But now moving forward, ladies and gentlemen, we'll be proceeding into a panel discussion. And you see in this ever-changing world of marketing, it's very unlikely that marketers will still stick to the same approach. It's no longer the big getting the small. It's no longer the elephant getting the tiger. It's about the fast getting the slower. It's about the tiger getting the dear. And with some new thoughts, some new secrets, we'd like to move in and talk to you about secrets of marketing in the new interactive age. And this panel discussion would be chaired by Mr. Shivjeet Kullar, founder for attitude.com. He's an ad guru, is a legendary author, play writer, jingle man, and a serial entrepreneur who has won over 100 national and international awards over the course of his career. He has worked with the best brands in India and has been rated as one of the top 10 most high-profile creative names in India by the campaign magazine. Shivjeet is now making a difference in the world of communication with his third startup, which is Attitude, named as one of the hottest startup by many experts, including Economic Times, CEO Maxine, and NASCARM. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the chairperson for our panel discussion, Mr. Shivjeet Kullar. Very well, welcome to you, sir. Thank you. So, I think he's told you all the good facts about me. I'll tell you some of the stuff you should also know. I spent 30 years in advertising, in JWT, in Linta, Sclarion, Bates. I was a writer. I was possibly the worst-behaved creative director in advertising throughout my career. I had clients who would throw me out of rooms. I had bosses who would fire me, but I really enjoyed advertising. One day, after I thought I was done with advertising and was leading a peaceful life, I had worked in advertising, I had sold an agency, I woke up with an idea for a startup, and it was an idea which was called Users Play Clients Pay. So, it basically was people who came and played like an advertising game and ads, Pepsi, ITC, Whirlpool, they all gave us ads to test. And because we were doing it this way, we could do testing much faster and cheaper than anybody else. So, I took this idea and at that time my son, there's your hand, there is. So, he used to be in digital and used to tell me, dad, stay out of digital. That is my area, don't get into this. I didn't listen to him and I have suffered for five years. I haven't slept much for five years because that's what a startup is like. One of the greatest shocks that I got, and that's why I was explaining to my fellow panelists, was that at that time, five years back, when you went to people and said, I have a very quick way of testing your advertising or your brand or your communication, half of them didn't wanna know. So, somebody said, boss, when it's a four-fold film, now it's on TV, don't test it, I'll be in trouble. So, half of the people didn't wanna know how the advertising is or how their storyboards were. I think what has happened today, that has all changed. And advertising and marketing and digital are all converging. And that's the topic we're gonna deal with today.  And then we are going to have a chat, but whoever's timing us, please keep enough time for questions and answers because we think it's best if dialogue flows both ways.  First, I'll call on Tanuja Pradhan from Jio, Tanuja. Now, I'd like to invite Anuja Mishra from PepsiCo. Always first, the ladies. The whistleblowers are the women of the year, if you read the Time Magazine. Then Prashant from Yum Brands, Prashankar. And last but not the least, Manik from MaxLife. Okay, so, here we are. We're all set. We're gonna try and keep it crisp, keep it moving, and try and give you an insight on the new secrets of marketing. Not the old ones, which you find in textbooks, a lot of which are invalid, but the new stuff and what's going on. So, I thought we'll start by each of the panel members introducing themselves, telling us something about what they do, and telling us one thing that the world doesn't know about them. Let's just make this interesting. Okay, so we'll do short introductions, starting with the ladies, of course.  So, you wanna start, Anuja? On 16 years of work experience across different function of marketing, consulting. If you talk about industry, so I have done a lot of work in telecom, real estate, FMCG, and few more. One thing which nobody knows is I also have a solo pilot license. So that's a... Give her a hand of her own. It's a pilot, yeah. Thank you, thank you. Lovely. Hi, everybody. I'm Anuja Mishra. I've worked for about 13 years across primarily the FMCG space. Currently, I work with PepsiCo and lead their hydration, energy, and innovation portfolio for beverages. Clearly, this is a very interesting space because as a beverage category, there are a lot of interesting learnings that are kind of coming to the forefront. And happy to talk about them in a while. There is very little that people don't know about me, but yes, I think something that most of you wouldn't know is that I'm a full marathoner and run a marathon pretty much once, three months. Okay, that's great. I work for a company that helps people express their love for their families. We sell life insurance. I've been around for many years in financial services. And I have a guru nowadays when I engage with customers and that guy's 10 years old. He's my benchmark for curiosity. He's my benchmark for learning new things. He's my benchmark to be comfortable with the changing ways of the world and adopting very, very quickly what technology makes possible. That's my 10 year old son. And I'm truly intrigued with the pace and the dexterity with which they're evolving. What's his name? His name is Aryan, sir. Aryan. Okay, great, thanks. Prashant. So my name is Prashant Gaur. I work with a company which makes the best pizzas in town and in the country. So I head marketing for Pizza Hut. It's been close to two years with Yum Brands and with Pizza Hut. I not only head marketing, but also look after technology. So that's one unique combination that I have as a job description. Typically, marketers are known for creativity, but I also have technology as part of my portfolio. One thing slightly off, slightly unique, different about me is the way I started my career. So I'm an engineer. Straight after my engineering, I got a job with Mahindra British Telecom. It's an IT firm. It used to be. I didn't like that work stream. So I came back to Jaipur and I joined an NGO. So my journey from working with an NGO to heading a brand like Pizza Hut has been amazing and I think not many people know about that show. Thank you. Okay, thanks. Okay, so we are gonna now get into the meat of the discussion. I think, has anybody here heard of the Meeker Report? The yearly Meeker Report. Okay, we did Meeker Report, right? May I read it? It is the Bible for trends, communication trends in the world. And this time, for the first time ever, the Meeker Report has reported that internet advertising in the world has overtaken TV advertising. This is the first time ever. I'm gonna start with a general interesting question to each of the panelists. And the question is how do they relate with the internet? So it's actually a personal question. Could have something to do with Facebook, something to do with research, something to do with, you know, playing something with their son. So each of them will take a minute and tell us what is their personal way of interacting with the internet. And this time we can start with money. Tough one, I mean, you know, it's become so tough to, Shivjit, take out internet from your lives and try and figure out the many ways in which it is intertwined with a whole lot of stuff that you do, whether it is searching for information or searching for opinions or engaging with some of the others. Actually, a medium that interacts has obviously a lot more power to hold attention at a very fundamental human level, which is why to my mind it's not surprising at all that as consumers' attention's captured by the medium more and more, advertisers also find it worth their while to shift their attention there to a medium. The other way I look at it is that nobody ever, nobody ever started or referred to a discipline as TV marketing or radio marketing. And so I find it a little out of place because fundamentally I want to reach a consumer and basis how the consumer is spending their time and attention with what size of the screen or print or otherwise, is then the approach for a marketer to do exactly that. And so if one were to walk consumer backwards, it is pretty intuitive that as attention spans go there, you engage much more than that. Okay, so his interaction with the internet is the fascination of observing how the internet itself, apart from what you do, it changes you to a great degree. Any favorite sites that we wouldn't know, any favorite website that you visit? The kind of content, for instance, that LinkedIn offers and I spend a good amount of time in a week there. The fact that there is an algorithm at a back curating content basis, your consumption basis, your interest areas and all of that, I find it extremely useful because in the old days, for instance, if you wanted to curate or read up on a particular subject or area of interest, the amount of hard work that you would have to do then and now is significantly reduced because what you're doing with the digital footprint is that you're leaving those trails. Someone else is using it to your benefit, curating it in a manner and serving it to you exactly how you want it. Okay, so he likes LinkedIn. So now we'll ask the marathon runner, okay? So, Arija, how do you interact with the internet? Shivjit, when you ask this question, I actually sort of went a little into a fix because it's a little like asking, how do you find breathing?  