Selecting vehicles to post. Write that down. Come with me. So, after walking my Indian board, I went outside. I wrote down what I wanted to post. I come inside, guess where I'm at? I'm going into the sales tower. What do I do?  You grab them, you're about to go photo real quick. It only takes a second, okay? That's going to be number one. Number two, maybe you went out to trade row, right? See this? You got the key ring, you know what I'm saying? And what are you going to do? You're going to grab the key ring. You're going to grab a couple, one or two trade ins that just came in on trade row and you're going to go photo them real quick. Look, maybe some dealerships are like, hey man, we don't want any of our trade ins photoed until they go through service. This is off limits for you. But if you can do it, I say the early bird gets the worm. Go take some early pictures of it. Put it out there. Call it the early bird special. Listen, there's a butt for every seat, okay?  I assure you. Now, if I've posted all the cars that I have, I need to get all my trade ins posted. Now, if you haven't posted anything out there, there's no sense in just digging in the trades.  But some of your best pieces and your best trades come in every single day. They're right here on the key ring. And a lot of the times I want to say this to you. Let's say your store starts at 9 a.m. At 9 a.m., you can walk in and you can try to grab these keys, okay? But there is a pretty good chance at 9 a.m. that somebody is coming through your managers, everybody included, and they're going to grab these keys. If I get here at 8.30, these keys are here for me to grab. Be early in your store if you want to post your first trades. No one's moved the cars from the back. No one's moved the keys. It's very easy to slide in early, fly under the radar, get this done if you can do it in your store. I would recommend sliding in a little early. Now, let's talk about how to select vehicles. Follow me, come on. Hey, guys, what's going on? It's Andy. A lot of you leave comments telling me that you need help. Do me a favor and say the best way to get a hold of me. Shoot me a text message right now,<PHONE_NUMBER>.<PHONE_NUMBER>. I'll help you with whatever you need.  Let's get back to the video. So, we're going out here and I see this truck. You see this truck out here? Okay. Zoom in. You see that charcoal gray tinder right there? See it out there? That truck's got nice wheels on it, right? Well, let's say I'm in Texas. I'm in Oklahoma. I'm in a place where it's cold. Maybe there's bad weather. I want to take it. I want to take trucks that got what? Nice wheels and tires on them. If you got them, post it. Find neat pieces. Think about this right now. What is something that you've gotten a lot of calls on lately? Look, if we were to take the market right now, take the whole market, we would put it into a pie chart. I would say 80% of the market is looking for $20,000 in undercars. 80%, $20,000 in under. The other 20%, they'll buy all the expensive neat stuff. My goal is that if you're looking for something to post, don't go post a $65,000 truck, unless it's a diesel four-wheel drive. You know what I mean? It's got a high demand in your market. There's no sense in going into that expensive of a vehicle. Why? Because if you're posting $65,000 trucks, how many of your customers can buy that unless you're in an Audi, a Mercedes, or a Bugatti store or something? I'm just saying. You're going to want to appeal to the $20,000 in undercar unless it's unique and rare. What is unique and rare? So, a 2011 model with 50,000 miles, that's rare, right? A 2021 model, a 2020 model with 80,000 miles, that's rare because that 2020 will be one of the better price vehicles on the market just because it's got miles. That's a great piece to put out there. Also, an older model with lower miles is a great piece to put out there even though it's pre-owned. It's new to the next person. Those are what I mean by finding unique vehicles. Also, maybe you live in a nice place and you've got convertibles. Look, Camaro's always do great. Anything under the $20,000 range is phenomenal. Pickup trucks on the internet are the best thing that ever existed. I'm just going to tell you, look for stuff unique. That's it for this video. Comment below so I know who you are. Set your notifications and then subscribe to the channel. We got daily sales training videos dropping. I'll see you soon.


And now ladies and gentlemen we are moving forward to our next segment which is the panel discussion but before that I'd like to once again thank our partners, our presenting partner Zeefi India's number one contact brand and our digital growth partner in mobi driving real connections. Moving on to the panel discussion for the day, the theme of the panel is how mobile has become the marketer's resilient channel. Our session chair for the panel is Mr Gul Ray's alum, chief investment and strategy officer at Apple. He's the chief investment and strategy officer at Apple Holdings. He has over 15 years of experience and drives Apple's strategy and investment decisions with an inspiring entrepreneurial journey behind him. Gul Ray's now divides his time across geographies and uses his extensive experience in extending the company's offerings to clients across industries. So I'm going to welcome you first, Gul Ray's alum, very warm welcome to you and I'm going to leave this screen over to you to get the panelists on board and get the conversation going. Thank you, thank you Karthi. I hope I'm audible and there's no echo. No absolutely, you're clearly audible. Perfect, so thank you once again and I also want to thank Exchange for Media for giving me this opportunity. Well it doesn't happen every day that you've got five brand