data between these systems. It's about how we integrate the workflow across tools, which is the verbs. It's how we embed some of the UI across these tools so that we're speaking the same language across these tools. And it's also how we put good governance in place around these ecosystems. So the customers know when they're selecting apps within a particular platform ecosystem that it's gonna be compliant, that it's gonna work well, that it's a responsible citizen. And the last thing about change is really embracing this concept of agile marketing. Again, this really isn't about technology. This is about a management approach. My book, Hacking Marketing, was really all about how we adopt management ideas from the software world to marketing because yeah, marketing is in many ways, has many of the same dynamics, you know, as software development these days. How do we leverage this, you know? And this is growing. The folks at Agile Sherpa who track this, you know, I've seen about a third of the companies they interview year over year using Agile methodologies. And Agile isn't just like, you know, like a fun word to say, it really does come down to very specific practices. You can have flexibility in which practices you embrace and how you, you know, adapt them to your business, you know, but it's not just saying work faster. It's about actually structuring the way work gets done, you know, to enable iteration and adaptation. And maybe, I guess I'll leave you with this, right? I mean, for all the technologies and architecture choices and management methodologies, at the end of the day, being really good at change boils down to embracing an open mindset. We have to be willing to change. So I hope, I know I fit you with a lot at the end of a long day before what hopefully will be a really great weekend for you. But I do hope, yeah, some aspect of this framework, you will find helpful as you continue to take advantage of what I really do believe is the golden age of marketing at this point. There's, it's really an incredible time to be a marketer. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Scott. That was a fantastic presentation. I must say, it was amazing. Gold mine of innovation, I must add. And we're getting so many questions. We have time for a few I'll start with, then Sonakshi has some of them. If you can hear me, Scott, the first question is is from Animesh, he's asking, in terms of industries, which are the biggest users of marketing technology? Have you done any research on that? Yeah, I haven't done a lot of primary research myself, but I've seen data from others. And as you might expect, the initial successes here, like the people have really been early adopters in marketing technology and leverage it the most, are companies that were sort of technology oriented to begin with. So certainly like software companies, are generally very strong users. Also in the consumer side, the rise of these direct to consumer brands, that when you think about it, I mean, they're technology companies more than anything. I mean, they're basically a technology in a brand and they've gotten really good at it. So one of the things I often recommend to people is to look at some of the leading software companies and look at some of the leading D to C brands to see some of the tactics and tools they're leveraging in MarTech. Right, Sonakshi, you want to go next? Sorry, your audio is muted. We actually do have another question, it's from Apurva Durga, he says first thing, Hi Scott, great framework, thank you for sharing it. Do you think some of the organizational factors, for example, organizational culture and perhaps some other parameters determine what can be centralized and what really should be decentralized? Yeah, it's a great question. And the truth is the barriers to decentralization are not technical. At this point, there is an incredible amount of technology out there that can empower the edge of the organization. The barriers are almost entirely cultural and managerial that we are just used to thinking of organizations as these very hierarchical centralized structures. You know, and because again, that's fine, that's where we came from, that was a certain era. But I think if there's one of the benefits, if I can say the word benefit in this context of the COVID crisis has been, we realized the ability to leverage, distributed and decentralized teams can actually be really, really helpful in today's environment. So I'm hoping that that will stir a lot of people thinking about, okay, maybe we should consider how we can empower the organization a little bit more de-centrally. Right, thanks. Yes, please, please go on. In terms of industries, what are the biggest users of marketing technology? Have you done any research on that? I asked that just before this. I just asked this question actually. I'm sorry, I was a bit off. So I have a question, there's a viewer from Dubai who has asked a very specific question is, we noticed that the number of countries represented on your landscape going up, what do you attribute that to? Is it cultural difference or emergence of new talent across the world? Yeah, it's a great question. And I should disclaim one of the reasons the number of technologies keep going up on my landscape is because new companies are being created. But it also keeps going up because, frankly, we keep discovering more. Being based in the US, particularly the way a lot of search engines work where they tend to highly localized search results. It's actually been pretty hard for me to discover all the different technologies in different countries around the world. And so I'm always very grateful when other people in these