Hello everybody, welcome to boost your employability. Thank you for checking in. I'm really excited about today's session, as I am for all sessions. We're going to be chatting to Ladi a little bit later. I'll do an introduction to Ladi and talk a bit about him and where he's come from, and what we're going to be discussing today on the session. Today's session is going to be about Ladi talking to us about his work selling multiple brands on Amazon's retail platform. We'll also be looking at things like behaviours, knowledges and skills that make you successful and also happy in a role such as the role that Ladi has. And we'll be talking a little bit about how to be an expert communicator and specifically about things like public speaking. So I also want your questions. So that is going to drive much of today's discussion. So please do get those in and I'll just talk a little bit about how you do that now. So if you're tuning in live and you've registered to and watching through the go to webinar app, you can post any questions by clicking on the questions icon on the screen. Do that because that really, really does get the session going and you get more out of that session as well. And we'll try and cover as many of those questions as we can. The session is recorded, but don't worry. Your questions will remain anonymous, but by recording the session it means you can watch it again on demand. And if that's the case, then you will find that on the Marketing Club webpage on CIM webpage. Also on the CIM YouTube channel, and that should be ready in about weeks, in a weeks time from today. If you want to talk about what we're doing and the session that you're in and chat about is on socials and please do. If you do that, please use the hashtag CIM events. Now, as you can see today's session is part of Marketing Club. So Marketing Club, for those of you that haven't checked in to that before, is designed to prepare people in a career and life in marketing. And you could be a student, you could be a career changer, or you could just be curious about marketing. And that's great. You know, we welcome anybody into these sessions. If you want to hear a little bit more about what we do, you can actually register to Marketing Club. And that means that you will get future updates on anything that might be of interest to you. And that includes the session today. So if you've enjoyed today's session, we can give you more information about relevant webinars like this. You'll also be kept up to date with the latest trends, innovations and concepts in marketing, and particularly across the marketing industry. And you can sign up to Marketing Club free of charge and we work on budget. And you do that by using the QR code, which you will see on the right hand bottom side of the screen. Now, if you don't manage to grab that now, don't worry about it. We'll pop that up again towards the end of this session. So about today's guest. So Ladi, he's taken an unconventional route, I would say, into professional marketing. And that's really interesting. And we can touch on a little bit of that as we get chatting to him. He studied aeronautical engineering initially. And then he moved into doing a business administration and management masters in 2015. And then in 2020, he received a PhD in marketing and consumer culture. So you can see that he's kind of transitioned into marketing gradually. And I find that fascinating. And at CIM, we're seeing more and more people moving from different subject areas or different career areas and seeing marketing as being a real attractive career option for them. He also had a day job. So what pays the bills, which is basically his digital advertising manager role at Minster FB. Now, that role is really fascinating. So he's basically leading, he's creating and he's implementing advertising strategies for the Amazon retail platform. And he does that across a global space. So he works with brands and organisations in the UK, in Europe, US, Australia and Singapore. So far and wide, he uses a hands-on approach to Amazon advertising. So using things like sponsored ads. So that's pay-per-click and demand side platforms that display side of things. And he's responsible for selling over 45 brands for his customers. Brands that include people like Weetabix. Yorkshire Tea, Baileyson Harding and Teacup. All very different brands with very different ideas. And it'd be interesting to tease out what that entails and the skills and the capabilities that are required to do that successfully. Ladi's also a CIM associate. So he's a friend of ours. He studied with CIM. And you can check out a little bit more about what Ladi's done and some of his achievements because he's got lots of them on LinkedIn. And I'm sure Ladi won't mind you stalking him on LinkedIn and checking out what he's been up to. So let's get started. Let's get into today's session and let's invite Ladi to join. Hi, Ladi. How are you doing? Hi, Jenny. Hi, everyone. Good to be here. Excellent. Excellent. Ladi, as I mentioned earlier, I'm really excited to get into chatting with you. Before we invite attendees to share some of those questions or dip into some of those questions that are coming through, I've got a few questions that I'll get things kicked off with because I'm really interested in what you do. It sounds really exciting and I'm sure that several of our viewers are curious about that as well and what your role entails. So can we talk a little bit about Minster FB, who they are, what they do and some of the brands that you advertise and how that works? Hi. Minster FB is an agency out in South Wales, so Nottingham Shared. It's about 20-30 minutes from Nottingham Center. We are an Amazon agency, so basically a lot of people find Amazon complicated, difficult to work with, and just generally it's new. It's different from working with other retailers like Tesco or Asda or even Ocado and some of the other online platforms. So they usually need somebody to take them through the process, a little bit of hand-holding, and that's what we do. So, for example, Fritella on the screen there wants to sell Fritella at their suites on Amazon, but how do they get their products on the page? How do they advertise? How do they engage with customers? How do they talk to people on Amazon via Amazon? Because they can do their TV marketing. They have their billboards, they have their radios. They even have social media. They can do all those things by themselves. But Amazon is the new frontier of sales, both online but also just generally, the way Amazon stores and all those new Amazon physical retail outlets function is quite different from the traditional. So that's what we do. But one of the things that keeps us in business, because very soon the client can say, okay, I know how it works and I don't need your services, one of the things that keeps us in business is that Amazon is constantly changing, constantly evolving. So the way Amazon functioned last year is relatively different from the way they functioned in this year and we know for a fact it will be different next year. So we are also constantly upscaling and re-inverted how we engage with Amazon for our clients. So that's one of the things I think the MD says makes us sticky. We try to be sticky with our clients when they're just representing them on Amazon, when trying to get them to be more profitable, more visible and just have a better experience on the platform for our clients. Brilliant. I knew it would be exciting. It sounds complicated and you talked about that constant upskilling need and I suppose keeping abreast of changes that are probably out of your hands and market and industry shifts. So what does somebody need to be good at if they work for Minster and particularly in your role? I know you've got several advertising execs that work with you. So what would they need to be good at? What kind of skills and capabilities would they need? So we can list all the skills but when we're looking at particular candidates, for example we tend to look more for specific attitudes and the two we always focus on is curiosity and analytical mindset. So with curiosity we want somebody, we're looking for somebody, we vibe with people who are constantly asking why because that's the only way to survive on Amazon. You can't just take things as face value. You always need to have that propensity to ask why does this button work this way? Why does this happen that way? What would happen if I do this thing? That constant curiosity, that drive to always know, to always learn and back to the upskilling thing, that is part and parcel of working with Amazon and then the analytical mindset is now more specific to advertising on Amazon because with digital advertising generally it's quite numbers driven. It's lots and lots of numbers, different numbers meaning different things, different associations and you sort of need to be able to bring all those spreadsheets together to sort of pull out the narrative to pull out what is insight. You need to be able to pull out insight from lots of scattered data. Sometimes in different silos you need to be able to be curious enough to find the silos but once you've found them pull out the insight from them. So that analytical mindset is the other sort of attitude we're quite keen on and usually once these two sort of attitudes are in the person we're quite confident in our training so we can upskill you. We can give you all the training and all the skills that you need. I think that's something you can practice. That's something people can over time just keep asking why for any question and over time you just find yourself whenever you encounter a new environment you can easily ask why without feeling awkward or without feeling shy whereas I do appreciate developing an analytical mindset can be a bit more of a challenge but I can expand on that on some of the ideas I have in regards to going down that path. OK, so those analytical skills and that curiosity is that something that you have or you look for in somebody as they're walking through the door or is it something that they can learn whilst they're in the job because a lot of the people that might be tuning in today have not worked in marketing before, they may be students or they may be just curious about marketing. Yes, so we're curiousity that so when they're walking through the door and we don't get that they're curious, we don't get the vibe that OK this is somebody who's naturally curious we then have to then ask the question is this something they can develop and more 9 out of 10 yes you can develop that it's just me asking you do you know why and you go no and then they go ask me why then ask and then over time you just become a habit. Well like I said the analytical mindset is a bit more challenging but what I can say is that the more comfortable