marketers on the panel, so without any further delay, let me start inviting the guests for this evening and I will do that in the alphabetical order. First I have Anil Vishwanathan. Anil has about 20 years of experience and he's the one responsible for feeding us chocolate and a sweet for the last 12 years. Anil, Anil works at Mondele, it's national as the senior director and Anil is also passionate about building brands that people love and it's clearly visible in the work that he does. Welcome Anil. Thank you, Gul Ray is happy to be here. Pleasure to have you. Next I have Karthi, Karthi Marshan and I fondly call him Karthi sir. He has over 32 years of experience, he's been with Kote Mahendra Bank for over 14 years now, currently working as the president and CMO for Kote Mahendra Bank and he also believes in using words to make a difference. Karthi sir. Hi Gul Ray, hi Anil, thanks for having me. Pleasure to have you sir. All right, next I have Manish, Manish Kalra. Manish has 20 years of experience across various industries, he started his careers with IPC, moved to City Bank, FC, Dell, make my trip and the list goes on. Karthi is working with Z5 as the head of marketing for Avod. Anil is passionate about understanding online user behavior and photography. Hi guys, happy to be here Gul Ray, thank you so much for doing this. Thanks Manish, pleasure to have you. And next I have the lovely ladies, Pallavi, Pallavi says she is the automotive industry for over 30 years, started in Yamaha, moved on to Harley Davidson where I believe she was the first person to be hired in India and she was the right from the beginning, moved on to MG and now at BMW. Pallavi is passionate about night day and technology which delivers seamless customer experience. Thanks Gul Ray and happy to be here. Pleasure to have you Pallavi and finally I have Sujata, Sujata has about 25 years of experience, started from P&G and now working as the head of marketing for India and South Asia at Giza. Sujata very surprisingly and it was good surprise to know that she is a lead vocalist in a rock band and if you are lucky you can catch her live in concert at Aadrak Mamba Hi Gul Ray, it's good to be here. Good to have you. All right, I typically have my analyst session with a fun question, it's your way it is. I promise you this is the only one which is a common question for all of you. The question is apart from your own brand, which is the best mobile campaign that you remember typically from the last 6-12 month range and why? Apart from your own brand, which is the most memorable mobile advertising campaign that you remember and why in the timeframe of last 6-12 months. And let me start with the lovely ladies Pallavi, do you want to take that first? You put me on a spot. I think I personally like, I mean I think the one which Royal Enfield launched and because I'm into writing so I think that's the only one I remember. They launched their experiential platform on mobile and that's a great customer experience platform for community. I think that's the one and the second one is the Starbucks India campaign which they launched just 6 months back. I think those two ones kind of strike the chord for me. Perfect, Suryata. Okay and I'm not saying this because Anil is on the panel but I really loved what Cadbury's just did I think a week ago where they got a lot of the SMEs onto the platform with their advertising. I thought that was a beautiful brand brought in the need of the hour and just struck the chord with you. I'm going to talk about that later. It's called Cadbury not just an ad. Yes. All right Anil, apart from your own brand. I think there's lots of interesting work that's going on good reason I think from my perspective specifically on mobile slightly different but I'm quite pleased at the work that Live Boy and Closeup have been doing in the global markets specifically leveraging mobile and kind of addressing some very specific core problems in rural market which typically any other form of media finds it difficult. So the work that Live Boy is doing on sanitation and Closeup is doing on oral hygiene leading the industry in the kind of work that they're doing. I think Kathi sir. I'll pick a campaign I saw Axis Bank do early on during COVID called reverse the Khata where they triggered the sentiment among all of us to fade forward so to speak to all the small and medium businesses who are struggling because of lots of business like your barber and your chaiwala, tapri chaiwala and so on and so forth. I thought that was outstanding and inspirational work. And it's amazing to see you come complimenting a community. We did it publicly as well. It tweeted about it at the time. All right Manish. So I would go with IKEA when they launched in Hyderabad then they kind of created a buzz around it where they could configure furniture and they had auto rickshaws and it was pretty 361 but mobile was the lead in which they could allocate a specific model of furniture. Oh yeah absolutely. All right so the topic for today is mobile marketing. Let me start with Sujata. Sujata you've got such a vast experience of 25 years and I'm sure you would have seen the entire you know evolution of not only mobile but digital as a channel. And today we talk about mobile being more effective media for marketing. So let me ask your opinion on how do you see this perceived effectiveness of mobile as a marketing strategy? Well you're right Guresh. We've really come a long way from you know TV where we had a single channel to cable to digital social and today mobile. So we've seen growth like never before and you know if you ask me what breach and efficacy of mobile it's it's quite insane to see the growth. Today we have 700 million internet users in India and that's up from 