countries and these regions reach out to me and they're like, oh my goodness Scott, you missed all these companies here. Let me share with you all these companies that are doing this. So I think it is a lot larger is to why those companies exist. That's a really interesting question. And I think it's a mix of a couple of things. One is certainly from a demand side. I mean, marketing technology gets so tied into the way we actually engage with our customers. And there are so many things about how we engage with customers that are specific to our industry. They're specific to regions. There are cultural differences. Then I do think there's very legitimate reasons to have specialist applications in different countries. I think the other reason why it happens is because, as we said earlier, there's no barriers to software entry. So what happened is an entrepreneur in a particular country saw that there was a need. It wasn't being served by one of the global Maratech companies as well. So they built a product and they won customers and their customers love them and they're growing and it's great. I mean, so will they succeed on a more broader global scale? That's when you get into the whole consolidation battle of some of them will. I mean, this is one of the things you see now a lot is some of these companies that start in a region other than Silicon Valley. We're now starting to see a lot of examples of those companies end up taking over and they become the winner on a global market. So I am very bullish on entrepreneurial Maratech from different regions around the world. What is it? So we have one more question. It's from Animesh Mishra. He is asking in India almost 90% of the companies collecting data do not have Maratech application or DMP or CDP implemented in their system. It will take time for them to realize the adverse impact. How can things be fast forwarded for all businesses to realize it's an imperative to adopt technologies? Yeah, I mean, this is the challenge, right? We know the technology changes much faster than organizations do. I think there's at the end of the day what motivates businesses is survival and competition. And I think, again, this is one of the things coming out of this COVID crisis where I think a lot of companies who felt they did not need to worry that much about how good their digital game was are realizing, oh my goodness, actually if I end up in a situation where the only way I can do business with my customers is digitally, wow, we really need to do this well. And particularly if they've got a competitor in their market who is better at it than they are. I find that tends to be as strong of a motivation as anything to make the investment and learn how to do this. Right, I have a quick question is, what do you think would be the long-term impact of COVID on marketing tech? What would be, what would stay in it? What would change in it? Yeah, it's, you know, there's that famous quote about, you know, making predictions is hard, especially about the future. I think the biggest change I expect is I don't believe technology is going to consolidate down to a few products. I think we are now in a world where every company, more or less, is going to become a software company to some degree. And any company that writes its own software to do some special part of its business or some special part of how it engages with customers, you know, that software is going to be written in the cloud. It's going to have APIs. You're going to have all these services to make it easier to interconnect these things. At some point I think the Martek landscape goes away because at some point it's almost like it becomes futile. It's like, okay, well, I mean, if you, yes, there's the major companies, the Adobe's, the Salesforce's, the HubSpots, whoever, you know, but there's literally going to be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of these highly specialized marketing apps. And exactly how quickly that happens and you know, what are the emerging technologies that accelerated, you know, that's where it gets harder to see exactly what will happen in a given year. But I think 10 years from now we'll look at a world where, yeah, and just, you know, there's millions of software apps everywhere and we think a bit as naturally as we do electricity. So we have a question from Kasyap Kampala, squat nice presentation. How do you see the impact of COVID on the Martek landscape? Do you see a reduction on the number of vendors? Do you see any new categories emerging? Yes, it's a really fascinating question because there are basically things about COVID that are going to harm the Martek landscape, right? I mean, business uncertainty, you know, translates to for companies that are VC backed, funding uncertainty, you know, Martek companies are not immune from the headwinds of the COVID crisis. On the other hand, you know, one of the, I mean, if you look at the global stock markets for SaaS companies, they've actually been doing great, you know, throughout this crisis. I think one of the reasons why is people, is that we were talking about earlier, right? It's almost like this COVID crisis has become a catalyst that makes us realize how important it is to start to get really serious about implementing digital business. And in that way, I think actually, yeah, it's a great time for a lot of marketing technologies to step up and to be able to say, we can help, we can get you to be a much better digital organization than you were before. So what the balance is between the negative and the positive? I don't know, but if I was a betting man, I think actually over the next two years, I think we'll see more growth in the Martek