All right, I'm gonna get started. So thank you everyone for coming. This is how to manage releases using git tags and semantic versioning. I'm Mike Miles, my pronouns are he, him. If you wanna follow along with these slides, I have annotated versions at this bit.ly link, which is bit.ly slash d-c-n-a-22-sem tag. The d-c-n-a are capitalized, and so is the s and the t. So before we dive into the topic a little more about myself, again, my name's Mike Miles. I'm from Boston, Massachusetts. I've been working with Drupal for 13, 14 years, something like that. I run the Boston Drupal Meetup currently. I've been doing that for about last seven years. I'm one of the organizers of New England Drupal Camp, which is happening mid-November. So if you wanna come out to New England in November, there's lots of beautiful leaves, so you should definitely come out to that camp. I work at MIT Sloan, the MIT School of Management as the Director of Web Development. So my team and I mainly were responsible for the mitsloan.mit.edu website, which is a Drupal 9 website, which we also manage with semantic releases, so I'm happy to talk about that in a little bit. As well as some other properties, we have some WordPress sites that we maintain as well. I'm also the host of a podcast called Developing Up, which is focused on the non-technal side of being a developer, so anything about having a career in development that's not about writing code is what we try to cover. I have to consider soon if I'm keeping this in or not, because it's been two years since I've done an episode, but the pandemic's winding down, so maybe now I can start doing it again. If you wanna know more about me all over the internet, MikeMiles86, Drupal.org, Drupal Slack, Twitter, LinkedIn, GitHub, et cetera, I think you can even go to MikeMiles86.com. I think I own that domain. I think it goes to my LinkedIn profile, but I don't remember. Anyways, let's set some ground rules here about what a release is. So in the context of this talk, when I'm talking about a release, I mean anytime you're pushing changes to your production environment, and what your production environment is is going to vary drastically across the group here. I'm gonna make a general assumption that most of us here work on Drupal-based websites, so production for us are production servers. But you could be a module maintainer, which then I guess production for you is Drupal.org. You could be a theme developer, you could have NPM packages, any sort of software. But anytime you're pushing a change, whether that change is a bug fix, a typo, re-architecture of your very popular WYSIWYG editor, that's a release. When you're pushing it up to production so it can be consumed by your production environment or your users. Oh, let's get to slide. And so the trouble with maintaining a project and having something that has a production version is that release management over time can become messy if you don't have any process in place that you follow regularly with you and your team doing your development. This can get messy in a number of ways. If you have discovered all of a sudden that you've had a vulnerability in your code base because of some piece of functionality, you wanna be able to quickly figure out how long ago was that change introduced? If you are building something that's being used publicly like say a Drupal module, if you don't have a reliable way for indicating the version of your module, it's going to make it hard for your users to understand can I adopt the latest version? What effects is it gonna have on my system? So what I'm gonna talk about today is first and foremost the basics of semantic versioning. Semantic versioning is a well-known numbering system used all throughout software to indicate the degree of changes from one version to the next. So we're gonna go into what that is. Then I'm gonna talk about some of the basics of using Git tags and the value of tagging commits in your Git repository. Again, I'm making a general assumption that I would say I would guess 99% of you are using some of the Git repository. Of course, if you're not, why would you come to a Git talk? But maybe you're interested. So we'll talk about what Git tags are, the two different types of Git tagging and how to use them. And then we're gonna take those topics, merge them together and talk about how you can use Git tags with semantic versioning to generate semantic Git releases in your Git repository to then keep track of the changes you push up to your production environment. And from there, I'm gonna share just a couple of tips for generating helpful release notes. There was a really great talk earlier today on documentation, which actually covered some of this, which I was excited to see. So I'll talk about how to write notes that are useful to the different audiences that you're gonna have to deliver them to. All right, semantic versioning. As I mentioned, it's a numbering system. It's a pretty straightforward one that's been around for decades. And it's used by everybody. And when I say everybody, I mean any piece of software you have likely has a semantic version number. So any of your operating systems that you're running, they have a three digit code for their current version. It's a semantic version number. All of popular browsers have semantic versions. So when you update to the latest Firefox, for example, you're gonna see the semantic version that you're using. Our favorite frameworks like Drupal, as you may well be aware, and you've heard like Drupal 3.4 just had a release or whatever the current release is. Like on, was it released Wednesdays? Is that what it is? So that's a semantic version number. And the tools we use get itself uses a semantic versioning for its number. Semantic versioning itself is versioned by semantic versioning for the guidelines, which is pretty interesting, which came first. So semantic versioning number, it's structured by three groups of numbers. You have the major, then the dot minor, then the dot patch number. And when these change, each time you change one of these numbers, it indicates a different degree of changes to your code base. So we'll start over with patches. Patch releases, which go from the version number 1.0.1 to 1.0.2, that's a patch release. And this indicates that there's been bug fixes or trivial updates, you know, you fix some hard code strings that were misspelled. In the case of actual Drupal project, usually patch releases also include security releases, depending on the changes. But it's anything you're changing in your code base that's not directly changing functionality or big sections of functionality or pieces of functionality in your code base. Minor updates going from version 1.0.2 to version 1.1.0. This indicates that you've introduced some sort of functionality change that is backwards compatible with the previous version. Example in Drupal could be the deprecation of an API in a version of Drupal 9. The API is still there, still can be used. It hasn't been removed but it's been deprecated, but that's a functionality change. And then major changes going from version 1.1.0 to version 2.0.0. This indicates that there are breaking backwards compatibility changes in your code base. You don't necessarily have backwards compatible issues, but usually that's what it indicates. So what we're all familiar with, I would say, you know, Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. It's not a very backwards compatible upgrade if you just upgrade your Drupal 8 code base. There's a lot of other things you have to do, which I think a lot of people have learned or to Drupal 9 at this point. So as you may have guessed, the frequency of when these changes, these updates happen vary. So the least likely one is a major update. Hopefully you don't have to rewrite your complete code base every time you're making a change. Minor updates happen more often than majors and then patches are what usually happen the most often because they're just the quick little fixes you have to do. The thing about semantic release numbers is they're set in stone. And what I mean by that is anytime you release a version of your code base using semantic versioning number, it's assumed that you're not gonna change the state of your code base at that point. That version means a specific thing. And now there's nothing technically preventing you, especially you can get from changing what that release number points to. However, it's just in practice, as soon as you release it to your production environment, you have to assume someone's using it. You have to assume that your production server is up and running and using it, that your end users have downloaded the latest version of your package already as soon as you release it. So you have to pay attention to what goes into it. A good example of this, if you are working say on four bug fixes for your code base and you released a patch update, but then you realize you forgot to commit the first, the fourth fix, well you can't just sneak it back into that release you just did, you would have to create a new patch release for that. So as a maintainer or someone who's a release manager, your job is to be responsible for double checking your version numbers before doing your release. So measure twice, cut once. What you should review is one in figuring out, well what number are you going to go with? What sort of changes are you introducing from your previous production release? So are you just doing a patch release or a minor release or a major release? And then making sure that that work that you're gonna include in it is added to that release and it's gonna be pushed out. All right, so that's semantic version number. Three groups of numbers, major.minor.patch. Patch means trivial changes, minor or functionality changes that are backwards compatible and major changes are usually non-backwards compatible functionality changes in general. So let's talk about git tags.  