300 million just five years ago. So you look at the scale of the growth out of that 700 million 582 million are on mobile. So I mean I think the topic of is reached there. I mean that's an absolute yes. And why is there so much I think is because of the second point which is it's so efficient. And I'm just going to talk about four quick points before I hand over but the first one is I don't think any one of us even when we're on this panel doesn't have our phone next to us. You know so the accessibility of mobile is that and see everyone's looking at their phone and smiling. So exactly that. So it's with us all the time. We're always looking at it. So because of that more time is spent on mobile and we watch more content on mobile. The second is being it's also very cost effective. You reach a huge number of people but in far less the cost that it would be for you know mass media advertising. And the third I think for you know brand like ours which is really important is you get very very effective targeting. So mobile devices and their IDs are unique for each customer. So we can actually leverage that data to do location based activity proximity targeting and actually personalize the content and being able to do that therefore allows a brand and you know Visa does that a lot with our customers to actually have interactive advertising based on what you're doing at that time and where you are and what offers can be relevant to you. So NetNet very very high reach and very very high efficiency. Fantastic I think I'm going to talk a lot more about those three points but one point that you know I want to touch upon is building brand on mobile. You know we can reach the audience and is it possible to build a brand. For that let me take you from Anil. Anil we all love the emotional level right. I mean we need the kuch khaase campaign or kuch meetha hojaya campaign. It's fantastic but what I want to know is from your perspective how difficult it is to translate the storytelling all your brand proposition on that small device on the small screen. Great question good guys and I think I think I guess it can be as difficult or easy as any other medium. I think fundamentally the trick is to start with the consumer and try and understand what the consumer is doing at that medium and I think all of us brand marketers have gone through the journey of first starting to adapt what you've created for some of the medium into some other medium and it's not worked and over a period of time we started to get platform first similar to the same story applies from mobile as well and I think the moment you realize that the nature of storytelling has to change. I think there's something that clicks and when you start looking at insights of what the consumer is doing in the medium then you start finding out ways in which we can build your brand differently from the classical way of storytelling. So I think that's where the penny drops in good ways and I think it's not difficult it's just the nature of building brand changes it's no longer about storytelling but it's possibly about a two-way engagement and where you're able to personalize but you're also open to receiving feedback and I think that two-way storytelling or two-way engagement is I guess the way to build brands as I can storytelling. I think storytelling with any form of you know length of the asset or type of the asset tends to be self-limiting in that sense because the brand is trying to communicate and we're not trying to engage. So just use an example of what we did last year with this activity called Purple Heart. Typically during Friendship's day is a big moment for us but you know the gen-zeres use chocolate to exchange you know friendship. Classically we should do a typical TV ad right but when it came to mobile and digital I think when we said we don't want to do a video content what how do you engage working with the partners working with what's happening in the medium you then come up with an insight like cyberbullying and cyberbullying is kind of such a topical subject for the gen-bedders and then you see that there's a great opportunity to talk about it and build your brand around that and then you created the Purple Heart campaign on mobile celebrating Friendship's day but a very different spin. You're able to build your brand, you're able to engage with your consumer and leverage that occasion in a very different way. So I think the core is to go consumer first, understand what they're doing in the medium and then try and engage with them as against look at classical storytelling goals. I think that's what we are realizing. Obviously it's a big pivot a lot needs to change the whole ecosystem changes and you know our whole partners need to kind of operate in a way which is different but it works in a different way. Interestingly Anil you mentioned about the way we are able to personalize the content right. My next question is to Manish and given the vast experience Manish you have that's the reason I'm asking this question that given the way we can target the ability to segment, dissect, define audience, create customer cohorts, it's like unparalleled to any other media right. Do you believe that collectively itself pushes us into a deeper funnel bucket right. Most of the brand marketers don't talk to mobile advertising firms about building brands just talk about more apart performance. Do you think that ability to customize communication segment create custom cohorts pushes us in the deeper funnel segment? I would say it pushes us towards targeting the right audience in a more effective way. It could be top funnel, it could be deeper funnel depending on the goals of the campaign on the market here. Like you rightly said there is no other medium in the country