But maybe the way I'd address this question is that two folds. One is, I think, as a consumer of the internet and the second is maybe as a marketer because it's possibly you're in the skin of both at some level. You know, the fact that man is a social animal was never more true than now, right? With the staggering data points, and I'm sure all of us know the data points like 450 million internet users and 300 million smartphone users and so on and so forth. It's obviously intriguing to say the least, but I guess at the core of it really what it's telling us is a very simple thing. Every human being and possibly the youth, this is more reflective of the youth, are looking for essentially two things, information and experiences. And that's exactly what the web or the internet is bringing to you. And I think that's where I kind of draw my learning as a marketer, like I think even Manik rightly mentioned, it's not about a particular forum or a particular platform, it's about marketing to your consumers. And to that extent, you have to be changing and interacting the way your consumers are changing. And the fact that the whole digital medium is so predictive, it can literally assess what you like, what you don't like, it's scary at the same, but it's so predictive. I think that's the really interesting piece about it on how do you kind of pick up those nuances and integrate your brand into the lives of people. So the whole digital piece I think is is in a way just personifying individuals. When we were advertising on television, it was a faceless audience. Today every consumer literally has a face that you could look at. So that's interesting. So she's reckoning that actually the internet in some ways is making humans more human, which is a pretty interesting take. Now we'll hear from the lady who has the brand that scared the hell out of all the brands, telecom brands, who are all squaking in their booths. So, Tanjia, what is your relationship with the net? What is your first comment on the internet? Yes, so in my current role, I look after consumer insights and also the technology intervention in different marketing. So for me it has become bread and butter where I'm invariably on internet. And something which has changed the traditional way of consumer insights is in geo, we don't do any brand tracks per se. So now because everybody used to say the brand is what consumers speak to each other. So that has become true because now your internet, through internet, you can track what's happening right there. So you don't have to wait for a month to get the feedback on your campaigns. You don't have to wait to see if your campaigns are making some impact, relevance, et cetera. So that is the reason why I'm glued on the internet. Also I'm just taking one step back and talking about interactivity as the name says of our session. I don't think it is right to say that this is the age of interactivity. We as a consumer were always ready to interact. Initially when companies, they send salesmen to their premier customers, it was the premise that they want to interact with their brand per se. Then came the call centers, then it was bombarded with consumer calls. Then we had the Gini call internet where we were vowed that salesmen memory is not an issue. So the internet or the computer also stored what was the historic transaction and we vowed the consumer saying, oh, he knows me, what I spoke last time. Now there's a era of app so where interaction is not limited to what has happened. It also expected us to predict based on all the interaction, tell me what next. As a consumer we were always, always interactive, just that today with the multi options which have come into the market in terms of the technology intervention, the multiple touch points for the consumers and also multiple substitutes for each and every product category. So the interactivity has completely opened up a new era of consumer conversation. When we said the brand is built when consumer speaks to consumer, that is the era which is happening today. So that's a take where she's saying that what was there before is now being amplified. There was interactivity but it's just moving to a whole new level. So the internet, I think what I'm just saying is a natural evolution of what was happening before. Okay, so now we will hear from Prashant who represents a product I'm no longer allowed to eat because of my weight. But for all you guys who love pizzas, he has the man who markets them and his first take on his relationship with the internet. Yeah, so I'll first answer this question as a father then as an individual and then as a marketer. So as a father I can't even imagine a world without internet. Every single day, every single meal that my six and a half year old daughter has, it is not possible without internet. So it has become part of our lives. I can't even imagine taking out time to convince her to engage in certain activities and especially having food without internet. So that's more as a father. As an individual, I like to play tennis and I like to play and learn guitar and I don't have a coach. I don't have any guitar teacher who comes and teaches me. So I pick these things straight from YouTube. It's very easy. I can just type how to serve like Federer. Of course I can't serve like him but there are online tutorials that you can literally access. Other is also as an individual, internet gives me a lot of empowerment. Today, and I can imagine how I used to travel with my family five years back versus how do I travel today. Five years back, seven years back, whenever you land into any foreign territory, you would ensure that you have the hotel address, you have the printed map of that city. Today I know that I have my smartphone which has the data back. If I want to book a cab, I can do that. If I have to access any place, I can do that. So I'm not dependent on anybody else. Internet is one medium through which I can find any answer that I'm looking for. Lastly, as a marketer, we have already discussed that how easy internet has made all of us to reach out to our consumers in no time and also to pick those valuable insights in real time basis. And also from a consumer standpoint, especially if you look at social media, one is to look at social media as a medium to interact with your friends, family, and friends of friends. But other way to look at social media is giving access to everybody and equal access to everybody. So today doesn't matter whether the guy is or the person is sitting out of Delhi or a small town, everybody has equal access to this world of internet. And they probably see internet and social media more as a platform, wherein they can display their talent. They can put it out for rest of the world to see it. And other is it also acts as an equalizer. It gives everybody a level playing field. So it doesn't matter whether I have 400 stores on ground and the other guy has 1,000, both the brands will only have one site, one M site. So it is a great leveler.  I want a round of applause for this answer. Give us a round of applause. Superb, so simply and well put.  And you have to tell her in this new age a secret, like when you approach marketing, this is something you must keep in mind. So while I tell the audience a joke, you guys just spend a minute, but this is what we're gonna do. It's like somebody is asking you here, I'm getting into marketing, tell me something and you gotta tell them and something substantial, not beating around the bush. Oh, keep in mind, left is right and right is left. Some great thing which will land somebody here a job. Okay, meanwhile, I will tell you an interesting little story about the internet. So currently that young chap, my son, as I told you, he heads our digital marketing. When he was six years old, he came to me and I was on my computer. And he says, dad, I said, yeah. He says, you have an email account. I said, yeah. He said, mom has an email account. I said, yeah. He says, Tanya's got four email accounts. So Tanya made four emails, I don't know why she made four emails. I said, that's right. So he looked at me very well and said, will there be enough room on the internet for me? So I assured him there would be. So now we're gonna deal with a question which is, since we are here to give you secrets of marketing the new age, what would be a key secret to tell somebody who wants to join marketing? Some strategy they should keep in mind. Anybody can just kick off. You? Actually, my very honest advice to a young marketer would be to not get intimidated by platforms and the jargons. Irrespective of how we evolve and irrespective of how platforms evolve, I think as a marketer, what you need to always remember is that some fundamentals don't change. The fact that there needs to be a brand promise, a brand purpose in a very sharp brand positioning can never change despite the platform changing. You could be marketing to somebody online, offline, on television, on radio. There has to be consistency in your communications. I think that's one message that as a marketer, and it's not a secret early, but I think just something that I would want everyone to be reminded of. Okay, so for me, it is about never forget the importance of human element in front of whether it's a product or technology, everything, but at the end of the day, the human aspect in your communication is must. It is about the relevance, empathy, be empathetic. So yeah, you may have different platform, you may have Facebook, social media, et cetera, et cetera, but there you cannot say, I'll just, sorry, but I'll just take one example. So for Geo KBC per se, the human element was everybody thought that if they were on the hot seat, they would have played better than the guy who was doing it. And that was the insight which we took, which was about the entertainment and the gamification. So for us, never forget the human element in entire communication, technology and platform, and everything can be taken care of. Thank you. I think I got the question wrong, but if the question was if I'm interviewing someone if I have to ask one question to that person. So you're interviewing someone, and you have to give them a secret for their future career where they should definitely get a job and one of them is definitely gonna use your secret and if they don't get a job, they're gonna sue you, so you have to give something good. So one is just adding, building up to this and probably sticking to the thing that I have in my mind is it is also important to ask someone as a marketer when you're meeting folks, especially folks who are interested in technology and digital as to define who your competitors are. So if I meet someone and the person tells me that your competition is actually ABC, pizza brands, for a job in the digital marketing space, I would say that person is out, he's not in my consideration set because my competition, by definition of it is, of course, the other pizza brands and other QSR brands, but when it comes to digital, my competition is Ola, my competition is Amazon, my competition is Facebook. So I think that is one nuance I would like to share with everybody that it's very important to understand that the entire landscape changes dramatically and other is more of the insight that at least we guys play on today sounds complicated, which is the mindset that we are talking to is the I-W-W-I-W-I-W-I. Sounds very complicated, but what it means is the mindset that we are talking to today is a generation which says to us, which tells us that I want what I want when I want it. That is the mindset. They want everything as per their desire at the time when they want in the form and shape that they want. So marketers have to apply to that. Sorry, I probably deviated from the core, but I thought maybe I'll just act a little bit on that. I think that's interesting advice, right, Lisa? Good advice, right? Okay, go for it. My advice to youngsters would be simply this. To focus on the consumer journey for your product, for your category. And focus attention and energies on what is it that the consumer goes through in the decision-making cycle for your category, for your product? What are the pain points? Where is it that they feel joy? Where is it that they need reassurance? Where is it that they need more information? Where is it they need samples? So on and so forth. And so this is very basic. And not focus so much on what technology can make possible because all of those answers will emerge and there are many people to provide those answers, but the unique and obvious insight on where as marketing strategy would you want to differentiate? What part of the journey would you over manage? And how would you give your consumer a compelling experience is what is paramount. Okay, so let's do an interesting thing. Is everybody, can everybody hear everything over here? Everybody, yeah. Everybody learning anything here? Raise your hands. Okay, so you guys are not learning. We'll do something for you. Now, everybody here represents a brand and everybody has their own brand story to tell. I think it would be interesting if each one of you, I can't say us as moderating is really bad. You can't