Hi all, I'm Abhinu H. Chen and today I'm going to cover a topic called choosing write storage for Kubernetes. Let me go in full screen mode. Okay, so this is about me, I'm an author, blogger and speaker, I'm open source contributor, I'm working as a distinguished member of technical staff in Vipro 5GT. So let's see the agenda. So in this agenda I'm going to cover what is stateful and what is stateless workload, right? And I will also do a quick recap of Kubernetes storage concepts followed by various options which are there for cloud native storage and then the most important part about choosing the right storage and some of the lessons learned and key takeaways. Okay, so let's get started. So what is, okay, so before we get into stateful and stateless workload, it's very important to understand that Kubernetes was originally created for stateless workload, but slowly it has been realized that stateful workloads are also something that needs to be hosted in Kubernetes, right? And what are stateless application or stateless workload? Those are applications which are not affected by pod restarts. So if a pod crashes because pod by its nature is something that can restart and it can get different IP and all, so stateless workloads are not affected by those restarts. Okay, very stateful workload are something that needs to store their state after pod restart. So let's say there is a database, right? So we don't want all of our data to be gone when our database pod restarts, right? So that is a stateful workload example. And to do so, we need permanent storage, right? And in Kubernetes, there is a concept called stateful sets. Now I want to just highlight the fact that the stateful sets are not similar or not same as stateful application, those are two different things, okay? Some of you might know these storage concepts, but for those who are not aware of it, a quick recap of Kubernetes storage concepts. And I'm not going to go in deep here, it will be at very, very high level so that whatever we talk or we go through next, that makes sense, okay? So we will just see what is volume, what is persistent volume, what is PVC persistent volume claim, what is storage class and what is host path, okay? Now volume, so volume is a directory, right? And volume is not a new word in Kubernetes that has been used before. And there are two types of volume, one is a femoral volume and other one is persistent volume. Fever, volume has a lifetime of a pod, right? So if you restart a pod, then those things will be gone, right? And persistent volume, I'll cover in next slide. Now, in terms of volume that is supported by Kubernetes, there are many, right? So if you see a quick list here on this slide, so it supports AWS, EBS, Azure Disk, Azure File, Empty Directory. So some of these are inbuilt, they like Empty Directory, host path are something that you can use. And some other one, let's say Azure Disk, you will need Azure subscription and Azure cloud access, okay? So this is about volume, let's go to persistent volume. Persistent volume, as the name suggests, it's again a piece of storage. And it is persistent basically, so like in AWS we have EBS volume, right? Where if you store something in the EBS volume, that data does not go away when you're easy to instant restart. So similar concept here, that if you attach a persistent volume to a pod, right? And then if a pod restarts or even pod terminates, that data does not go away. And now, how do we create persistent volume? A quick YAML file is given here, right?  And what is the access mode of that PV? So there are different mode support in pre-tried ones, pre-tried many. And read only, right? So and whether it is host path type or different type, that is again, one of the option, okay? So this is a very simple YAML file of creating a PV in Kubernetes. And persistent volume could be static or dynamic. What it means is, see, if it is a dynamic persistent volume, that means we don't need to create it and storage provisioner will take care of provisioning the PV. Now, coming to persistent volume claim. So PVC is a way the Kubernetes uses the storage, right? So if I've created a PV of, let's say 50 gig, then I cannot really have PV shown to pod, right? Or PV is not visible to pod. So PV is consumed using PVC. So when a pod needs a storage, it has to call the PVC, okay? For that, we need to create a PVC. And how do we create a PVC? As the sample script given here, we just give the PVC name, okay? Storage class name, access mode, and how much is the storage requirement for PVC? Now PVC to PV winding is one to one, and this is very important to understand, because this is a major, major limitation. So let's say if I have a PV of 100 gig, and I create a PVC of 5 gig, right? And access mode and storage class name matches there, then that PV is going to be by two PVC, okay? Since we have asked for 5 gig, we will not be able to use another 95 gig. That will be waste, and there will not be any other PVC that can use that remaining PVC. So that's what one to one mapping means. And this causes a lot of wastage of storage, right? Because you might not know exact storage requirement, right? In the beginning, and you don't want to run out of storage.  And then if that is not being utilized, then your storage is not really utilized properly, okay? Now, so that is PVC. Coming to storage class, a storage class is like a profile, okay? So see, Kubernetes supports different kind of storage, right? And application also requires different kind of storage. Some application requires very high performing storage, and some application where there might not be any need of very high performing storage. In that case, we don't need to really give high performing storage to all kind of workload. We can create a category or profiles of very storage, and those are called storage class. So we can create a storage class for let's say high performing storage, one storage class for low performing storage and so on, right? So these are like tiers. So how does storage class helps? It is useful for dynamic PV provisioning, right? So one of the example given here, YAML file is given here. So here, what are we doing? We are creating a storage class called CNCF EBS storage class. So this is EBS specific storage class, and we are giving a provisioner, okay? And these are just three parameters given, but there are several options. And these options are again not consistent. Different cloud provider, different vendors give different parameters, right? So you need to find out the right parameters for your volume type and all. So here, what we are saying that my storage class is going to use type IO1, and it will guarantee IOPS per GB of 10, right? Now, so what happens here is when you use this storage class, okay? In any PVC, then you don't need to create PV. So let's say the same example where my PVC is of 5 GB, right? And I did not create any PV. So my PVC is 5 GB, I did not create any PV. And now when my PVC is created because this storage class is mentioned, there will be automatic provisioning of 5 GB of PV using this provisioner, okay? And what is the benefit of it? You're not wasting the storage. And this is still one-to-one mapping, but then the headache of creating PV and maintaining PV is taken away from you. Some specific type of volumes and providers give regional replication capabilities, right? Like GCP gives it. And different option features supported by different vendors. So I think that I've already mentioned. Now there is a concept called host path. What is host path? So host path is a way by which you can utilize the storage, which is locally present on the server, okay? Now, in this example, if you see this YAML file, it's a CNC of demo PV. So in this persistent volume, okay, I'm mentioning host path and path name is slash MNT slash data. Now this storage is coming from my local node. So wherever whatever worker node is being used where I'm creating this, that storage will be used. Now the limitation of this kind of host path is that storage is local, right? So it is not getting replicated from one worker node to other worker node. So if that worker node goes down, even though you're using persistent volume, your data will go away because underlying the storage itself is not available, right? So that is one major limitation, okay? And second is that it is not recommended for production. The reason being it has seven security risk, right? So in our sandbox environment or non-production environment, it's perfectly all right to use host path, okay? But in production, it's a big no-no, I mean it's not at all recommended, okay? Now let's move on to next part where it is about Kubernetes storage options. So we have seen why we need storage, right? How do we give storage to Kubernetes both of them, right? So we give it in terms of PVCs. So whichever part wants persistent storage, persistent volume, it has to have PVC mentioned in its YAML file, and then that PVC maps to a PV. And there is a storage class option also that we can use for doing dynamic provisioning. And that is it. And if you want to use local storage, you can use host path. Let's see the storage options. So this screenshot is taken from CNCF landscape. So as of 25th of July, this is the landscape of cloud-native storage. And if you see here, there are like 56 different options, okay? And all these logos are logos of the company mostly which