you are with numbers whether it's taking online courses or just taking some of the especially for students there might be some statistical classes or whatever they have available to them you know just being able to sit more comfortable with numbers over time that that propensity to make to draw insights can be developed but I do appreciate that takes a little more effort because not everybody feels comfortable when they say spreadsheet filled with different numbers on there but again with practice the more you can be able to look at those numbers and go this is what's happening over time you can develop that as well but yeah it's both of them I think are learnable you know there's nothing that can be learned but obviously different people have natural propensities understood OK so it's about continuing to learn and professional development and being flexible as well yeah OK great you are a self-professed good public speaker it's kind of plastered all over your LinkedIn profile and why not you know we will guilty of saying what we're good at that's what LinkedIn sport what is it that is important about public speaking for you I think first of all I was a lecturer I've done it full time and I did it part time for the last two years so you can be a lecturer with help well you can be but to be a good lecturer you need to be good at public speaking so that was sort of the beginning of that journey but in my current job public speaking is even more important because like I said Amazon is a new platform so there's a lot of information available a lot of it quite big, a lot of it hard to interpret so you need to be able to communicate that clearly and succinctly to the client so you know we're walking on behalf of this client and you know Amazon is producing thousands of touch points this had a number of clients looking at your products this had a number of clients buying this had a number of clients returning you know how can we bring all of that together so you have that analytical mindset so pull out the insight but can you communicate it to the client because often times than not our job means is to interpret Amazon for our clients because it's not straightforward it's not designed to be straightforward so if you can draw out all the insight but then you cannot effectively communicate that to the client that feedback loop is then broken so we need to be able to communicate as clearly as we can and also so that we can also work better with the clients other external factors out at Amazon so we can explain for example on Amazon you're actually getting very strong repeat customers that's something you're seeing elsewhere and if it isn't then together we can collaboratively understand why Amazon is unique and how we can leverage that whether it's just leveraging that on Amazon or how they can leverage that outside Amazon so that's something else we try to emphasise well collaborative but on and off so if you cannot effectively communicate what's happening on the platform to the clients then they might as well go elsewhere Fair enough and that storytelling and communication is really prevalent at the moment I know that we're investing a lot in making sure that people have got the right tools to do that storytelling piece it stands you out from the competition right? Absolutely, yeah so public speaking is not something that everybody enjoys doing and I certainly don't always enjoy doing it we were talking offline before and if you don't do it for a while it's something that kind of slips away particularly for me anyway and it did cause a level of anxiety for me at certain points have you always been good at it? Was it something that was a bit of a fear for you at any stage? It's always a fear I was trying to read before this webinar I was nervous, I was anxious that for me anyway it never goes away but I think this is where the resilience comes in and it's both public speaking and everything else we do at Minster in the sense that it never walks out to the first time you just have to keep going back on and on and on it just isn't always natural even for example I'm claiming to be good at public speaking but when we have a new client I'm a bit apprehensive would it like me, would it understand what I'm trying to say would it feel comfortable asking me questions or would it be difficult it's always that fear that anxiety is always there underneath the surface but in terms of actually developing a way more comfortable public speaking unfortunately practice is the only thing that has worked maybe there might be an opportunity for hypnotism but generally you just have to keep practising one of the advice I can give is, I won't say it's controversial but it's a bit out there you can have a practised this is who I am I feel you have so if you're in an interview setting and the person just gives you that horrible open question tell me about yourself where do you even start if you rehearsed a version of that I would recommend a long version and a short version you have a short version you can say in 30 seconds an innovative page basically for yourself this is who I am this is why I'm interesting and this is why I can bring to the company or whatever a rehearsed version that you can maybe tweak it's consistent in different settings you feel more comfortable speaking especially if you're open with something you've practised multiple times and then if they go oh actually that's interesting tell me more you then switch to the longer version so if you've spoken for 2-3 minutes on something you're absolutely sure about you've practised it you've probably got some feedback the rest of the conversation will be a lot smoother so I think that's the main thing that I would recommend have that this is who I am spell long version short version and after that you should be way more comfortable and sometimes the person you're speaking to is just as anxious as well so have that back of your mind we're all anxious we're just winging it the best guidance I was given was by someone close to me actually not in a professional setting and they said that everybody wants you to succeed if you could just remember that actually you're the expert in the room and there's a reason why you stood up there and use that as a platform to deliver what you want to deliver and take confidence from that easier said than done I realise and it took me a while to get there just to remind you guys you can file any questions you've got for Ladi or for me if you want to learn something about CIM please do that using the question icon on the screen just to question mark it's kind of like an orange in a circle the other thing I wanted to talk about is like turning a we kind of touched on that a little bit there but the weakness aspect when I say weakness I like to say it's an area for development right so turning something that perhaps isn't something you're so strong at or confident at and turning that into a strength if you're do you have something that you're thinking do you know what I'd love to be able to do that a little bit better and if you do what are you going to do about it so some of the feedback I've got is I can be too verbose so I go on and on and on and on especially in Amazon like I said there's lots and lots of information so when I meet the client I say oh look at all this information do you know you can do this you can do that and sometimes the client can feel overwhelmed so that's something I'm currently working on to be more succinct and then the client wants more information and obviously more than obliged to respond but not going there from the get go and trying to explain everything about Amazon in a 15 minutes conversation so one of the things we're trying to do about that within Mainstays have different sessions for clients where we then go you know this is a master class on this very specific topic this niche topic and then we're going to as much detail as possible so it's not just me on that on that master class thing it's the entire business that is currently working on that so one of the ways to get it out of my system is to have a separate section where I can go into as much detail as I can brilliant and that question wasn't for me to reveal any of your weaknesses here it's more just to sort of show that you know we're all human and you know the journey you've taken means that you're constantly evolving as well so hopefully that'll be useful to some of those that are tuning in. I've got a question from somebody that is tuning in actually and they're asking what advice do you give to your customers about false reviews from your customers competitors? False reviews is very very tricky on Amazon and then we even need to understand what we even we need to define false reviews because the way the Amazon platform works you can live a review without even buying something but that review has less weight than somebody who's a verified customer so if a competitor comes and puts a negative review on our product saying this is a horrible product so it's quite challenging but what we can do is we can just flag it if we think if it's not true we can flag it and raise a concern with Amazon and go we don't think this review is truthful do you want to look into it and more often than not if it is if it's not genuine Amazon does take it down but if it's a case where it's a generally disgruntled customer or Amazon doesn't feel that it's a false review what we then focus on is generating positive reviews because that's the usually the solution of that rather than getting on the defence and taking that down we just go let's focus on getting more reviews and the simplest way of getting more reviews on Amazon is getting more sales the more sales you get the more positive reviews you get and that's more or less how it would yield anyway.  