talk about yourself. Each one of you gives us an example of something you admire that another brand is doing. So not your own brand, but when you look around the landscape and it could be anything, it could be from Modi to someone else, but could you give us a thought that, hey, I like the way, I like what this brand does? Because to me, that in a way is a lot more believable than us talking about our own brand. We do this so well, all right? So what is it that you feel that you've seen? I'll give you guys an example. Everybody, anybody has heard of the first case the Disruptor video? So there's this brand of clothing who was launching abroad. I think it was called Elhart clothing. And they didn't want to do a fashion show. They said like fashion shows, been there, done that, it's done. So they took 22 strangers and made them stand opposite each other, 11, 11, wearing their clothing and made them kiss. For the first time in their lives. So guy, girl, guy, girl, girl, girl, girl, the whole, in USA, anything goes. And they got 42 million hits on this one thing. So you needn't give as specific an example. It could be, okay, pawns, dead gang of girls, it could be anything. But just let's hear something which you think another brand was doing very well, hopefully possibly with the internet in it. Any of you? The obvious one that comes to my mind is also a brand that I literally use every single day which is Uber. And my choice is, bases the ease, the convenience and the empowerment this brand has given. Imagine, they send a cab at a click of a button and they just don't own any single taxi, right? And a recent thing that I picked up as to what they're doing as a brand is, of course they are increasing their penetration in metros and smaller towns. But they're also now shifting the entire game towards shared economy. I think that's a very nice nuance that at least I have picked up. They also understand that with so much of emission, pollution, et cetera, coming into our lives, they are pushing the agenda of sharing and the sharing economy. So while 10 on 10 as far as technology is concerned, but they also are now playing a larger, sustainable game, which I quite appreciate. You know, I think a brand that I really admire, and again, this comes from the food and beverage industry, is Oreo. You know, Oreo is a 100 year old brand. It's a cookie brand, right? And what would we think about a cookie? But the fact that that brand is so relevant on social media, more importantly, not just relevant, but relevant through the core of the product. You know, so everything that they do on social is always anchored and centered around the product. You know, around just that circular cookie and the interesting things that they do. And that's an amazing example of, you know, how you don't have to necessarily be a tech brand to be cool on social. You know, you can be as relevant with the core of your product, with the consumers anytime. Ford Motor Company in India has a phenomenal job of integrating the online and the offline part of purchasing a car kind of journey. You know, if you look at it, your journey starts with a generic kind of a search, saying SUV less than 20 lakhs.  And now there's the physical part of the journey, which is the test drive. So did the car come on time? Was it clean, so on and so forth? Then you go into a more refined kind of search that says, all right, ground clearance for this brand and weight to power ratio and mileage and so on and so forth. Then it's the social media like, where you say, how's the service? And do these, what's the cost of ownership and stuff like that?  This is so phenomenally tied in. Right at the inception of the generic search, to the branded search, to the social media and the final culmination at the showroom, which is the physical part. A unique identity for the consumer. They've tailored messaging across the funnel depending on where you are in your decision cycle. They've also made sure that your experience is omnichannel so that there are ways that the dealer recognizes you as you start to engage with the physical part of the journey. And they've got awesome ROI for the way they have spent, the audiences that they have spoken to and the kind of impact they have. Okay, for me again, it's automobile brand, which is Fiat. So, you know, they're so strong on their brand philosophy, what they have done abroad, that they have gone beyond the category and to ensure the safety of drivers during night drive, they have actually opened Fiat suites on the highways. So when you are tired, you can actually go and use your Fiat key and check in into that hotel, take rest for four, five hours and check out in the morning. So that actually shows that for the core of their philosophy, they have gone beyond just being in the category. And when you talk about their digital activation or something with the technology, so in one of the countries, they also came up with the app called Fiat Safe Key. The moment you put your car key in, the moment you start it, it actually monitors your speed, it monitors traffic and if you're over-speeding, it does alarm you. So that is the integration, which is fantastic because, you know, especially, may not be in India, but abroad, there are concerns on teen driving. And for parents, and that app is installed on parents' phone as well, where they can monitor if the kid is driving fast. So they ensure that their brand philosophy of safety, you know, gets across in different platform. So now we will shift to each of the panelists, giving us an example from their own brands, from initiatives they're doing, from any heartwarming, interactive session or angle of the consumer. I'll tell you a story about our brand, which I found incredible. So our brand, as I mentioned, is attitude.com, where users come on and you see a film, could be a commercial, or it could be a behavioral film, basically saying what do you feel about insurance, this, that, et cetera, pitching business to you, we should do some business. Yeah, cool. So you do that, and then you win some points and then a data report comes, like analysts do a data report, and that's it. There was this father, so you win his loyalty points. There was a letter we got from a father asking us if we could donate his daughter's reward points, and she had a lot of them to charity because she had died. You know, when I saw that letter, and first of all that the girl had accumulated, so you get prizes from your points, and the fact somebody should be so involved with your brand to actually ask this question, I really love that. And on the flip side of it, we give prizes, we give a car out every two months, not fours and all, but small cars, and we, and that ensures in a big way that the data is authentic, because no point giving wrong name, wrong, this thing. So I checked one of the cars in South India. I don't know what a name was. When we went to give the car, we found her name and address it, all right, but she was 66 years, 63 years old, and she actually said she was 30. So because of our rules, we couldn't give it. She was like so, but she said, but she didn't say it, she was a little younger, we just couldn't give it to her. Okay, so now, we're going to hear from them, and please listen carefully. These people together represent salaries that are bigger than the African nation's yearly budget. These are the best that you got. So they're gonna- That was a fake thing. So they will each, Rwanda, there's nothing, it must be all- Don't amplify it.  Let's start off from that side. So I can tell you, Kullar, your perception is very wrong about salaries, but I hope somebody's recording this so I can play it to my boss. What we did last year is that we were faced with a unique situation. Life insurance is not a business that's like food and travel and doesn't naturally lend itself, for instance, to digital consumption. It's also not an intuitive need. You don't wake up one morning and say, And so it's about nudging somebody into consciousness and saying, what if? Now, what if is better done face to face when I look at you? And so we needed a moving kind of a conversation. So that's one part. And then there are that percentage of people who are coming online to search for solutions, for insurance solutions. And after many, after many permutations and combinations, we found that it's a function of what your brand stands for, what's the price point, what's the proposition, and what's the experience, as would usually be the case for most brands that are transacting online in a direct to consumer business. And here, there is this other thing about us being an intermediary led. Keep your mouth near it. It's drifting away from you. All right. We're an intermediary led business. For instance, usually there'd be a seller involved. So the choice we had was because we had 5% market share. So let's play in the preference funnel and try and tell people we're better in simple marketing terms or expand the category. Because anyways, not too many people were searching for life insurance or critical illness or cancer insurance. And after much soul searching, we thought we'll take the bold theme of expanding the category. And the traditional marketing logic would say, if you're 5% and LIC is 50%, don't try to expand the category. The larger benefit will go there. And we said, all right, we're doing this only direct to consumer and digital. So hopefully we should have a measurement ecosystem to know who we nudge, where is he or she in the purchase funnel, what should be the sequence of conversations that we should have with them. So that when they're ripe for their decision, they're more likely to consider us, the brand that nudged them in the first place than anybody else. And so, cutting one year and 16 months of effort in between, on March 31st, as we finished the last fiscal, we ended with approximately one third of the category, which means in direct to consumer protection, as a category, we were 33%, one out of the three direct term plans sold in the country were from MaxLife. And this includes LIC. And a lot of that had to do with the fact that we started to expand the category and started to have nudge conversations right at the top of the funnel, even though there are brands like ICICI, HDFC, and State Bank of India, there are much, much larger, much stronger from a consumer consideration point of view. Good move, bold move. I think one of the very recent examples that I'd like to share with you all, and before I do that, you know, Kavya, I think most of us in the room would tend to think that brands like, you know, brands from PepsiCo would typically be large A&M, you know, big brands present on television. I think we're challenging ourselves and pretty much the landscape is challenging us to look at things differently. So very recently, about a couple of months ago, we launched a vitamin fortified beverage called Aquafina Vitamin Splash.  And we made a very conscious choice.   