provide these solutions. And some are owned by Lenox Foundation, like Rook. CNCF projects, all of those 56, these six are CNCF project. You can see it here. Out of these, OpenEBS is something that is used in production in CNCF itself. I mean, that is not the only place, but yeah, it is also used in CNCF as production. And if you're aware about the concept of graduated project, then Rook is the only project which is CNCF graduated out of those 56. Now, a little bit detail about these projects or these options, one that not all of them are same, right? So it's not like a cloud provider situation, right? Where you take virtual machine from Azure, it is called Azure virtual machine. If you take it from AWS, call EC2, but they are the same virtual machine. They are same, there will be some operating system and storage and so on, right? They are same, but here it is not like that. So one example would be, let's say, MinIo, this one, right? So MinIo is only for your object storage, right? So you know there are three types of storage. One is object storage, like S3, object storage. And number two is block storage, right? And number three is file system-based, right? So these are the three. And file system-based means NFS is also part of file system. So one of the difference between these products is one that they are catering to specific type of storage. Let's say MinIo caters only to object storage part. Some cover all three object, all three storage types like Chef, okay? Some are, so this is like one difference in terms of what kind of storage options are supported. Second difference is that, I think this can be understood from this slide. So there are three types of cloud-native storage or Kubernetes storage. One, which is a traditional solution with CSI plug-in, okay? So that means, let's say NetApp. Now NetApp is there in storage world from so long and to support container workloads or support Kubernetes, what they have done, they have created CSI plug-in, right? So CSI is container storage interface, which is a standard given by CNCF that every vendor has to follow, because otherwise they will not be any way to say that, yeah, things are working, right? And second is, so this is CSI plug-in is one way. So out of those 56, some of those cloud-native storage are CSI plug-ins, basically. Okay, second is some solutions are software-defined storage with container optimization. So they have decide, so they don't rely on plug-in, but they have a container optimization. So they are, as a solution works for container also, and they say that they have optimized it for containers, so that it works for containers. And third category of solution is cloud-native solution. So there are certain products which were built ground up, ground serve, and for this Kubernetes, right? So those are like cloud-native solutions, all three different categories. Now the question is, the most important part is as an architect or as a solution architect for Kubernetes, I need to decide which storage is right storage for me, right? How do we decide that? So choosing the right storage option is our next agenda in this session. So now in this slide, I have listed 20 such decision-pride areas, okay? And you are free to add more or you're free to skip something which are not relevant to you, but these are more or less something that covers all possibilities, okay? Now let's go through each one of them because this is the most important part. Okay, so whenever you're choosing any storage solution for Kubernetes, you might lend up in a situation where you will have different storage for virtual machines, which is like non-container world and container world. So now the question here is whether you want two different solutions or one, right? So ideally, you will prefer to have one solution, right? So that you have less management overhead and so many challenges go away. You don't have to really go with two different vendors and don't have to manage two different way of maintaining a storage for different type of work, okay? So first question that you should ask while deciding any particular storage solution, whether it supports both virtual machine and containers. Second one is, as I mentioned before, there are three types of storage. One is block, object and file system. So second question would be whether given solution supports all three or one of them or two of them, how is it? Because almost I would say I can't get the number, but yeah, most of the solution do not support all three, okay? All right, now third is whether you have enterprise support available. And this is again a very common question from open source software perspective, right? So when you are running open source software in production, you want to be sure that there is enterprise support available from some vendor. And they are there to help you 24 by 7 for all kind of server issues and all. All right, number four, so whether it supports major cloud providers or not. So see these storage options are also applicable for, let's say on-premise or let's say if you want to run your Kubernetes in AWS, right? Or it might be EKS, then you want to know whether this solution will work with EKS volumes and all, right? And similarly it will work with Azure Disk or not, right? So whether it supports major cloud provider or the cloud provider that is in use in your organization, so that is full criteria. Fifth one, whether it provides any kind of replication feature, why do you need replication in Kubernetes? So you need replication for higher availability and disaster recovery, right? So many solution supports mostly async replication. Some of them are supporting sync replication also so that there is no data loss, right? So based on your requirement, you can decide what solution fits in your requirement, whether if you need sync replication based solution then that could be one of your major criteria, okay? So six and seven are types of replication which are supported by various products. Eighth is provides de-duplication and compression and this is again a normal software defined storage feature. We need de-duplication and compression, okay? Next one is ease of deployment. Some of the solutions are very difficult to implement and they are all command line options and all and that is quite difficult, right? When you want to manage your storage at scale, then ease of deployment also matters. And many companies also look for workload migration feature, right? So and what I mean by workload migration is this could be first of all across Kubernetes cluster, right? So your Kubernetes cluster one could be running on-premise or maybe cloud one. And you want it to migrate from cloud one to cloud two. And you want to do this at storage level, right? You want to create a snapshot, copy that snapshot, restore it. That could be one option, right? Or you might want to have a sync replication where your application is always copied or rather the application data is always copied when something goes wrong here. You have exactly same copy available on the other side, right? And you can do a failover to other side. So whether that workload migration feature is there or not. Number 11, whether it supports high performance. Now, how high performance might not be a key criteria for everyone, right? So just see, let's say if you are hosting some telco great workload, let's say some VNF hosting you want to do, right? And there your storage performance and network throughput, everything matters, right? So in that case, you want to be sure that your performance requirements are met. Then next point is point in time snapshot feature because you might want to take backups of your application at time to time and whether is there any snapshot or some other backup mechanism available, you want to ensure that. Next one is QoS Guarantee, quality of service guarantee. Like these many IOPS per second, that kind of thing is there or not. Encryption again, very important from security perspective. So whether it supports encryption at rest, encryption in motion. And for all kind of corruption issues, whether it supports checksum error detection, then whether it's, and how does the scalability work, right? That's another point. So, see when you create this kind of storage solution, you will be using multiple nodes, right, storage nodes. So let's say you started with three storage nodes and you got 50, 50, 50, like 150 terabyte of storage. Now, when you're running out of it, what is the way it works? I mean, how do you scale it? Is it like adding one more node will take care of rebalancing and everything and you will be getting the same performance after that or not? So that is scaling with nodes, is there or not? Next is whether there's any infra lock-in or not, right? So sometime it happens where a certain storage solution work only with their hardware or certain hardware. Now, that is what is lock-in, right? So whether that infra lock-in or hardware lock-in is there or not? That is again, one point that you should consider. Is there any backup and recovery feature? And last one, whether it's supposed thin provisioning or not? Okay, so as you can see, some of these points are related to security, some are related to software-defined storage, some are related to high availability, disaster recovery, some are related to key features of type of storage or type of workload. And so you have to evaluate from different, different