industry, not less. I have a question from Navar Hussein. He's asking, how do you think we have, do you think, sorry, do you think we have to merge in marketing new technology and remove old technology and make it convenient to have more factories? So I'm not entirely sure I understood the question. Is it like merging? Yes, merging new technology, removing old technology and making it more convenient for the end users. Yes, so definitely. So I'll start with that last one. Absolutely, marketing technology suffers from the same problem that a lot of technology does, which is it actually kind of sucks to use. I mean, the software industry is getting better about user experience. And certainly we have a few companies, like the Apple iPhone was always held out as like, oh, what a great user experience. We got a long ways to go as an industry. Do I think make software easier for people to use, more intuitive, especially in that mode of where you're talking about decentralization and you're really willing to empower people who are not technical to be able to get the most value out of this. As far as things merging together between old and new technologies, we mentioned very briefly in the presentation this integration platform as a service category. That is actually a very rich category. I mean, there are easily a hundred companies in that space. And while some of them are focused on how do you connect different cloud applications together, there's actually quite a bit of that technology on how do you interface to legacy systems? Because we've got a lot of legacy systems out there. It's going to take a long time before they get re-platformed in the cloud. And if you're a business of any scale with any real history, yes, you need to have a strategy about how you integrate those legacy systems into your more modern cloud digital marketing as well. We have one last question for the day. Just a second. Mr. Dhan Senkar, you mentioned influencer marketing. Is there an uptake for employees to be the brand advocates in a decentralized way rather than making advertise rather than marketing, driving the brand messages? I'll repeat that. You mentioned influencer marketing. Is there an uptake for employees to be the brand advocate in a decentralized way rather than marketing, driving the brand messages? Yes. I think this is one of the cases where you want the balance between centralization and decentralization. You want marketing to provide some sort of framework in this enlightened governance of, okay, let's make sure we understand together what the brand messages are and make sure that we're aligned and that what we're sharing is consistent. So that when different people connect with different employees in the company, they don't feel like they're dealing with like 20 different companies. They feel like, oh yeah, this is all the same company. I think with that framework in place, then you're absolutely right. You then want to empower those individuals on the edge of the organization to apply that framework, to engage in personal and direct ways. I mean, this is social media. It is a very human channel. You can buy all sorts of advertising from a centralized marketing program, but that no way ever comes close to the sort of one-to-one personal connections you get when you have a real brand advocate talking from the heart, because this is the work they do. It's not because they were hired by marketing to do this. It's because this is what they do and they love it and they know a lot about it and they enjoy engaging with customers around it. Yeah, you can't buy that. That's amazing. Okay, so before we conclude, just one last question. What is your guess for 2021's landscape or like 10,000 or 12,000 or like, is it even higher? Do you think like people are going to be betting on it by the end of the day? Yeah, is there a prediction market somewhere? So I don't know, you know, part of the challenge is, like if you'd asked me last year, I would have predicted that the landscape would have shrunk. I thought 7,000 was a lot. I thought it was probably going to contract a bit. The fact that it went up to 8,000 caught me completely by surprise. But I think, you know, one of the things that makes it challenging is, well, two reasons. One is you have to decide what qualifies as a marketing technology. And the truth is, I mean, there's a whole bunch of marketing technology tools that I didn't consider qualified, but you could make the argument that they should be. So for instance, like let's just take WordPress, the most popular content management system on the platform. WordPress has an ecosystem of nearly 60,000 plugins. Now again, most of those plugins suck. Most, a bunch of those plugins are dead, right? So they're not all active. But still, when you think about it, there's probably easily now several thousand plugins for WordPress that are active and being used in some way in marketing experiences. So the question becomes, do those thousands of plugins, do they count? Should they be on the modern tech landscape? Now, for the most part, I said no, unless if they were like really super popular, you know, like Yoast or something like that. But I think it's one of the reasons why it becomes hard to like peg a number is because the truth is the boundaries on what we consider to be marketing technology are pretty fluid. How's that for dodging the question? Very nice, very nicely done, I must say that. But I think on that note, we're gonna enter the session with Scott. Thank you so much for this wonderful session. Thank you so much for having me. Have a great weekend. Thank you, thank you. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we move on to the next session for the day. It's a very special session. It's actually a leaders panel. We have with us three fantastic speakers, Paran Thiru Bengadam, CTO Medlife, Yash Dayal, CTO Zivane, and Sandeep Komaravelli, Director of International Growth Shopify. So I welcome all of you. Please reveal, we can start with the session. Yes, welcome, I am your co-moderator. So actually, and me will be asking questions. Before we begin, I just want to announce the real life on social platforms as well as you can post your questions on Zoom. We will be glad to be asking our esteemed speakers. Without further delay, I want to straightaway go to my very first question. I will start with you, Mr. Sandeep. If you're there, yes, you can hear me, yes. I don't know, yes. Yes. Tell me, we're talking about e-commerce and road ahead. First, how has e-commerce journey been in the, it becomes a very must ask question in the last 90 days, if I may say. Yeah, I think like most of the things that we know have changed for good. And some, I don't know if they're going to go back to normal given what we are seeing, but specifically e-commerce, I think there are two large trends that we've observed at Shopify. And maybe I can briefly touch upon both of them. The first one I think is something that you would expect. There is a lot of surge in demand for retailers and businesses wanting to go online. And that is expected because obviously, all the businesses who've considered online as a nice to have channel, now no longer look at it as a nice to have because of the constraints that we are living currently under. What has been interesting is also like the type of retailers who are going online. So we see a lot of interest from brick and mortar retailers and also those who are in the essential goods category. There's been a lot of demand and surge in those businesses wanting to go online. That's I think the first trend. The second one I think is just businesses and retailers realizing the importance of not only selling locally, but also being able to deliver locally as you're aware, like because of all the constraints, it has become very important to have these tools and these platforms which can help you not only market yourself effectively within your neighborhood, within the locality, but also being able to deliver that. And I think that has also changed the way businesses think of online as a channel traditionally. So those are the two big trends amongst a lot of the other smaller ones that we've observed in Shopify. Paranth, the same question to you. What are your observations of the last 90 days and the impact it has on the commerce? See, there is a big shift in the landscape when I say March, April to now. See, if you look at March and April timeframe, we had a lot of problems from the health care because MedLife is a e-health platform. We had fundamental issues of supply chain completely broken. We couldn't get people to our warehouse. We couldn't find people to deliver medicines even though the demand is very high. The demand was actually high even starting, but we had all these challenges because of which we couldn't do. But after like May onwards, the supply chain, interstate supply chain was fine. We could be able to get people both from our warehouse perspective as well as from our last mile perspective. But some of the challenges we see is, so each of these ones, there is a SOP now published by the government to maintain it of for example, how to run a warehouse, how to maintain a last mile system, last mile agents. These things are putting in an additional constraint which are needed necessarily. Those are some of the things which is happening. But the good part about the whole spectrum is, for example, if you see a consumer behavior, our e-consultation before was actually very less. Predominantly people used to come to us for buying medicines in online. But now because the going to a hospital is a bigger problem for them, our consultation, e-consultation demand has improved drastically. The same as the case with e-pharmacy because people are scared to actually go to an offline pharmacy to meet them. So that's why the demand is very good for us in both these things. But there are some constraints by which we have to operate which is taking a toll on it. That's pretty much. Yes, if you take the real mirror view, how do you see this last three months? Sir, your audio is muted. Sorry. Hey, first of all, guys, let me introduce myself. I'm Yash, I work for Zivami. I think most of you guys know Zivami's India's leading destination for women's intimate wear in India. And my role in Zivami is leading the world technology vision of the company. I think I would agree with what Prasanth and Sandeep have said. Sorry, what Paranth and Sandeep have said. It's been a roller coaster ride. Would be like almost like an understatement. I think in Zivami we've gone through stages where we had a complete store shutdown. We were not getting orders in. Again, lots of challenges on the supply chain side. So and I think what is very interesting and scary at the same time was that you didn't. So until now there was still a little bit of predictability. So even though we say e-commerce is very fast, changing rapidly, but the amount of unpredictability during these times was just enormous, right? So you would not know tomorrow whether your warehouse is working or whether there'll be a containment in the warehouse, whether your office can continue. Of course, a lot of us, everyone started working from home. So that brought its own set of interesting challenges. So overall, I would say a worldwide and roller coaster thing, but on the positive side, right? If you look at everything for any