A very interesting, you know, thing, and it's actually very logical and very obvious and very common sensical, is that digital also allows you to integrate offline, your offline interventions extremely well with your online interventions. So what are the kind of places where consumers are thinking about wellness or thinking about health? You know, let's say it's at a spa, it's at a salon, you know, it's when you really sort of want to relax, it's at a parlor, it's when you go shopping into the modern trade kind of channels. So we tapped all those channels where consumers would be in a positive frame of mind to look for wellness kind of, you know, products. We also brought on board a large army of influencers, you know, to just sort of try the product and very organically, a lot of them have come back and spoken about the product. But fundamentally, I think the really big learning, and it's not again a secret, but a big learning is that the whole interactive age also means interacting with the consumer's ecosystem. So we've literally now planted vitamin splash in the relevant consumers. So we've identified about six and a half million consumers and our entire point is about reaching out to that consumer through multiple touch points, you know, catch them at a modern trade store through geo-fencing, or when they're at a salon, you know, let them try the product, get the sort of right influencers to talk to them at the right kind of events, sample the product at a lot of these fashion events where, you know, again, it's all about looking good. So I think fundamentally, you know, that's a big shift that we're making and for PepsiCo as an organization, almost 30% of our spends today is on digital, which is a drastic move, Shivji, from about three years ago maybe. Okay, so we're gonna hear the two remaining views, and then we're gonna be finished with speaking, time will take questions. But I'm gonna have a last question from each of these distinguished panelists, which will be, if you were to launch a site, what would it be? So they have to keep this in their mind. You can give it a name, you can tell us, but that'll be your last question, and you gotta give us, okay, I'll do this, okay? Let's finish the last views. Yeah, so for GEO, I would go back to the same example, GEO KBC, which was, you know, a play along platform, where, you know, the insight was that everybody, you know, wanted to play, interact, and we wanted to create a second screen while people were watching TV. And, you know, there was a time when four million users, they played together at same time on GEO, you know, play along. In total, we crossed more than 30 million users who played with us, and that is the best platform, or the best showcase of interactivity coming from GEO. Great. Yeah, so I know that we just 42 seconds left. I talked about the mindset, the always-on, I want what I want when I want it mindset, and their expectations from the category, which is actually category agnostic, and the impact that it has on brands. So, one clear observation inside is that easy is today beating better. So, if you're not easy, then you're not relevant, hence, easy's beating better. So, I'm just talking about impacts that it is having on our business, on our brand, on our category. Other is looking at how fast the online world is changing and so are our consumers. Earlier, we used to make 18 to 24 months marketing calendars. We still make those, but the real meat of those marketing calendars is just true for three months. So, we keep a very tight eye on what is the marketing calendar for the next three months. Rest all is more of a theory, more of, you know, keeping things trigger-ready. There is a significant shift from 35-seconders, TVCs to six-seconder YouTube campaigns, and also the real-time consumer reach, while we still continue to do brand imagery track reports, the insights come only after eight weeks. Rather, we would log on to Google Analytics or Google Analytics 360, that's gonna give you real-time update on the health of the business. So, all of these changes are happening as we speak. Even copy test. Earlier, for example, in my category, I know that buy one, get one is the wild guard that we can play. Is there a better way I can represent the same offer? Earlier, I had to go for a print out today. I can just do a copy test. Buy one, get one free. Buy two at 50% blah, blah, blah. On Google, and within a matter of couple of hours, I'll get to know which is the best copy, which is the winning copy. So, all of these are impact at an org level, the way we work, the way marketers look at the marketing strategy. Even impact on org. For example, in Pizzard, a CTO is reporting into the CMO. Something which is unheard of, right, but it's working for the brand. Equally important is the single view of the customer. Today, what's happening is consumers are going online. For whatever reasons, they make the card and then they drop out and they call up at the call center. And the guy that picks up the call at the call center has no idea who's calling. Ideally, consumers would expect that the brand should know that the guy made a card online and now for whatever reason he's calling at the call center and the guy should just say, okay, I can see your card. Please go ahead. We'll just close your order. So, all of these are the impacts that we are witnessing in our category. I'll just pick one example, I'm cognizant of the time. How we leverage the power of internet and we leverage the power of social media last year. So, I mean, if you look at the mind of the competitors and India is a duopoly, right? So, we were looking at one disruption in this category and you know what? That disruption didn't come through TV, didn't come through any digital campaign but it came through a social media campaign. So, the day Sakshi Malik won the bronze medal for India in Olympics and that was the first bronze medal. We thought that we'll just invite everybody who has Sakshi's name in her name. So, Sakshi has a word in her name. We will invite all those Sakshi's to come to a pizza store across the country and we will give them a pizza for free and it just became viral in, I would say, less than an hour's time. We were breaking the internet for 48 hours and even in today's consumer work that we do, consumers tell us that the last ad from Pizza Hut that we recall is the one wherein you did something with Sakshi and something with Sindhu. So, that's the journey that we have over taken and it's really nice. So, I don't think we're gonna have time for that last question. Maybe you can ask them privately.  It says you are over time by three minutes, 23 seconds. Time is up and then as you keep looking, we will get you. Then it says the police are waiting.  So, I'm not, it's there, I'm telling you, you guys. So, I value my family. So, I want you guys to give a big round of applause to each of these people and everything we've heard and I think you can. So, I think before we summarize the session, we'll also open the house for question answers because I'm sure that one of the few times when you get a panelist such as this, but in the interest of time, we can take two questions to the maximum if there are any questions in the audience that you'd like to ask the panelists. You'll have two questions and the best of them gets a free Business World subscription for the entire year. Okay, let's do it. So, I, this, yeah, this question is to Anuja. So, as all of you spoke about the ease to understand the behavior of the user internet and encaching the opportunities, at the same time, you all understand that internet plays very, can be very detrimental also in terms of now controlling the brand in terms of damaging it. So, sometimes like we see videos posted against the brand. So, how do you control that basically? So, what is your response to those kind of, circulation which happens in the internet era and whether you tend to respond to it immediately or have a lag to it and then respond it later wisely, that's what I want to understand, controlling the damage to the brand. So, if I understand your question correctly, your question is essentially about if there is a content piece that you put out to the consumer and it's not taken too well, how do you respond? Is that the question? So, if the user internet is posted or video posted where we talk about, okay, this is more acidic, you can actually wash this, something like that, clean your house like this. So, it also goes against the brand, right? Yeah. So, first thing like creating awareness among customer, saying that, okay, this brand is safe or something like that and taking a control measures over that, that how we can prevent this to further circulate and damage the brand, basically. Let me, again, answer this in two parts. The way we, you know, I think what's really essential in what we're doing very actively at PepsiCo, one part of it is to be extremely active on the whole online listening piece. So, you know, we've got an agency that tracks every commentary, every piece of commentary across our brands and the brand teams are supposed to be, you know, tracking the positive, negative and neutral commentary, looking at it, each of it individually, pretty much twice a week, you know, or three times a week. We've also got a team in place, you know, that's responsible for responding to questions, you know, so there are, again, two parts to it. There is one part which is fairly, you know, kind of is built on FAQs. When I'm launching a new product, I know there'll be a certain set of questions that the consumers would have and so, you know, it's obviously kind of logical to have answers ready for that. The second part of, you know, if it is things that may just come up, not in the right spirit, you know, which are maybe, like you said, detrimental to the brand, there are, again, two approaches. I think one of it is when it's a genuine consumer concern, our turnaround time, you know, is 24 hours to that response. However, I think as, you know, as a responsible brand, it's also important to understand that, you know, what is the intent behind any kind of content that's put out? You may not be able to control and respond to everything and it's not maybe equally, you know, the right thing to do. The consumers out there are very, very intelligent, let me tell you. Very often, you know, when there are people who put out content that's not in our interest, there is equally a very strong loyal base of consumers today and that's the advantage of social media who come to, you know, your rescue, who are the ones who would come and talk about, you know, the great things that the brand is doing even before you do it. So I think it's constantly important for a brand to invest, you know, into building the brand ethics and the brand on the social media so that you have your consumers come and talk about the good things that you're doing and you don't have to talk about it, you know, virtually. I think, you know, just another aspect to your question, what we've also done very actively is to ensure, we've had a pact with Google to ensure that the brand narratives and the brand communication does not figure alongside with any objectionable content. That's, I think, an important piece that marketers need to be very, very careful of is to, you know, what's coming alongside right before or, you know, next to your content and how is that coloring the consumer's mind? I hope I answered your question. All right, thank you. I think we'll have to close this in the interest of time. You can definitely take it offline, sir. Thank you, thank you very much to the panelists here and let me please invite Mr. Rohan Mehta, CEO of Social Connect, to join us on the stage to present a small token or a memento to our panelists here. Thank you, please, welcome in, Rohan. And we can put a round of applause for this wonderful discussion. We're sure that this was intriguing in lots of ways and gave you some new insights and thought processes to work towards a new perspective and take on the brand strategy further.