perspective. And what can happen here? Like how do you really evaluate that? So you can create a table sort of thing where you mention all these 20 parameters or maybe more, maybe less. And then you choose certain option. Let's say you choose five options. Okay, let's say you want to evaluate Rook. You want to evaluate four more, okay? You put all five in that same table. Now you start exploring whether solution one fits in point number one, point number two, point number three and so on. Okay, and then based on this entire exercise, you will get to know which one is the right solution. I did not mention the licensing and subscription cost aspect, but that is also important. Some of the lesson learned, since there are too many options and if you start exploring all 56, it might be a long-term exercise, right? Because you cannot do it theoretically by reading literature that is available in public domain. So you have to do certain POCs. Now you cannot do POCs of 56 different solutions. So one of the recommendation is that at theoretical level you decide, right? Which one in which five are aligned to your strategy, right? Very highly, then start from there. I mean, don't start with all 56. Number two, very important lesson that some of the limitation will not be known before end. So I mean, in many public, publicly available documentation, you will not see a heading called known limitation or these are the things which do not work, right? So it will happen that once you start using it, you will find out, I mean, there could be multiple scenarios. One could be that there is a feature which is mentioned, it is there, but actually it is not there, it is work in progress kind of thing or it might not be working, there are known issues. Okay, so those kind of things you will get to know only when you do the POC. So once you shortlist, let's say five of them, then do a quick POC in some test environment and try to see various features, whether I'm able to take back out there, whether it is supporting async replication, I mean, you can do those smaller small POC. Now, as I mentioned before, subscription and licensing of add-on should also be considered in the beginning itself. So what I mean by licensing of add-on, so in most of these products, core functionality is free mostly. Core functionality means the storage fabric part is free. So you can implement their solution and that will take care of creating a storage pool, doing dynamic provisioning and all those basic things will be taken care of. And you can give that storage to your parts, you know. But when it comes to let's say sync replication or when it comes to backup, when it comes to even management, sometime somewhere does give command line-based management free, but if you have to manage using the management portal, then you have to pay for add-on, right? And it's not substantial amount, but yeah, it is still something one has to consider. So yeah, that's what I meant by licensing of add-on should be considered. And since you're dealing with open source, Slack channel is the best place to get the support. Sometime the enterprise supported version also have some support email and all and you can reach them and get support. So these are some of the lessons. What are the common challenges? First one, it's a fast changing area, right? So I mean, if you have done a POC one month ago, then you cannot be sure that everything is same now because people are introducing new features and people are fixing bugs. I mean, a lot of things are happening, right? So sometime it will be good to find out the roadmap of given product, right? So certain thing might not be there. Let's say out of your 10 criteria, 9 are meeting, 1 is not meeting. Now, you can always check with their, if it is open source, you can just check in the open source community if there is a roadmap to get that 10th feature. Or if it is supported by any company and that falls under that company, then you can ask them if it is part of their roadmap or not. That way you can catch up. Otherwise, if only on the basis of 9 parameter, you reject because you're not, I mean that solution is not fitting in your 10 out of 10 things, then you should not throw it out. Number two is lack of support for VM and container both. I think I mentioned it in the beginning, that very few solution supports virtual machine and container both. And the practical experience is that very few company want to go for two different solutions, right? One for Kubernetes and one for traditional virtual machine world, right? Third one, error prone command line based step. I think this is self-explanatory and it is about, I mean, you don't want to do first, neither you want to do entire management using command line, nor you want to do automation on your own to bring it up to a shape where it can be used in production, both are not good. So this is again a common challenge. Lack of application awareness. Now application in Kubernetes is something that is not clearly defined, right? So there's nothing, no entity called application. Application is some of various objects. It will have pod, it will have deployment, it will have some config map, it will have some secret, I mean, and all together is one application, right? So, and the storage which is attached to it, when you say, I want to back up my application. Now, is this storage solution aware of your application? Can you define your application? Can you say that, okay, whatever is there in this namespace, that is my application? Is that kind of option given? So typically it is not there. So lack of application awareness is common challenge. And replication and disaster recovery features are something which are commonly missing. And sometime async replication is there, but sync replication is not there. And so on, right? So these are some of the common challenges. Okay, coming to key takeaways. Number one, so out of those 20 criteria or decision criteria which I explained, the most important ones are enterprise strategy. So many companies have alignment with certain storage partner vendor, right? So that, and they want to continue that. They don't want to introduce one more vendor, one more complex thing in the mix. So sometime that itself becomes a single decision criteria, right? And of course, unless it is limited by so many features, but then that itself is good enough to choose. That is like simplest of all case. Next is enterprise support, again very, very important and features, various features. These are three main criterias and features is again I mean, it can have several other points, right? So which feature you're looking for, you will try to map with it. Now next one, again a lesson learned in the key takeaway that most of the vendor supported product do not have exact same commercial version, feature and open source version. And that is obvious, I mean, that is how it works. If they give exactly same version, then what is their value at, right? So there are, I would say, as I mentioned before, I mean, most of the feature, the core feature is free and is always given. But some of the, I don't like, let's say GUI based maintenance and all that. That is given as part of subscription. Some vendors, very few vendors, give their as is commercial version with several restrictions. What they say, I'm giving you exactly same product which I give you when you buy my subscription, but then this product which I'm giving you for free is not going to have same kind of, not same kind of thing. I mean, it will have certain limitations. So it will work only with five terabyte of storage. It will work with only 10 nodes or whatever. I mean, those kind of restriction will be there. And those are good. I mean, I mean, for non-production kind of environment, you're good with those restriction, right? You can still live with those restrictions. Yeah, I mean, in such cases, feel free to use those products in non-production. Give a special consideration for performance requirement because not all vendors stress on performance. Some vendors are very good in performance and their performance of their storage subsystem is their key USB. And if you're looking for performance, then you should consider it, right? Excellent. And to an automation and GUI driven configuration is not available. And this is a challenge, right? If a mix of GUI and command line is given, then it becomes a nightmare in real life, right? And last but not the least, no one size fits all solution, right? So though I've mentioned 20 criterias and you might have maybe 10 more, 20 more to be added in that list, and you can, I mean, by this line, what I mean to say is that you will not find a single product which will fit in all those 40 criteria.  Either it might not be good in performance or it might not be good from manageability perspective or it might not be covering all the features. So, I mean, there's so many ways it is different. So no one size fits all solution. Okay, so that is it. And this is about my company. So I work for Bipro. We are a billion company. We have got 11, 20 active clients. This is our employee strength. And this is as of FY21 results. We have presence in 66 countries. And with that, we have come to end of this presentation. So thank you very much for your time. Thank you.