There are two types. The first is a lightweight tag. So lightweight tags are just basically they're pointers to a commit. I like to think of them as they're helpful notes so you don't have to remember a commit's hash number if you wanna switch to that commit. It's helpful for you to put a human readable name towards a commit so if you need to quickly jump back to it. Example, if you're working in the middle of development and you're building a big feature, you may start that feature with a commit and you're gonna tag that as like start a feature X and you can keep doing your work so you can roll back if you need to and you know you don't have to look through your git logs. The tag, how to create a tag, it might be a little hard to read the lights but from command line at least you say the command git tag whatever your tag name is. That can be whatever string you want. If you don't include a commit hash after that it's gonna go for your head commit so whatever the latest is but you can provide it a commit hash to apply that tag to so you can go back and back tag commits if you ever wanted to. So I can show this, let's see if I can show this. All right, so I have a sample repo here. It has just a read me in it. Is this big enough, you want me to make this text bigger? Bigger please, okay. Enhance, enhance, enhance, enhance, enhance. How's that? All right, clear, all right. So if I just do a git log on this repo my current commit in my read me is I started section five which I'll just show you here, not that one. Here we go, section five. So obviously what I'm gonna be making here are trivial changes but we can just imagine. So section five is my last commit here and if I wanted to now tag this commit which is my head main commit, oops. I would do git tag and then my tag name so I could say section five. And now, I'll just show you the git log. You can see here the top commit here. Head main, it says tag section dash five. So what that allows me to do, quick, if I start adding things here item one, item two. I commit these. Now you'll see that my head commit is different and if I wanted to go back to when I started section five now I can just do git checkout section five, my tag name. Right, so it rolls me back to that version. I hope I have to read me and it's just the start of that. So that's the easy way for me as a dev to go back to that. I'll go back to here, great. All right, so that's lightweight tags and I mention them because they're helpful tools in knowing how to do tagging but it's not the recommended way to use tags for marketing releases. What you wanna do for that are annotated tags. So annotated tags are different in terms of the fact that they are full objects in the get database. I'm not gonna explain the structure of the get database here, mainly because I don't know it. But I do know that they're full objects so they can be checked some, they have separate information than just the commit they're applied to. So we'll have who generated that tag when they generated the tag. Most importantly, they have tagging messages that you can attach to them, hence why they're called annotated. And they can be signed and verified using a new privacy guard. So you may see this for projects such as Composer. If you go to the Composer website to download it, you'll give you the command to download Composer and then it has a checksum that you can verify it against and that's basically what this does. So the way to generate an annotated tag, you say command line get tag then dash a and then your tag name. So that stands for you wanna create an annotated tag. Again, the tag name could be whatever you want. And then you could do dash m and provide an annotation message and you can do as many dash ms as you want so you can really get crazy with your annotations. And then optionally, you can add what commit to apply it to. If you don't include that, it will apply to your latest commit. So just to show the difference of what this looks like from a lightweight tag, let me do get show section five. I think that's the command. Yeah, so this was the tag I created before the lightweight tag. So it says tag section five and all it shows me is my commit information and the changes in that commit. But if I go to recreate this one, which obviously I haven't pushed it up to any production environment so I can change my tags. I don't have to worry about it. I'll do get tag and I'll delete section five. And now I'll, oh, I'd have to go back to the commit, don't I? Get log. See now I have to copy this hash. So if I do get tag dash a section five and then the commit hash, oh, I want a message though too. So I can add a message doing dash m, you know, started section five here. Then the commit hash, all right. So that'll create that. If I do get log, you'll see the tag is still applied to that commit where I started section five. It looks here, it looks the same as it did with lightweight tag. But if I do get show, what we see here now is a little more information. So it says tag section five at the top, then it says tagger and it says my name because I'm the one who did the tagging, what time tagging happened and the tag message, the annotation there, which is separate then from the committed information. So it creates a separate object that has a lot more information that's better for tracking purposes. So great, now what? Now if we were to take annotated tags instead of using just some random name, use a semantic version number, well then you have semantic releases because you can take that tag and since it's a state of your code base and do whatever you need to do for your process to push that version of your code up to your production environment or somehow mark that, that went out at a certain time. The benefits of using a semantic version number for your get tags and then relying on tagging for pushing out states of your code is that it signifies the important changes in your repository, because the semantic version number means a certain degree of changes in your code base. So you can say, this is version 232.3.0 and in it we rewrote how our email service works or something, right? It indicates that there was a big change in functionality. So you can quickly scan through your tags and know when you made significant changes or minor changes in your code base. That can help with tracking purposes and just history and knowledge. It communicates the degree of changes between two tags. So if you did a release last week and it was version 1.0.1 and you do a release this week and it was version 1.2.0, you know in between that week you changed some sort of functionality that was still backwards compatible. So again, you can quickly compare the differences from previous releases. And then it's just a straightforward way to track history of changes just again because of how the number quickly identifies the degree of changes. The benefits as well as I say it's supported by many Git interfaces is kind of a cop-out I think after reviewing this but it's because these Git interfaces like if you use Git Crackin, this is Git Crackin, screenshot Git Crackin, they show you your tags and if you're using semantic version numbers it makes it quick and easy for you to scan your tags and determine when things change. So in Git Crackin, the screenshot here on the bottom left, it has the tag panel and it lists out in this case it's a bunch of patch releases that were released because they're tagged. Or if you use GitHub or GitLab, you can view your tags again. This is from GitHub, this screenshot where we can see the same releases have gone out at different days. So for example, I'm gonna make a guess that where it says eight days ago version <IP_ADDRESS> went out and then eight days ago version <IP_ADDRESS> went out we probably forgot to include one of our bug fixes that we meant to release, so we had to do a quick another release, something like that. It's also supported by many automated tools. So if you use any sort of CI pipeline for doing your production deployments, having semantic version numbers on your Git tags makes that really helpful and easy to implement. Circle CI for example, again, I'm sorry for the brightness of this. You can define a workflow to be triggered on tags matching a regular expression. And so the semantic version numbers, number dot number dot number is very easy to track for. So this is what we do it and my team is our Circle CI deployment looks for tags matching semantic version numbers and that triggers the deploy to production build steps for us. You can do the same thing in BitBucket pipelines. You can trigger pipeline based off a tag structure. It's a little more basic, it just does blobs, but you can still, it's a simple structure to match for. And then I know Travis does this as well, where you can compare the value of the Travis tag to a regular expression. And I think some of the other tools out there that you may use for CI probably supports stuff like this as well. So to create a semantic release using Git tags, it's a one, two, three step process. One, you create an annotated tag. So you're gonna use semantic versioning for the tag name and provide an annotation. We'll talk about annotations in a moment. Number two, then you push that tag up to your remote repository. If you're using a hosted Git repository, then number three is insert your deployment steps here, which I know that could be step three to step 200 depending on your process. But in terms of using Git tags and semantic versioning for your release process, it's these three things and then you let deployment happen and it's triggered on a very specific structure as state of your code base. So if we take a look at creating semantic release tag using command line. Again, if you use a GUI like Git Kraken or even on GitHub, you can do this as well using their interface. You can generate these tags on a commit that way as well. But I like using command line. So it would be git tag dash A and then the semantic version number, which general practice for the tag name is to prefix it with lowercase v, which stands for the English word version. So version 2.7.45 and then a commit message, sorry, a annotation message, which you don't want to just be this, but you could start with the message release to then the version number 2.7.45. You want to do more than this though, which we'll get into in the next section. Then you do git push up to your remote with the tag number and then whatever your production deployment steps are from there. So if I show this here in that git repo, let's see, git status, great, we're clean, and git log, I think I have a commit here, right? Add items to section five. So let's say I complete section five. I have three, complete section five, yay. So now if that was a significant change in my code base and I want to push that out, let me look at my previous version. So I have these listed out here. Version section five, you'll see from my git tags doesn't fit the flow, but everything else does. So my last one was version 1.2.0. So let's say my next one is now going to be a minor release. So I'll do git tag-a version 1.3.0, message completed section five, which I think that matches as a minor release because I added new functionality. I added a new section. So if I do my git tag, you'll see that's listed down below and it's great to git show version 1.3.0. Then we see that, again, my tag information and then which commit it applies to that indicates that state of my code base. What does git log show right now? If I do git log, you'll see, so log just shows the commit that the tags apply to. So you see at the very top here, my main commit, my head commit, has the tag version 1.3.0. So that's why if you do git show and then the tag name or commit hash, it'll show you more detailed information about that. So that's where you get the tagger information. All righty, let's move on. So now what? Now we know we can use tags, annotated tags to mark full objects in our git database at a significant state of our code base and semantic versioning numbers to indicate the state of changes since the last release. Well, now we need release notes. Semantic version numbers are great for showing the degree of changes that have happened between two states of your code base, but they don't