The webinar will begin shortly. Please remain on the line. The webinar will begin shortly. Please remain on the line. The webinar will begin shortly. Please remain on the line. The broadcast is now starting. All attendees are in listen only mode. Good afternoon everybody and a very warm welcome to our Lunchtime Webinar Express series. We've got a great session today with Megan Harrison on the opportunities and challenges to marketers in the field of transforming businesses. If you've watched any of our Webinar Express sessions before, then you'll know how this works. But before I pass things over to Megan, I'll very quickly give you some information about the session and how you can get involved in the Q&A. So we'll be hearing from Megan for around 30 to 35 minutes. We will then move into a 10 to 15 minute Q&A to answer some of your questions. By clicking on the question mark. So don't be shy, please pop your questions in and we look forward to answering some of those a little later on. If you would like a copy of Megan's slides, then you can download a PDF of them from the handout section. You'll be able to watch the session again along with all our previous Webinars on the CIM YouTube channel. Just head into playlists, find the Webinar Express folder and you'll find them all in there. Feel free to access whenever you want, so do take a look as we've had some fantastic and insightful sessions since the Webinar Express series started. If you would like to share any thoughts about today's Webinar on the socials, you can use the hashtag you see on screen, CIM events. We love to see your comments on the socials, so please do get involved and let us know what you think of today's session. And finally, if you are a university student studying a marketing qualification, then you may want to sign up to the CIM Marketing Club. All you'll need to do is take a photo of the QR code that's on screen. Alternatively, you can hop onto our website and find the Marketing Club web page within the qualifications drop-down menu. It'll keep you up to date with the latest trends, innovations and concepts in the marketing industry. So it really is worth taking a look and signing up. Okay, so without further delay, I'd now like to introduce our guest speaker for today's session, Megan Harrison. If you'd like to turn your webcam on, Megan, I'll pass things over to you and the floor is yours when you're ready. Thank you very much, Pippa, and good afternoon everybody. I'm Megan Harrison as Pippa just said and I look forward to being here in the next 30-35 minutes to share some of my thoughts around business transformation and the implications for marketing and marketers like us. Before I go on to introduce myself a bit more, I thought just set us up as a reminder of what we'll be covering today. So a little bit around business transformation and why marketing is often at the forefront of that. And then we'll move into the organisational impact of that and really looking at some of the opportunities and challenges that throws up not only at the organisational level but actually from a marketing perspective as well. And then we'll go on to talk a little bit more about the real impacts to marketing not only functionally but from a leadership perspective as well. And then as we said, there will be time for discussion around the examples learning tips and Q&As at the end as well. So by way of introduction, probably not so much about me but more about setting context for what I'm about to share my thoughts and this session overall. I guess the real purpose of this slide is to say hello and this is I guess me. So I've worked for a real diverse bunch of businesses that you can see here and left some fantastic businesses and also some fantastic brands. But I think really the purpose of showing this is to lay the context for the discussion to say these businesses are fantastic and these brands are fantastic but all of them actually quite different to each other. There's a real mix of PLC businesses in here as well as some privately owned businesses and there's a real mix of brands as well. So some of those in leading position, some of those in challenger position and I think what that really therefore kind of led me to kind of develop and learn about is that really through all of my career most of those businesses have wanted have had some appetite for change to some degree. So some of them would like a complete overhaul and that's the task in hand and they want to totally transform the way they work and some of those just have smaller aspirations but there's always a good appetite for change in those businesses that I've worked in and in my career overall. And the second thing that has been common actually through all of those roles is most of those businesses have set the agenda to become more consumer or customer focused in their approach and really become more consumer centric essentially. Now obviously my career is very much in FMCG, that's not necessarily true for everybody who is listening today but I think and hope that we would all be able to identify with some sort of customer or consumer that we are serving as market is and therefore hopefully that generic thought is very kind of relatable for everybody. And of course that leads us to quite an obvious point I guess. Who wouldn't agree with that? I think as marketers particularly here but also broader business leaders as well I'm sure we would all agree with that and actually most organisations would agree with that principle that we should become more and more consumer or customer focused. And so I think as a principal itself everybody would tick the box and sign up to that being a very good vision set and a very good thought to progress. No matter what stage of a business is at overall. So in business transformation for that reason then, marketing is often right at the heart of this change and we find ourselves therefore often either having to lead that transformation or at the very least having to be a fundamental part of that shift towards a more consumer or customer centric approach and of course to do that then you might need some mad marketers just like us to take up this opportunity or challenge and I think it does throw up a lot of opportunity but it does throw up a lot of challenge and of course we're often writing in the thick of that as well. So in all of that of course that I think is why marketing often find themselves at the centre of business transformation but of course the impacts of that are widely felt actually through an organisation. If a vision is set in that way then of course the realities of that are actually become quite challenging, they throw up many many more things than that principle that we all agree to up front and think is a great idea to do. So these are some of the things that I think I've learnt along the way about what that can throw up the reality of that situation might be for example if you look in the middle of the left hand diagram there, the circle that that might involve more over investments in what I'd call the front end of a business model so we might have to invest more in gleaning consumer insights or actually in supporting a brand in where we invest overhead perhaps broadly