Well, ladies and gentlemen, now we move on to the next panel discussion, too, which is quickly moving on to the panel discussion on managing content and brand innovation in midst of 2020's disruptive change. Well, ladies and gentlemen, in this session, leaders will discuss how the drastic changes are affecting the way the businesses are creating, managing, activating and measuring strategic content. And it is my privilege to invite Mr. Ketan Kulkarni, CMO and head, business development Blue Dart, Mr. Kunal Kishore, co-founder and CEO, PlanConnect.ai, Ms. Shalini Rao, CMO, Bangalore Airport, International Airport Limited, Mr. Yadwinder Singh Gholairia, Director of Sales and Marketing, Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India Private Limited, Mr. Tanveer S. Oberoi, Head, Agency Partnerships and Sales India, Google, Customer Solutions, Google, and our session chair is going to be Ms. Vani Gupta Dandeya, founder Cherry Peach Plum Growth Partners. Thank you so much to our esteemed panelists for joining us and giving us your valuable time. And with this, I'd like to pass it on to Ms. Dandeya for taking it forward with her Able panel over to you. Ms. Dandeya, requesting you to kindly unmute yourself, please. And meanwhile, everyone welcome to the India brand conference. Over to you. Thank you. Hi, am I audible? Yes, Vani, very clear. OK, super, super, super. So lovely to see all of you guys. And we've had some discussions amongst ourselves. We have a very exciting topic on content marketing. So I want to start by just quickly talking about why content marketing and it's become even more relevant now in these times. You know, now these times that we're living in, it's different from digital advertising because or sorry, from traditional advertising because traditional advertising is interrupted by its very nature. It's about me standing on stage and talking about why must you buy me. But content marketing is different as we will all discuss from our own different perspectives. Content marketing is different because it allows permissible. It's about providing consumers with educative and informative material as they would require in the form that they would require in a context that's most relevant to them. So with that, let me first quickly ask any one of you, you're most welcome to jump in on how has content marketing changed for you? Or how did you make use of content marketing? First in these last five, seven months. And if there is anything in particular that you'd like to talk about the pre-COVID times, that will be lovely. Anyone free to jump in? I'm going to jump in first, waiting for the next. Okay, so one interesting, you know, we are an airport and a lot of people often ask why would an airport need to worry about even marketing from that perspective. So I think the one difference for us is our whole focus has always been engagement, right, because if you're going anywhere, you will fly through my airport. There's not always about it. So, but when the pandemic happened, the very reason why you would engage with the airport actually just ceased to exist. I had no passengers coming through anymore. I had no reason to engage with you. There suddenly everything just changed, right? So we had to change our content strategy, which was earlier about information, some of the engagement in terms of what you did on the ground to, we picked up two sources that we usually worked for. And we had to think very fast and we became the authentic source of information. So we started something called the Voice of Bangalore, saying that there were notifications, they were confusing, they kept changing, people didn't know what they wanted. So we became the source of authentic information. So that was a huge complaint that we took. And the second thing that we did was there was still some operations going on. People are always fascinated with what's happening at an airport. So cargo, repetition flights, what's happening on the ground, what are you doing with sanitization, etc. And the third thing we picked up was, you know, still memory. I'm sure a lot of people relate to this. I'm dying to travel. I haven't been outside for a while. So we tapped on to virtual travel. Where would you like to go? These are the places. Share your thoughts. So we picked those three. We had to think really fast, but we picked those three and really managed to stay engaged. And so a massive impact on traffic, etc. as a result of doing that. Traffic to our website. When I say traffic, I mean traffic on our channels, etc. We grew 30% on a follow-up base at this time, which is very unusual for an airport. So I think we're pretty happy about that. So yeah, that's something interesting we did. We had to complete a shift, but it worked. Lovely. OK. So I will now move to Tanveer. Tanveer works with Google. And more specifically, he works with a number of partner alliances. So he's a great one to have here on board. Tanveer, tell us from amongst the many clients that you worked with. Irrespective of COVID times. Would you like to tell us about two or three cases where clients have been able to use content in very innovative ways? Yeah, firstly, good to meet everyone. Thank you, Vani, for the opportunity and the exchange for media group for having us here. I think Shalini made very relevant points with respect to how brands have really innovated in these testing times and have started thinking beyond the obvious, right? What you would typically communicate or how you typically communicate is no longer being you. You've actually got to think a lot more differently in your approaches and think beyond the obvious as well. And it's great to see the increase in traffic though digitally, Shalini, but I'm hoping it will also be the same in times in the near future. To give you an example, Vani, I think what's pivotally changed, I think in the last one year, is that brands have always tended to lose insights when they go ahead and plan their content, right? But lately, in the last one year, I believe that they've pivoted even more towards actually leveraging trends, data, and insights to actually plan their content, right? Because now, as Vani rightly pointed out, it wasn't about doing what you always did. You had to find new trends. What are your possible customers looking for? What are your prospect customers looking for? Your audiences, what are they out there in the market or to really leverage and find what you could communicate to them? So I'll give you one specific example of what in the CPG sector, Madan did, right? And Nestle has always been the forefront of innovations and Vani was no surprise in taking a lead on this. They realized that during lockdown, we were all craving for good food, right? We would all go ahead, search for new recipes, do it yourself. The chef that never existed in me suddenly started walking into the kitchen, testing with Maggie, which was really important. And hence, they actually went ahead and used the power of Google Trends to find decipher, you know, two basic trends. One is folks that were searching for do it yourself recipes. And the second was what was the inspiration behind these recipes? That's typically what folks were really searching for so that they could make food which was something enough. And then they combined this insights which they got from Google with the brand salience of Maggie, right? The brand power of Maggie as a brand which has been allowed for some time, the reach of YouTube and the influencer community on YouTube, worked this all together and actually went ahead and hosted a whole bunch of new recipes on their link, Maggie.in, which then became pretty much a repository of how to go ahead and decipher new recipes, okay? Just to give you some stats, for example, right? Even before they started promoting this, they had two million views on it, which is fantastic, right? They had even thought about it before. And then in order to go ahead and really catapult this further, they went ahead and literally did a block off of 106 top food channels in the country, right? Which tend to inspire you to really look for food content. And as a result of that, they had 120 odd million unique users. Just because they went ahead and did that. Now that's massive, right? 120 unique users, we were out there in the market, the food was top of mind, hungry users. And understandably, Maggie became the most relevant proposition for them. And that eventually resulted in something like as high as 600 million impressions for them. So just imagine from a grand perspective, that's brilliant ROI, that's effective ROI, right? And that's how they really, you know, there are a whole bunch of such examples, but this was one that definitely comes top of mind and fits right up the neckly alley of being innovative in their approach. Lovely. So Tanveer, this is a great example of a brand which actually opportunistically made use of almost tailwind, so to speak.  