explain anything about the context about what changed. So this is why you want release notes to explain to your users, to yourself, to your team, here are actually the changes that happened. You wanna avoid just the bare minimum annotation of which I just did of release and then the release number 2.7.45 because again, that's just redundant information from the actual tag name. Now this is helpful to have it in there, but I wanna just have it be that. You can add as many dash M's as you want to your annotation and it'll do each one on a new line. So you can really get more verbose and list out the functionality changes that were included. In terms of what you should add and you may not wanna do all these just from command line I'll show you some other places to put them in a moment, but for patch releases, so going from version 1.0.1 to 1.0.2, you wanna at least list out the bugs that were fixed. You'll see that some projects could be issue numbers with a brief description or Giro tickets or whatever system you're using just to say like these are the bugs that are included, these are the trivial changes that were included. For minor releases, so version 1.0.2 to 1.1.0, you wanna include any patch release information but then any changes to the existing functionality. You wanna list that out as well. Importantly, any of the important usage details that change. For example, from Drupal, when an API becomes deprecated in Drupal, there's all this information that gets added about what services you should use instead, what other non-deprecated code you should use instead. So that would go into a minor release, things that would be helpful to understand the functionality that did change and then what about using that functionality do you need to change? And then for major releases, everything from minor and patch and then you wanna list out the functionality that's been removed, the functionality that's being added and most importantly, any upgrade steps that need to be followed or settings that need to change, environments that need to be updated. This is really important especially if you have a public project like an NPM package or a module and you want people to understand to upgrade to this new major version, version two of our module, make sure you have PHP 8.1, make sure you have these other modules and places, make sure you run this upgrade process, this migration, et cetera. You wanna list that there so people know what it will take to upgrade that version and they can make informed decisions for themselves. Now a note on private projects. So if you work on a project that's not like an open source project that you're pushing out to be publicly consumed maybe it's for your company's website, for a client's website or your own work. If you're the only person or your team's the only people who are going to look at these messages because you push out some sort of artifact and no one else has access to your repo, you could get away with not including all that detail as your release notes. At the very minimum, you could get a list of commit messages between releases and then include those as your release notes. Hopefully this only works if you and your team follow a pattern of using really verbose and helpful commit messages. Maybe you prefix them with your issue number or take a number, et cetera. But you could use get to compile these. So here's a command for get log using the pretty flag. Oh, my laptop's gonna fall. So you can say get log dash dash pretty format equal format colon modulus s which will get the commit message from a release or sorry from a commit. And then you can compare basically two commit hashes and it'll give you all the messages in between those two. So what that means you can do though, you can also take your previous release tag which points to a commit. And then if you're going to generate a new tag you could just say head or whatever commit it's gonna be applied to and you'll pull in the commit messages of all the commits between those two points. And I would add the dash dash no merges flag to this as well so you won't get the message that says merge branch x into main branch. Cause that's not helpful. And but you could take this in a leasing command line you could wrap it in a sub shell when you're generating your annotated tag in the message flag. And so you can have get do this for you. So I can show this just to show what it will do. I'm gonna get tag deletes version 1.3.0 that I created a moment ago. Again, I still haven't pushed it up to production so I'm okay to do that. And if I wanna do get tag annotated version 1.3.0 message and I really shouldn't just try to type that so I'm gonna copy it. No. All right, let's try to type it. Let's see. Get log pretty goes format modulus s. Come on, Mike, you can do it. Oh, version 1.2.0 dot dot or dot dot dot dot dot dot. Head no merges even though there are no merges let's throw it in there. I hit the double quote by accident. No, right now I can copy it. All right, oh come on now. All right, we're gonna move on cause I don't wanna, oh I'm still in a double quote. I don't know what I'm in now. Oh no, what did I do? All right, I need to unquote something. Control C. Control C. All right, thank you. I'm not trying that command again. Wait but I can fix it, I can fix it, I can fix it. And I could, I've deleted all this stuff a lot faster way too, but. All right, there we go. This needs to go here and this goes here. There we go. All right, woo. So get log looks the same. Version 1.3.0 is on the head. But if I do the information about it get show version 1.3.0. You'll see it pulled in the three commit messages from the three commits from the previous release. So for me, so that's helpful as a private project at the very least for your team because you can quickly pull those together. All right, now let's move on to extra credit. If you're gonna have a lot of changes or a public project and making them command line isn't gonna make sense, keep a changelog.txt or not read me in your repo. This is an example from symphonies changelog for version 5.3. So every time they did a release they would update their changelog and include that in the release and they still do that. So you can quickly list out your bugs here and keep track of it in your repository or publish a page of release notes. I think we're all familiar with going to Drupal and seeing what we need to do to upgrade to the latest release or for modules. A lot of projects do this. And so if you maintain something that's public facing you may wanna think about this especially for major releases where you may need to include a lot of steps just to help inform people. Or you can do this privately if you have like Confluence or something where you and your team or JIS or something if you wanna do that for your team. Just a place where you can put all this detail information and reference it later. You can also automate your tag generation. So if you're not sure, if you're still figuring out if it's a patch release or a minor release you could help from your marketplace. If you're on GitHub for example I know there's GitHub actions that if you apply them to your repo it will read your commit messages and look for keywords to determine what the next semantic version should be. So if you say like patch or minor or major in that commit. So everyone can be doing their own work if you work with a team and you commit it together and then the robots will figure out the next version for you. I think a lot of the CI environments out there they have scripts or tools to help you with this. Though if you have a very unique release process you create a bash script to automate the steps yourself. The bash script basically is like a wrapper for git commands that I showed. You could do that and pull together whatever information you need or make whatever updates you want. My team and I do this. So I created a script that we use and I've since open sourced it here at github.com slash mic miles 86 slash sem tag hyphen generator. And what this basically does for us and just use this as a guide if you want to or ignore it if you want to I'm not trying to sell anybody anything. But it basically wraps those git commands and you can tell it all these different options about hey I wanna do a minor release or a major release. I wanted to apply to this remote or this branch. I wanna just test it to see if anything will fail.   So we use this because it's a lot helpful. It gets rid of a lot of the manual steps from typing because I have never screwed up typing. So it's helpful I think in that case. So for example, it makes it really quick and easy as long as the internet so works for me. Which I guess it does because my presentation's up here. I have the repo for that tool here. And I have, I have this little demo section in my readme. So look I demoed, I'm gonna demo this at Drupalcon 22. So I'll save this and I think I actually already committed that. Git log, now I added code bar first so I have to do this. Cool. Git status, great I have a change. Get commit, yay demoed at Drupalcon. Oh come on. All right. Semicolon, no single code, that's what it was. Okay, so now I have that commit. Git log, do I screw it up? All right, good it's there. And we'll tag this as a patch release. So now I can do, I can do sh tag release. And by default it will do a patch release for me. And if I leave everything off it will just take all the defaults which are described on the Git repo. But if I do this, it's gonna update it, it's gonna pull in the previous tag. I don't know, oh I have to push it up for a skip push origin. All right, let's try that again. It'll tell you errors if something's gonna break which is great, let's try it one more time. There, so I generated release 2.1.3 and it pushed it up to GitHub for me which is that's all my production steps for this. So now if we rewrote this, I have 13 tags, 2.1.3 and yay demo.drupalcon is the release message. It has today's date, it has the release number in it and then it has a list of commit messages. So that was really quick, right? For me I just had to know that command to type it. Just had to know a bit about the changes in my repo. So this saves my team and I a lot of work. We do daily releases almost and most of them are patch releases but when it's your turn to be the release manager, basically in the morning you're merging in commit or pull requests and then you're typing that command and it's generating for you. So takeaways from this. Symantec versioning is an industry standard for tracking releases and since we haven't talked about it in a little bit, just for refresher, patch releases are bug fixes or trivial changes going from version 1.0.0 to 1.0.1. Minor releases are backwards compatible changes to your functionality going from version 1.0.1 to 1.1.0. Major releases are backwards breaking changes in functionality going from version 1.1.0 to 2.0.0 for example. Git tags allow you to mark commits in your code base as having some sort of significance. So you can lightweight tags, use that as your development process so you can keep track of being able to quickly