commercially and that might also represent a very different shift in decision making that we are trying to therefore focus on consumer led decision making rather than perhaps in the FMCG world that might be a supply chain or trading focus that might have lived before that and so those kind of realities start to come through quite quickly and what we then start to see I think quite quickly as well is some of the more challenging areas of transformation emerging so we start to see this point around alignment is everybody aligned in the realities of what that means does everybody is everybody willing to make that shift to a consumer led or customer led decision making sort of approach and actually sometimes that can represent perceived shift in powers within an organisation which perhaps aren't real but obviously can cause some challenge along the way does everybody understand what this really means and does everybody have a good understanding of the change that is coming and actually does everybody have the right level of capability and skill sets to really drive that agenda and that's not in any way weakness that's about signalling that a business is going to change and therefore the levels of capability may also change in that way through this process some deep rooted cultural norms will no doubt be challenged a business is used to operating in X way and then when we start to move in another way actually what we used to do yesterday is not going to be the same as what we might be doing tomorrow and so the cultural norms of a business might also need to adapt and of course ways of working structures processes they may not be fit for purpose for that new way of working and so there's a whole sort of shift in that that also needs to happen and when the going really gets tough I think it's really interesting always to see how committed really we are to that vision for the long term and even how much the sponsors of that vision come under pressure to sometimes perhaps compromise on that in some ways as well so I think all of those things represent the impacts to an organisation through a business transformational process and of course closer to home then for us what we start to see more of is emerging is those key opportunities and challenges for marketing and clearly today that's what I'm going to really move on now to talk about and how that impacts us as marketers closer to home. So I think always in that situation if a business is really trying to become more consumer and customer focused and we accept the point that marketing therefore will be at the heart of that transformation then of course it will a lot of the emphasis on what happens next will fall to marketing and you could even go as far to say it starts with marketing because the consumer is that front end that we're really trying to focus on so one of the things I've always reflect on is that to be able to start leading in that way and driving that transformation with the business then of course we must get our own house in order to start with and that can vary depending on the state of an organisation for how developed a marketing function is within an organisation and the individuals and team sort of development is as well so I sort of just listed out here some of the typical questions I start to ask myself in those circumstances and really it's about just really holding the mirror up at this point saying are we in a good enough position here to start leading that transformation that we're being asked to and I would ask these questions of myself as much as of I have to put the light back on there we go I would ask these questions of myself as much as I would of lots of other people in my team and us as a function as well so here are some of those questions do we have a clear vision and strategy that a business can follow do we have are we truly the consumer customer experts and are we really driving that consumer focus decision making in everything that we're doing are we credible do we appear credible both internally to the audience as well as externally outside of the organisation as a group of marketers or a team that truly can lead that do we come across as professional, confident even bold because we will have to be brave at times to lead the way on that transformation but also as a team are we aligned are we clear on that alignment and what we stand for in the organisation and beyond are our fundamentals of marketing established and clear and are we really clear on our strengths, weaknesses and gaps and those might be okay if we know that our strengths are in the right places and are we able to lead and influence our marketing which is a huge role for us to be playing in any business transformation and are we sound in terms of financial and commercial acumen and that makes a lot of difference depending on who you're trying to influence in the organisation to do things differently so the question I was asked is why should anybody be led by us are we fully equipped to do that so how does the function stack up and perhaps what's the roadmap to building this together and I just popped in here perhaps an example of a useful tool that you can use to do this it's fairly straightforward but I think when you really understand that a business's vision of where you really the business would like to go then from a marketing perspective we can start to think about one of the priority areas therefore that we need to be absolutely brilliant as market is so you could list those out in that first column on the left there and then the second column is very much about a current assessment of our capability as either a group or we might choose to do that individually how good are we at those things right now on a score of one to five it can be that straightforward but actually how important is that attribute if we were achieving excellence in it would it be to that business transformation and through doing that I think you can really start to get very clear on the priorities that you'd really like to focus on to make sure that the function or individually you're up to that those opportunities and challenges that we've outlined to take on that transformation overall and from there you can get into a roadmap so perhaps starting to get to a plan of how you might start to improve certain areas or develop in other areas and in which timeframe so which I think is a great place to start as a marketing function but beyond marketing there are many many other skills that we need and actually other things that we have to do to try to drive that kind of transformation agenda so I've got six here that I'm now going to chat about a little bit more and in each of these I'm going to try and give a bit of an example perhaps some how I've done that in the past some of the key learnings and then I'll summarise these at the end before we go to Q&A so there are six as I said there's one all around engagement and how we can never underestimate that there's one around using our core strengths as marketers of getting creative well beyond marketing and into the organisation more broadly a third around pragmatism and how important is to stay pragmatic in these times of change a fourth around pacing ourselves a fifth around really