Sorry could you rephrase that? Yeah so is that approach more about your campaign your strategy with that customer to deliver something over a long you know deliver success for them over a medium term duration rather than just dealing with one knee jerk reaction you wouldn't respond quickly like that you would stick to your campaign. Yeah we'll stick to the campaign but like I said the knee jerk would be to report the review to Amazon for investigation so that would be the first reaction and then usually 72 hours they'll get back to us if they will take it down or not and that's usually the solution we're going to leave it on and we're going to take it down there's no in-between and if they don't take it down we'll just continue what we do which is generating sales. Okay thank you so we're getting a few more questions through now which is great thank you keep those coming through what was your light bulb moment that caused you to shift into marketing? That was something I was going to ask you myself actually and are you satisfied with your choice today? Oh yeah very I'll answer the last question first yeah very satisfied Amazon because I have a relatively short attention span I'm the perfect system for that because everything is new everyday so that's great for me but light bulb moment I don't think there was an explicit light bulb moment it was more of a shift so after I finished my engineering degree I didn't enjoy it the last year was the most difficult I was very close to dropping out but for a few for multiple reasons I just persisted so by this time I finished I then decided to be a photographer so that's as far as engineering can go straight into creative and art but once I was a photographer I got into product photography and then I really really enjoyed so I first started with portraits taking pictures of people and that was interesting but actually taking pictures of objects for some reason just appealed to me more but then I realised after I took the picture it was completely out of my control how the picture was used and that's when I said I really needed to market and why are they using my picture at this way rather than that way and I had opinions but I couldn't articulate it properly because I didn't have the marketing language I didn't understand marketing full stop so that's when I said I was reading about it and then went on to do the master's degree in business with my dissertation was in marketing so it wasn't a specific moment it was just a slow gradual movement in that direction and just to add to that it's really important that if you are thinking about a career in marketing or another industry try and identify who you are a little bit and understand what might make you happy and the type of environment you might want to work in and do that discovery piece early on because we could all look at somebody that does an amazing TED talk and say I want to be that person but actually if your values don't align to that then you're never going to get there and if you do get there you're probably not going to be happy and successful when you do that so do that discovery bit and check out some of the organisations that you might want to work for and then you can start to have a think about the types of roles that they offer so the one I always use I need to get another one is if you're interested in sustainability then someone like Patagonia the clothing brand are doing some really good stuff so you might want to look at what they're doing for example great, thank you so we've got more questions coming through so did you have to work your way up to where you are now in this role that you have and if so what are the best routes to get into advertising but also to where you are yeah I sort of did so when I joined Minster I was the only advertising executive and then I became the advertising manager so I did work my way up but it's not always like that usually there will be more in most of the agencies there are more steps to get into the advertising manager role so I did start literally as an executive so I lead a team of five executives so I always try to remember what my experience was like when I'm giving instructions so in terms of advice if I'm sounding like a broken clock now but it's that desire to learn so for example although I did the PHD and Master's Degree I also did the same online course I did multiple online courses so I first started with the free stuff so I'm not sure if you've had a future learn I started and stopped multiple on Coursera Udemy but future learn just had the platform and the style of delivery that I liked and that was the one that I first finished so it was a free course I did two free courses on future learn I was like definitely I want to do something in digital marketing and then I went to do the same certification and then I was like okay then I paid for the same certification I was like yes this is why I want then I went to do the degree and then even in my current role I still have to get the Amazon sponsored ad certification that's still a requirement for my role and Amazon makes it fun that the certification lasts only 12 months so every 12 months I need to be re-certified sometimes I don't have to read your old documents I just take the certification and I pass and sometimes I don't pass I was like okay fine I need to go and re-familiarise myself so that's first for knowledge and that has to be in there and that's how you grow in terms of getting your foot through the door especially if you don't have experience and I know for a fact that's a challenge because a lot of employers will be like what's your experience, what's your experience if you can show a first for knowledge and that's with some of the certification and like I'm saying don't start with the paid stuff because it's expensive some are costing thousands of pounds some 70 quid I think my future learn certificate was 70 pounds so you don't even have to start with the free stuff and I know Google and Facebook or Meta and Amazon, three of them have three versions of the certification put down your CV, put down your LinkedIn to show yes I don't have the experience but I'm willing to learn and this is the evidence of that you stack as much of those as you can and then you can get your foot in the door and then when you're in the room when you're in the room you can't stop you just have to keep gaining new skills and learning new things Brilliant, thank you and on that note someone's asking specifically whether you can gain that Amazon affiliate marketing badge if you like that qualification can you do that anywhere they're asking online Google, Amazon sponsored ad certification so it can be quite complex because they have about six certificates there so I'll stick to the one it's called Amazon sponsored as foundations I can't remember where foundations comes first or sponsored as comes first one or the other but just Google Amazon sponsored advertising foundation certificate that's the one I recommend you do first and then there's like beginner intermediate and advanced and of course you can just follow that process and it's all free, you don't have to pay well like I said it lasts only 12 months but you should be able to get something before it expires OK, thank you and someone's asking trade secrets now but hidden in a question they're asking what technical tools and digital marketing tools and strategies you implement on a daily basis that enhances the platform experience Yeah, I think I'll just dodge the question a little bit one of the things I enjoy about LinkedIn is how much people share about what they're doing and half of it is bragging let's be frank, they are bragging about how awesome they are but actually there are two hashtags I follow one called hashtag Amazon ads the other one called hashtag Amazon advertising and there's lots of people just sharing what they're doing and that's really really great it's quite American centric because Amazon is an American company there are a lot of the agents there are more American agents that they are British it's still people sharing this is what, you know, literally I did this cause and effect I produced this, I did that so for me that's a great part of getting new things but even on top of that I'm sure there is a hashtag Google ads version there's a hashtag Facebook ads version so for me that's where I'm constantly looking for new things to try new things to learn but in terms of my daily what I'm actually implementing it's collaborative there isn't a specific tactic that I use I show to work so I have the advertising executive who run the ads day to day I have my marketing director who I report to and I have the account management team who I speak to, I have the client who I'm speaking to so there's never one tactic that definitely is always what what are the different sort of circumstances, what are the different factors and how can we manoeuvre within and outside of you sometimes they're not budget do we have it not stock, you know, things like that and then finally there are thought party tools that we use but if you're not in your role it's prohibitively expensive that wouldn't recommend but there are also some thought party tools that we use to help us automate some of the actions and that's a completely different conversation okay thank you, well dodged so somebody's asking what courses and skills are most important for a person that's planning a career switch so we've got a career change, you're asking that moving from traditional selling into technology driven selling like platform yeah, I'll say the three platforms Amazon, Google and Facebook those three are the their courses so again all of them have their beginner courses, intermediate courses and advanced courses and generally they tend to be way more Google ads jobs because it's the biggest in terms of advertising so if you want to increase your chances of getting an digital advertising roles then go for Google ads followed by Facebook, what Amazon will do so I think those courses will be the best place to start and most importantly they're free and you can do it online I think that's where I would start but on top of that because it's quite data-driven I would also recommend anything to do with Excel so again don't ever pay for an online Excel course you don't need to if they're coming to training in person, fair enough but if it's online don't pay for it whether it's just for the certification to put on your CV or more importantly for the knowledge we don't always use Excel but a lot of the logic of if or filtering data, finding commonalities and all those different Excel formulas will replicate them in their own internal database to what Excel is the best soft foundation for being comfortable with data analytics or data analysis basically so if there's any Excel course you feel happy to jump on whether it's a three week course one week, one month, whatever it's just Excel YouTube videos the only thing I'm apprehensive with Excel YouTube videos is that if you're not doing it you might as well just watch and tell it if you're just watching people do Excel and you're not doing it yourself then I doubt you're going to remember but again YouTube's also there another supplement I highly recommend and then you don't have more advanced tools like SPSS, Tableau Way more advanced, Python and all that crazy stuff you don't need to but if you do Excel and go actually I really like this what's next at that Excel then definitely Tableau Power BI Python will be the next step Amazing that you've blended the two old school worlds with all the new funky tech as well Excel doesn't go away it's fit for purpose isn't it So we've got an undergrad who's asking probably on behalf of all the undergrads really who are moving into marketing or at least looking to get into marketing who have got no experience in marketing I'm talking professionally here what steps can they take at