which gives you this kind of targeting. You can target me by my geography, by my device types, my interest, my age group, anything and everything that defines me as an individual you can find my behavior online. So if you want to kind of target me with a brand campaign video is a great available medium. Like Anil said what kind of video you should do, how you make it effective in the first 10 seconds, how do you show the course story moments in the first 15 seconds, how does it catch attention, makes you take an action. That's a great brand building medium and you can kind of gamify it, you can come up with new ideas which engages with the youth or the middle-aged guy or anyone in that spectrum. If you want a bottom funnel campaign obviously there are like ways like CPC. So I come from e-commerce and completely online world. You can go hardcore CPC campaigns, you can hardcore gospel transaction campaigns. I'm sure Sujatha does a lot of gospel lead campaigns, so does Karthi and everyone. So you can kind of define the core deliverables for this medium and then optimize your creative, your targeting, your medium accordingly. But I think I wanted to jump in your first question. Mobile is the only advertising medium for me man.  So for the last so many years I spent a lot of money when I was building Amazon brand in India and I think those were crazy days. But for the last 2-3 years it's just been mobile and that's where you find the audience and that's where you find effectiveness and that's where you find targeting and that's how I believe the entire online world as well as our market is going to evolve. Obviously Anil and all they are also going after a broader audience and but let's say for likes of Sujatha which is Visa which is targeted you want a high profile person same for Karthi and obviously Pallavi should not advertise anywhere else. So I'm kind of very clear that this is the audience and just to give you one perspective since we are Z5 after COVID we realized almost 50% of our views are moved to connected devices and I say connected devices TVs it's like big screen families watching and you can now target a family with online medium which is affluent family obviously which can afford a kind of a high end product. But I can go on and on and you have to be kind of pulling me in here. You know I was telling the exchange for media team that I can spend an hour with each one of you individually. So it's a huge task to make sure that you know we get the relevant points out of this one hour. All right let me move to Karthi sir. Karthi sir you started your career with a mainline agency and that different the creative background right. So do you think on the mobile device when we are advertising that creativity for that aspirational angle we talked about segmentation we talked about targeting smaller groups. Is that more challenging because now you've got to come up with creativity for that smaller cohort and not one vast audience or the creativity gets limited what's your take on it. No I think like many wise men and women before me have said creativity is I think best generated when there are guardrails and constraints right. The more you squeeze the pipe the more creative people are required to get and I would say that the constraints placed by the small screen actually have taken time of course we've all taken time to learn the medium but if I could illustrate with a plug my brand early this year during covid we had the opportunity not just to shoot not just to shoot on mobile because our model done we are saying we're sitting at home our director was sitting at his home our creative director was sitting at his home and so were we but we shot for a product and a service of the bank which is delivered completely via the mobile which is the account opening experience. So for us the joy of all those boxes essentially all of them singing from the same hymn book so to speak which is that a product which is completely the product and the brand and the experience and the communication everything so you know like when we were growing up the four P's were all over the place but today every single P's in that device there is nowhere else like Manish is so eloquently expressing it's not just about the advertising but what you asked about the brand also the experience the brand is the brand experience and the brand experience is now largely for most of us it's on the device even for Pallavi the bulk of the brand experiences while the guy while the person sitting in the car what are they doing in the car 99% of the time they are on a device so that opportunity to be to have the mobile integrated with every single thing you do I think is enormous today I'll stop now. Talking about these creative ways and moving on to Pallavi Pallavi I mean seriously launching the BMW.ion where you can buy the car online typically you know we're used to buying groceries from our mobile phone and today you can buy a luxury car on on the phone or on your device I was super awesome the more creative ways tell us more about that experience. No I think you know I just want to jump in quickly I'm in a little bit of a remote location so my background is a bit of a lake if you can see it's flashy so I was actually riding from from Manali so a bit of a challenge with the network but I just want to add I think most importantly for mobile marketing is the people who strategize and today the world has changed the way marketers used to advertise before is very different there's a lot to do with and I'm a big fan of technology which leads to automation and customer experience so when we at BMW were looking at you know when COVID hit all of us we still wanted to be close to our customers and not want to sell but just to tell them that we are here