engaging others as advocates and inferences to try to I guess help you on your way and engage other people to help you do the heavy lifting and the sixth and final topic is all around the fact that they will always be pirates in this and those pirates I use that term loosely but people who don't want to change or people who are finding that agenda quite hard and how to really think about those and break down the challenge there in a really proactive way so the first thing I'm going to talk about is engaging and I think engage engage engage I've called this because I think you can never do too much engagement and of course our time isn't limitless but the more you can do that and get people really bought into the vision and perhaps the consumer or the brands themselves I think the more successful you can be so by this I would mean not only internal sort of closer to home but actually the total business how do you engage the total business around that vision beyond not just marketing but commercial or the other functions that perhaps you work with every day and of course there are key sponsors and stakeholders who've probably set the vision but really engaging them around sort of the marketing element of that is really really key as well as the external audience so really building the reputation externally as well and then also doing this with a real sense of boldness that if we can't engage an organization around the vision and the marketing agenda then I think it would be quite hard to keep going ourselves at it so I would always encourage be brave be bold and sort of really live the vision that you're setting so a couple of examples here and as from when I was at Robert's Bakery we had to relaunch the brand at time quite radically actually and one of the things that we were very very cash strapped we didn't have too much money but we really believed in trying to do things differently and trying to cut through and we launched we knew we had to launch this new vision to the business but without much money and without much space actually to get the whole business sort of in one place at one time we came up with this idea that we would do this from the side of the lorry a lorry and it was one of those lorries where you can pull the curtain back and you can see that there and all the money we had we invested in some amazing kit huge screen and sound system and we literally gathered people to the side of that lorry and I would love to have played the video for you today of how we engaged that total business in doing that but unfortunately that doesn't work very well with the webinar so we've had to not show that but I'm sure I can share it if anyone else would like to see it at that point so that was just a way of engaging people in a really different way the middle section here you can see this is just I think a great way to try to demonstrate how bold we were at that time in engaging the external audience and this we went to an awards evening where we were up for a big award and we just launched which was the first bread skew ever to be launched in recyclable paper and we really wanted to make our point about that and so we decided it was a black tie event but every single one of these people agreed to doing this we made our costumes out of those bread paper bags and you can see me here wearing a bread paper bag skirt and lots of these other people with bread paper bag bow ties waistcoats, handbags, masks and you can see that when you go and do that you do make quite a splash and we ended up right on the front of the homepage here of the BIA at that time attracting attention for the business and the brand and really leading as we meant to go on from the front and the third section here in which we used to do we had this just idea one day of getting these sort of temporary tattoos and the idea really being about us wearing the brand and we used to take these stencils to both internal events and external events and we used to sort of see this as a way of just really publicising the brand either internally or externally so hopefully just a couple of examples of how you can really engage people in really different ways that I think get you noticed in an organisation outside the second area is all around getting creative and as marketing is what we take for granted we are creative if we aren't creative in the classical sense of I'm no artist by any means but we usually have creative minds and creative mindsets and one of the observations I've had all the way through the years of being involved in transformations is that we can use our creativity to problem solve but to bring fun and challenge and also to influence and most importantly beyond marketing so taking our creativity out into the wider organisation is a great way to bring about that influence is a great way to network you're doing something for other people but in return you might always ask for 15 or 20 minutes on their agenda to talk about the vision and what they can do to help that vision move along so a couple of three examples again here the first is an initiative in Pisa Cousins where this is more of an initiative around launching more of a refreshed values but through that we really want to bring about a lot more sort of a culture of more continuous feedback and we have this idea that we would therefore become the feedback fairies this is me dressed as a feedback fairy and we basically ran almost like a speed dating style of feedback with lots of different groups in the organisation which are nothing to do with marketing they might be in the supply chain or the operation and this was obviously encouraging that culture of feedback but obviously it gave us presence and network opportunities and opportunities to talk to those groups of people as well about the marketing agenda the middle one is going to look very very strange and actually it is a quite unique idea and it isn't my own so it's from a book called The Pirates Inside which Adam Morgan wrote and you may have also read it's very focused on challenger brands but here's the point really and this was one of the best symbols of bringing a consumer to life in an organisation is go and get a mannequin and dress them up as your target consumer and get them present in your organisation and as you can imagine this is a very strange idea especially when I got two mannequins in my garage at home and my husband was really wondering what on earth I was doing with these but and then dressing them as our target consumer was pretty interesting as well but we literally then did place them around the organisation we got whole organisation focused on at this time this target consumer was called next-gen Gemma she was a millennial and we wanted people very focused on who we were serving and the best thing about mannequins is you can pick them up and you can cart them around with you to lots of different places so we were very very keen to always have her present and here she is actually sitting in the chairman's seat as he walked into the office one day we had her sitting there and he luckily had a very good sense of humour and that was a little bit of fun as well and the third one was very much around some things I used to do way back actually in Kimberley