the moment to increase their chances of success in industry and I'm going to sort of add to that I think that's probably success in terms of when they get into the role but I'm guessing there needs to be a step before that which is how do you make that leap Yeah it depends on your course if you're an undergrad so if there are any courses that lend themselves so different undergrad courses give you options some undergrad courses you don't get an option you don't start on the business management course and that's it you just have to take all the courses that are offered to you but if you're in one of the courses where you have options of different models absolutely pick the ones that lend themselves towards digital marketing and then for your final year dissertation if you can get as close as possible to digital marketing so for example you might be doing a psychology degree or a sociology degree okay how can you focus slightly more on consumer behaviour or online purchase behaviour so bend things a little bit to your advantage we've already spoken about public speaking if there's any opportunity for presentations any opportunities for giving feedback jump on it if you're in a group of five and only one person needs to present absolutely you want to be that person you want to get as much practice as you can but also if you're doing presenting you would also get feedback and hopefully most lecturers are kind they will give you feedback to help support that process and I've mentioned courses too many times but that's also there and it's never too late to start applying you can look at placement years one of the advertising executives we have is we taught for a year placement as well so again depends on your university so some universities don't let you switch some let you switch so if you don't if you're in your second year if it's possible within your university see if you can switch to a placement year course and then most a lot of agencies are more willing to take the risk on the placement years you don't rather than you've graduated with zero experience and if you can't switch that's still fine but then don't wait till you're ready to work before you start applying for roles I would recommend that three to six months ahead get into the application and that's because you can start practicing interview techniques you can read all the interview techniques as much as possible but until you're on that hot seat your first interview you most likely not do well that's natural your first job interview will not go great but if by the time you're three, four, six months in you've done two, three interviews that's when you're ready to go and of course be honest in the interview when they ask you when can you start be honest I can start on this date and depending on the business circumstances they will make your own decision to start applying at the better I think a year advances a bit too soon but yeah three to six months I'll say start putting your application out there thank you, good answer obviously we're going to talk about the marketing and technical skills that made people successful in their jobs but I'm really keen to push those transferable skills as well and say that that is absolutely key for any job that you do and Ladi touched on that a little bit earlier so I would say familiarise yourself with the types of capabilities so I'm talking behaviours, knowledges and different skills that are transferable across any sector and industry and that will give you the tools to move into different space and you can always learn the technicalities along the way another thing that that CIM does that supports undergrads is we run something called the pitch competition which is open to second and third year undergrads currently, we're looking to expand that eventually and that competition is designed to give people the opportunity to work on a marketing challenge a real challenge where they work in teams of two or three and it's that work experience that will help you understand what a real organisation that you potentially would go and work for would give you if you're interested in gaining experience in that way the pitch competition is actually open now and live checkout on CIM webpage for that and that's free, I'm not going to be flogging anything today so next question how effectively is advertising used to promote mobile app businesses and what strategies are you applying to that? So the one to sell that application using digital advertising is it's probably the most effective really I'm sure you've seen ads the person who asked that question has seen ads for rage shadow legends, it's everywhere you can't avoid it and go look at how many downloads they get per month, millions so it's you still have to be clever about especially if you don't have a rate budget you still have to be quite clever in terms of you're selecting your targets who's most likely to convert and other things but that's probably the most effective way of getting people to download because if you're using traditional advertising for example if they see the ad for this app they then have to go search for it on Google or Apple yeah Apple Store App Store, yes Google Store App Store, well if it's a digital ad usually if they click on the ad it takes them straight to where they can download it and it's about reducing the friction between creating the the demand for your product and also allowing them to get hold of it so making that journey as short as possible is quite important and digital if you're selling a digital software service experience then advertising on digital is probably your best bet really okay thank you I've got a bit of a juicy question here and probably my fault I mentioned sustainability earlier it's quite a hot topic for most organisations definitely for the brands that you're selling I'm sure they've got sustainable targets and things like that or ambitions at least so working with Amazon did they highlight the net effect of reducing emissions using deliveries is that something that comes into play in your role specifically around counter negatives on the sort of the pressure and the impacts on high street and local shopping and that kind of thing so the two separate questions they say out a bit just you know for longer shots capital footprint so that's one conversation there and Amazon is you know they are doing what they can do you know they are looking at a lot of their plans now are electrical or they are using oil cooking oil okay stick to electrical so a lot of the bands are increasing the electrical bands and then in terms of even deliveries to their customers it's still optional but if you have Amazon Prime you can select for all your deliveries to come on a certain day so because of Amazon Prime you have next delivery so you can buy four different items across four different days so you're going to have four different deliveries from Monday to Wednesday that's quite wasteful the environmental impact and that's not nice so you can say actually Amazon bring all my deliveries in on just the Wednesday so I set mine on Wednesday because that's when I walk from home and then if it's urgent so it's an emergency I can say for this product I want to deliver tomorrow so that's on the consumer side they have different things that can help to reduce that environmental impact and they're also changing their packaging as well you know they're trying to use less plastic more paper you know more recyclables so I'm sounding like an Amazon rep now and I appreciate that but that's where I work I need to know these things so the environmental impact is large and Amazon is trying to reduce that but then what we then do for our clients is something we call SIOC which is short for shipped in own packaging so we encourage our clients to deliver their products into Amazon warehouse so Amazon doesn't have to wrap it Amazon doesn't have to put it in a package so one that saves Amazon time and materials because it's somebody's job to do that that doesn't get paid and also the paper needs to wrap it as well they get to save that and also the clients as well can add that to their sustainability credentials that they have packed they're not shipping they're not shipping air because usually Amazon has standard boxes so unless your product is affected to that shape you will be shipping a little bit of air but if you can send your product with our packaging you don't have to ship air so there's lots of different things we are doing in terms of encouraging our clients to be more sustainable and then within mean state itself we are looking at our own footprints as well so in terms of electricity who are we buying our electricity from things like car sharing recycling so even as a business itself we are trying to reduce our footprint so that's the first half of the question the second half is more political in terms of the impact of digital on high street and I don't want to stray too far down that road because my political opinions will come out but I think that's something that needs to go beyond just the business it needs to be a bigger conversation between city councils and state governments so I'm not just talking about the British government I'm talking about all the different governments that digital businesses thrive in so not just Amazon the city councils the state governments, the businesses themselves and how they can work more collaboratively because I love my high street high street is not just about buying stuff it's also a third space it's a place where you've been indoors all day you want to go somewhere, you want to see people you want to have chance encounters you want to talk Tinder is great, Instagram is great TikTok is great but sometimes that human connection is needed and high street plays a big important role in that but in terms of the relationship Amazon has with that high street I think that's a bigger political conversation and the future of the high street as you touched on is a real big challenge people have predicted that most people will live out of cities and only travel into city to work or to shop but they got that wrong, more people are moving to the city and want to be in that space so it's really difficult to plan from an infrastructure point of view because we can't predict the movement of people I would also say that and something you touched on there green space and using your cities in a different way is probably where it needs to be the cities really is a microcosm of people that learn work, travel to and use it for tourism as well it's not just a high street so maybe the high streets and some of these brands need to think about what their role is in some of that and culturally as well so somebody you don't work for Amazon but obviously Amazon is a big part of what you do but somebody is asking if there is anything that continues to surprise