constraint, what are the opportunities? I think it gave us a very nice opportunity where we were, so typically companies, e-commerce companies especially, are always rushing to the scale. And there's a lot of chaos to support the business. So the opportunity here was that we could all take a little bit of, we got a little bit of elbow room to go out and clean the shop and clean the house a little bit and clean the tech. Right. Paranth, I want to come to you with this question. Yours is a different category. There is a surge in demand, right? There is, despite what the market sentiment is, I mean, there's a certain kind of traffic that's coming your way. From the tech perspective, if I had to ask you from the marketing technology perspective, have you, what are the different changes or different adaptations or different readjustments that you have made to suit the timing, the way customers tend to engage with e-commerce platforms in this kind of a pandemic time? See, overall, in the case of tech, if you see, there are a lot of things we have changed. If you look at our business early February, I would say majority of our customers pay by COD, cash on the money. But now there is a need for a contactless delivery to come in and there is a need for us to get a prepayment share increased drastically. So that is the first point from the customer perspective to see. This is one of the biggest change we have done and pretty much in every flow, we want to adopt a prepaid for that. So now customers are not used to it because they're historically used to paying by cash. So when we come to the doorstep, we enable them, hey, I'll push you an SMS, you can directly pay it right at the door point or I'll give you a QR code right at the door point, you can pay it. So that is one step of the journey. The other one, if you look at it, for example, our diagnostics business, wherein we come to home, pick up our blood sample. This is very scary, right? Why will anybody come to you? Because at this point in time, but there are a lot of chronic patients, if you're a diabetic patient, you're expected to do a sample test or quarter once. So normally when a diagnostics person, when a phlebotomist goes to our house, he will have everything, he'll have a gloves, all the new kits, but now he'll have a BP kit and we'll actually give him a lot more safety precautions so that the customer is a lot more comfortable. If I shift this from a customer to our warehouse site, originally when our warehouse agents comes into our warehouse, they have a biometric one, which will do the fingerprinting and the enter. Now, because of the COVID time, we cannot allow him to do that. So then there is a face recognition one based on this we have and put as attendance. So the attendance right from the attendance registering, raw string doing it, bookmarking is timing, everything has changed from the warehouse site, as well as from the in-customer multiple things. These are the things we have changed. Salip, how has it been for you from the tech, marketing tech side? Did you get enough time to kind of change, adapt to new technology? Because initially I think there was a dip in sentiment of purchase sentiment. How did you utilize that time and did you add any new features from the tech side of it, could you take us through that? Yeah, for sure. For us, I think it's a lot more to with how we are able to work and enable our merchants. Because Shopify, as you may be aware, is a platform that is helping merchants go online. And it is a platform that can help you just not only set up quickly, but also grow and manage your retail business, irrespective of how small or how big you are. So our view to all of this is basically enabling and supporting merchants who are either going online for the first time or those who want to, those who are completely reliant only on online channels for their sales. And there were two, three things that we have done on that side on both of these, which is for new businesses or new entrepreneurs who are coming and setting up an online store, how do we enable them to actually do that in a very short window is what we've been focused on. And as I mentioned earlier, is there a way in which we can build out themes? So we have like these themes which are helpful for these new merchants to immediately go online within a couple of hours. There are also tools that we have provided to merchants so that they can easily communicate with their customers through social channels, through email, through all of these tools. And for those who are already online and are like growing their business, we've started working, we started providing tools and integrations with all the local payment methods, or unspoken about contactless delivery. Also, how do you transform all the demand that has been there from your physical stores? How do you basically convert that into online demand? And what is the easiest way to do that? I think those are some of the areas where we've been focused on and that has been really helpful. I think the other aspect of it has also been around just communication and increasing awareness on what are the best ways that you can use all of the tools available, right? A lot of the tools are already available. I think if there's one thing that has happened in the last few years, it's just like the barrier for using some of these technology tools has gone down so much, both from a cost perspective and even from a usage perspective. So I think a lot of focus was also on just educating all of these retailers and merchants and brands on how do you make use of all of these to effectively just keep your business running and growing. Right. Yes, your category has