Clark and we were creatively trained and we used to run creative sessions and I ran a very dry creative session on cost saving with an operations team but again the opportunity for networking for bringing the marketing agenda forward is really really important and that was another great way to be using our marketing skill sets the third is all around staying pragmatic and flexible and I think really what I mean about here this is that as marketer we can have these wonderful visions that are truly inspiring or inspirational and really really motivating but I think at times of change as well we can sometimes get a little bit stuck in our ivory towers on those and become a bit puristic so for me the advice here is ditching the ivory tower to make some progress and that doesn't mean completely ditching it it means stepping out of that to become slightly more pragmatic knowing our strategic boundaries but also knowing what you can compromise on so creating those win-win opportunities that serve the strategic agenda overall but do mean that you make some progress and one of the examples I'm going to share here is that when I was really struggling to get this idea moving in terms of how we could combine those two agendas and so I made up this word which is practical and hopefully you've already guessed what that means is that when you've got a very tactically focused organisation that really only wants to think about tomorrow and maybe volume versus value or maybe a promotions led environment that you're trying to make some headroom with by driving a brand then actually I really developed this word as a bit of a signal for all of us to be able to use that when someone came up with the tax initiative how could we do that and help the business but actually do it on the strategic agenda so this word is practical embraces all of that and there's a couple of outside examples here that you can see from other businesses that I'll leave you to look at more deeply perhaps afterwards but again in the spirit of just trying to share a couple of tools this is a very straightforward tool that essentially I guess the next size I've just got to put the light back on again is just an exercise of laying out and being clear of your strategic priorities on the left, on the right understanding that tactical business need so in this example which is totally made up because I couldn't share anything for confidential reasons of the past but you might have a brand that is premium Italian and all about good coffee but the tactical business need is a retailer specific skew that's a good deal that is blue and you know to try to find that stratical sweet spot is really what I'm encouraging here and the example here is okay how about adulterator one-off exclusive that meets both of those needs that won't compromise the strategic agenda overall so that's what stratical is all about the fourth is all about pacing yourself I think everybody will understand that saying it's a marathon not a sprint but I think in particularly stubborn businesses that really don't want to change or finding change very difficult you know it's always trying to remember that this will take some time and being really clear on expectations of timing that it might take X amount of years setting some really clear milestones and really celebrating those when you meet them and this 85% effort rule has been widely discussed and written about by Greg McEwen but I think the point here is not give 85% time or effort but more just about actually making sure you're working really smartly so that you don't exhaust yourself in trying to get that transformation agenda moving and really thinking about how you pace yourself for the long term to get that job done. The fifth is really all around finding and identifying these champions, advocates and influencers and identifying and then working them hard and I'll say that with a big smile on my face because I'm very open about that with people I'm asking to also partner with me on those agendas and I think the key thing here is identifying those influencers they may be formal or informal and the context I shared earlier to the different businesses I've worked in has surprised me sometimes in terms of the way that the stakeholder or influencer network might differ some of those businesses are very subjective and so the last person you'd expect to have the greatest influence does and trying to really find those people and observe is really really important and then using your extended network within the business or even outside is really important to gain that help and always establishing that win-win mentality too. So a great example here is a long time ago now when I was working in the GlobalDurex team and we were trying to set a new direction for the brand and we were trying to do exactly this, lead with the consumer and the brand more strongly in a very sales driven environment. One of the things I had to do really was find an influential partner in doing this and I found this in the French team and they were exceptionally credible, very well respected actually by the rest of the organisation the other local markets but they were very particular as well about what they wanted and we were bringing forward a different kind of advertising vehicle and they were very specific about what they wanted on the end frame and in the end I felt it was more important to compromise with that so it was sort of an 85 percent, 15 percent compromise to really get that French team on board which they did then get on board and from there they then did the heavy lifting of wanting everybody else to use that advertising vehicle and they helped me no end with convincing other markets to do that so I think that's a good example hopefully of how you can really get those partners working for you if you can identify them and the last is you know this is tongue in cheek but there will always be pirates so expect them and when I say pirates like I say it is very tongue in cheek I don't think anybody's purposely ever trying to derail an agenda but lots of people for lots of different reasons are in different stages of how willing they are to embrace that transformation and for lots of reasons people might not want to they don't know how to it represents some kind of challenge or threat for them so the key I think here is to spot them and really try to understand why they might not be so up for it and then really take those steps to try to move towards them try to get some common understanding and understand what's important for them and again creating those win-win agendas and I think trying to find points to help them shine as well, help them shine in the agenda that you're trying to drive and create and also asking for help either from other people but perhaps even as openly as with them themselves so I think there are many specific examples probably that I can't share specifically but they are my top tips around parts and I think the key thing is always expect them and move towards them if you can so that is me drawing to a close in summary then I think in business transformation marketing is often at the heart of any change especially if a business is trying to move towards a consumer or customer centric model