you in a positive way about working with Amazon I think it is the advertising side which I spent my day to do it the Amazon advertising today is way more sophisticated than the Amazon advertising that I started with when I was an executive on day one I had to nerd out a little bit so before we had sponsored products, sponsored brands, sponsored display and all the three different advertising tools on Amazon more or less did the same thing with very simple differences so they did the same thing and we used all three but today each one is actually very distinct and you have to think carefully in terms of how you deploy them so that's one in terms of it's just getting more sophisticated and that gets me positively excited but then there's also another thing called DSP which is the display side of advertising usually Amazon's a lot of the clients would deal with focus on the search side but what we're now seeing is a blur in between the two so display advertising is looking one more like search and search advertising is looking one more like display so it means that we can bring those to Amazon advertising a lot closer and from what I've seen that's only going to accelerate so for example video ads on Amazon didn't exist two years ago now video ads is about to become a staple on Amazon advertising and that would only just get more more interesting so when you see a video ad on Amazon you hear it here first Thank you Lincoln into my world a little bit the CIM qualification that you got the accreditation that you have with us is that important for undergraduates? That's a tricky one because I got my after so I'm not it's tricky because I got that doing my master so I'm not sure how relevant that would have been for me during my undergrad I did an engineering undergrad so it's quite difficult for me to answer but I would say it's a positive especially when I'm speaking to traditional especially when I'm speaking to marketers on the client side who come from the traditional path they're new to digital so having that CIM qualification at least gives me the language to communicate with them a little bit better in terms of its specific use for undergrads I can't really speak on that Yeah that was a little bit unfair for me to ask you that I'll try and pick up a bit of that question so we know from talking to our members and recruitment organisations that CIM qualifications is the most looks after qualification after most looks at qualification after an undergraduate degree so employers if I give you an example if they're shortlisting and they've got a bunch of CVs they're more likely to recruit or interview those that have got CIM qualification it shows that additional learning and it shows that they've got that understanding of the skills and the knowledge and the competencies to be successful in the profession I think I think it's something like 60% of people who have done a CIM qualification in the first year go on to either get a pay rise or a promotion or something like that as well so it's instilling a bit of confidence to people too I said I wouldn't vlog anything but it couldn't help someone asked the question I've got to answer it so what about the opportunities for digital advertisers across the UK I don't know whether you have any views on what the size and the scale of the market is Oh it's massive I have a decker I present it to students about the size of digital advertising so in terms of cash value in terms of people spending on advertising I believe we've crossed over to digital advertising having higher spend than traditional advertising on asset traditional that's everything tele, billboards out of I don't know what you call them where the boss stop signs everything is the pound value is lesser when compared to digital so in terms of the industry itself is absolutely massive get going to them but in terms of the actual individuals getting jobs there I don't have any values on that but if a lot of companies are spending more on digital than they are spending on traditional they need people to manage it they need people who sometimes are native to it so that's where the rare occasion where being young is an advantage because a lot of young people are native to digital, the digital ecosystem that's something like 8 5-8 hours on the 25 is spent online so you already have the advantage there so there is a lot of opportunities I'm sure of it and like I said it's also broken down so you have the Google ecosystem you have the social media ecosystem currently led by Facebook but TikTok advertising is a fast rising platform we have a lot of clients sending traffic from their TikTok to Amazon a year ago I said that's a silly concept so there's always that there's always something new on the horizon as well so yeah there is a lot of opportunity out there and one of the good things about digital is you also have a higher chance of finding either a work at home job or a flexible role so I'm currently flexible like going twice a week but I know there are many many digital advertising jobs that are purely remote and again I know that's something a lot of young people are quite keen on but even just the industry as a whole yeah it's massive yeah exactly and we're seeing a huge demand for digital skills in the UK regardless of whether that's marketing or otherwise so absolutely do concentrate on those digital things at the moment again going back to transferable skills they are really really important and there are lots of them but I would definitely do some research around the types of transferable skills that people need we're probably going to have a chance for maybe one question before we wrap up so somebody's asking about what employers look for when hiring graduates now that's quite a broad question because it depends what the role is depends where they've come from so do you want to have a stab at that one? yeah I think we've saw touched on it multiple times but I think that that you know whether it's the TV or that this person is willing to learn this person wants to learn this person isn't just applying for a job because they need one and that can be communicated in multiple ways so it's like this is some of the courses that you can put on your CV and also the kind of questions you ask as well during the interview because sometimes the interview is both ways we always forget at the end of the interview when they go do you have any question and I'm caught on that whether oh yes I'm supposed to have a question prepare for that ask questions that suggest you're genuinely interested in the business and not just in the business exactly what they're doing was their core proposition and you're interested in that but from a CV perspective you just need something on your CV that makes you slightly slightly I don't want it to be slightly different because it means you need to say everybody else is CV but something that suggests you're not going through the motions ok thank you we've got a few questions I said that was probably the last question but I'll try and combine a set of questions into one here people are asking about getting a CIM qualification whether that be level 6 level 7, level 4 or level 3 and doing that in addition to a marketing degree now I would say that and Ladi you may have a different opinion on this so feel free to jump in I would say that it's additionality so there's no point doing two courses at the same and gaining skills from two different organisations at the same but actually look at what you've learned and look at what you want to learn that's in addition and choose a pathway that gives you that additionality and again that goes back to understanding who you are what you're good at what your needs are do that bit but also look at what kind of role are you going to go for if you're going to go for a role that actually means that there's something that's missing have a look at the qualifications that can give you that additionality and I would say that that would make you more rounded and definitely make you more competitive in the industry so I'm going to close questions there sadly I hate doing that when the questions are still coming through but I just wanted to touch on a few up and coming things bear with me so so if you've enjoyed this session we've got future sessions so we've run about 10 webinars a year we've run about four boost your employability sessions academic year traditionally the next sessions which you can see on screen now we've got one with Daniel Rouse on the 26th of October and that's going to be about latest trends in digital marketing he did that last year and he did that year before that was really really successful so we're continuing to do that it's constantly evolving check that out and again boost your employability the next session I'll be hosting will be on the 7th of December and again at one o'clock and we'll be talking to somebody who employs over 100 people remotely and those people don't have an office they work all over the world they work on people's brands and things like that so that's really interesting and Laddie touched on that kind of remote working aspect now it really does change how we recruit and if you want to check some of those things out you can absolutely go on to CIM web page and basically search for events in there we have a list of events that are coming up you can search for specific things or you can search by and finally we will be emailing you a short survey that helps us decide what we do going forward so we want to hear what's good what's bad, what you want more of what you want less of and that will inform future discussions and also the types of guests that we get on you might want Laddie back on the questions are still coming through so we could probably try and arrange that I don't know he's smiling but we'll see and that survey is really sure it's anonymous so please get that done so finally I would like to say thank you very much to Laddie thanks to everybody that tuned in I love that discussion I wish we had a bit more time and I look forward to seeing everybody hopefully on a future webinar have a great day cheers


Personally, I'm a big fan of psychedelics. I've had some of the most profound experiences with them. But of course we have to be careful. When it comes to psychedelics, there's a fine line between enlightenment and psychosis. But despite that, there's something really cool that I want to share with you. For those who don't know, psychedelics have the capacity to rapidly increase neuroplasticity, meaning help establish a lot of new strong mental pathways in the brain. Here's a cool visualization of it.  Still though, you gotta be safe when tripping. Check out the Spirit Medicine Walkers course if you want some tips on healthy journeying. The course itself is pay what feels right, so you can come in at whatever level makes sense to you.