switch back to a previous version of your code base and then annotated tags to mark a more robust object about the current state of your code base. And then naming your annotated tags with Symantec versioning numbers is a simple way to generate Symantec releases or I guess a straightforward way and allows you and your team or your users to keep track of when things change and the degree of changes between releases. And then if you write helpful release notes they're gonna provide that additional context and information about what exactly did change and what people need to know to be able to use those changes. And I think also a takeaway from this as well is if you understand Symantec versioning number because it's used by everybody, working with Drupal use a lot of other third party code, use a lot of modules or themes or plugins and being able to see when their version numbers change and being informed about what that indicates to you can also help you with your project and keep it secure and make sure you're not gonna introduce something that then breaks your production. As well as it helps keep track of what your version should be. For example, I would recommend if you are updating to the next, if you go and say Drupal 9.3 to Drupal 9.4 it's a minor release in Drupal. For your project, you would may want to update your release number to a minor version when you include that Drupal core change because you've done a minor change from a major framework that your project uses so your project numbers should upgrade as well. I have resources for this talk. This presentation and annotated version with animated GIFs about the Git commands I did with no mistyping is available at this Bitly link, Bitly, DCNA 22, SEM tag, capitalization matters with Bitly so make sure the DCNA is capital and the S is capital and the T is capital. If you wanna know more details about semantic versioning itself the semantic versioning website semver.org has all the details about it and where it came from and how it's evolved and what they're thinking about for the future. This is a really long URL to read, I'm not gonna read it, but if you look at the Git handbook on Git basic tagging it's gonna give you more information about how tags work and where to use tags and other options you have with tagging. If you wanna help getting started with how to write effective change logs or release notes if you go to changelog.md they have some very helpful guidelines of how to get started and based on the focus of your project. And then if you wanna take a look at my tag generator for your own use or just inspiration on how you might do something similar it's that github.com such as Mike Miles 86 sem tag dash generator. With that I wanna thank you. It's been great. I'm so glad to be back with everybody and it's been great seeing everyone and talking with everybody. I didn't realize how much I missed it and how exhausted I'm gonna be after this week but it's been great. So thank you and thank you for coming. And I think there's some time for questions if you have any I'll help you happily repeat it into the microphone for you. Yes. Yeah, so the question was if you had a number of say patch releases like bug fixes and then a minor release you wanted to go out, is it better to combine them all into a minor release or do individual releases? I think it would depend on the timing. Like if you really need those bug fixes out now like their security improvements and you're not ready to do that other one yet do those now. But if they're ready at the same time you can combine them and they would make it a minor release say this minor release includes this minor change and these patch changes as well. There's no reason you have to keep them separate and do like a whole bunch of little releases. Thank you. Back there. Yeah, so the question was you know this makes sense for software and releases does it really make sense for like a Drupal website because it may just be all patch releases a lot. So we do have like me and my team manage Drupal website and I agree it can be harder. I've had discussions with people on this who feel either way. I think it's important because even if you're doing a bunch of patch releases for your code because there's the code base with your config changes especially for Drupal that you still want to be able to keep track of. Your end users like you're not going to show that version on your website unless maybe they're like healthcare organizations that have to do that. They follow a certain numbering system. I think it still makes sense just because to keep in the practice of it as well. And if you have someone new come to your team for them if they're used to those in that numbering system they can understand the history of your project as well. So I would say it makes sense to do. If you're the only sole developer and you're the only one who's going to see it you know no one's going to yell at you if you don't do it or anything. Yeah you have to make a judgment call and it can be hard with Drupal website. Like I wouldn't recommend like if you're making content changes that doesn't make any sense because the content's not stored with the code base. Like it's anytime you make changes with code base but so like if you update a view and the view change if you're just changing I don't know like you're using a table with zebra striping and you change the color of the zebra stripes that could be a patch release but if you're changing the view and you're adding whole new operation details or something like that could be a minor release. It depends on the degree of changes but so that's where it's you and your team need to talk about what have we really changed since last time we did a production and how should we market? Because there's gray area there and it takes a while to get used to. The question was did my team and I use change logs in our repo? No we don't. What we do is we're on GitHub so we mainly we have that script that compiles our release notes because we follow very strict commit message rules so it has like we use JIRA so it includes the JIRA number and stuff and so we just compile them here and we keep track of them here. We also have it releases are connected back to JIRA so every JIRA ticket also can tell us what release it was included in with the release number which is really cool so no we don't have a change log. Way in the back. Yeah the question is are there best practices for handling alpha, beta, et cetera? There probably are, I don't know them because originally when I put together this talk I thought about including that but the semantic versioning system says not to use those it should just be the three numbers. The one thing they do mention and I can show on this tags page is anything that's below version one is that usually indicates it's a development version so if you're in alpha or beta stage I would say at least from semantic versioning number you would still be at zero dot whatever or whatever and when you're ready to do your first production release release that's your version one to go out so there's probably are other guidelines on it that I don't know if, yes. Yeah so the question was they're working with a Drupal 7, a Drupal 9 upgrade and so Drupal 7 is version one, Drupal 9 is version two so in the work in between how do you mark those versions using semantic version number? I would say that's a good question. There's two options you could probably do in my recommendation would be you could use the zero, you could just stay, all right Drupal 9 is where we're gonna start that's what we'll consider our first version that we're moving up to it, right? It's a brand new thing on the website because you're gonna have to change the semantic version number anyways so you could do all the work up to there being zero dot whatever to give your team practice into doing that and then when you're ready to deploy Drupal 9 that commit is version one. The op-ed you could if just for historical purposes you could mark some version of Drupal 7 before you started the Drupal, to Drupal 9 upgrade you go back and just apply a tag to that say that's version one and then you don't have to back tag everything since then but you could start your tagging process there and when you're ready to go to Drupal 9 then you could mark it as version two. It is confusing and that's where it's a little variable based on what your team wants especially if it's not a very public facing project but you don't have to go back and back tag everything. Yeah, so yeah, but you can always go back and back tag and add tags if you want to. Any other questions over here, yes? Yeah, true or false? The question was true or false? Yeah, you don't have to so the comment was when you're still doing the production pieces before you do like a production release of the building pieces you don't have to tag everything and you don't have to. It's totally up to you you could just wait until you're ready for your first go live production and start like at version one dot zero. There's no reason why you have to go and do the past one if you're just gonna keep marking them for internal purposes. Well, we always use semantic version numbers just for our tagging purposes but we haven't had in a long time a project that isn't already in production so we haven't run into that thing where we're starting like a new project and up the time we release it to a production environment we don't tag it but I would recommend my team that we tag it though just so we follow the process. Yes? Yeah, you could add a lightweight tag to it if you wanted to so the question was if you wanted to mark something with alpha beta or whatnot you could do it as lightweight tag and there's nothing that's stopping you from marking the tag with that stuff in it like as an annotated tag it's just if you're relying on that's not gonna work I don't think that's gonna work for like composer or stuff like that so if you have a contributor project I think there's I don't know all the guidelines but there are guidelines for how to adjust those numbers to mark that and you'd have to look that up. All right, well if there's no other questions thank you again. Appreciate it.


Recognition of antibiotic stewardship programs, ASPS, as essential components of quality health care has dramatically increased in the past decade. ASPS are now required across hospital settings as a condition of participation for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and for accreditation by the Joint Commission. The urgency of success becomes progressively greater as complex patterns of antibiotic resistance continue to emerge, exacerbated by unpredictable factors such as a worldwide pandemic. This article was authored by Tema F. Barlam.


It is with this humility and faith that we can fulfill our mission to build a just world for all. We stand in the pace of fear and hate and proclaim that love wins. We rise up and respond to public derision of the other with the full embrace of and warm welcome for all God's beautiful children. We confront the injustices of the powerful with a steady drumbeat of justice.


Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage here in Seattle, Washington for AWS's marketplace seller conference. The big news here is that the Amazon partner network and marketplace coming together and reorganizing into one organization, the AWS partner organization, APO, bringing together the best of the partnership and the marketplace to sell through as the sellers cover. This is the second year, but technically with COVID, I call it a year and a half. This is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, your host, got a great guest, Leah Purcell, vice president of business development at Foursquare. Leah, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Look great. Yeah, hey thanks. Thanks for having me here.  All fun, it was a great app. And I think it was competitor Galala sold to Facebook, but that was the beginning of location data. Now you got Uber apps, you got all apps, location everywhere, data is big. Here in the marketplace, they sell data. They got a data exchange, Chris ahead of marketplaces, like we have all these things, we're going to bring them together and make it simpler. So you're on the data side. I'm assuming you're selling data and you're participating in the data exchange. What is Foursquare doing right now? Yeah, exactly. So we are part of the data exchange and you mentioned checking in. So we're really proud of our roots, the Foursquare app and that's kind of the basis still of our business. We have 100 million data points, which are actually places of interest across the world, 200 countries. And we're in the business of understanding where places are and how people move through those places over time. And what's the value proposition for that data? You're selling the data? We are selling the data and we're selling it. You can think about use cases like, how can I improve the engagement with my app through location data? So for example, Nextdoor is a customer of ours. Everyone knows Nextdoor. When a new business comes online, they want to make sure that business is a real business. So they use our places to ensure that the address of that business is accurate. So how do you guys get your data? Because if you don't have the first-party app, you probably had critical mass of data. But then do other people use your data and then re-contribute back in? Kind of like how Stripe is for financial. You guys are plugging in to apps? A great question. So we still do have our consumer apps. We're still proud of those. It's still a basis of our company, really. But we take that data, so our first-party data. We also, for all the web, we have some partners that integrate our SDK. And so we're pulling in all that data from various sources and then scrubbing it and making sure we have the most unique. So you guys still have a business where the app's working? Yep. Okay, but also, let's just say I want to have a cube app. Yeah. And I want to do a check-in button. Yep. So rather than build checking in, could I OEM? You could. Four Squares? You could. And we could help you understand where people are checking in. So we know someone's here at the Hilton and Bellevue. We know exactly where that place is. You, building the cube app, you could say, I'm going to check in here. And we are verified. We know that that's the right place. So that's good for a developer, if you're building an app. Absolutely. So we have an SDK that any developer can integrate. Great, okay. So what's the relationship with the marketplace? Take us through how Four Square works with AWS. Marketplace. Sure. So we are primarily integrated with ADX, which is sort of a piece of marketplace. It's for data specifically. We have both of our main products, which are places that POI database and visits, which is how people move through those places over time. So we're able to say, these are the top chains in the country. Here's how people move throughout those. And both those products are listed on ADX. So if I'm in Palo Alto and I go to Joe and the Juice, you know that I kind of hang in one spot, or is it privacy there? I mean, how do you know, like, what goes on? So we know somebody does that. We don't know that you do that. So we ensure, you know, we're very privacy-centric and privacy-focused. We're not going to, we don't tell anybody that you yourself. It's pattern data. It is. So it's normalized data, right? Over time, groups of people, and how are people using the data to improve processes, user experience? What are some of the use cases? So that example of Nextdoor, that's really a use case that we see a lot, and that's improving their application. So that Nextdoor app to ensure that the data's accurate, and that as you as a user, you know that that business is real, because it's verified by Foursquare. Another one is you can use our data to make business decisions around where you're going to place your next, locate, you know, your next QSR. So Yum Brands is a customer of ours. Those guys are Pizza Hut, KFC. They work with us to figure out where they should put their next KFC. Yeah.  Yeah. People are still, even though e-commerce, right? People still go into stores and still are. Yeah, and there's probably a lot of math involved in knowing demographics, patterns, volume. Yeah, some of our key customers are really data scientists. Like the thing about with businesses that have true data science companies, they're really looking at that. Yeah, I mean, in and out's on the exit for a reason. Right. They want in and out. Yeah, and we can tell you. So they want to put it inland. Right, and we can actually tell you where that customer from in and out, where they go next. Right, so then you know, oh, they go to this park, or they go somewhere, and we can help you place your next in and out based on that visitation. And so there's real science involved. So take us through the customers, you said data scientists? Mostly data scientists, that's kind of a key. Customer data science at a large corporation, like a QSR, that's somebody. Okay, so how's the procurement process on the marketplace? What does the buyer get? So what we see the real value is, is because they're already a customer of Amazon, that procurement is really easy, right? All the fulfillment goes through Amazon, through ADX. And what you're buying is either an API. So you can get an API, you can make real-time calls, or you're buying a flat file, like an actual database of those 100 points of interest. And then they integrate into their tool set, they can do it, so it's pretty data friendly in terms of format. There, you can kind of do whatever you want with it. We're going to give you that. As long as you're smart enough to figure out what to do, we have a lot of data to give you. So what's your experience with AWS Marketplace? I mean, obviously we see a lot of changes. They had a reorg, partner network merging with Marketplace. You've been more in the data exchange. Chris kind of called that out, it's kind of a new thing. And he was hinting at a lot of confusion, but simplifying things. What's your take of the current AWS Marketplace religion? I actually think ADX, because our experience has primarily been ADX, I think they've done a really good job. They've really focused on the data and they understand how people like us sell our data. It hasn't been super confusing. We've had a lot of support. I think that's what Amazon gives you. You have to put a lot of effort into it, but they also give you a lot of support. Yeah, and I think data exchange is pretty significant to the strategic mission. It is, we feel that. We feel like they really value us as a partner. What's the big thing you're seeing out there right now in data? Because you're seeing a lot more data exchanges going on. There's always been data exchange, but you're seeing a lot more exchanges between companies. So let's just take partners. You're seeing a lot more people handle front end of a supply chain and you got more data exchanges. What's the future of data exchanges? If you had to kind of guess, given your history in the industry, what's the next around the corner trend? I think there has to be consolidation. I know everyone's building one, but there's probably too many. I know from our experience, we can't support all of them. We're not a huge company. We can't support Amazon and X and Y and Z. Like it's just too many. So we kind of put all of our eggs in a couple baskets. So I think there'll be consolidation. I think there has to be just some innovation on what data products are. For us, we have these two. It's an API and a flat file. I think as exchanges think about expanding, what are the other types of data products that can help us build? I mean, one of the things that we see, we cover a lot of them. The cube is Edge. You got Amazon putting out new products in regions. You got new wavelengths out there. You got regions. You got city level, connectivity, data coming from cars. So a lot more IoT data. How do you guys see that folding in to your vision of data acquisition and data usage, leverage, reuse, durability? Yeah, I mean, we're keeping an eye on all that. I think we haven't quite figured out how we want to allocate resources against it, but it's a really interesting space to be in. I don't think data is going anywhere. I think it's really just going to grow and how people use it is going to expand. Okay, so if I'm a customer, I go to the marketplace. I want to buy four-square data. What's the pitch? We can help you improve your business decisions or your applications through location data. We know where places are and how people move through the world over time. So we can tell you we're sure that this is the Hilton and Bellevue. We know that. We know how many people are moving through here, and that's really the pitch. And they use that for whatever their needs are, business improvement, user experience. Yeah, those are really the primary. I mean, we also have some financial use cases, so head funds. Maybe they're thinking about how they want to invest their money. They're going to look at visits over time to understand what people are doing. The pandemic made that super important. Yeah, that's awesome. Well, this is great, great success story. Congratulations, and thanks for sharing on theCUBE. Really appreciate you coming on. Thank you. My final question is more about kind of the future. I want to get your thoughts, because you're season pro. When you have the confluence of physical and digital coming together. Yeah. You know, I was just talking with a friend about FedEx's earnings, comparing that to, say, AWS has a fleet of delivery too. Amazon, Amazon, not AWS. So, but physical world only products, location matters, but then what about the person when they're walking around the real world? What happens when they get to the metaverse? Or, you know, they get to digital. They attend an event. Yeah. How do you see that crossover? Because you have foot in both camps. We do. You got the app and you got the physical world. It's going to come together. Is there thoughts around that?  And not officially on behalf of Foursquare, but I'm just curious, this is the confluence of the blending of physical and digital. Yeah, I know. Wow. I admittedly haven't thought a whole lot about that. I think it would be really weird if I could track myself over time in the metaverse. I mean, I think, yeah, as you said, it's all gonna- By the way, I'm not bullish on the metaverse when it's block diagrams, when you have gaming platforms that are like the best visual experience possible. Right. Yeah, I mean, I think we'll see. I don't know that I have a prediction. Well, hybrid, I'm seeing a lot of hybrid events. Like this event is still intimate VIP, but next year, I guarantee you it's going to be larger. Much larger. And it's going to be physical and face-to-face, but digital as well. Not people experiencing the first-party physical digital hybrid. Yeah. And it's interesting. It's something that we track a lot of. Yeah, for sure. I think we'll have, I think there's something there for us. I think that there's a play there as we watch the kind of things change. All right, Leah, thank you for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. All right, with Foursquare, I'm John Furrier. Checking in with Foursquare here on theCUBE, here at the Amazon Web Services Marketplace Cellar Conference second year, back from the pandemic in person. More coverage after this short break.