and transformation does bring many opportunities for marketing but also some challenges a big, big point here is about getting your marketing house in order first I think is really, really key so that you can then go on and beyond functional marketing and influence further so I've talked about all of those six points around engagement getting creative and using your creative skills beyond marketing to influence staying pragmatic pacing yourself finding your champions advocates and influencers and working them really, really hard and watching out for those pirates and trying to bring them closer rather than push them away from you and above all I'd say really do try and enjoy any transformation ride it is quite hard work and it is challenging but I do think it's exceptionally fulfilling as well if you have any further questions beyond the Q&A today this is where I am I'm on LinkedIn that's my public URL and I'm happy to help do reach out if you'd like to or contact me and I think then now we are over to Q&A Pippa Brilliant thank you so much Megan that was absolutely fantastic I'm really, really insightful we have had some questions and there are still some kind of coming in at the moment so just looking at some of the first questions that we had in were more on the practical side of things so one of the questions was can you recommend any reading or courses on creativity Gosh yes I can now I mean I think it's interesting because creativity I think can be taught I think a lot of people say that you have it or you don't well maybe if you're trying to be a fine art student you've got to have some I think you've got to have some sort of tendency towards that but I think creativity can be taught when I was taught about creativity it was with an agency called What If and I was classically trained in creativity by them now I know they are still around I don't know if they're still doing those training courses but certainly they do have some really great books around creativity written by What If so it's What If with I think a question mark an exclamation mark and I still really advocate them and actually I meet many marketers today who were also trained at that time by What If and I think using their process is really good they I think it is quite straightforward so if you it can only get hold of the book yourself then I think you can teach yourself that there's some great tools and techniques in there and really practical applications of that as well fantastic thank you and one of the other questions in a similar vein was what strategic models or tools do you recommend for use throughout business transformation yes I mean I think you know what's really interesting is I tend to have just developed and keep sort of moving on my own really because I think I knew did put all in here actually but it's I think it's almost like a whole nother web because it's quite complicated or long to discuss I mean there obviously if you wanted to do some formal training I was lucky enough to go to Ashley's Business School and there are they do run some amazing you know couple of days there in strategic business tools and you know that's something perhaps you could ask an organization to sponsor you in and those tools were excellent in that you really do take out a series of tools with them and there are lots of other partners I work with as well in the field and I can most definitely put people in contact with them if you would like after this two or three very very good strategic partners that I've worked with who have tools but the things I would say probably is that most of those are the same tools and a lot of those tools the way I like to think about it is tools around the where to play and then tools around the how to win and the where to play is really all about can you get that vision formed can you identify your levers for growth in how you are going to set the vision for growth for it is consumer or customer based into your brand levers and can you understand what that opportunity is and most of that is the where to play and then the how to play is really about against that strategy how are you going to activate to deliver that and classically that might use something as straight forward as a 4p model which we're all familiar with particularly I'm sorry if that's very FMCG but that is essentially using lots of the activation tools to deliver that strategy or the tools of mental availability or physical availability the other one I really could recommend to everybody for some reading if you haven't read this before is a book called How Brands Bro by Byron Sharp that's been around about 10 years what I love about that book is it is scientifically proven principles that it's basically it's based on statistical modelling so it's pretty hard to argue and I think it's a really great sort of book to read to to get some guiding strategic principles from if you're interested fantastic thank you and we've had a few pirate related questions so I'm going to try and put them into one question because they were there's a few of them and they were asking what's the best way to deal with those that are perhaps a little bit resistant to change and on the basis that it's unlikely to get everybody on board what would be the best way to deal with the percentage of those on board would you be looking at a particular percentage of having the workforce behind you or those that you're trying to convince and look at perhaps any more than 60-70% or is there a case of where do you stop putting the effort in because you know you're not going to get 100% of pirates perhaps to support you with the change so they were just asking what do you do with those that are resistant to change and at what point do you kind of consider it successful that you've kind of converted the majority who were initially resistant? Yeah, I mean I think here it is exactly that point you need the majority because otherwise you can't move the agenda forward so you do need the majority I mean I've never really put a percentage on that I think you get a sense don't you of whether you are feeling as though you have enough people on board or whether you've got to work harder at that I would definitely say you will never get 100% and so I would almost go as far as saying almost like that 85% rule again perhaps don't try to get them all except there will be some pirates always try and work hard on them but sometimes you won't get everybody I think the key is you must get the majority so I guess the 70-30 perhaps would be the right place to go. Those who are particularly stubborn I think there's some that you don't really mind. You can have a healthy debate with they're never going to be convinced but they're actually not going to do too much damage. I think what you've really got to focus on are the people who either have a very influential voice who are very who really are not for their converting or people who are very influential with sponsors that you need to continue to support you on the journey that you're going on so and then I think you've got to really start to break those people down perhaps there's five of them and really start to try very different ways in and tactics but actually you might need to enlist some