And here came Maggie teaching us on how you could do a zillion things. And you know, even men who've never walked into the kitchen can actually do a zillion things. And let me help you with what you can do. But there is Yad Vinder over here who handles, he heads Honda two wheelers. And what's interesting is that at a time like this, one would think managing this business must have been a real challenging task. How do you use content to help, you know, maintain or even increase sales? How did you use content to keep motivation levels up for even your dealership network? Because I would imagine for a lot of them, you know, just walk-ins must have gone completely dry. And what does one do when people are simply not stepping out? Yeah, Vani. Thank you for having me on show and as well as greetings to all the co-panelists. Tanveer gave an example of something which was very, very relevant during the lockdown. And here you are talking to me where we became immobile. We were in the mobility business and the personal mobility because of the lockdown, everybody has to park their two-wheel or four-wheelers in their respective direction. So that was the first biggest challenge for us that how you still remain relevant to your existing customers and the prospects. So the very first fact was, you know, fortunately we could link some content around the engagement that our logo itself is about wings and wings are meant to fly from one to another. But what we related it with the bird, that birds also come back to rest in their nest. So this is the time that you can park your two-wheelers in your respective garage. And in a way, you are also contributing back to the society by not using your two-wheeler during this lockdown. So please, we made it more socially relevant that if you're not using maybe who bought this vehicle, some of them buy not for commuting, it is their passion for weekend ride, especially the super bikes and all. But this is the time that we contribute, orbit and being patient as I think as one of the earliest session talked about the things are going to change. But this is the time to rest. But if I'm a two-wheeler owner, I have a fear and anxiety about my warranty, my free services, because everything is time bound. So we, second method was about reassuring that we are going to extend during, for the lockdown period, whatever the services which were made for the manufacturer side, for the grams all your free services or your warranty issue, they will not lapse. We are going to extend as long as there's a lockdown, the similar kind of period would be extended. So rest be assured from the brand point of view. Now comes about, when we entered into the unlock 1.0, it was again very important to get the assurance back from the customer because in our business, because we're coming down to the showroom for services, naturally you have a lot of anxiety around the sanitization and whether the proper hygiene is there or not. But with all the steps we took through a particular manual leads to the dealer that they have to do all these A, B, C, D points and a detailed manual that's gone and to take care of their workshop aspect, what kind of things they need to take care in their workshop in the new normal, even in the showroom, in terms of motion sensing or the mask or the sanitization. After doing every activity, how to create that content? One is that as a principal, we are already doing it on our website on digitally. But at a local level, every dealer has his own set of units in operation, we call it UIO, they have a set of customers. So you need to make your small video because what seeing is believing, you show them how each and every step of the engagement of the customer while they come, even for the servicing of the vehicle at the workshop, we make a video of every step, what are the sanitization, what is the social distance and distancing you have taken care of, how you're measuring the temperature at the entrance, how you're all staff wearing the proper gloves, we have reduced one bay and to keep the distance between one vehicle being serviced with another vehicle. But if you only say in words, it may not have that kind of impact. So we utilize the social media by guiding them this content to reach out to their customer. Because if you are not at the pulse of your customer, it's very difficult to engage them. And digital media was the most handy thing at that point of time to reach quickly to the people, to their respective customers and share a very, very personalized message. I would also say there were many dealers who took a step, they have gone a step further, where the owner himself initially gave the message about why their dealership should not have any concern visiting their dealership, because as a owner, I have ensured that everything is in order. It is not like KF Airline initial video coming in once you are sitting in Airline and taking your first flight in Kingfisher, not that kind of message. But I think it was always reassuring that the owner himself is there and addressing the customers, the prospect directly, that I am here and I have ensured everything is there. So this is the way we worked out with the... Yavinder, both Yavinder and Shalini, I'm gonna come back to you and request you to elaborate a little more on some of the things that you have said, Yavinder, which I think Shalini would be relevant for you as well, which is you said, Yavinder, not just words. I wanna know if you were able to use video at this time. And how did you see the response on that? Because we're seeing a lot of user referring video as a medium to receive information on. Then the second was you talked about how we had our own website, but equipping different dealers given that you have such a huge network, how do you equip them with a digitization at speed must have been a challenge. So give us a few practical tips on what did you actually do? And this will apply to you as well, Shalini. In fact, a lot of what you spoke about would be a great relevance to all travel companies because the entire travel sector was sort of... Suddenly one felt, well, no one's traveling. Everybody's scared to get onto a flight and everybody's scared to take a holiday. So what does one do? So your insights and elaboration over there will be really helpful as well as this bit about personal reassurances. I think that was very interesting that you said, Yavinder. So we'd love to hear a little more about that. But before that, I'd like to bring in Kunal who's been silent for a while. Kunal, the beautiful thing about what you do working with influencers is that you can use the power of the collective to deliver multiple messages and actually create a lot more credibility than even what content marketing in its conventional form can because you're looking at bringing in others. People like me to tell me about what's possible to do, what's great to do. Now, influencer marketing is also much misunderstood and common questions around influencer marketing is are they going to be big celebs? Does it mean big monies? Is there really something, a concept called micro influencers? How can one use micro influencers effectively and what kind of an ROI can one look at? Help us understand some of this because this is a very, very common refrain when it comes to influencer marketing. How do I know whether my money has been well spent? So any actually influencer marketing became very, very relevant in the time like this where the pandemic actually confined us into a indoor location where people are at home. There were societies where there were no news people going in, largely the entire consumption of content was happening on the digital side of it. And how can we say that there was a lot of data that was getting used by the brands to actually identify the trend and then look at connecting with their end consumer by actually identifying the trend and then creating content around it. So coming back to your question, influencer marketing in the current time has very, very relevant but is very, very complex as we see. And why is it complex? Because there are different platforms, user platforms, user-generated platforms where user-generated content are getting created right from the YouTube to Facebook, to Instagram, to Twitter, where there are so many people who create creating content and by the virtue of the content that they're creating, they're creating a kind of a very meaningful engagement with end consumer or end consumer for brands because these guys are really interested in the content that these guys are creating. So imagine a guy who was very, very enthusiastic about fitness, he started to create content out of often for fitness. And as people started to like and people who are fitness enthusiasts on their own, they started to actually follow him and started to see him as someone who could possibly advise everything around fitness. And that is when fitness brands see it and say that these guys can actually improve the consumer behavior. If I need to introduce a product in the market which is a new subject that helps in metabolism, why not go to a subject matter expert who has a captive audience and can influence the consumer behavior. So then started to latch on to this entire aspect where the consumer behavior change was driven by people who were followed passionately by these guys for the content that they're creating. But with that, every good industry that starts off with a lot of promise start to see some challenges. So they were, in the recent time, there was an entire episode where there was a company that was busted in Bombay who were creating a lot of food identities to actually boost the followers with not authentic followers around influencer. So it became very, very critical for the brands to understand that if they're spending their marketing dollars around these creators, whether they is going home to a real people, are they reaching out to the real people or not? So tell me, how do