Happy holidays banana nut bread using the kit. We have banana heavy cream cinnamon Betty Crocker kit Brown sugar and eggs. So I've already put the mix inside of a bowl I'm gonna smash up one very ripe banana you guys I tend to use mixes and Quite as it kept most of your favorite bakeries and restaurants also use Pre-bought mixes because of the consistency, okay adding some heavy cream instead of water Doing about one tablespoon of brown sugar half a teaspoon of Cinnamon two eggs. I'm going to use the butter instead of vegetable oil and that's it y'all You can see here. I'm just putting in the eggs I'm gonna mix all of the ingredients together pour it in a grease muffin pan or Loaf pan, excuse me bake it at 375 for about 45 minutes and let me tell you something this smells so Good, I cut it while it was still a little too hot, but that's okay I'm gonna show you how moist this is that heavy whipping cream is what makes it really moist look at that Very very simple you guys and I just used what I had on hand. So I hope you enjoyed this recipe Thank you so much for watching. Take care. Bye


I'm delighted to see the MiGTA ambassadors here this morning in the front row and I also acknowledge the presence of other ambassadors and members of our diplomatic network here and Vice-Chancellor Ian Young, thank you so much for hosting the seminar here at ANU. Nearly two years ago, five countries came together through a meeting of their foreign ministers in the margins of the United Nations General Assembly in New York to form a new partnership. At first blush, a somewhat unlikely grouping. MiGTA made up of the nations of Mexico, Indonesia, Korea, Turkey and Australia. We are nations of influence in our respective regions geographically. While each nation has different or though complementary priorities, it is evident that MiGTA brings greater weight together as a group than what could be achieved by acting alone. For example, the combined GDP of MiGTA countries is over $5.8 trillion, about 8% of the world's economy and this share is expected to grow. Our combined population is around 530 million, about 8% of the world's population. We're all members of the United Nations, the G20, the World Trade Organization, the Global Partnership for Development Cooperation. We are like-minded on many global issues and we're all active contributors on the global stage. Yet there's a diverse range of geographic, thematic and religious groupings in which three or more of the MiGTA countries are also prominent contributors, which we find to be one of the group's great strengths. For Australia, MiGTA marks a significant addition to the type and composition of international partnerships we've traditionally prioritised. The complexities of the modern world demand Australia develop new and innovative ways of pursuing our interests. Countries now have to give priority to solving issues that transcend borders and regions and we must work with others who share similar foreign policy priorities. This is why Australia is part of MiGTA, a new partnership that has potential to be a significant and positive force for good. MiGTA members are marked by our diversity, but we share characteristics that make us practical partners. We have a common interest in promoting an open, free, rules-based international order. We are all democracies. We believe in open trade and economic development. Our economies are the 12th, 14th, 15th, 16th and 17th largest in the world and growing at a faster rate than many in the top 10. Goldman Sachs has predicted that Mexico may well become the fifth largest economy by 2050. PWC assesses that on current growth rates Indonesia will be the seventh largest economy by 2030 and fourth by 2050. Turkey is also likely to be in the top 10. Australia and Korea aspire to be so. So MiGTA provides a forum to exchange views and canvas possible solutions to common challenges. It's a forum that hopes to shape international opinion in ways that benefit us all. Last month in Seoul, my fellow MiGTA foreign ministers and I discussed the most serious challenges we're facing. The joint communique issued after the meeting reveals the range of issues discussed and agreed upon including counter-terrorism. No country is immune from the scourge of terrorism and the phenomenon of foreign terrorist fighters. Terrorism is now more global, more complex, more dangerous than ever before. Fueled by hate, the terrorist organisations such as Daesh are attracting thousands of citizens from across the globe to join these murderous causes. During the MiGTA foreign ministers meeting we learned from Korean authorities that a South Korean teenager had attempted to enter Syria with the intention of joining Daesh. We shared experiences, ideas and information. I detailed how Australia faces this same real threat. Since becoming foreign minister I have cancelled around 120 Australian passports to prevent Australian citizens travelling to Syria and Iraq to become foreign terrorist fighters in that conflict. Our joint communique explicitly expressed our agreement to stand together against the common threat of terrorism and recognise the importance of governments and communities strengthening social cohesion to meet the challenge of violent extremism. We highlighted the importance of preventing and addressing the issue of foreign terrorist fighters. Over the past two years MiGTA have issued a number of joint press releases on issues as diverse as Ebola, North Korea's nuclear program, the downing of Malaysian Airlines MH17, global health, global governance even on International Women's Day. Our UN ambassadors in New York and Geneva meet regularly to discuss the contribution that MiGTA can make to strengthening global governance. MiGTA members are also concerned about the global economy. Australia wants to promote global prosperity through openness to trade and helping drive business growth. And we find that MiGTA can be utilised as a powerful advocate for the benefits of liberalised trade and investment. We have strong trade investment and tourism linkages between the MiGTA members already and there's plenty of opportunity to expand this. Last year alone other MiGTA countries, other than Australia, so that makes it the MiGTA, invested around $25 billion in Australia. Visitors from MiGTA countries spend approximately 5.8% of the total expenditure of overseas visitors here in Australia. And of Australians travelling overseas for short-term visits, nearly 13% travel to Mexico, Indonesia, Korea or Turkey. I'm also working with my MiGTA colleagues to test whether our development cooperation is meeting the contemporary challenges the world faces. I'm committed to making continuous improvements to our aid program. Recently we established the Innovation Exchange where we identify innovative solutions to otherwise intractable development issues, trial them and if they work we scale them up and apply them in our region. But MiGTA opens up new opportunities to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of the programs we deliver. We can play a bridging role between developed and developing countries. In coming months there are two critical global negotiations on development cooperation. In Ethiopia in July countries will come together to discuss ways to finance how the world tackles poverty. In New York in September the nations of the world will seek to agree on the successes to the Millennium Development Goals. These are big issues for Australia and we along with other MiGTA members have been a vocal contributor to these discussions. Our participation in these meetings provides an opportunity to combine our voices and support the issues and the international institutions which promote our interests and values. The value of MiGTA as a forum is reflected by how often the foreign ministers meet. Three times a year on the margins of the UN General Assembly lead this week, on the margins of the G20 and especially convene MiGTA foreign ministers meeting. And this gives the group a unique and powerful momentum building deep and lasting connections. And I have appreciated the opportunity to get to know my foreign minister counterparts from Mexico, Indonesia, Korea and Turkey. A very unique opportunity that is difficult to share with others. This September, Korea will hand over to Australia the position of coordinator of MiGTA. And I take this opportunity to thank Korea, particularly Foreign Minister Beyonce for all that they've done to enhance MiGTA's capacity and influence. Australia will focus on establishing practical ways of working together to achieve tangible outcomes. And I look forward to hosting my fellow MiGTA foreign ministers in Australia next year. Mexico and Seoul have set a very high standard. So I intend to take the opportunity to showcase to the delegates the best of Australia's world leading achievements in innovation, science, technology, culture, education, fashion, sport. Already MiGTA members have come up with creative ways to build greater people to people lengths between our countries. We are exchanging diplomats. We are engaging in each other's graduate diploma courses in our respective departments of foreign affairs and trade. We're exchanging academics, students, journalists so that we can understand each other better and the challenges we face. And I extend a special welcome this morning to the journalists who have travelled from Seoul, Jakarta, Ankara and Mexico City. I encourage other academics and students in Australia and other MiGTA countries to continue to consider the challenges and the opportunities and areas of common interest for MiGTA countries. I particularly want to thank the Australian National University and Professor Michael Wesley for agreeing to lead the MiGTA academic work here at the Coralville School of Asia Pacific Affairs. As MiGTA continues to strengthen, I expect we will find many more opportunities to cooperate, many more opportunities to have our voice heard jointly on issues of concern. Speaking alone, our voices will rarely be as strong as when we speak together. Together our diversity creates a unique voice that can and will be a powerful advocate for global peace and prosperity. After a modest beginning with modest aspirations, we have found that there is so much that we can achieve together. And I firmly believe that MiGTA will be a blueprint for others who see a partnership of like-minded but diverse countries as a positive contribution to make to global peace and security. Thank you.