help as well. Not only from those key influences that you heard about me talking about with the French 2x example but actually maybe some really senior people in the organization as well so I've got to do the light again and some really senior people in the organization as well who are sponsors of this program and obviously that needs to be done with exceptional care because what you don't want to do is to start any kind of sense of a tell-tale sort of mentality or culture but I think asking for support is always a good thing to do and asking for support of other people who can perhaps influence on your behalf because sometimes the message not coming from marketing is also very very powerful so hence if you build that network out and you start to build some great relationships with other people who can then do that job on your behalf to some degree that can really save you a lot of pain and move you to a greater majority hopefully. Amazing thank you and I think we may be able to fit one more quick question in this one is from somebody who has got a big project at work and they're trying to they've had some delays with it and they're trying to rebuild the momentum and excitement and have asked are there any tips for when the trust or confidence is lost trying to rebuild that trust and confidence? Yeah well you know probably I would really think about do you punctuate that a bit more formally okay that's been quite challenging we've got to this point we still believe in the long term so let's have kind of a quick time out and let's hear all the opinion around the room about what's feeling quite hard actually and that gives you some amazing feedback then to go and build again and then I would actually almost do a sort of mini relaunch of it again internally once you've done that and of course we're good at that we know how to do that so how do you sort of go again and say right look we've course corrected a little bit here because that was we were finding that quite over-duty we've listened to the feedback here now where I think we probably could go with a few tweaks that obviously is still on the vision of what you've got to do and to really sign post and signal that you might want to then acknowledge that in a way that really grabs attention to say we're going again we need full commitment this is almost phase two of that journey and you know some of the pacing yourself comes into that problem a little bit I think where you might have to acknowledge there's a milestone there acknowledge the great achievement and successes but acknowledge some things aren't quite working at this point and better to do that I think continuing on a journey that perhaps is feeling hard work for everybody great thank you Megan really appreciate you taking the time to answer those questions as well as lots of great questions coming in we've also had some really lovely feedback as well saying that the presentation was amazing and thanking you so just wanted to share that as well but unfortunately that's it for our webinar today we'd like to thank Megan once again and also the CIM North West Group for organising the webinar we do hope you've enjoyed the session and found it interesting and worthwhile and just very quickly before we finish we'll be sending out a short survey about the webinar and we'd love to hear your feedback it will only take a few minutes and all survey responses are anonymous so please do let us know your thoughts on the session and what you would like to see from our webinar express series in the future so we'll be taking a bit of a break with our webinar express series for the rest of the summer but we'll be back on the 19th of September when our East of England group will be hosting participation the 8th P in the marketing mix with Jules Joseph the event is up on our website already so head on over to the events page for further details and to register for the session so that just leaves me to say a final thank you to you for joining us today we hope you've enjoyed the webinar take care everyone have a lovely summer and we look forward to seeing you again in September


Hi, I'm Arushi. I'm going to present this joint work with Abhishek Jain, Manoj Prabhakaran and Rajiv Raghunath on communication models and best achievable security in two round MPC. Secure multi-party competition or MPC is an interactive protocol that allows a group of mutually distrusting parties to jointly compute a function on their private inputs. The security of MPC guarantees that an adversary who corrupts a subset of the parties should not learn anything beyond the output of the function. Most MPC protocols considered in literature are designed over two kinds of communication channels namely broadcast and point-to-point. A broadcast channel allows a sender to send the same message to multiple receivers while point-to-point channels enable parties to exchange private messages amongst each other. These communication models play a fundamental role in deciding what kind of security can be achieved by the MPC protocol and under what assumptions. For instance, a broadcast channel is necessary for achieving security when the number of corrupt parties are greater than one-third fraction of the total parties while point-to-point channels are necessary for achieving information-theoretic security. In this work, our goal is to examine the role of these communication models in two round MPC. Two rounds in the MPC setting are clearly minimal since one round MPC is known to be impossible. In recent years, a series of works have made significant advances in the two round MPC setting. These works have managed to establish feasibility of general computation in two round MPC relying essentially on minimal computational assumptions. In this work, we consider the honest majority setting where the adversary is allowed to corrupt a minority of the parties. There are numerous advantages of working in this setting. For instance, the honest majority setting enables protocols with stronger security guarantees. Secondly, unlike the dishonest majority setting, protocols in the honest majority setting can be designed only based on symmetry key primitives, which in general are more efficient than public key primitives. Moreover, it is possible to design protocols with fewer rounds in this setting. And finally, working in this setting is truly justified because it often holds up in practical applications where these protocols are expected to be deployed. As I mentioned earlier, in this work, we consider the two round honest majority setting and investigate in different communication models involving broadcast and point-to-point channels what levels of security are achievable and under what assumptions. We primarily focus on the plain model that is without any trusted setup assumptions, but sometimes we augment this plain model with an untrusted or bare public key infrastructure setup where the parties are allowed to choose their own public keys and post them on a public bulletin board. Let me first quickly recall all the commonly used security notions in MPC. The simplest one of course is privacy against a semi-honest or an honest but curious adversary. The case of malicious adversaries is slightly more complex and