Sgwrth i amlwg, mae'r cyntaf o gweithio i'r ffordd ddim yn ymwneud. Byddai'n meddwl ystod baiad yn ysgolw'r rhagorau a'r cyfrifwyr sy'n ddiddordeb hwnnw. Dyma'r rhagorau sy'n ddiddordeb hwnnw i gweithio'r ysgolwyr sy'n ei wneud i gael'r cyfrifwyr sy'n ddiddordeb hwnnw. Mae'n bosbwysig cyfrifwyr yma'r ysgolwyr ar y cyfrifwyr mewn cyfrifwyr ac rwy'n meddwl ysgolwyr. systematig review. As we move forward we realise that we didn't actually have sufficient information to do justice to that title. So for the time being we have some provisional findings to discuss with you and we'll talk a little bit about the gaps surrounding current reporting and current evidence to support this particularly interesting topic. I should give thanks to the co-authors particularly Sylvia here and Bayard who has done a lot of work on this in the last couple of weeks. Since I'm the first to speak I'm going to dwell a little on this particular slide. This is really just, as I'm sure most of you are aware, a little bit of justification with regards to why we're doing work on this topic and why we think today is so important. It's also a good opportunity for those of you who unfortunately are meant to be next door to slowly pick up your things and relocate unless you wish to stay which I would recommend. So this is some data from the WHO, a country reported data that was submitted to the WHO in the last couple of years. These are a selected number of conflict affected countries and you can see that in each and every country there is quite a substantial burden of NCDs. The problem that we face and the reason that we wanted to look at this in a little bit more detail is that the specifics and the finer details are very poorly understood. I'm sure it goes without saying for most of you that we see now that the burden of NCDs is certainly growing. Greater number of middle income countries are affected by non-communicable diseases. We also see a global demographic shift, aging populations and so on, which are proportionally more affected by NCDs. But also in crisis specific contexts, some of the stressors related to crisis, the relationship between health seeking behaviour, the relationship between unhealthy practices, alcohol use, smoking, drug use and so on, and also the burden of mental health and the relationship between mental health and non-communicable diseases, which is well established, is something that I think we need to explore in more detail. Of course, in these crisis contexts, the breakdown of health services and the treatment gap is also a very interesting area for further research. Back to the systematic review. This is the aim of the review and the overarching objectives. You'll see as we discuss some of the findings that we haven't really yet been able to do justice to some of the objectives. But as we move forward and as we work towards completing the review, we hope to have some further details to share with you. So it goes without saying that the systematic review followed the Prisma guidelines. We employed three arms in terms of the search terms, looking at crisis-related terms, terms related to non-communicable diseases and terms related to the burden of disease. And we searched the usual databases plus grey literature sources. So we had some of the co-authors that work for humanitarian agencies were supplying grey lit sources themselves and we approached other agencies and other databases. But this is an ongoing process and I will come back to that as the end as we solicit more papers from you. So we were looking specifically at crisis-affected populations, specifically civilians, so we didn't look at veterans. That was quite a significant number of papers that looked at combat veterans who were back in their home countries. We were looking specifically at low and middle income countries and also NCDs and their complications. And we only looked at quantitative studies. We had no language restrictions and no time restrictions. So we picked up initially just over 12,000 papers. We settled on 71 published studies and a further 10 studies from the grey literature. This slide shows you the trend in publication over time. So the first study that we found was published back in 1990. You see a reasonably positive trend towards further publication in the last five to ten years. Most of these studies since 2010 are from the Middle East. Many of the more recent studies related to the Syria crisis more specifically. Here we have broken down some of the papers by context. There are some interesting observations to be made here. The first on the left here is really the lack of published work coming out related to the African continent, which is quite dramatic. Only one paper from the chosen studies. Likewise, only two papers that looked at IDP populations specifically. And just over three quarters of the papers were focused on conflict crises. This is another interesting observation certainly for those of you that are doing work or that intend to go on and do research in this particular area. Currently the evidence is very reliant on very poor quality data. Lots of routine data reporting from hospital databases and so on. These sort of retrospective studies which are methodologically quite poor. Only a handful of case control studies and a lot of descriptive work. This is perhaps the most interesting of the slides. What sort of diseases have people been investigating? Some of the studies I should say were reporting on multiple different disease outcomes. You'll see the total number here is more than the 81. You see the big three there, cardiac disease, hypertension, diabetes. Quite an interesting number of papers related to cancer as well. And the seven other papers. We had one paper that looked at dermatological problems. Another paper that looked at GI disease. Only one paper actually that looked at GI disease which was quite interesting. And then a couple of renal papers as well. Some stuff on arthritis, COPD and asthma. So where are the gaps? You can see from the early findings that we've presented here that there are certainly a great number of gaps. One of the major problems that we've identified thus far is that there is a real lack of population level data. There are very few studies that are reporting at a population level. And this makes it very difficult to look at issues related to access to care and the treatment gap and to really make strong statements regarding the burden of disease in this particular population. As I mentioned briefly, there's currently an over-reliance on very basic study methodologies, lots of descriptive work, reliance on the retrospective analysis of routine hospital data. Very rarely are we finding the use of control groups. And often also some of these studies are making fairly tenuous and quite interesting causative links based on this fairly poor quality data. There was one study in particular that looked at retrospectively at some data from the conflict in the Balkans and made some interesting correlations between the conflict and the incidence of right-sided colon cancer, which was quite an interesting study. And the quality of data. So less than half of the papers are using validated diagnostic tools, which is something worth bearing in mind. And as I've just mentioned, only one third of the paper are making conclusions that we think they can really make based on the data that they have access to. So next steps, as I've said a couple of times, this is very provisional data. There is still more work to be done. We still need to go through with the second screening of the data and the full quality appraisal, which is pending. We would certainly like to identify more Cray literature. We do feel that there is more out there. And this is a call to you. If you do have information that you think would be useful to us, please do get in touch with Bayard directly. And similarly, as we're still in the fairly early stages of this study, we're really interested to hear what sort of research questions and what sort of information you would like to be extracted from this study. We have our own aims and objectives, but if there's anything that you think is missing from there, then now is a good time to discuss that. So we do hope to ultimately publish the final results in a paper or a series of papers. So thank you very much. Please do get in touch with Bayard if you have any further information and I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you. Any quick questions and clarification? Hi, thanks very much. I'm Amy Banagie from UCL. I wanted to ask if there was any articles referring to training or degree of workforce expertise in these areas because as well as Burden wants to know about the resource to tackle it because there usually aren't even the doctors in health. Professionals who go out there, there isn't expertise to deal with NCDs usually more often. So I just wondered if that was tackled both in the humanitarian forces and in the country level as well. Thank you. Sure, and that's a very interesting question. I don't think that any of the papers that we have picked up as part of this review approach that issue directly, but it's possible that we have missed some of those papers that we were screening particularly looking at burden of disease. So some of the search terms we used may actually have filtered out some of those studies. So it's difficult to say if there is any work that has been done on that. Slim Slammer from WHO MRO. I did myself a review, I need to share, actually we were discussing with Philippa to share some of the papers that were never been publishing this, but about five to six years ago. What was interesting is before the Syria crisis, the papers that you missed partially were coming from Rita and Katrina and mainly on disaster, not on conflict. But since five to six years we have seen emerging now a number of papers that are mainly on conflict. But before that, most of the papers that you can find out are mainly on disaster, not on conflicts, and mainly coming from hurricanes, some of the earthquake related to Pakistan. So you probably have found those ones as well. But I think that there is something now happening also with always a delay between some of the events and the publication of course. But I think that something is changing in the last years, mainly related to conflict in the Middle East. Thank you. Thanks very much, James.