you as ClamConnect give that reassurance to a client? You know, if as a client, I were betting money on you, how do I know that ClamConnect is going to get me genuine influencers and that they're not going to be bots that are liking my video? Sure. So at the ClamConnect level, what we're doing is we're getting brands to actually discover the right set of influencer for their campaign by actually identifying the influencer and shortlisting the influencer on three different parameters. And one of those parameters is the authenticity of the followers and how... So we have our own algorithm where we actually are looking at... So all these public profiles, these are all public profiles and the data is publicly available for accessing. So our platform is able to access and analyze any digital persona where their behavior is not like a real digital behavior. So when we're doing that, we're able to actually look at all these fake identities who largely are following influencer and we are able to cut through and we can give you exact in detail how many of the people who followed by the influencer to this influencer and how many are non-authentic followers. We also identify unnatural spikes. So we take a historical history of the influencer's growth and if we see that the organic growth of the influencer largely is in the range of 5,000, 10,000 and if we see an inorganic spike of 2 lakh in one day, then our algorithm is also able to identify that there is something which is unnatural and then able to correlate those numbers to authentic followers. So we're using multiple parameters to actually assess the authenticity of the followers. Lovely. Is there any quick one or two must include in the brief or must watch out for or good to do that you would like to tell clients when speaking to influencer marketing as a powerful tool for content marketing? Influencer marketing as a tool is while it is one part of the digital media span but it has to be seen very differently because the content if you are actually doing the brand has to meet the content while the content is doing on what they need to say but the content creation that needs to be left at the influencer side because influencers have been able to create that deep engagement because of the authenticity of the content that they are creating. Very nice. So don't dictate the content. Let the influencer give him a free hand give him or her a free hand to be able to create content as they wish to true to their personality. So it seems is rather not seems but is authentic. Correct. Because as brand we are in a habit of we are a control freak always. We are controlled are messaging at all levels. So we do. Correct. So you have to say this and this and all the messages don't leave this and show it like this. Correct. So you have to do it. So you have to do it. So you have to do it. Correct. So this is a different medium all together because you are dealing with people who have created very, very strong connection with their own set of audience. So anything unnatural that they do they would not be able to get that kind of engagement again. So you have to give the brief to these set of influencers but let them decide how the content creation because they understand they have built it organically to reach a million followers. So they know what has worked for them. What has not. Exactly. Very well Kunal I'm going to jump from you now back to Shalini. Shalini is there anything that you would like to share with us on how you were able to create content in a very short period of time or what kind of content you created to give travel assurances because you're actually you must have been in a very, very difficult position. I think while everybody else was working from home we were still coming into office at times then because airport was operational. So when everybody said I'm watching Netflix I was like really where do you have the time? Because we were working on some of this. To your question Vani you got up to think about video. And I think we moved entirely to video as a format. So it's not like we were not looking at it. But we realized show and tell is the only thing that's going to work in the industry. So we were we got some good feedback which said people are worried, airports are huge areas. So they're not going to be safe, et cetera. So we did two things. One is technically on the ground from a technology perspective. We're one of the first airports globally to do an end-to-end contactless process. Now we did it, but if I didn't tell anybody about it there's no way I was going to reassure. So we picked up mine. It may sound cliched to be when you look back but we did hashtag we are here for you. And we did everything that we talked about under that whether it's anonymization or first. And interestingly we did it for our employees just for our passengers. Because we also need to show people about what we were doing internally. Coming back we used video. We used video to demo the entire process because there were a lot of people because things changed overnight. How you were going into the airport the fact that you were going to get almost can temperature checked was going to touch my ID. I didn't want anybody to touch anything. Didn't have to touch or touch screen so and we changed all that. We used phone to pick it up on mobile phone but we had to show you. So we did video and you will love these numbers but in a very short span of time we got 6.4 million views on our video simply because it and I don't have numbers of what went viral on WhatsApp but it became a demo. Everybody's like okay what can I expect at the airport yellow look at this this is what you have to do from this moment to that point and Airlines worked with us everybody worked with us collaboratively. So video was the one big way to show what we were doing and it worked. It worked because we got that feedback. So people were prepared to get all this this is what you're going to expect hold it up magnification screens. I don't know if any of you have traveled but life has changed at an airport in the last couple of months. So we not only did it on the ground we had to show it as well and I think that was the biggest using video to get that effect. And we used WhatsApp and I have to say this we use WhatsApp literally among groups we don't need to share it with friends and family just to really share because you have to inform people on what to do. So yeah that was it. And in a very short span of time I call it whiplash it was like okay you have to turn it around. Yeah I can imagine it must have been a phenomenal challenge. I mean I can't even imagine what you guys went through and dealing with the fear of the disease yourself to be there and make sure that everyone else felt reassured. I want to come to you and me now. Yesterday we were talking about the director mixed technology. Now you are at Google and Google is the God of all technology so to speak and you have the ability of guiding marketers like us to make sure everything we talk about which is making sure that the right message goes to the right consumer segment is actually possible using your technology. Give us a little a few insights on how this works and how some clients have used this very effectively. Sure firstly going with the season it's Bell's feeling in my ears right now given the fact that everyone's using digital so effectively so well done folks. Please keep that going and we're here to help you out. So yeah so let me explain what director mix really means as a product and how we really basically help brands kind of leverage this product per se. So to explain it very simply each one of us have different requirements we have different search patterns when we actually go ahead and look for a product as well research a product as well or user product or a service as well. So for example if I was to use Uber I would probably use it for dropping me off to office some what someone would probably use it to actually go to a mall another person would actually go ahead and use it to pick up their kids from daycare and so on and so forth in normal circumstances. Now imagine if Uber was to show one standard ad to all three consumers even though the requirement or usage of the product is very different right. It'll be monotonous it may not be as relevant. So how can you leverage basically insights again to go ahead and optimize and show a consumer or a user an ad which is most relevant to them. Typically what you do is you'd go to your creative agency and say hey can you create 10 sets of ads for me which will then target these sort of consumers or users per se. What Director Mix does is that basis insights using Google Trends we work with the brand to identify the moments that really matter to them from a consumer standpoint and basis a certain body copy of an ad we are able to create different versions of the same ad to meet the requirement of the different kinds of consumers. So at the click of a button basis an internal resource that we have we can churn out 70, 90, 100, 120 creatives basis the requirements or the different patterns or the journeys of consumers for a single product or a service. So I'll give you an example. We spoke about CPG earlier which was Maggie. Let's talk about brands leveraging instances or occasions or events happening right now which have happened recently. Let's say the IPL. Now Duraflex it's a mattress