a bit of vanity in it. People are very specific, very particular about buying intimate wear and how do you enable an online experience that matches the offline part of it? I mean, the use of tech here has become very critical in your category especially. Tell me, I mean, you said you've got a lot of time to do away with some tech parts and introduce new ones. What were the new features added and how did you utilize this time to build a very effective marketing tech side? So there were basically two things that we started working on. So again, let me rephrase a bit. We didn't get a lot of time but I think relatively we got a little bit more time. So I think one of the ones was that I think one of the core things we did is we took a look at what are core improvements and optimizations we could do on our servers and actually that also helped in reducing some of our server costs and that is overall added to the business health. In fact, I was speaking to some of my friends at AWS and they said that this is something which they're seeing across the industry like most companies have actually gone in and double down and figuring out how to optimize their infrastructure and they're actually seeing AWS builds go down for most of the startups. And the other thing is I think it's something which will also happen naturally is I think as people were talking about contactless experience, right? So the moment you go into a store that's a very kind of becomes like a contact heavy experience. So I think one of the things we are looking to understand is whether they happen, whether there is a shift which happens from people who were traditionally going to retail stores, whether they actually start shifting towards the digital format. Having said that, I think at least on a retail store we've ensured that all the safety and hygiene is there. So if a customer really wants to go into a retail store they should feel like completely comfortable going there. Apparently, there's another factor which is that seamless experience. Customer is buying online but they expect a certain kind of experience and how are you using tech to enable that seamless transition, a quick solution and also what have been the key learnings from this phase, particularly that will stay with you as part of your strategy especially the marketing tech side of it. See, if you look at a seamless experience there are multiple things we have done actually during the COVID time. So for example, you take a prescription and you go to a medical shop and let's say a particular composition is not there. You know what the pharmacist will say? Hey, I don't have this combination but I have this composition here the molecular composition is same, do you want to get it? So most of the time you go with the person and get it but mostly in online when we originally used to come we never used to give the seamless experience. So we say, hey, whatever you're searching is not there it's not there. Then we realize later because our supply is blocked in there are a lot of the substitutes that we used to have in which we never exposed to the end user. So now if you come in exactly how you shop in in an offline you will get the same experience if you come to online. You'll see you'll search for a medicine and it'll say, hey, this is the medicine which is there this is maybe a generic one or it is a patented one which is costly. These are the substitutes same molecular composition it is generated and it is available in inventory it is at a cheaper discount. So the experience of what is customers are needing is exactly what do they expect from an offline pharmacy thing, the same experience they prefer to get it from the store, this one. And the next one, see sometimes when you go to a hospital, right? You finish a doctor and you go to a pharmacist sometimes the doctor says, hey, you have these medications to buy and these are the pathology tests or the blood tests that you need to do. So you need a single place where you're able to do both in the same one and you come back, right? Similarly, the one when you come to a chronic patient you are a diabetic and you're going and buying these ones immediately we'll show you, hey, you're a diabetic patient these are the packages that we have for your blood tests to finish in and this is what you can get through it. So exactly what you walk into a hospital the same experience or if you go to a pharmacy to buy similar experience you'll see in the e-com space. That's one of the similar experience we will now do. I will be asking questions to Sandeep and Yash and then Sonakshi we're getting a lot of questions he'll come with some more audience questions also going so we don't want to miss on them. So Sandeep I want to come to you that you have the vendor side and you have the customer side, right? Where did you innovate the most? Where was the need to innovate the most as far as the tech part is concerned? And what were those innovations that you can tell us specifically? Yeah, I mean our platform is essentially for merchants so whatever we do is largely for the merchants and for us most of the things that we do is feedback that we receive from the merchant saying hey I have this for all for my customers so can you enable that? I think a couple of things specific to like what happened in the last 90 days is basically one to do with communication so are there ways in which we can help these merchants communicate better with their customers so integration with social platforms, live updates is there a way in which we can keep constant communication going? I think it's just a matter of setting the right expectation it's not like you want the delivery to happen in two hours