We are presenting product promotion, so we will move ahead and I will ask my team mate to go ahead. So basically we will be starting from the definition of product promotion. So as you all know that promotion is the fourth element of marketing mix that is of four piece, product, price, place and promotion. The promotion means giving the information about the product or product line or brand to the potential customers with an intent to generate sales and develop brand loyalty. However, the objectives of promotions are such as providing the information about available features and users of the product that is being promoted and also to stimulate the demand by creating awareness and interest among the audience or the potential customers. By differentiating the product from other competitor products like in the market if there are already the products present from the competitors, by promotions we will be differentiating the product of a certain company why it is best suitable for the consumers and also to stabilize the sales by highlighting the importance and its features like by highlighting the features that a certain product of our company is having which gives the edge over other competitor products are being listed and by giving this interest is generated in the potential customers. Next slide please. So there are four different kinds of promotions and there are informative promotion, pursue issue promotion, reminder promotion by a behavior modifications. Coming to informative promotion, it can be taken place during every stage of the product life cycle. Right from introduction to that of the maturity phase, every phase includes this informative kind of promotion. Customer generally buys a product only if he has all the relevant information being told about the product. And the informative promotion creates primary demand in the consumers, pursue issue promotion. It is followed during the growth stage of product. It generally means to pursue the people to buy by stimulating purchase and create a positive image of the product in the consumers. It also influences the long term behavior of customers. It involves high pressure selling, so only few of the companies takes that because it cannot be done by every other company. Generally the startups which are trying to just now trying to penetrate into the market will not be taking up the pursue issue promotion whereas they will be going towards the more kind of informative promotions. And then comes reminder promotion. This will be taken up during the maturity stage of the product. This is done to keep the product alive in the minds of the customers. Like more emphasis is made upon the brand name so as to make the brand loyal customers, consumers and customers aware that the product is still in the market. And the final kind of promotion is buyer behavior modification. In this there is the access promotion basing upon the modifications of the consumer behavior. Constant personal selling and repeated advertisements are the schemes that are adopted in the wake of the behavioral modifications that can be seen in the potential customers. And next slide. This will be continued by my friends. Yes, I will continue this and this is the promotion strategies that usually companies apply. So the first one is social media promotion where the promotion is done on the social media like Facebook and Instagram. The environment there is relaxed and the targeting can be done very easily over social media. Second is mail ordering market, mail order marketing where we receive mails and different kind of from companies wherever we have registered they will start mailing us. So that is second promotion strategy. Then the third comes giveaways and samples. Some ways we will see that companies are have taken up a small stall in malls and they're just giving up, giving you the samples to just give it a taste or something. Then there is point of sale promotion and end cap marketing which involves direct store marketing means outside the store you can see the clothes are hanging. They are showing that sales at 50% discount and everything. So that is the promotion strategy which is called point of sale promotion. And the next one is customer referral incentive program where we must have seen like the company Amway. They use a promotion of their customers means they go by a pyramid strategy. They will ask your customer to make two other customers. So that is the customer referral incentive program. Then causes and charity where a company acknowledges itself or portrays itself as a company which is doing something for the society or their product is doing something for the society. So and then moving on branded promotional gift and means branded promotional gifts, a gift where like your t-shirts, your marks, your cups. Yes, yes sir. Cups and just like sir said it is there and then there comes customer appreciation events where small events are conducted by companies and customers are invited free food, sorry, free refreshments are given and their customers are not bound to buy anything. But they just come there to look at the product and promotion is done through that. Then there's after sale customer surveys like the mail thing. They will mail you to ask your opinion and everything and this gives them a scope to even promote their next product. Yes, I'll take these slides. So this is about the product promotion models. So basically the product promotion blends, we have two kinds of blends other. The first one is actually the push blend and another one is the pull blend. Now let me talk about the push blend. You know what is push blend is actually it is a sales basically the sale that is the pushing into the product is pushing into the haul size. And the whole sale is actually pushing the product into the retailers and retailers basically pushing the models into the consumers. Now comes to the pull blend model. The pull blend model is actually, you know, they directly the producers, they are going for, you know, spending a lot of monies to get an advertisement and directly that creates a demand in the consumers. Let's see the next slide actually. I will explain it clearly in the next slide. Yeah, this is a strategy. See here. Now the producer promote aggressively the product into the wholesalers. You can see the arrows, you know, in the left side, what is push model is representing there. So, you know, producers promote aggressively the product into the wholesalers from wholesalers. You know, again, aggressively promotes into the retailers, from retailers against into the consumers.  It's a direct awareness is happening in this particular way. So I think I hope you have understand about the two kind of models. Okay, continue. Persevesive Promotions. Persevesive Promotional Activities. These are relevant at the growth stage of the product. Primary objective of the management is to persuade people to buy the product. Persevesive Promotional Activities are used to change a buyer's attitude or convince them to buy a product or service. And we also need to use Persevesive Promotion strategies to explain how your product is better or different than your competition offerings and why the perspective buyers should go with your company. And encouraging buyers to make a purchase immediately to buy more than they would normally buy at regular price or to increase their use of your product or service is another use of Persevesive tactics. The basic purpose of this promotion strategy is to stimulate purchase, create a positive image of the project in the mind of customers so that influence in the long term behaviors. Sure. Now moving on to some practical applicability that we have seen around the world. So first of all, I'd like to put forth the case of Samsung where Samsung how it did the strategy, how it segmented and then how it positioned its marketing strategy on the field. So in start everybody knows that Samsung was not that much of bigger brand. What Mr. Yoon did, the CEO, the MD of that company, what he did, he targeted the younger generation as because it was completely technologically driven brand. So he started targeting the younger generation as because from younger generation, because younger generation are the guiding thread of both the generation, the older one also the newer one also. So he targeted the younger one. Apart from that, he also invested heavily in research and development. I'd like to draw the attention towards the 2008 and 2009 recession where many companies were not able to standards put on the ground. But what Samsung did, it invested more than 25% of its investment in R&D and that somewhere paved their path. And apart from that, they were on their path to excel the motives by targeting the younger generation. That was the main motive. The next slide. Now the Cadbury. I have put the study of Cadbury as because their marketing lines, their advertisements, they become sweet. So this was what Cadbury did. It tapped the advertisement potential of themselves. So I won't go further as because of time constraints. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Sir, I'll quit it now. Great job. Great job. Fantastic. You covered it. You covered it so well. Yes, promotion, product promotion. Congratulations. I'm so happy. You people must be reading those chat messages. I really love those appreciative messages. More than the people who are getting appreciated. I love those people who are appreciating.


to move on to a very interesting segment. A panel discussion on whether the stock market reward brands would sacrifice brand building for short profits, we have with us Mr. V. Kabrajan, Banerjee Director, Nostal Limited, Mr. Arnaud, Banerjee CEO of the CF Limited, and Ms. Anne Enger, Mahalakshmi, Senior Consulting Director of Money Control. And also the moderator for the session is going to be Mr. Vikram Vasapooja, V. Kamla, Group CEO, Madison Media and OOH. So with this, I'd like to request our panelists along with our moderator kindly join us. OBS, I can see that there are lots of people, please just stay tuned. I need my request to you all to please also hashtag E-M-E-R 2022. We just request our speakers to just sit down for the moment while the stage is getting ready for the panel. Thank you all for joining us. So ladies and gentlemen, this is going to be an exciting panel discussion we have with us, Mr. V. Kabrajan, we've got Arnaud Banerjee, N. Mahalakshmi, and the moderator of the session is going to be Mr. Vikram Vasapooja, who will be joining us. So as I can see the stage now being ready and the device being put on the podium, we just request with your warmest and kindest of applause, ladies and gentlemen, requesting our panelists to kindly please join us. V. Kabrajan, we've got Arnaud Banerjee, we've got N. Mahalakshmi, and the moderator of the session is Mr. Vikram Vasapooja. Over to you to take the floor. Thank you so much. I'm ready. I think I'll just say a warm-up now. Very, very warm-up and privilege to be to operating this very important panel. We have Arnaud, who is here, Kya, who is Yusuf, and Mahalakshmi, who is Mahalakshmi. We have a pretty interesting problem on our hands today. You can read behind me. The motion is very as strong as you want, a piece that satisfies brand-reeling economy profits. Who better to deliberate on this than a person who studies the markets every day and, of course, two CEOs have to battle a big battle with results and their businesses. I'm hoping to gain some insights about how, what are the compulsions and what are the kind of ways in which we can actually overcome stock market pressures and actually have marketing work without constraints. So I'm going to die right here. I'm hoping to both get a nice and tight panel so I'm hoping to cover this panel three more times. So I'm going to start by trying to establish a link between markets and what results. So yeah, let's start with you. Markets really await the what results of companies. Are there any elevations within company management on how markets are likely to react to the what results? Good afternoon. Thank you. Congratulations to my simple, eight-another impressive report. So it's a privilege to be part of this run. I've been in this game for many, many years. I'm just saying this, you know, each and our others, in fact, I'm going to say this tomorrow morning I have an each and every one of you I said. I don't think we should be or we are looking at the stock market price in determining the, in different in the stock market price, what will be the outcome in thinking about the bottlenecks and so forth. It's the outcome of what you deliver in water. So you have very little control over how the stock market will behave. So therefore what I would be or what the CEO should be interested in that it is the shareholder value creation we are supposed to do. And for that the results are very important. So shareholder value creation in short term will be different and long term should be different and the stock market is in a different one altogether. But my belief is that in the long run as long as you create the value you will get the right valuation. So