brand. What they wanted to leverage was this whole customer base that has got a strong cricket affinity. So what they simply went ahead and did is that they actually worked alongside Google to help identify that which cricket enthusiast is searching for what sort of stuff while watching a cricket match. So are they searching for super overs? Are they searching for the biggest sixes? Are they searching for the fastest balls? Are they searching for the best shots? So while they were all watching cricket their search patterns during the consumption were very, very different and using this search insights, these data insights that we actually help them acquire we were able to customize advertising and create 70 different versions of the same ad with messaging relevant to what an individual was interested in. So for example, if I was searching for super over so the message, the ad copy that I would see would say 10 super over in the comfort of your DuraFlex mattress, right? If you were looking for Bumrah bowling the fastest ball or the Yorker, okay? Don't get York at the comfort office DuraFlex mattress. So it would actually pick up what really match it to a consumer. Now, what that does is for the consumer who's watching it it immediately registers because what it does is it increases your brand awareness. It increases your connect with the brand and as a result of this director mix initiative that we actually did with the DuraFlex they were able to reach out to 29 million cricket enthusiasts, right? Which is phenomenal for a brand like that. They were able to get 101% increase in brand awareness lift in brand awareness, which is phenomenal. And the number of brand searches which is eventually the testimony of your ROI, right? They had a 639% increase in brand searches that happened for DuraFlex as a brand. Now that is effective content. That is effective advertising. So that's how director mix works.  I spoke about Uber, there's DuraFlex, there's Nestle portfolio as well, there's Raymond's and so on. So there are a whole bunch of them who've used this very, very effectively in during the course and I would highly encourage Honda two-wheelers and even Bangalore airport authority to probably use it as well. Charlie, reach out to me in case you need help. Well, well-made pitch, Tharveer. With that, I wanna go to Yadvinder and talk about how did you create content in these times, Yadvinder? Because yours was a very different and a very challenging task to manage as many different dealerships. Tell us a few practical things that you did. How did you create content as quickly? Yeah, absolutely. See, when we started opening up, and we tried to map how many of our dealers are digitally enabled in terms of reaching out to the customers and also at the same time, they had Google rating. So it was, the results were not very encouraging. All the Metro towns, they were quite aware and quite active on the digital. While semi-open and the rural area, most of our dealership network were not very active and maybe even the frequency of doing the posts on the Facebook was once in a month or once in a quarter, you could see the press release of even our company which was five months old if they haven't updated. So what we did that initially we tried to link their own website and pages with the content which is updated at Honda official website. Second, like if they want to do anything updated, some of them will be pushed from our website to the relevant our dealers' websites and their Facebook pages. So it will always remain relevant because it is with the latest one, not one year old or six months old. That was one thing. Second was that about the real business, we also provided the interface of booking through our official website and created the UPI, the interface that even if a customer anywhere sitting in India want to choose a particular city and their own favorite dealer, they just have to go to the official website of Honda and put the money or the booking amount into that particular dealer's account. The only thing that interface via the official website gives that trust and confidence to the customer that their money is secure. While there could be some doubt if they are putting the money in the individual dealer's account on one-to-one basis, the interface provided. So and within one month, 1000 plus network of ours was able to open up their account where the money can be put and it was linked through our website. So this was another thing which we did. But again, the biggest part was the owners or the particular dealer's own website and they are not even evaluating their own Google rating in terms of experience of customer. So what they are supposed to do? First is they are not even watching. They are not, absolutely they are unaware of where do I stand? Even if it is there, they are 10 ratings by individual dealers of their customer experience or even the buying experience. So we quickly shared with them again how they can check their own performance, the performance which is evaluated by the social media and or even put on the social media by the respective experience of the customer. So we made them aware, then gave a list of do's and don'ts, how they have to proceed in a surprise manner. See, it is all like we all here sitting and giving the gyan to them in 10 days. They will basically fear. It's not so complicated, but if you have to do it suddenly because of the pandemic around, it looked like a big uphill task to them. So we took it in a stepwise manner. First, this is what we have to do. Like even Shalini talked about the usage of WhatsApp. The WhatsApp is the most frequently used. People spend almost three hours, four hours on WhatsApp daily basis. So how to use WhatsApp as a chat box and that chat box, how you can respond to your respective customer in terms of giving them the E quotation, pricing, the brochure and engage with them. That was the easiest way for them to introduce into a digital way of engaging with the new age customer or I would say the colonial era customer of the contactless customer that you can be in touch with them and almost you can do paperless work with them. They can get the quotation, they can get the brochure, the catalog, everything online. Another part is the second step or I would say the third step was when this actually started coming through dealership after the unlock started happening, how again to have several new initiative to ensure it remains the experience or the engagement remains contactless. So we are all talking about coming closer to the customer in times of distancing. It's paradox. We want to come closer to the customer. I think only person is Tanveer here. Okay, they can bring us closer in times of distancing. So what we did was like a typical example is a job card opening at a workshop. If someone has already visited a workshop whether it is a four wheeler or a two wheeler, you would always find there is one location only where you have to make your job card and tell what are the complaints and what has to be done to your vehicle. So what we did was that we quickly built up our own system because our is the online system for service as well as real time system for service as well as for sales. So we made that multiple through the iPad. Even 10 people can make the job card or 10 different customer and everything is linked to the centralized system. Similarly for inquiry, if they are 10 customers even if you are doing some outdoor thing on your mobile you can enter the details of the customer. It will come to the centralized system of the dealer and through that to company itself. So it without reducing the efficiency or for there is a waiting for the customer they were quickly because in this time everybody wanted to come quick and go very fast. You know, they never wanted to spend more time. You just take my vehicle you have to do it quickly. But then he has to pay. I must tell them what I have service, what complaint he has asked us to check what points he asked for the checkup in the workshop and all. So job card is must in any case. We cannot avoid that. So these are the other things which we did in the actual operation as a dealership and finally giving them the steps of making a standardization sort of standardization of their own website because it's all about brand, what we want to save. People should not have their individual messages because this was a very difficult time. We are supposed to be empathetic rather than hard sell. We have difficult everybody wanted to sell but not over sell. There has to be tonality of empathy with the customer because of the current situation. And also the brand and corporate identity, the brand messaging, we need to remain authentic to the brand tonality and as well as being relevant to their local situation because some states were having a big spread of COVID, some states were not that much touched. So based on their local situation what kind, how you should remain relevant in what you are messaging to your customer and the most difficult part is how you remain differentiated because everybody is trying to do the same thing. Everybody is talking about, okay, standardization. Everybody is talking about using mask and social distancing but how you still remain differentiated and at the last time, compliment Charlie also, I took the first flight after the unlock to Bangalore only from Delhi to Bangalore and I experienced myself and I became the, I would rather say a satisfied traveler from Delhi airport to the Bangalore airport that how my experience was almost seamless and I did not find any problem especially the experience in the lounge area that we as travelers were not supposed to touch anything.  