Obviously he's just going to flip it.  Just because you flipped something?  He's going to flip it when the cop Australian in the back seat of an undercover cop.   So that alone will get you some lenience.   So when it comes to the females, you're just extra mischievous. Like, you take girls out to dinner by the end of the evening and you just end up on feeding them all these beverages freely until that memory's leaving them like dementia is creeping in, sleeping them before they get drooled like a dental anesthetist.  I can't, you try saying mate. What's your idea of romance? Taking a girl on a blind date, right?   Acting like he's something special to all the sluts he vets.   Open the crowd, boo you off the stage and don't react to what you say. But they don't care.  Let's go.  Dumb D.  Don't even get me started, lad. It's the Dunflop 8th birthday weekend. I didn't even want to be a part of that.  So I can't believe I'm even studying with bars to rap.  See when I was doing my research, I thought I would have had a couple of great fans. But I couldn't think up any dates.  I spent weeks in sales just looking for something to make rhyme. But I couldn't find any angles.  Now what's happening, Leeds?    Trust me, you don't want no trouble now. Think Tony Bellew, Liam Smith, Paddy the baddie. I'm just another scouts who punches hard. Davy, from Hobart in Tasmania now. That's hardly the main street to Philly. If you think he keeps a milli, you're being silly.  So I've got to teach him how scouts are slang like Kerry and Billy. See, I don't even know why they let these fakes debut. Me, I had the tough, bagging up grams of stuff. Man was just slangin' drugs to make it through. So the bud that you're smokin', that's the haze we grew. And you can get a box office like it's pay-per-view. 99% of bottle wrappers are faggots. If I think with all the lies and stories, I'm a real guy, I've had to rise in court in life to Jordies. But all of those years of being around drugs led to addiction, which in turn led to lack of preparation and writing poorly.  Now after a long night of getting bummed, you walk like you've been on a boat.  You love sneaking with gloats and sneaking off home without leaving a note. Basically what I'm sayin' is that tattoo's not the first time you've taken D to the throat. McDon D. Motherfucker at Corks danglin' round his head when he boarded the flight. He touched down in England and went for a walk in the night. Tourism at four in the morning, he saw all the sights. He bumped into a group of huddies who started talkin' some shite. But he stood his ground fame, it didn't cause him a fright. He should have just handed over his wallet, but he was all for a fight. Now most people would have saw their own life flashed before their own eyes, but he just stood there and went, huh, you called that a knife? That never happened. Now that never happened. And if you believe that little story, well, you're slacking. Cos if you'd have been like, you called that a knife, you'd have been like, yeah, and stabbed him in the face.  I'm a whole different breed of British. I won't make you a cup of tea.   Faced with that tough decision, do I pay for coke or for rent?  Looks like I'm going homeless again. And you think it's okay because you're known as a vet. No, motherfucker. You're just known as a mess. You are known as the bloke at the end of most of the events with his nose in the air like he's broken his net trying to catch on a line that went over his head.  Look at him.   Sorry, cut. It's like havin' a conversation with Stallone at the end of Rocky 1.   Guess that explains why I always shits the band. Your fuckin' birthstone is crystal meth. Your fuckin' birthstone is crystal meth.  So I think it's pretty obvious, Mike. He needs some honest advice. It's probably time you got your priorities right.  It's like, you've been doin' coke since in utero. Since in utero. I am sure your mother took drugs.  Okay, let's just drag you around.  So I put innuendo in a bag and sell it back to him for 30 quid.  He was like, well, if you ask me I'll be takin' it, obviously.  I'll be makin' a mockery. But you know what, guys? I really hate the hypocrisy because he'll probably drop a bar about me rapin' or wallabying everybody here on the guy who does the fuckin' Australian commentary. If I ever took an L to this fuckin' bell, well, I'd never live it down. So I just sniffed a mound of cocaine. There's a big amount in those veins. But let me chill for now. Everybody's simmered down. I deserve a bigger offer.  The man know the flow's sick. But I'm not into those quips.  Now listen here, Dundee. Mate, hear the full-on tit.  You should change it. It should be this.  I'm not even sayin' I'm tryin' to be funny. But if he changes the D to an E, well, he suits that Dundee.   It looked like me brand. You had a stripe and then went for a joint. It's ironic how you brought somebody called Case and then went round in circles to get to the point. And you told Shuffle Tea that your mother-in-law would tear a box of nowhere and then snap his jaw. Well, she's dead, man, I'm sure. But if she turns up here today, I'll end up as your new step-dad-in-law. Your mother-in-law is not a bad man.    Evil lady at the door and you can't pay a back sheen about that long. Shuffle Tea's funny scheme about how long it took to get at us. So tell me, Dundee D, was it really as long as Shuffle said it was?    Enjoy that. So you can city yourself to be a bit of a tough can, do ya, buck?  Jungle juice. You try intimidatin' me, boy. I promise you'll catch these punches, too. Bloody old Meg Ryan in Top Gun.    If I say I wanna push him over to Edge, go all Amanda-todd cos I'm makin' fun of you and have that body weighin' heavy on the soul like sprungy shoes.   We ain't need to put him on suicide watcher, worry about his mental health. Cos it's kinda hard to neck yourself on ya, and you ain't gotta neck yourself on ya.  How's that work? He couldn't choke if you left the lad hangin', but he manages to win every one of his rap battles, but that's how he has it.    If you take the win with everything you've been with, been throughin', mate, and you deserve it, mate.  I'll lose this battle. I care if I get murdered, right?       You did the whole round about how you used it to change when you had the kid and now you play happy families with the lady you married and the baby she got in sick. How could I ever hate on that? That is big. That's amazing, man. That is it. You're a responsible father now. No more blazin' in bags of piff, breakin' up grams of sniff or takin' the massive hits.  And now you're in shape. You look great. I mean, man, it's ripped. It must be amazing to be able to tell the family that you're going to the UK for the battle trip and now you're gonna be the next Australian rapper to make it now. That is big.  And I know we ain't payin' this man a quid. It's not meant to be funny. I know we ain't payin' this man a quid. You ought to beg for spare chains to get flights from Tasmania and a place you can have a kid.  In fact, you may as well have a spliff. Have a couple of spacecakes. Let the weight pile back on a bit because at the end of the day, you never change.  Trust me, the same old ways and the habits stick. You said that your life was saved by this battleship.  Now, judging from the lack of reaction, that wasn't very good.  So you said battle rap saved your life when mine's been potentially ruined. It's not meant to be funny.   Battle rap doesn't bring me happiness anymore.  You're not the only one who's had to battle with addiction. Just these past few months, I've been standin' in the kitchen, I've been scratching, I've been itchin'in me. I can't handle this affliction and it gets to that point where I have to just go fishing. Right now, I much prefer angling to battling and I've achieved a lot through rapping and for that, I am proud but I can't escape the fact that the buzzer once had his dying down. They say all good things must come to an end and I'm starting to think that the time is now so live on stage, I'm retiring. Wow, it's goodbye for now and this couldn't have been too hungry I'm season a rival bout. This was just in Uendall saying thank you all for the memories and takin' this final bout. Tired of my mom!


Madam Chair, Ministers, Head of Delegation, Distinguished Data Guests, Distinguished Participants, Ladies and Gentlemen, thank you all for joining us today. Together with me, my Deputy Secretary-General, three directors, we warmly welcome you to the sixth World Telecommunication ICT Policy Forum. Why we all wish we could have made face-to-face in Geneva? I'm glad that the ITU family has come together in this way to discuss over the next three days the new and emerging technologies that show so much promise for all humanity. My special thanks go to all the regional coordinators and all those who have closely worked with the ITU Secretariat over the last three weeks to address the challenges of hosting this event under these difficult circumstances. I'm also immensely grateful for all the efforts put in by all the members of the informal experts group during the preparatory process. They have provided us with a solid set of draft opinions and they did it with almost no brackets left. I think that might be the first time. Under the outstanding leadership of their Chairman, Mr. Fabio Bigi, this woman and a man representing our entire family showed a constructive spirit of cooperation and consensus like no other. I'm very pleased with the outputs of this group. The five draft opinions in front of us sent a clear, strong and positive message to the world that these new and emerging technologies and ICTs in general are essential to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals and address some of the world's most pressing opportunities and challenges from COVID-19 to the digital divide. New data from ITU reveals strong global growth in internet use. The largest we have seen in a decade. It is a reminder that our world is more connected than ever. And yet the ability to connect the remains profoundly unequal and almost three billion people are still offline. There's a lot more to do to get everyone connected and to drive the development of new and emerging technologies central to the digital economy. I believe this forum and all the work that has gone into can help put us on the path to meet this huge challenge. I'm confident in your determination and ability to rise to the moment. And I'm grateful to her excellency, the Minister for Communications and the Digitalization of Ghana, Mrs. Osula and also Echo 4 for accepting to lead our discussions and serve as chair of the forum. Before I leave you in her capable hands, I want to remind you that what we are doing here over the next three days, we have facilitated the preparation of the three major ITU conferences that are awaiting us in the new year. So that WTSA, March WTDC in June and the PP 2022 in September, October can in turn bring the benefits for digital transformation to all for years to come. I wish you all a very successful WTPF 2021. Thank you very much.