there is no point in trying to do things day to day keeping in mind the stock market. If I may, can you a little bit on that are you saying what the results are whatever you have to report you really aren't worried too much about what the stock market is going to think? Not at all. And I also believe that nobody should be worried about that as well because what is the role the role is for the board for the top management is to deliver business in line with the strategy. And the stock market is behaving based on your potential to deliver or what you actually care about. So in that context it is important that you deliver good business and in that process I am saying don't worry about the stock market price of today or no, no, no. Stock market will react. But if you consistently deliver business you will get the valuation you want and most importantly forget the stock market because you know you are going to stop market as an umpire of this. Because even himself in the quarterly business he was open performance incentive of the variable thing can be impacted. We are not a country with so much of e-sauce in the float or we are our content systems not majority of the companies are not leading to stock market price in the US we will find the stock market valuation and the development market. Therefore your goal is to deliver business as expected of you. Do not worry about the stock market price at all. Then that sounds comforting we will come back to that. Another few joint SEAC in 2005 before it went public. Are the P&N pressures any different once you used to come here? No SEAC was coming here. It was then that was a big one that was a big one. No it was coming here. With what we just said I would like to add something to that it is all about a consistent story to all stakeholders including the stock market investors including your business partners and the employees within. So you cannot just swing in and swing out of a strategy in a quarter to quarter basis and as long as the story is positive and consistent I think all the stakeholders have matured enough to understand where you are going and what you are going to do.  As long as your story is positive and you have clear a view of that and you share it because of the stakeholders I think that's the way to go and the story is more important than the results. Malakshmi you have actually you bring the reality check into this entire thing. As agencies we sometimes feel that clients certainly with the acts done on budgets in the quarter even though the property is there seems to be that the property protection seems to be a concern. How do you think markets behave? Are you voting? Revenue, profit, insistency, sharp claims, what is your take? Would you agree with these tenants speakers? No. So I knew on this that I don't want to sit in that judgment about how this works really saying as to us what these gentlemen are saying. That is why I brought the numbers. There are very quick maps to see what is the act to say as ratio for the last 15 years and how do they correlate with stock market returns on a quarterly basis including some amount of lead. Because the results come in like 15 days a day and so on and as it turns out there is absolutely zero correlation between ad spend and stock market returns and some of the start numbers. You know, Imani the year where this increased the most which is 19% of sales was 2018 and that is the year where the stock market return was called <IP_ADDRESS>.4%. I had numbers for Godrich consumer HUL, ITC and all of this and ITC is absolutely classic because they had a steady ratio for the last 20 years for the first 5-7 years it was 3% next 5-7 years it was 2% and I think you have been more erratic than your lead performance over the past few years. So there is when you articulate this discussion saying that sacrificing quarterly profits stock markets do not work and you know and sacrifice building brands and prioritize that over quarterly profits it pre-supposes that there is a positive correlation between them and that's not true at all at least that's not what the worst of the top 5-6 consumer company tells. This is brilliant. We are less than 10 minutes into the final discussion and all three of our annual panelists have absolutely dismissed the notion that we are going to bash on regardless. So again I am going to come to you Tia Is it a myth that we find that if you have an annual plan and an annual budget there are quarter by quarter it's almost like in a September-September you see budgets all with ease likewise in December, likewise in a month especially in a month then why is that is that an observation of quarter to quarter behavior so is that happening because the company management is going to go with the stock market? Yeah, that's why I firmly believe you should not be judging the stock market because they are not into this at all they, as she pointed out stock market behavior is irrespective of what you are saying I will tell you you are dead now what is the top management of this Evo's decision if at all he is going to be controlling certain expenses now whether he will be doing it in order to produce a result the answer is yes he can do it is being done I will plan about it he can be doing it now, but then you can do it only for a very short period of time let us say for example that there is a pandemic and there is chaos there is a huge uncertainty at that point of time you want to control the expenses you will go ahead and do but in the history of the company in the long term he cannot be using a certain that every quarter he is going to be doing it if he is doing so or if he is thinking and budgeting something and he is mirroring this his business is anyway going to suffer so the fundamental truth is what the Evo's goal is not to spend advertising expenses the Evo's goal is to deliver the results as per the science now we will also talk about it that Evo is so at all in this he can do anything so there is a government structure so therefore I keep in south market out of it they don't interfere in your what you spent, what you didn't spend there is a board which is following the strategy and the strategy goals and the vision for the company so it may have a market share or a revenue growth share now in that strategy you will know what should be the mix and where you will invest in terms of capital in terms of revenue expenditure in terms of investment because we are in the advertising today and if they are going to be looking at human resources what you are going to invest in so broadly the board has looked into it has approved the decision right on approving the strategies with the board definitely now I also believe the board's decision is not what is the advertising they are approving the advertising they are approving your law and strategy and the direction that you are taking and the resources that you are going to allocate the very first thing we have to ask is whether the board composition has the competent people to be advising and because they are not independent in the executive day to day role at all so that is also defined it is a mature thing supposed to be disclosing what is your board composition that are competencies that are in the board of law the next part of it is connected with the executive he can in the part do as I mentioned you are in extreme circumstances if he is going to be deviating that the board has definitely a sale you produce profit by cutting down certain expenses now inclusive we follow that even for a very little bit of general manager says the profit additional that is shown by cutting down an investment that is required will not be accounted as a profit at all we have established this practice vice president of particular division which is meant to target by cutting down an advertising expenses that is removed so he cannot be saying I produce this profit other than that as an informed decision board was told that we have cut down this they are saying for a capital expenditure I can where we are discussing advertising a capital expenditure a company can go in a different let us say a digital or anything so therefore there are checks and balances my view is that whether they are doing they may be doing for one quarter or two quarters if he is consistently going to do it if he is going to pay a price the business will suffer board has every right to question and now when next year he comes back for the budget he has to explain he has not spent the money he budgeted something and how he can be asking for otherwise right till the board is so very blind let me just move on now for this one Tiaw can tell you he said business basically said that it's a strategy no law business plan and that's what we are working through but then why do we get the feeling that the one cost which is probably the easiest to cut is marketing because that is a you can't cut raw material costs immediately at least in one's experience one has been in organizations just listed once where it has been used as a tool to show off profits if you actually do profit protection where budget cuts now if the A do you believe is hypothetical this pretty office tool is to me than it does in which case the question then becomes why is it that brand building which requires more investments longer investments and typically the value of brand building manifests itself in a good way of the value sheet as against spends which actually end up in the P and L I get the sense that the P and L is being given the focus of the long-term value sheet good way am I assertion correct or not I think it's not a zero one kind of situation if anyone states that advertising project is that untouched because of profit pressures that is untouched but will it go to 50% cut 100% cut that's also a good way so you have to navigate the whole thing by looking at the realities what are important but the fact is that it's not a discussion aspect it is a strategy experiment so if there are people who make it 0, 4, 2, 3 quarters there is half of them the rightness of the brand will go down the the action orientation towards the brand will go down and market share will go down so there is a consequence of long-term erosion of market share so yes some amount of up and down does happen and I think there is nothing wrong with that it should happen and if you do it short-term let's say if you cut it by 20-30% no power in damage happens yes, awareness will go up a little bit but the brand has a balance so if you can blind through the waters like that nicely then it is perfectly okay and there is nothing wrong and it happens so as long as you are coaching with the long-term story of how much time will you take let's say there is an existing brand which is totally caching to the operation and you also have new businesses and new brands coming up so they will not give you cash they will you can call it lost and funding or you can call it respectfully so there has to be a story behind that and you may have an appetite of funding for 2 years or 20 years as long as I have that appetite transparently share with all stakeholders and everybody understands what I am doing and in a quarter to quarter scenario yes it can go down by 20% it can go up by 30% absolutely fine so there needs to be a consistent story which the market buys into we also see that when the likes of Naikas and Zomatos without any profit lists there will be a reasonable reception there is a little probability but they did get a good reception but when it comes to legacy companies every quarter when you guys report the only thing in the headlines there is a net up so much and sales up so much I don't see a single thing about a story which says so many more people that's all if story is everything that's not what you guys do in your headlines what's your story? you are absolutely right although if I were to say seriously this is hard markets from a stock market perspective it is absolutely true that in the near term are you in the medium term markets buy into narratives and stories and only over a period of time are you tested so I don't think I will dismiss the market reception like any of the other companies because we have to understand the context of what is driving this whole thing about if you go back to the day depression period at that time markets were looking at cash as a proxy for companies value and they would value a company based on cash because lots of companies didn't have business but they had huge amount of cash in their books so the metric that was used was earnings to cash net assets and so on and then there was a period in the US when the money started picking up the highways came up and brands started getting built up and people started they said that people place their faith in companies that can create large brands which become cash machines and therefore we are willing to value the company not for its assets but based on the earnings that they were doing now we have come to a situation where in this digital space it's turning out to be a better kind of market where you get to dominate a certain space and the profit pool in that space so the competition