to serve them and that's when we launched something called the BMW contactless experience and it was across the entire spectrum of the business which is sales service after sales most importantly after sales because most of the people weren't driving their cars right what they wanted was that once when the showroom opened and the after service starts our cars should be taken care of I mean I think that's what automotive is all about take one of the first purchase experience then pre-purchase experience and I think that's what mobile has done for us we launched the entire contactless experience with the whole objective of serving the customer like any any other brand like Visa would do primarily I can relate to that from that perspective our customers in trying to would want everything at a click of a button my car is serviced I want to see my car while it's being serviced that what parts have been changed are we cleared with them is the communication act what we are changing is as per the price we are quoting I think now mobile marketing is all about transparency especially in a luxury segment because these customers expect everything at a click of a button and most times it's about they are truly our branded assetors right so they expect much more than what we can sometimes deliver but that's been the whole journey since COVID-19 I think digital transformation and mobile marketing has just accelerated its pace for marketers of tomorrow but marketers of today and we're all learning in that pace but for us the most important thing and personally I think as a marketer and a professional is being how do you join all the business is not just marketing marketing is a function to support the end goal of sales how do we bring everybody together in an organization to understand what this little device can do for us because automotive in general is extremely traditional sector but we have to learn something which was more progressive but more importantly bringing the entire business unit together not just marketing as a function because then it's isolation and it doesn't deliver on the business goals so I think yeah I added lots of facets this small device that you talked about for me also gives us one more ability which we call location right so from pervasive to proximity and Shrizata mentioned about it earlier I want to take your thoughts because this is a perfect use case for proximity advertising they've seen some jewelry brands doing it some luxury brands doing it in fact Toyota does it very nicely in most parts of the world what's your strategy in India on proximity advertising that's for you can you hear me yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yes yes I did get the question I think if I were to look at proximity advertising that's something which which has been happening for a long time now specifically when it comes to luxury segment it's it's it's hyper targeted to be honest it's not just about proximity but it's about how much personalization can we do where we can talk to our customers not just from a point of selling but also from a point of telling them that we are here to serve them like I was saying so it's about hyper targeting and not just proximity targeting for us for us the most important touch point still remains the deal because it's a physical manifestation of a product when it comes to automotive in general so the facet still remains the same so until unless augmented reality becomes ARBR as a solution becomes really massive for India I think that's where the leap of faith as manufacturers we will all take to ensure that we are able to serve the customer wherever they are whether in the living room whether the kitchen or or maybe in their PlayStation sitting somewhere so I guess this is proximity is something which has been happening for a long time I think the true true ability to create experiences for consumers of tomorrow and consumers of today will come from automating the ARBR solutions together to bring seamless customer experience across value chain and that happens only through mobile today which are primarily virtual showrooms also experiencing your car sitting in your living room or maybe anywhere you would want to do so I would I would you know package it in from a luxury experience point of view very differently all right thanks for the week talking about the proximity how can I forget Anil congratulations on that campaign man it was fantastic you just to be not just a canvary add to a different level of proximity advertising tell us more about that and any other plans of any other innovations and proximity advertising yeah I mean this was an idea I mean I wouldn't I mean obviously we didn't think of it as proximity advertising I think the core of it came from kind of the brand purpose of generosity and how can we think about ways in which means in which we can land our purpose in a meaningful way I think quite often when it comes to purpose it's a tricky territory where you know you need to be sure about what you're doing and be clear that you're able to achieve what you want to do so I think and we've been talking about generosity for a while so whether it was the thank you activation that we did earlier with the thank you bars and stuff that we've done in IPL and then we said okay what can we do and of course a brilliant idea came from our creative partners of course as you played around with it I think the idea was to then engage with our partners Facebook and Google and get them in and see you know how can we kind of conceive and is it possible thankfully it was possible I think the big risk was whether we'd be able to land it because it was in August and we wanted to land it Diwali doesn't change right so we had to make it happen by Diwali and the risk was