Hi, I'm Albuquerque Siddiq Ango, Developer Evangelizing Program Manager at GitLab. In this session, I'll be sharing with you how you can improve the impact of your diversity initiatives in Africa. A little bit about myself. I'm an engineering-based currently in the Netherlands, and my interests include Kubernetes, CIC, the GitOps, and DevSecOps. You can find me on Twitter, at CIRC247. I'm also a community organizer. One of my recent activities include leading the organization of the Kubernetes Community Days Africa. Now, let's proceed first to learn about Africa as a continent. Oftentimes, you hear a lot of people speak about or refer to Africa like one country that all of us belong to, or you sense the ignorance of a lot of people in the West, in the Americas or Europe, about the continent of Africa. The continent of Africa is composed of 54 sovereign nations, countries that speak diverse languages. And I think because of the lack of data that most people lack of knowledge about the continent, it's often assumed that it's one place that they can just visit, or if they visit Kenya or South Africa, it's more like they know about the whole of Africa. Oftentimes, I've been asked if I say, oh, I'm from Nigeria, oh, that's Africa. And I'll be asked to references about things that when I digest, I was, OK, you're probably referring to Kenya or you're referring to South Africa, and you sense the ignorance in the person because he thought it's all the same thing. But Africa is very diverse. Now, let's see the different parts of Africa. One, North Africa. But this is mostly composed of Arabian-speaking countries like Egypt, Algeria, Libya, Morocco, Western Sahara. They are often classified together with Middle Easts and called MENA, that is Middle East and not Africa. And most of the countries belong to the Arab League. Now, the next one is Sub-Saharan Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa are countries that are to the south of North Africa and composed of most of the countries within Africa. Now, within Sub-Saharan Africa, we have West Africa, which includes Nigeria. We are from Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, Niger Republic, Mali, Mauritania, and a host of other countries. Now, out of the 400 million people in West Africa, Nigeria is composed of like 40 to 50% of that. And there are loads of languages that are spoken within West Africa. I personally speak Hausa, Yoruba, English, and a bit of Arabic. Now, then we have Central Africa. A lot of people here, quite a lot about the DRC, Democratic Republic of Congo or South Sudan. There are lots of other countries within Central Africa. Then we have East Africa, Kenya, Mozambique, Madagascar, Somalia, Ethiopia, and so on. Then we have Southern Africa, with South Africa being the most prominent among the countries in Southern Africa. Now, these are the countries in Africa. Africa is not Wakanda. It's not just one country. It's a huge continent with lots of countries. Because literally, I think the last time I traveled from Nigeria to South Africa, Cape Town, I flew six hours to get to South Africa. So it's a very large continent. Now, to the main part of my talk, which is how do you improve your diversity initiatives in Africa? We've seen that Africa is a huge continent, more than a billion people. But how do you now craft or create these diversity initiatives to have impact on the continent? The first things are, what are your objectives from the first place? What are you trying to achieve? Is it just publicity stunts so that the media will say, oh, this company is doing something in Africa or doing some diversity initiatives? Are you just interested in adding more numbers to the KPIs you are sharing for your stakeholders? Or are you creating some form of talent pipeline for your company and creating more talents that you can recruit or bring into the industry? Or are you trying to create visibility for your solution or your products that you are trying to sell? What you are trying to achieve goes a long way in defining the kind of result you have from your diversity initiatives. It is very important for you to clearly research and define your objective, then set the right KPIs that you want to achieve. If it's just numbers, you can get numbers, you can, I've seen events or programs that are organized mainly for numbers, a ton of people show up. But at the end of the day, you don't see the impact, you don't see what exactly was the company trying to achieve and everything boils down to, oh, they were probably just after the publicity. So it's important to get this right. Whatever you try aside this depends on your OKR. What is your objective? What is the key results you are looking for at the end of the day? And how do you identify that you've achieved this curiosity? What is the key performance indicator that you want to see from the initiatives you are trying to create? Now, the next thing is the diversity. You need to understand how diverse the continent is. We've seen language. Most of us are most of the continents that are used by projects and initiatives is English. English is just a small part of the language spoken on the continent. I think it's around 13% or something. So it is important to understand that if your content is mainly in English, you are only reaching a subset of the continent. Then gender, right from the beginning, your initiative should take into consideration how gender is perceived, how gender is handled and how you can reach more. Taking into consideration that there is a lot of cultural differences even within a particular country. Then region, this is where a lot of countries get it wrong. You are doing an initiative. You call it, okay, let's say for example, White Heart Hacking Africa. But all your speakers, all your focus, all the influencers and all the people that are driving this initiative are based in Nigeria or they are based in Kenya or they are based in South Africa. You stand the risk of it just being in that country instead of being a continent-wide event, one country against 53 other nations. So it is important for you to understand, okay, who are your audience? How do you intend to reach them? How can you effectively reach as many people as possible within the continent? You can probably make it in more regional events within Africa, like West Africa or East Africa or North Africa or Southern Africa because some of the countries within this region are kind of closely meet and they tend to, content tend to circulate more within those regions than you just pick in a specific region and expect the impact to radiate to the rest of the continent. It won't just work. Now, then to do more into the language diversity, like I was sharing earlier, 17% of the continent speaks Arabic and mostly in the northern part of Africa, which is like the top region, the northern region of Africa, 13% speak English. And these English are mostly official language, not local languages. 11.5% speak French as official language. 10% speak Wahili, both as local and as official. Then 5% speak Hausa, mostly in Western Africa. This is just like top 5%, the top five of the languages that are spoken on the continent. There are thousands of other languages across different regions, but if you want to reach more people, these are the languages you need to focus on, not just English. So it is important that, for example, if you take Cameroon, Cameroon has the anglophone part and the francophone part. So if your content is mainly in English, you stand the risk of not reaching a whole lot of other people that might benefit from your content. And anytime you are creating initiatives, it is important to also take note the different language barriers. Someone who speaks English might not be good at the English because it's probably a secondary third language. So it is important to take into consideration how people, the type of language people speak and how you can easily reach them. Now, the next thing is traveling. Traveling is hard within Africa and when you want to travel out of Africa. So a lot of sponsorship, I've seen a lot of sponsors who were, hey, we want students to attend KubeCon, we are giving out free tickets, sponsorship tickets, but these tickets you are giving free is nothing compared to the amount of stress, the amount of money and so on that will be required for people to travel out of Africa. In Europe, it's easy to travel because it's cheaper, I've traveled less than 100 Euro from one country to another within Europe. Within Africa, getting visa is a problem. I personally have been denied visa up to 10 times by different countries to US, within the EU and so on. There are countries I don't even bother any longer to even try to travel to because of my issues getting visa. But once I moved to Europe, things got a bit easier, but it's not everyone that can move to Europe. It's very expensive traveling out of Africa. For example, there was a time I did a bit of research and noticed because I'm based in Nigeria, it is cheaper for me to travel Amsterdam, Abuja, Amsterdam than to travel Abuja, Amsterdam, Abuja, probably due to taxes, due to fuel and a lot of other things. So it is important to take all this into consideration. And also it can be very difficult to travel from one point in Africa to another. I've traveled to Africa once where the only option I had was to use Emirates to travel to Dubai then to keep them. I know of someone who wanted to attend a conference and had to travel to Europe before getting to Africa. It's, Nigeria is very close to Nigeria, but most times when I'm checking for flights that can travel to Nigeria, if I don't want to take the more than a day long trip, which can be really dangerous, it's only Air France that flies to Nigeria most times. So it's very, very difficult. So when you are creating your initiatives and you are looking as people moving around, taking into consideration that it can be very hard to travel within Africa. Now the next thing is, how do you intend to move this initiative along the way? When you start, okay, probably you are trying to get visibility for a technology or for a project. Where do new people start from? Then what's the next thing? How do they pipeline? How do they move along to learn different stages of this technology and evolve and grow within it? There has been several times where in the name of empowerment, a lot of technologies are introduced to people. Let's say for example, Android development. Most of the initiatives that are introduced and that is introduced to people who probably have never used Java before, don't have very sound knowledge of computing, then you expect them to start building Android applications and to start shipping apps to the Play Store. Things have gotten better, but you stand in chance of losing a lot of people to, this is complex, this is hard. What sort of pipeline are you creating? Once someone learns Kubernetes, what's the next thing? What are their mentorship for them? Are there ways they can get into projects? How do they get into projects? You want people to contribute to the, let's say for example, the Kubernetes project. Where do they start from? Where do they evolve? Where do they get mentorship? Where do they access resources? It is important to be specific with how you intend all these initiatives to introduce, to progress with people, not just to throw things at them and expect results. Now the next thing is, prioritize having remote or hybrid. One thing I've seen, or I've learned from the recent lockdowns and pandemics, it is easier to reach more richer content, to get speakers, to get quality speakers, to get diverse speakers, to get lots of participants. If we look at from the last physical events that was held for KubeCon to the KubeCon EU of 2020 to this that's happening, you will notice the surge in participants and speakers that are able to attend because the travel barrier is no longer there. And a whole lot of the visa issues, the visa limitations are no longer there. So more people are able to participate and engage. So it is important to prioritize remote or hybrid. Hybrid in the sense