intensity and businesses is changing and digital companies and you know and these companies are probably going to be monopolies or duopolies and that means that you are going to be able to dominate a huge profit pool and that is what the markets are right now in this company of course there is a lot of it so it is because of you know the liquidity and I work there but you don't need to get there so in the traditional companies I think one of the things that also power these companies is they are able to raise a lot of cash and there is a bit of greater pool theory that clears out there that you know that somebody is going to come and buy out and therefore the trading can go on in larger companies largely their ability to to revise it that today isn't it clear to Rajiv Bajaj that he is going to be a victim why is it that they are not putting in money out there I think the important thing to understand whether it is Nica or Oula or any other company the brand the way the markets look at it brand is supposed to deliver for the company and it is value only for the economic value or economic returns that can generate and as long as the market is able to see the brand creation in society will yield returns in a respectable period of time these days it will yield me to about 30 years also the market will receive them well so there is a narrative because you are saying for example Uber is the classic case Uber has openly said that they don't see the company making profits, why is it value today at 70 billion dollars because they have convinced the world that they are going to be either the number one or number two player in your right heading services across the world and if I remember correctly when they came out with an IPO the initial price was one tenth of what it was finally made that because I mean why they were still a private company because they said that the addressable market was no longer just US they hoped to assess the entire world but they haven't changed the calculation and the investors bought into that so today even in Nica's case if Nica's value very good if it were still only in the marketing space and we are buying into that they are able to attract a lot more value because they have been able to demonstrate they will be able to replicate that success even in the fashion space which is much bigger so there is a lot of storytelling and narrative in it at the same time these things will have to come true and they have to that's a fascinating thread that we picked up and they are welcome to that because what I really thought about this is there are CEOs and there are CEOs there seem to be some CEOs and I professed to be one of them whose condition to be thinking that I had to deliver top line and what to like and there are others like Uber and Elon Musk who will not even talk about any of this they will just talk about changing the entire of the way word should be looked at what is your because if the stock market is what they are doing this and it's really a company management that is doing it it's really coming down to the how CEOs assume what their measure of success is what's your perspective ironically you are able to have to cut the cost advertising is very easy to do the employing production the process and connected with capital expenditure it is not and in one minute half a day things can be done to cut the advertising that is why I don't think now having dealt with quantity of sales for 15 years I think is the the first problem is with the companies you are writing the quarterly research press report in the typical way talking about the numbers and you can write about other intangibles you have done and the press doesn't take no decision that's a book now in a final interview in a television channel these that are talked about and you will not be you will not be having an opportunity to talk about things as with advertising next one is there are CEOs who will be able to talk about the brand but if you take a totally different the number of CEOs who will come forward to talk about the brand branding expenses will be very limited now I am not worried so much about the press they are important the interesting community is the analyst fund managers who have spent time with you to understand your long term strategy about the new product category how you are going to be positioning yourself and therefore if you are going to be spending in advertising whether it has a correlation with your market share goals and initially you will spend more this long term story you have an opportunity to tell that quite a few companies you leave the job be a CEO and then CEO is talking he will not be coming out I have seen this that you can pick up today 50 analyst support I will share it with you then it is being talked about about the brand building or the advertising expenses it is not as they talk about the margin talk about the raw material prices talk about the capacity edition you are getting it to merger acquisition it is not talking about advertising they are not paying to the people who are dealing with them or the analysts who are discussing with you they are also not attaching the value that is the issue at the end of the day if I have to succeed I need revenue growth that will come from the market share or I need new candidates now for that I need to invest in brand building I am not saying advertising number of other things that are supposed to be done and they are supposed to be investing I am of the view the stock market will recognize that not only in the new in the conventional businesses the stock market will grant you that that you are supposed to be investing I do not pay but we are not doing a proper communication out there we are believing it is only bottom line that is important but I think you guys should share the data because you are one quarter or two quarters now they are not bringing down the line so in fact today's newspaper itself had this very interesting headline that the choice has been given to the company whether they need to separate the chairman and the managing director it is not going to be sort of pushed down on any one company do you think this is opening up an opportunity for companies to bring out two narratives the chairman will actually manage the stakeholders with stories maybe it can be just a top line bottom line kind of story what do you think the CEOs what do you think the CEOs need to be brought in there narrated from maybe a very brilliant audience I think the role of the chairman and the board is quite different from the operating team and the CEO and I have not seen the chairman coming into this kind of role of the big stakeholder especially in the US it is the CEO's role it depends on the orientation of the CEO in particular I partially agree with that but I have seen the CEOs completely different picture which is more holistically or more skewed towards the building even I need focus in some cases so it depends on the company that he represents it depends on the values or the vision that he represents and brings to the table and the journey that he is going to take in the next 5-10 years including the next 2-3 quarters so yes there are people who cover a wide amount of things including brand expense expense is just an input to it so I don't see really the board of the chairman it is the executive that will keep doing it and it has to do the job well if the executive team thinks that brand is important for his business and brand loyalty is important for market shares he will bring that to play in the story that he shares okay great I think I have time for just one more round look I think if I just summarize where we are the value is special right now it almost seems that the stock market is completely irrelevant to the functioning of the company that is what the management is all responsible for so if we are talking about markets going up and down we shouldn't find a state court in a chair market that is entirely the doings of the company however over time there has to be obviously the performance of the company is sort of is still appealing and they are communicating because stock market is not irrelevant that is not discussed that was a huge stretch I think stock market is very relevant because it is a reflection of how the market is looking forward of the company and if we are getting a value same as industry it is an input to us it is a re-rated it is an input to us so there is huge value from the stock market and there is so much scrutiny in the public space and there are certain sometimes blind spots also do come up from blind spots especially there is something that we need to focus on going forward so it is part of the ecosystem it is like any of the stakeholders are revalidant what is your take at this point in time on the world do you think are they able to see the results and actually see the strength of the company I think I would like to share the miracle ourselves if we share what we want to share and what we believe in which is going to produce the next quarter or quarter after quarter investors are definitely listening they listen and they appreciate that and then of course the performance has to live up to that expectation and do you think institutional investors lead the thinking that there is a retail investors or retail investors are blind and go into the wrong but it is moving towards largely institutional investors and the retail investors is not going to create that valuation it is in certain cases it is institutional investors who are and they have insight into what you are doing and you have got they can see through you at this exhibition in order to do this if you explain this is what you are doing for this purpose they will be able to give you the time and be patient by only coming you ask the question whether they are actually enough kind of they are I complain about investment it is a huge turnaround every quarter you need to suffer once in six months he will be in this one and that one that is the frustrating otherwise actually in the last six months we have seen a few of these new wage companies without a profit to talk about if they are taking into the market with actually success now they were investors they were private entity investors who funded these companies and they were encouraging them to do marketing work now that it is listed do you expect them to change their narrative no that is again true because as a private company there is a lot of room and as we all know in the past few years all of this has practically investments and such a space has really exploded because of easy money and so then obviously when you go into the market so you become log more unseparable than the countable of each shareholder the expectations are definitely very different and how much again it comes back to the same thing how do you build your narrative how do you keep narrative and you can always steer to a direction and say we are doing this because we are building this business here or we are building a brand here look at Amazon Amazon did not do net profits for a long long time but they were able to convince the market they were investing for the future and they have to they have to dominate this case if you heard and understand the report e-commerce is about 4,000 crores and Amazon is a big big channel that is they have actually monetize and advertise they have to 4 decades of working in bold economy companies if they can get a job in a company where you need more loss and more learning of money last word what do you think what is the kind of accountability you think that a CEO should sort of project to the market what makes you narrative the box talks about the CEO statement so he has to he is accountable for the entire performance and if there is expectation built up which is reflected in the share price today he has to live up to that expectation yeah I have always believed in long-term valuation it is not the part of the business not even when I decide on the term the foundation that is laid should be a value to the company and all this brand is very important I am sorry the brand is talking about and you will find it in my business the valuation of the company dying alone and we will talk about it and you will find it so because we are talking in the context of stock market has a brilliant code which says that markets are made like investors the voting machine and the short-term and the main machine of the long-term so in the short-term they just say who vote for the most popular and in the long-term you are obviously able to value for the most weighty companies if you look at Mahalashmi's this great picture in the workshop Warren Buffet is this great employee that is probably what he just told us thank you a big applause for this wonderful panel and for your request I hope to join the MD the production media will try to join us on stage and give a momentum to all our panelists ladies and gentlemen a huge round of applause once again and thank you so much for joining us each we are requesting to give a momentum I hope that by partners young to all our panelists and I am more greater ladies and gentlemen