a variety of security notions have been considered in this setting. The most common one being security with a bot where the adversary can prevent the honest parties from learning the output by prematurely aborting the protocol. Three variants of security with a bot are often considered in existing literature. The first one is security with selective abort where the adversary may selectively force a subset of the honest parties to abort. The next one is security with unanimous abort where the adversary may still prevent the honest parties from learning the output, but the honest parties all agree on whether or not to abort. Finally, in the security with identifiable abort, the honest parties not only agree on whether or not to abort, but in the in case they abort, they are also able to identify at least one corrupt party that caused the abort. Finally, the strongest notion is that of guaranteed output delivery where the honest parties are guaranteed to learn the output no matter what, even if the adversary misbehaves. This notion can be considered against full on malicious adversaries or against just fail-stop adversaries who behave like semi-honest adversaries except that they may prematurely abort the protocol. Overall, we have the following hierarchy of security notions starting with security against semi-honest adversaries, then we have security with selective abort, then security with unanimous abort, then identifiable abort. And finally, the strongest one is guaranteed output delivery against malicious adversaries. And similarly, we can have another set of hierarchy starting with security against semi-honest adversaries, followed by guaranteed output delivery against fail-stop adversaries, and finally guaranteed output delivery against malicious adversaries. Let's now get an idea of what is already known in the two round NPC setting. For semi-honest security, Garg et al and Beno Moda et al designed protocols in the broadcast-only setting. But since broadcast can very easily be emulated over point-to-point channels in the semi-honest setting, this result establishes feasibility in all the models. Gordon et al showed that fail-stop guaranteed output delivery protocol is impossible in the broadcast-only setting, while Anant et al established feasibility in all other communication models. For selective abort, Anant et al established feasibility in all communication models except the broadcast-only setting. Gengan et al and Patra et al established impossibility of unanimous abort, identifiable abort, and malicious guaranteed output delivery in the following communication models. And finally, Anant et al and Applebomb et al established feasibility of unanimous abort in the broadcast plus P2P and broadcast plus PKI models. Given these results, the question about feasibility of two round NPC in the following scenarios remains unresolved. In this work, we provide answers to all of these questions, thereby completing this picture. We show that security with abort is impossible in the broadcast-only setting. Moreover, identifiable abort is also impossible in the broadcast plus P2P setting. But on the positive side, we show that malicious guaranteed output delivery and hence identifiable abort are achievable in the broadcast plus PKI setting. Overall, these results collectively establish the following hierarchy between different communication channels. Since broadcast plus PKI is the only setting where the strongest security notion of malicious guaranteed output delivery is achievable, this is clearly the strongest communication model. Then we have broadcast plus P2P, which are necessary for both unanimous and identifiable abort. Then comes point-to-point channels, which are required for selective abort. And finally, the weakest communication model is the broadcast-only setting. Let me now elaborate on some of our contributions. We first show that two round honest-majority MPC over broadcast channels implies a two-message oblivious transfer protocol. In the semi-honest setting, the two round honest-majority MPC implies a semi-honest OT, while in the malicious setting, it implies a maliciously secure OT. Moreover, this implication holds both in the playing model and in the CRS model. Also, this implication justifies the use of OT in the semi-honest protocols designed by Gargital and Venomodiatol. We further show that two-message maliciously secure OT is impossible in the playing model. These two results combined establish impossibility of security with abort in the broadcast-only setting in the honest-majority setting. This also shows that the use of point-to-point channels in the work of Anantetol and Apropometol was indeed necessary and establishes equivalence between the honest-majority and dishonest-majority in this particular scenario. In the broadcast-plus-PKI setting, we design a two-round protocol using public key encryption and multi-CRS non-interactive zero-knowledge that achieves guaranteed output delivery. This protocol also establishes feasibility of identifiable abort in this communication model. Finally, we show that identifiable abort is impossible over broadcast and P2P channels in the playing model. Additionally, we also show that a fail-stop guaranteed output delivery protocol that is secure against the corruption of more than n over 3 and fewer than n over 2 corrupt parties also implies a two-message OT protocol. This justifies the use of OT in the protocol designed by Anantetol. But for this talk, I'm only going to focus on these three results. Moving on to the main ideas that help us achieve these three results, the rest of this talk will be organized as follows. I will start by discussing our impossibility result in the broadcast-only model, then I will talk about the guaranteed output delivery protocol in the broadcast-plus-PKI model, and finally conclude with the impossibility of identifiable abort in the broadcast-plus-P2P model. Okay, so to quickly recall the oblivious transfer functionality, this is a two-party functionality where the sender provides two inputs, M0 and M1, and the receiver provides a single bit B as input. At the end of the protocol, the receiver receives MB as the output. For security, we want that the sender should not learn anything about the receiver's input. While the receiver should not learn anything about the sender's other input, that was not revealed as part of the output of the protocol. We now show that two-round maliciously secure, honest majority MPC in the broadcast-only setting implies a two-message oblivious transfer protocol. Let's consider the simplest case of three parties where one party is allowed to be corrupt. These arguments easily generalize to any number of parties. In the broadcast-only protocol, all parties broadcast a message in both rounds of the protocol. Let's assume that the function that these parties are computing is the following multi-party variant of OT, where Alice acts as the receiver, Bob acts as the sender, while Charlie does not have any input and simply acts as a helper party. At the end, only Alice gets an output. Since Alice is the only output party, it does not need to broadcast its second-round message. It can simply compute this message locally during the output