where probably you have viewing parties where people can participate in awesome clusters of events within different regions. This will make people where you have your diversity initiative to be able to contribute and participate more in whatever you are trying to do. The next thing is, most initiatives tend to use influencers within a community, especially in Africa, to reach more people or to push their content more. Yeah, it is extremely important and they can help in pushing down your resources or content down to the right people, but be cautious because sometimes a lot, we've seen a lot of situations where the product gets, or the initiative gets represented poorly or because the influencers have some different agendas or different initiatives that they are pursuing or they might not represent what you are trying to achieve or the objectives or the policies or the credits that you have as a company or organization. The end of painting your initiatives in a bad light or creating a scenario where you have to now initiate some disaster control initiative. So be careful how you use influencers. Now, the next thing is partner with existing communities. There are communities who have built networks, who have built structures within the continent. For example, the Google developer groups, they have organizers in a lot of countries, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the developer students group have organizers in schools all over Africa. She called Africa has a great initiatives for ladies and women all over Africa and so on. Oscar does a lot of awesome work at an open source community in Africa. The Facebook developers are who has a huge network of developers. So instead of starting your own initiatives right from the ground again and it becomes more expensive to maintain and a huge overhead for you, you can partner with some of this organization so that you can hit the ground running and move more faster than you having to look at the stress of starting your own initiative all over again. Next thing is understand the challenges that are inherent in Africa before demanding too much or before setting unrealistic expectations. One, internet is a huge problem. Yes, in the Netherlands, my internet service is one gigabit per second. If that is a huge luxury, even for a company in Nigeria, if I will speak specifically for Nigeria, not to talk of an individual. There are times where you struggle to get kilobits per second. So anytime you are setting your expectations or setting anything that requires certain results, be reasonable in how you set those expectations because you know the internet is not as great as yours and you can incentivize where necessary if you are working with people who are struggling with internet or enable them to be able to make a advantage of hubs or communities by engaging with those communities, engaging with those hubs to enable your target audience. Not just expecting that, hey, your audience will have the resources to deploy Kubernetes or to build Docker images out of the blue or to download your one gigabit resources one gigabit resources that you've provided. Power is a problem, a huge problem. For example, some parts of Africa, for example, like in Nigeria, where electricity is a huge problem. You can stay for days without power. So be mindful of when you are setting your expectation around the results to know that there can be power problem. People can face power issues. Security can be a challenge. While you should be mindful of what you see in media and what you read in the media because one thing is a lot of Western media are based in their country. So they have a lot of news to focus on in their country and a small fraction of time to focus on news, international news from other region. So they tend to highlight the negative or those news that are important for their ratings instead of reporting some of the awesome and great things that are happening. So you tend to see a lot of bad and less good from the continent. There is a lot of awesome activities and programs that are happening within the continent. But if you are not looking, you will see them. These are just to name a few of the challenges. Do your research. Work with the communities to understand what issues they are having before you set your expectation. The next thing is prioritized mentorship over events. A lot of communities want to focus on events. Let's hold these, let's hold that. Instead, focus on mentorship. For example, like most of the CNCF projects have different mentorship at different level for people who have been learning but want to actively engage with the community or contribute, can start by learning from those who are already established within the community and grow. The next thing is showcasing thought leadership on the continent. There are lots of people doing awesome things but we tend to focus on those who are still trying to learn or those who don't have the knowledge yet instead of also highlighting and showcasing those who have already done great and awesome work for the community. That way we even raise people to become mentors within the continent and to also be role models for others within the continent to look up to instead of every time trying to come in and help. The last thing is, I want to talk about is is a thin line between helping and unconscious savior mentality which is a very huge problem we deal with in Africa. Most times people come with good intentions and they want to really create and support but the way it is being presented or the way it is being offered is more about let's help these poor people who don't have anything, they who are suffering, who are doing this and that and it usually comes from not really studying and understanding the reality of situations on ground. So you end up wasting your resources because you had the wrong information, you don't have data, the right data to understand the situation of things on ground. We are not engaging with partners on ground. You think the same solutions that have worked with American countries or the European countries are still the same solutions that work in Africa. At the end of the day, the whole initiative goes down the drain. So it is important for you to engage with partners to understand what is the situation on ground instead of those blindly creating an initiative and expect to get results. Listen, understand the audience. Don't just shove things down their throat. Set realistic goals and expectations. It's not like in the EU or the Americas where everything they have, there's this type of hardware, I put it enabling environment that's already been created and makes it easy for other things to grow and start. So when you are not bringing your own initiative, they already have a good foundation to start on. In Africa, in some places in Africa, you have to set the foundations yourself or build on certain foundations that have been created by some organizations. If only you asked. Then maintain a pipeline. What happens next from your initiative when you introduce it at first? What's the next thing? Is it just to hold the event and that's all, it's gone? What's the next? Are you building some form of partnership? Are you building some form of pipeline where you can get more talent, grow the talent, then take them into organizations or into projects? You need to clearly define that and make sure the pipeline is maintained and sustained. So these are the important things you need to really, really look into before pushing your initiative down. Understand the continent. Know more about the continent. Engage with reliable partners, not just anyone who has a good profile on Twitter. Verify their successes, work with other people who have demonstrative results. Don't just go for online personas, people who really, really, really want to push things down the continent. Understand the diversity of the continent is extremely important. I will go a long way in you at even more success in whatever initiative you want to bring to the continent. Thank you very much. And I will be available for questions in the chat and if you have more questions, you can reach me on Twitter at circuit247 and more information about me is on my website. Thank you and goodbye.


My name is Ishaad Hussain. I'm a professor of Microbiology. This course has been named Microbiology and has been specifically designed for MS biotechnology students. Today we are talking about microbes and their classification. The learning objective for this talk include what are microbes? Why do we classify them? What are the basis for that classification? And what type of organisms we encounter in our lives? And how organisms are named scientifically? So what are microbes? Microbes, they also are called germs and microorganisms. As the name indicates, these are very small objects that cannot be seen with the naked eye. So we need some amplification process like a microscope to see them, to study them. And the studying of microbes is what we call microbiology, although microbiology has many branches. But overall the study that involves microbes or any aspect of microbes is called microbiology. There are many branches we would talk about those branches in the Duke course. We would learn more about them. Microbes are very simple in their structure. If you compare a microbe with an animal or a human, we see that animals and humans are multicellular. And those cells are arranged into tissues and then the tissues are arranged into organs.  So they're very simple. But they have various kinds in them. There's a lot of diversity. And because of that diversity, classifying them is really a challenge for the microbiologists. Generally, all microbes could be grouped either into prokaryotes or into eukaryotes. Prokaryotes, they don't have a defined nucleus. On the other hand, eukaryotes have a distinct nucleus. As could be seen in this picture, large cell belongs to a eukaryote whereas the smaller one is a prokaryotic cell. As you can see, the nucleus is very well defined in the eukaryotic cell but there is no such division in the prokaryotic cell. Now, why do we classify organisms? As you can see that studying anything randomly, it does not make much sense. So if we have a lot of things and that needs to be arranged, we would have to develop some scheme, some plan, maybe based on their shape, maybe on their size or maybe on their uses. Similarly, microorganisms, they're classified because classifying them makes life easier. And the benefits that we get include that we can study them conveniently as a group. They're easy to identify when we classify, when we put them into different groups, it is easy to identify them. Similarly, their interrelationships between these various groups could be established and similarly evolutionary relationships among various organisms could be studied as well. Now, what are the bases for classification of microorganisms? They are classified based on the similarities that they share with each other. It could be a shape or physical structure, what we call morphology. It could be biochemical similarities, could be generic similarities like DNA sequences or RNA sequences that they share with each other or even evolutionary relationships. It could be used for classifying them.


ROG Maximus Z690 Hero, sneak peek for cooling the board uses the kitchen sink of heat pipes, heat sinks, and thermal pads to keep the board cool. This also backwards compatible with older LG 1200 coolers. It's cool and it's supposed to be smart with AI overclocking, AI networking, AI cooling, and two-way AI noise cancellation. Cool, smart, and sexy with its built-in tasteful RGB. This guy does have DDR5 and PCI-E5, so everything is fast, fast, fast for this motherboard. As part of the fast, fast, fast ethos of this motherboard, it also comes with what ASUS calls the Hyper M.2 card. This add-on card comes with a MOBO and you can have three M.2 SSDs in here. ASUS has a new feature where you just press a button and it unlatches the PCI-E lock here. We weren't able to benchmark this because we don't have a 12th gen Intel CPU. No one does, but the specs look great.