Alright, since we have a lot of talks today, I will try to keep things a bit shorter. So today, a serverless first approach, or in short, will-it-lambda. My name is Nik van Engelsman. I'm a Cloud Solutions Architect for BandLab Technologies. And today, I will mainly talk about our flagship project or product, which is BandLab. On the agenda, so why BandLab went serverless with it-lambda, our first real-world migration, some lessons learned, serverless live video streaming setup, and some Q&A. But before we start, how many of you have tried the API Gateway in Lambda, for instance? And who is using it in production? It's a lot less. But it's still cool to see that everyone's interested. I will keep this short. So in the past, I used to work at a Dutch AWS partner company. And in there, we did managed hosting solutions for clients. And my role was basically to educate clients and migrate them to the cloud. And this was way before serverless, so it was from 2011 until somewhere 2016. And what it involved was usually, like, looking at their current applications and identifying which parts needed to be changed in order to support becoming highly available and fall tolerant. And in turn, clients only wanted to worry about pushing code. And that's kind of similar of what we're trying to achieve with serverless. But as you can imagine, it's kind of a big deal, because we as a company needed to keep the infrastructure up to date, scalable, secured, patched, autoscaled. And back then, there wasn't even Docker. So what we usually get was artifacts which we had to unzip, install, dependencies, and then update the infrastructure, the autoscaling group. So yeah, if you think about it, that's a lot of work, right? So if we fast forward to 2015, 16, that's when API Gateway and Lambda was introduced as a combo, and things really started to change, right? Everybody could see that this brings a lot of value and can change how we develop applications. And that's also why I try to invest more time in these solutions. I asked my company if I could do some R&D, and came up with a few example applications which really show that it's totally possible to make a serverless backend which is highly available. It supports a lot of traffic right away. And yeah, you can basically skip a few steps like setting up VPC security groups. You name it, right? I also started to invest my time in the serverless framework, so did some contributions and tried to stay close with the community there and the guys who are contributing to the core. So now 2016, that's when I was given the opportunity to join BandLab. The BandLab platform, as it says, it's a music creation platform, so we're mostly dealing with audio objects and audio in general. So when I joined, there was really like this startup culture, things needed to move fast, the platform was gaining traffic, and the main value was bringing value to users each day, right? It wasn't really about making it high-performance, fault tolerant. So surprise, surprise, they didn't set up autoscaling when I joined. So that's kind of a big deal if you're working on a platform and you estimate some huge growth. So there was definitely something that needed to change. So looking back at the earlier slide, some of the things we cannot forget because of serverless. So highly available, it's taken care of, infrastructure up to date, we don't need to necessarily think about that, it should be patched and autoscaled by AWS, and the teams wanted to focus on the application, which serverless, at least it gives you more time, in my opinion, to work on the application and the features you want to bring out there to users, then thinking about autoscaling, setting up the infrastructure, etc. So next topic, Will it Lambda? So we decided each time we wanted to migrate something that existed, we needed some sort of flow to identify, like, is this suitable for serverless yes or no, or should we think about something else? And we came up with this. It's very simple, right? It's so simple, right? So the idea is you ask the question, like, Will it Lambda? Of course there's more behind that than just saying yes. And if it's no, we must try harder because the reason to try harder is that if you think about if you can get it working, it gives you so much more value and less, in my opinion, operations is required in order to keep it out there and keep it running. And yeah, that's why we say try harder. So I guess most of you are already a bit familiar with the limits of Lambda in general, the concurrency. So by default, if you open a new account, you get 1,000 concurrent lambdas, which is already quite a lot for most applications. There's the memory limit, the timeouts, of course. I will not name everything but because it's already there. But there's more than just these default limits, right? So there's the option to choose runtimes today. It's already a lot better because of the new introductions from reinvent to bring your own runtime. So that's awesome. Cold starts can still be an issue for certain applications. So yeah, you have to think about that. Then where do you want to keep your state? Does your Lambda function even require some state? We usually go with S3 or Dynamo, RDS. To be honest, we don't, right now, we don't do much with VPCs and lambdas because for us still the latency is too much and it requires this extra complexity with the network interfaces where there's still limit. And you can end up in a situation where your network interfaces aren't cleaned up while still the traffic is growing and you don't want to have that. And then there's the other thing if you need, like, if you're in a private subnet and you still want to make requests to the internet, you're paying this, yeah, this amount of money for not gateway, which is not very surplus, right? And then there's third-party binaries. So if you're thinking, like, will it Lambda? You should also consider, like, am I dependent on native packages and do I need to compile those? Again, there's something new which is the Lambda layers, which somebody is talking about later, so that's nice. So that definitely solves a few things because now the community can also push out these shared layers, which others can depend on, and it saves a bit of your time, so you don't have to, for instance, compile FFMPEG yourself. Next, so our first real-world migration. So what you see on this image is what we call our mix editor. It works on mobile and web. And the colored bars you see there are those represent audio files. So when I joined, we already had a service for this. This was hosted in Azure, it used Azure Storage as well. But the idea was that we wanted to start with audio-specific services and we wanted to move them to AWS because in Azure, they were all hosted inside this monolith and we wanted to keep it more for the social part, so it would only, yeah, concern about doing a lot of HTTP requests and rather also doing audio processing on the same auto-scanning groups. So again, we did the thing where we say, like, will it Lambda? And there were things we needed to figure out, right? We needed to figure out if we could have FFMPEG running inside Lambda. So this was 2016 before even the Lambda layers and nobody was really doing that much with binaries. So, yeah, it definitely took us some time to get it compiled and working within Lambda, especially with permissions and identifying where it is on the Lambda within the runtime environment. So there was this project. It's on GitHub still. It's actually really good. It's called LAMCI and they have this Docker Lambda image. And what they tried to do was backwards engineer how the Lambda environment looked like and to represent it as good as possible. So we could use this Docker image to compile FFMPEG inside and then we could copy it to our Lambda function and it worked just fine. We had to deal with a live endpoint for the migration. So there was already this API endpoint and we didn't want to introduce a new path because we couldn't update old mobile clients. So they would break if we would migrate it without taking care of backwards compatibility. So the way we did that was, of course, we had the domain already in Route 53 but we used CloudFront with its path patterns and by adding a new path pattern, we could do like during the deployment, take over this specific path and then redirect it to a different application or in our case an API gateway endpoint. And we needed to worry about state and this was rather simple. We wanted S3 and Dynamo to do the storage and Dynamo to do the fast lookups. So this is sort of what it looked like back then. I tried to recreate it as good as possible from my memory but the way it worked is like if you see the blue line, that's basically the default origin going toward the Azure cloud. The next line you see is going to an API gateway and it was using what I said, the CloudFront path pattern to switch the traffic to go to an API gateway endpoint. Then we would have this proxy lambda function which would know if it's a get or a post or put request and if it was a get request, it would first check in S3 if the audio object would be there and if it wasn't, it would go back to an HTTP call directly to Azure, return the original response which was coming from Azure back to the client and in the background it would send this SNS message to trigger a downloader function which would then download the audio which was still on Azure. It would forward it to the bucket and the bucket then would be triggering this DSP function we call it digital signal processing and it would then generate different extensions of the audio file to support multiple mobile clients and put it in another bucket where we store the formatted versions so then the next time the same request comes in it would be in S3 and basically the sample or the audio object would have been migrated from Azure. So once we had that running we basically could support like we had a living migration in process and we could run all the old requests of samples which hadn't been migrated and since the concurrency was pretty high we could just run thousands of get requests to initiate this whole migration flow. So some lessons learned from this. So our dream was to only ship or write code and ship it but there's more to it because you still need ops, right? You still need to know if your function failed so we use CloudWatch alarms in the beginning and then slowly moved into a different route there but which ended up being aggregated events going to Slack which one of our engineers could accept and then look into the issue but saying there's still some work there it's not about only writing code. The two states of every programmer one day you think I'm a god I don't know what I'm doing. This is basically because either sometimes the documentation isn't up to date or you're testing this totally new AWS service which isn't generally available yet or it's just new and the documentation is different. Yeah, that's the state that you can end up in and cold starts, yeah you need to be prepared to defend like cold starts that they aren't an issue and that you're willing to take the cold starts just because having a serverless setup in the end requires less operations but once it's warm then you can just throw whatever you want at it and it will just scale which is very hard to do in the old setup, right? If you had to do it yourselves. So a few migrations later are will it lambda diagram look a bit like this? So who sees the difference here? So yeah, ECS, we figured like for some migrations or in general creating new services some of them it wasn't worth the effort to get it in lambda like I mean you always want to but in some cases it just wasn't worth the effort because it will be way more complex even or just way more time needed to develop it so in this case is we use ECS to still be sort of serverless with Fargate but yeah, there's still more management because you need to create the Docker images and it's a bit more overhead, right? So last topic, serverless live streaming and I think end of 2017 BandLab acquired a platform called 2TV it allows online video streaming kind of like Twitch but it was specifically aimed towards DJs and since we are a music collaboration platform it was a good fit for us but there were things we needed to find out, right? So their current infrastructure that we bought it was scalable but there were a lot of pieces which were like single EC2 instances with no failover in general the outcome was for us like video streaming it requires servers and it's too difficult to get it serverless until we got a message from AWS saying that the Elemental Cloud would