or one day it's about just keeping the customers informed so what is the best way to keep in touch with the customers? Second I think is more to do with how do you enable that all the things that you're doing as a business from like your stock outs or inventory or pricing changes, all of those you're able to manage it efficiently I think those are the areas where at least Shopify has had a lot of tools and features because I think it becomes most important to set the right expectation in times like these when you have a lot of fluctuations not just in like the constraints and running your own business but even externally as well the other important I don't think it's an innovation but a change that we've seen in at least of brands who have done better is like using the social channels not just as channels to communicate promotions or way to acquire customers but also using them as channels to collect feedback and interact that has not been like that has not been one of the ways in which social channels were traditionally used but it's been encouraging to see how that has been helpful so tools of like how do you have a unified inbox to communicate, to manage all the messages that you're getting from customers across all social platforms or integration with platforms which can push out live updates on radio packages through WhatsApp so things like those which are largely in the communication domain is where we've seen feedback from merchants that they have been very helpful. Yes, my question to you is that customer engagement in this period becomes very critical and I think that is the only way of course to stay connected. Are you also as part of your marketing policy and strategy waiting for the offline to open or are you completely adjusting to an online in a way that customers stay engaged and how are you planning to keep them engaged using tech? So I think thankfully I think we have all types of Zivami customers and I hope that a majority of them are actually do both offline as well as online. I think a lot of changes on how the communication is happening. I think during COVID times there was a lot of communication about how our customers can... So we understood that that time it was paramount for customers to feel comfortable about safety and hygiene. So a lot of help on how they can manage themselves during COVID times. A lot of communication on those things. And another thing which I think across the industry people are seeing is for example, if you look at if you consider the mass loss pyramid I think customers have actually dropped down several levels. So I think suddenly safety hygiene is becoming paramount and also with all the economic changes I think there's a lot more focus on getting value and focus on value. So I think those are some of the innovations which we're trying to do. For instance, Zivame started selling COVID masks. So that's an essential item that you can start buying. And overall, I think there were a lot of quick innovations which we had to do. For example, a large portion of our catalog is not essentials. So we had places where deliveries could happen today but not happen tomorrow. If an order is coming from a red zone how do we manage those? So a lot of innovation went in all around towards the front end, towards the customer facing side as well as on the back end, where outside to manage all of these things. Srinakshi, my colleague has some questions. Yes, I have received a few audience questions. The first one is by Vikram Kumar. Paranth, this is for you. Did you see significant change in behavior of patients being open to shift prescriptions from what their doctor wrote? Or do they still insist on sticking to what doctors write? It is, there is a big shift. And it is not just because of COVID also but COVID time it has improved drastically. I'll tell you that is why I was telling you on the substitution one. So originally if you see when a patient when they upload a prescription exactly what the medicine is there is what they prefer. Otherwise they'll mostly say no. Now patients understand because there is a lot of engagement we have done our customer care agents have called them before to do a substitute. And that we have been doing for months. Then as part of COVID what we did is as a tech facility in the app itself you can do. So customers have changed a lot now and they are okay to do a substitute provided you give them the enough information what's a composition which is matching both. So there is a big landscape shift on the substitution model. So one is for Sandeep. Do countries behave differently when it comes to e-commerce otherwise? I think the larger trends have remained the same. So like most of the retailers wanting to go online I think those are the trends that have remained the same. The differences that we've seen is primarily in terms of the regulatory landscape like for example in India the non-essential ban on e-commerce was there. So all the demand and everything that we've seen is largely for those retailers who are in the essential goods category. But outside of that I think the trend has been similar that there's an increase in demand for like shifting your business to online. Most of the retailers are now looking at how do you efficiently grow that channel and not look at it as a supplement but almost like one of the important channels along with your physical stores or physical business. So I'd say like the larger trends are similar. Of course the local nuances are always there but the larger trends are similar at their cost countries. All right. So I have another question which is for Paranth as well as for Yash. Do you develop a lot of technology frameworks in-house or