So hats off to you without what action you have taken on ground and many of them are now reassured to travel at least to Bangalore I'm sure about that. Fantastic, so maybe my first flight too will be to Bangalore but I just want to quickly capture all that you said because there was a lot of very very valuable stuff which you talked about you said you talked about standardization of the websites across different partners making sure that they had the updated press releases so that they had the latest information on their digital assets making them aware of their Google rating and then providing them with the right do's and don'ts of what they could do to make sure that they were putting out the right content using WhatsApp very effectively which I think perhaps is I wouldn't say so much under leveraged but perhaps a little under understood medium still and it doesn't pop up as an immediate vehicle that marketers can use very effectively too and how you were able to actually do manage everything contactless even as the consumer walked into the store but over here there is a bigger overriding theme which is even before you get to customers or consumers reassuring them actually managing your own internal employees is in itself a task so anything that you'd like to add Shalini on how are you able to manage motivation levels internally? Did you create any content specifically for your internal employees to help them feel reassured that it's okay to go to work? Yes, we did simple answer in fact I was going to bring that up yet as marketers we focus so much on the external consumers so to speak but we spend a hell of a lot of time with our internal consumers as much so we did three or four things one is we picked up regular communication so from our CEO and from all the CXOs we ensured updates and our conversation going on literally every fortnight we had CXO chats which allowed people to come in and ask us questions we took turns at who was there so that people could actually ask us because they were worried we had dockets that we created virtually of course that we sent out to everybody but all the measures that were happening in the offices, at the terminal everything that was being done for everybody but the two most interesting things that I think we did was we started an internal helpline we called it BL911 where and volunteered and manned by people within the organization 24-7 we ran it for about two months because there was a stage at which we peaked if you recall Bangalore was peaking people were getting worried we called anytime and we got calls, employees called we set up mental health counselling because people were getting hassled about staying home being able to get out so we actually created not just communication but managed it from setting up those relationships I know we managed the call center we got calls people had all kinds of queries from what's my insurance policy if this happens what are you going to do for me as the organization so a whole bunch of things so yes internal was I think the same we are here for you so we said we are here for you not just for the passengers we are here for you for our employees we are 1500 odd people so yeah I think that was a very very big one we definitely did fantastic Tanil back to you did you see a huge spike and if you had to advise marketers on what could they do better from all that you've seen not just covid times but even pre-covid what would you say we could do better well I think honestly there's a very broad answer to that the one observation that I've had working with a whole bunch of brands across the country is what the only positive that's possibly come out of this pandemic is the fact that I think it's even further expedited our awareness about digitalized platforms how we as marketers can leverage content more effectively and more importantly as Yadwinder kind of dwelled upon it as well helped us audit whether we've got the infrastructure both from a marketing perspective as well as a tech perspective to actually go ahead and reach out to our consumers in the most effective manner depending on the situation that you're in at this point of time and I think we've seen a whole bunch of brands large multinationals to upcoming SMBs to establish MSMEs who've actually gone ahead and invested phenomenally in one tech infrastructure to actually leverage their content further secondly to be a lot more effective with respect to their communication when I say communication it's no longer about spray and pray any longer it's about going ahead and being effective on ROI for every dollar every rupee spent because that's what it's about the reality is a number of marketers had to face the challenges where they're marketing budgets shrunk due to obviously sales coming down substantially over a period of time I see Adwinder smiling I'm sure it's the case in his case as well and hence they had to innovate differently to actually ensure that they still drive sales in the most effective manner with the best of ROI possible so I think the optimization of content as well as their media strategy over a period of the last six months has been the biggest challenge that marketers have faced and we've seen some phenomenal success stories come out of that very heartening to hear what both Shalini and Adwinder have been driving as well for their respective brands and these are just testimonies of how it's going to develop in the months to come So I think there's an interesting thing that you're saying over here as well and feel free, anybody feel free to jump in you know, content marketing is different also from traditional advertising because it actually does not require any big spends it's also very flexible and as we've seen through the last few months a lot of times, a lot of questions that I get asked especially by young companies and startups is if you're marketing, does that mean spending a whole lot of money? Is it about making fancy ads with big celebrities? And no, for 90% of us marketers actually we've never walked into a production studio we've never signed up a big celebrity and yet we've been very, very effective at marketing and that is what content marketing is about that you can not only do very effective messaging in a short span of time at very small spends but also make it aroiable Any last words from any one of you on questions that you might have had from your bosses or how you managed this particular issue or am I getting returns for whatever I'm doing or does this mean that you're spending a lot of money or at this time, you know when you're not getting enough revenue should we be doing this? Anything from anyone as a closing remark? Yeah, if I'd like to So I will quote another digital marketer only and he very well summarized it which leads to your last question He said, if content is the king then context is the king gone and return on investment is the godzilla So we are facing the bosses to really on the third point that it's like a godzilla for us that what's the right return on investment awareness okay, Google graph can clearly show it's spike but how much impact on the sales and the business and the real conversions that remains the question mark for all the marketers to So godzilla is the monster in content marketing because we don't want godzilla No, what I'm saying is that how do we measure I'm saying for awareness and everything, yes it's easy to very clearly see the spike which are happening but again it depends upon how much conversions at the end on ground it basically depends on the purpose by which you created that content Yeah, and I think sometimes we should also be a little more, what should I say, lenient in a lot of the different methods of digital advertising that we do try because not everything is measurable and if intuitively it looks good and if intuitively you feel that that's what your consumers are looking for and you're able to provide that then that's good I'd like to add one more thing yeah winners have actually added that while the content is very very critical but the relevance of the content is even more important and the relevance is driven by data and insight what can be has been pointing out that through data and insight you can actually bring in relevant content so I would say that in the content marketing focus on content authenticity focus on relevance and learn it from the data that you could possibly Fantastic, so I think there are endless possibilities with content and we've seen it just across the width of you know industries and categories that are possible even from the members here on this panel in the many different ways that we can use content across different spaces so thank you so much it's been lovely talking to all of you and yeah that's it from my side Bhavna would you like to take over Thank you, thank you so much what an incredible panel discussion that was, thank you so much for moderating it's so wonderfully and thank you so much Shalini Yadwinder then Veer and Kunal for giving in all your valuable insights with the experiential sharing you had for our panel today, thank you once again