become available to all customers so we did some experiments, right? So if you're not aware about the Elemental Cloud from AWS, the products what they support is basically this setup which is exactly what we needed so you have this live video coming in media live would be this ingestion service which takes the incoming video it would then send as a failover two streams A and B to Elemental... yeah, media package, that's what we use and media package is to distribute the video to clients so it would do on the fly from media live to media package on the fly conversion to different video formats and this was exactly what we needed because it was almost what we had running on Chew but of course we needed to do some research in order if we could migrate it there were some limits because Elemental like having this setup working we did it through the UI it took a lot of configuration to get up and running and we couldn't autoscale this, right? so it would be this manual creation of each of these streams for every user that wanted to stream on the platform so what we did there was... yeah, there were more things actually so the state we kept in Dynamo we needed content moderation because on the existing platform there were people streaming soccer or football matches and gaming which led to a lot of traffic that's not the traffic we wanted and it needed to be identified as soon as the video comes in and CloudFront, so you can set up CloudFront with media package, it's default to the product but in order to have it fast like to have an endpoint up and running fast CloudFront, we couldn't use the feature as it came so what we did was we used Lambda Edge to still have one CloudFront origin and then based on the path patterns or the paths we would dynamically switch to these media package endpoints and autoscaling we replicated you can think of it as like autoscaling for EC2 or ECS it works around CloudWatch metrics and this decides like you have a min and a max based on percentages so we tried to replicate that where for each input stream that was generated we would keep track of this with CloudWatch metrics we kept track of percentages and based on these CloudWatch alarms we would trigger step functions which would then make sure that there are always a few video ingestion setups up and running so I will go with fast racer step functions if you haven't tried it it's an easy way to co-locate multiple Lambda functions and if you have a specific it's just a state machine right so you can have different routes or you can have things triggered in parallel but the most important part is from start to finish each of these steps would pass the state to the next function so you will always have the full state of the whole trigger from start to finish which is very useful if you're dealing with state and you want to have things running based on maybe timings or you want to add delays that's also very nice it supports retries logic, delay logic all within step functions itself so you can remove all of this logic from your Lambda functions I will do a quick demo if there's still some time to show you how the video streaming is working in action if it's not we're still working on the actual delivering of the migration for QTV the feature is already live on BandLab itself but you have to be a better user so if you're on the platform and you want to try this feature just send me a message and I can see what I can do for you yeah that's it yeah, alright, questions I wanted to say when getting ffmpec running in BandLab you just need a static build of it correct yeah, but still I think it's a good process to at least try it yourself so you get used to the limits and definitely with layers it's getting way easier which is awesome yeah other questions when you use ffmpec how do you prevent your Lambda function from happening so in our case so the part which you saw for which we did the migration is mostly about smaller audio objects so it's always within a fixed limit so our mix editor goes to something like 10 minutes at max so each track can be 10 minutes long max and it would be a lot of maybe small samples on a specific track so it still always fits within our limit but let's say if we wanted to move to podcasts as an example I tried it once you can do input and output buffers from what I tried I tried a 2 gigabyte video and it would use input buffers from S3 directly and output buffers directly and then Lambda is just being used as this proxy and then you wouldn't hit for instance the local storage limit it's, I mean it was experimental but it worked other questions just recently so when you Lambda appeared today so when you put a Lambda function there's always in different languages but there's an insertization part where you just alter the function and if you do the warm up you can do all kind of insertization if you don't pay for it actually it's a nice thing and we'll leave it at that once I can see it makes it use a function code but I was actually looking it was coding around for a genome part a code that functioned as a yeah some sort of like after I'm going to give it back once the function is taken off I couldn't find anything where you can get a code back saying code is functioned when you take it off yeah so what you're saying is like if Lambda would have a feature where the moment you triggered let's say the callback to whatever was calling it that you would still have some time to do some after logic that's what you mean yeah yeah that would be nice but for now yeah the only thing you can do no the only thing you could do is like doing it right before the callback yep yep yeah so our goal is always to to make it serve us first and if it really doesn't work or it takes too much time then we would default to ECS so yeah yeah so one of them was like what you mentioned if what if the function wouldn't be able to run the FFM pack in let's say 5 or 15 minutes that's always a thing we're looking into of course you can do things like for instance do it in chunks or in parallel and then have one thing which joins everything together that's possible so that's something you could do with with step functions but sort of like defeats the purpose where you just want to to build your application and ship a feature and if you're already seeing like this what this it makes the effort times 3 or whatever goal you have there that's the point like where we are like that it's probably not worth the effort but to be fair it for us it hardly ever happens the only issue we have was for instance local storage size so we have one process so now we only talked about the individual audio objects but our mix editor supports 10 tracks to 10 minutes and to like mix all of these layers into one final output it would do all the mixes for each track then it would like mix everything onto one track and apply maybe a final effect like some reverb like this whole process at one point we had it working in a lambda it took us a lot of time and effort to have all the states and it became so complex and we would still hit the issue as soon as we wanted to go from 5 minutes to 20 minutes we knew that the issue would come back so that's when we decided like we were just going to move this to ECS so we're also running on Azure cloud for the Azure functions as well so most of there all the new services are being built also in a serverless manner but me personally I don't have that much experience in Azure cloud thank you thank you


Good evening and welcome to day one of the Fiji Symposium in Bangalore, a platform for all talks and dialogues on financial inclusion. And we have with us from the World Bank, Mr. Douglas Pierce. Welcome to the Fiji Symposium. First of all, tell us, how does it feel to be part of the first ever Fiji Symposium? It's great to have it finally started. It's been, this is an important initiative for us at the World Bank Group. And the Symposium is the first big event that's taking place in this three-year program. So great to be here and it's also, it's great to see the strong engagement of the telecoms regulators, of fintech firms and of leading IT industry actors. So that's a very welcome development, as well as the financial sector engagement, which is also very strong. So could you tell us more about the potential, about digital financial services in increasing financial inclusion? Sure, we see technology and digital technologies and innovative practices as essential to reach full financial inclusion. Financial inclusion is expanding at an impressive rate, particularly in India. But to get to the difficult to reach groups, the higher cost underserved groups where information symmetry is a problem, where there just isn't the data to a price risk accurately, where the data isn't available to tailor products to meet people's needs. That's where digital technology comes into its own. The data from transactions, from digital payments, can then inform pricing, risk and can lead to tailored products which meet the needs of underserved people. The other very important area is around reducing costs, the costs of serving people and reaching people. So around use of data, tech mean information symmetry, tailored products, mitigating risks and reducing costs of delivery, a huge potential for technology to enable full financial inclusion to be reached more quickly. What exactly is Fiji and how does it plan to stimulate financial inclusion? Well Fiji is a financial inclusion global initiative. It has three components. One is around the symposium which we're here for. The other two are around country led reforms and actions to improve financial inclusion including through digital technology. For us in the World Bank Group we work with countries who have prioritised financial inclusion as a goal. We work to support them in achieving those goals by implementing a set of reforms and other actions. Through Fiji we put together programs of country support, technical support data, technical partnerships, policy advice. We complement those country programs with the third component of Fiji which is the working groups. And the working groups bring together regulators, industry, academics and others to address gaps. So gaps where the technical tools aren't available for national authorities to take the kind of ambitious reforms which India has done in this area or it can be areas where guidelines or guidance is needed or it could just be a shortage of data and knowledge. So working groups, country programs and symposia we see as the three core elements of Fiji. Also with specifically to the World Bank what are the main concerns and the main issues that they're going to attack to actually bridge the financial inclusion gap? Well at the World Bank Group we have launched a new blockchain lab which is really part of a first stage of our effort to match technology and IT expertise with financial sector expertise and we want to make that available for central banks, for national authorities beyond just blockchain across fintech and technology more broadly. We also have as a priority supporting the capacity of regulators to basically encourage innovation so allowing new entrants, new fintech providers, new types of actors requires the ability of supervisors to identify risks, monitor risks, protect consumers. So there's a capacity challenge there for regulators. Now we want to support regulators and we do very actively support regulators and national authorities in putting in place an enabling framework for innovation and for technology. That can be through regulatory sandboxes, through fintech accelerators. It can be through use of data, applying machine learning to data to mitigate risks or to improve financial literacy. And it can just be the cool work we do with over 60 countries around in putting in place basic payment systems, critical financial inclusion reforms and then enabling the use of data and of entrants of new technologies. All right, that's great. Thank you so much for your time and thank you so much for your answers.


Now in business, Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria-Smedan has reaffirmed commitment and support for development of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises MSMEs in Nigeria. The Director-General of Smedan, Deco Radha, gave the assurance in Kanu at Agency's 2021 Board Management Retreat. According to him, MSMEs remain the engine room for critical economic growth and poverty reduction globally. Radha said that the retreat would provide them with another solemn opportunity to chart new roadmaps towards repositioning the MSMEs' sub-sector in a restructured and more efficient manner.


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