do you acquire them off the shelf? So Paranth maybe you can start first. Okay. So majority of them we take it from open source. Actually we don't develop. In fact pretty much the entire stack I would say is actually picked it up from the open source ones and our deployment 100% is out of AWS. But there are some things which are we don't go and buy products. For example, if we build a data platform it's not like the off the shelf data platform we pick it up. We take Apache Spark as a engine for us and then we build our data platform because there are a lot of stitching that you have to do it. So we don't buy off the shelf products but we don't go for licensed text tax. Yash? Yeah, I think similar to what Paranth mentioned I think we try to build as much as we can in-house. Again, we're also based on open stack. So try to leverage those but try to build as much as we can in-house. Okay, so last question for all three of you. What do you think are the future trends considering all three of you from completely different e-commerce portals? So the trends are completely different. Can you respect it? Yes. Yeah, so irrespective. So what do you think is the next one? Sandeep? Okay, yeah, I think the most important one that I feel is that some of the consumer behavior that has changed or that has been forced because of COVID, I think that will continue which is good news for a lot of the merchants who are looking at online business. So that trend I think is going to continue. The second one I think is like all the technology tools that are available today that I think they will be like a sea change or improvement and all of them will evolve over a period of time because with changing times and like changing demands and requirements they also need to evolve. So I think both of them are like things that at least in my view are going to continue even after the normalcy returns. I don't know where ever that is but yeah, after the current set of constraints go away. Okay, Paran? In the e-health space, there is actually a big shift in the consumer behavior and we think this is going to stay on for a long time. I'll give you two examples. If you look at pre-COVID time we still used to have e-consultation which is that paid consultation, you fix a doctor and you speak. But if you see for what all disease types they come there, it's pretty much one or two. Like 90% I would say is mental health issue or sexology issue. These are the only reasons for which they come to e-consultation. Rest all of the time they're comfortable going and meeting a doctor face to face. During the COVID time what happened a big shift is they understand the risk of going and meeting a doctor in the hospital or in the clinic. So they've actually tried out e-consultation as part of this COVID one. And lot of them have become very comfortable and it's not just our platform. If you look at all the e-consultation platform in India, startups, everybody's traffic or the order count has gone multi-exhired. And now I think what will happen is let's say you live in Bangalore and you have fever and you want to go meet a doctor and come back. The minimum I'll tell you four hours it'll take. Three to four hours by the time you drive go meet a doctor, finish everything, come back home easily you're done. But here it's a 10 minutes call which you're done. This luxury they actually opened up only because of COVID necessity. And we think this is going to stay on for a long time. The other one is actually on the telemedicine side. Affordability and accessibility becomes an option before they didn't realize because sometimes they go to the next door, buy a person. But when you go to the next door shop and you buy you don't have enough data. For example, our tier one customers behave very differently. If it is a patented drug, I'll give you 10% discount. But if it is a generic drug substitute and the same, the discount range is very, very high. So these information they are never getting from the offline store. So once you expose all these things, actually we are thinking in both these spaces that the consumer behavior has changed drastically and it's going to remain there forever. Very nicely put. Yash? Yeah, I would echo with what Paran said. I think unfortunately not such a big spike as what he was talking about in the e-health sector. But overall, I think there will be a trend of people moving more towards online. So I think it's kind of like what demonetization did. It kind of enforced digital payments on a lot of people. So people were forced to use digital payments. I think because of this lockdown and because of all the constraints which people have, I think a lot of people who are not trying online or who had some little bit of hesitation, a lot of them have actually are trying online. So I would say there will be a trend towards moving into online space. And just to support that, even if you look at the fashion industry, if you look at some of the very traditional brick-and-mortar retailers like Zara and H&M, all of them are actually setting up online shops. So it's COVID has changed the world for Shofia. Okay, fantastic. Thank you so much, dear panelists. Paran, Sandeep, Yash, you guys have been great. It has been a fantastic insightful session. With this, we actually end the Martillik India Bridge One series, which is the first precursor to the main Martillik India event in September 2020. So I thank you once again, everybody. Thank you, everyone for joining us. And we still, I just want to mention that we still have a lot of questions unanswered, but we will try to maybe... Yes, we are a little above time for it. Thank you so much. We will definitely take it off now. Thank you.