computation phase. Let's now consider a modified protocol where Bob and Charlie operate as a single entity. Now, if Bob and Charlie are indeed a single entity, they can broadcast all their messages together in the second round. This gives us a two-message protocol for the OT functionality, where in the first round, only Alice, who acts as the receiver, sends a message. And in the second round, Bob and Charlie, who together act as the sender, send a message. Finally, Alice locally computes the output of the protocol in the output computation phase. But now, we need to show that this protocol does indeed implement the OT functionality in a secure manner. So Alice's view pretty much remains unaffected in this modified protocol vis-à-vis the original protocol. Security against a receiver therefore follows from the security of the original two-round NPC protocol. This means that if the original protocol was semi-honest secure, then we get security against a semi-honest receiver. And if the original protocol was maliciously secure, then we get security against a malicious receiver. To argue security against the sender, we observe that Charlie did not have any input in the original protocol. If the adversary now only corrupts Bob in the original protocol, it can obtain the same viewer as in this transformed two-party protocol by internally simulating Charlie. Therefore, we get security against a semi-honest sender. We know that in this case, even if the original protocol was maliciously secure, we only get semi-honest security against the sender. Hence, we have successfully shown that a maliciously secure broadcast-only two-round NPC implies a two-message malicious receiver OT. We additionally show in our paper that a two-message malicious receiver OT is in fact impossible, thereby establishing impossibility of a maliciously secure broadcast-only two-round NPC. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, I won't be able to discuss the impossibility of two-round malicious receiver OT in this talk. Let's now move on to the setting where the parties still operate over a broadcast channel. But in addition to that, they have access to a bare public infrastructure setup. In this setting, we show existence of a guaranteed output delivery protocol. So, all existing maliciously secure guaranteed output delivery protocols in the broadcast plus PKI setting, crucially rely on a trusted CRS setup, which means that the structure of these protocol looks like the following. There is a CRS setup and a bare PKI setup at the beginning, followed by two rounds of interaction over a broadcast channel. We observe that in these protocols, the CRS is only used for nizic proofs. In the honest majority setting, however, these nizic proofs can very easily be replaced by multi-CRS nizics. In multi-CRS nizics, the setup consists of multiple CRS strings, as opposed to a single CRS, and soundness holds as long as a majority of the CRSs were honestly generated. These CRSs generated by the individual parties can now be embedded inside the bare PKI setup. In particular, the public keys of the new bare PKI setup will include these CRSs and the public keys of the original PKI setup. And since the adversary in multi-CRS nizics is allowed to choose its CRSs adaptively, after looking at the CRSs chosen by the honest parties, this is a valid bare PKI setup. As a result, this gives us a two-round guaranteed output delivery protocol in the broadcast plus PKI setting without relying on a CRS. While this protocol also implies a protocol with identifiable abort, note that in this protocol, we rely on a special bare PKI setup. In our paper, we present a separate protocol for identifiable abort, where the PKI can be instantiated using any generic public key encryption scheme. Designing a similar guaranteed output delivery protocol where the PKI can be instantiated using any public key encryption scheme is still an interesting open question. So let's now finally look at the impossibility result for identifiable abort in the broadcast plus P2P setting. Let's assume for the sake of contradiction that such a protocol exists in the broadcast plus PKI setting and every party both broadcasts a message and sends private messages to all parties in both rounds of the protocol. The function that we consider is this OT-like functionality where Alice has a single bit B as input Bob provides two inputs M0 and M1 and Charlie does not provide any input and at the end of the protocol only Charlie receives an output. Let us now consider a scenario where the adversary corrupts Alice. The adversarial strategy that Alice adopts is to honestly behave throughout the protocol except that it does not send a private channel message to Charlie in the first round of the protocol. In this attack scenario, the honest parties should either be able to identify the bad party and output bot or obtain a non-bot output. Let's consider each of these scenarios separately. If the party is a bot, they must also identify the corrupt party. Now, while Charlie knows that Alice is corrupt, from Bob's point of view, he has no reason to believe why Alice would be corrupt. Bob in fact cannot distinguish between a scenario where Alice is indeed corrupt and does not send a private message to Charlie and a different scenario where Charlie is corrupt and falsely accuses Alice of not sending him a message in the first round. Therefore, this case clearly cannot hold. How about if the parties obtain a non-bot output in this particular attack scenario? In this case, since the honest parties compute a non-bot output, the simulator must be able to extract some input from Alice. This could either be Alice's real input bit B or 1 minus B. In case the simulator extracts Alice's real input B, we can argue that in an alternate scenario where Bob is corrupt and Alice is honest, Bob can run the same simulator algorithm to extract honest Alice's input. This is because the messages that are used by the simulator, which are encircled in green here, are all part of Bob's view. Since this would clearly violate Alice's privacy, this particular case cannot hold. Now, if the simulator extracts 1 minus B, then we can show that in an alternate scenario where Alice is honest and Charlie is corrupt, it can first participate in the protocol honestly to learn the correct output and then recompute its second round messages while completely ignoring Alice's first round private channel message. This allows a corrupt Charlie to obtain both M0 and M1, thereby violating Bob's privacy. As a result, this case cannot hold either. Overall, we have succeeded in demonstrating that in this particular attack scenario where Alice does not send a private channel message to Charlie in the first round, the parties can neither compute a non-bord output nor identify a corrupt party. Therefore, no such identifiable abort protocol exists. To conclude, we complete the feasibility landscape of two round MPC in different communication models with varying security guarantees. As a result of this, we establish the following hierarchy of communication models. Our results also explain the use of specific communication channels and computational assumptions in existing two round MPC protocols. Thank you.