whether we'd have egg on our face but trying to say something which is generally cannot you know not not specific enough it's the put us to the team and came together wave maker or media agency delta x the guys gave the solution and of course Facebook and Google as well I think yeah I think it just I mean we knew it was it was very interesting but I think also seems like caught the pulse of the feeling of gratitude that I think all of us are having especially in the festive context to give and if we are secure and have the privilege of being secure then what can we do to kind of include and involve others so I think that that's what we tapped into once you got into the interesting things is of course you know the local retailers and then actually having to go physically to them and take the legal approval and not everybody and obviously everybody was curious in kya kare bhai humara naam deke kya keroge etc etc so we had to go actually store by store and condense them because it was something that didn't work it required a fair amount of legwork at the back end so like in classic art style you know we always realizing there is nothing like truly online or truly offline it's getting more and more you know integrated in that sense so we had to work in the back end so that it looks you know kind of sleek in the front end I mean there's actually the other interesting anecdote was that you know once we once we hosted the ad you got so many irate people saying yeah I went and saw the video I'm not getting it then you have to tell them it's a server based ad and you can get to see it only when you're served it so that's when we then created the other solution where we had a drop-down list you can go and select your pin codes so just be sure that you're not flipping you're actually doing something which is tech based it's quite interesting I think we do see there's a potential scaled up further we did the Diwali which is based in the north and the west so we do see you know why why not take it to the wider country kind of I mean the options are unlimited and what's good is what can where can we take this idea that's the power of what we take it and you know once we have a great idea you see have an opportunity to keep scaling it up look I was saying produce to the team who executed in such a short span of time great Sujatha I mean you have great amount of offline data right about every customer consumer buying pattern transaction tell us more about how would you layer offline data with the online data and try and use it for mobile marketing campaigns so a couple of things firstly Anil like I said I thought it was a beautiful idea we actually and what it did is more than just giving you're actually helping small and medium entrepreneurs during this time at Visa we have a campaign called where you shop matters which is really among the similar lines so we'll touch base on that really talking about that we'll just actually I want to tell you one thing the data doesn't lie with us it actually lies with the likes of Karthi we don't hold customer data the bank you know we partner with our banks and we partner and they have the data we actually don't have the data but what we do what we do do is we are able to use a lot of signals and you know we use proximity and we layer that on top of that so for example Pallavi talked about contactless so contactless has been our biggest focus for the last year or so and what we're able to do slowly on the mobile and we've seen huge success prior to COVID and now now that people are stepping out again and it's happening is that when while you do you know sort of a mass media generic campaign what you can do is layer is so for example we tied up with one of the biggest retail outlets in the country and every time you were about 500 meters in the radius of that of that outlet any outlet in the country so it was that well targeted you got an offer on your mobile saying if you use your contactless you got 5% off the moment you went closer and you went 100 meters it became you get 10% off and when you were 10 meters radius which is like literally you had to be at the door of the store you got a 15% off and using that and what we saw there was a growth of you know of more than four times in the usage of contactless cards during that period so we use signals like that but like I said we actually don't get customer data I think Karthi is a best person to talk about how they use customer data because we partner with them but we don't get that on that was this execution based on beacon bluetooth how was that executed yeah so it was it was based on it was a combination of that of local beacons as well as bluetooth and a wider range thing so you can do it for about one kilometer radius so we did 500 110 meters and it was amazing because the customer came and said we kept wondering like you know when we get to the cash counter is that 15 gonna go to 30 because we kept raising it as we went closer and closer so that was an interesting one well that is very interesting in fact some of you mentioned about the connected TV so let me ask Manish jumping topics from approximately connected TV and since he's the expert from Z5's Manish how have you seen the growth of connected TVs in India I know in USA it's already on the track to exceed linear TVs do you see a similar trend and much of a percentage of your subscriber base is coming from connected TVs yeah like I said COVID has been a shot in the arm on connected TV viewing families got together they didn't have anything to go out to and cinemas were closed so we saw the base was pretty small so it was a 5x growth in the households who are watching on connected TV pre and post COVID right now almost 15 to 20 percent of our traffic comes from connected TVs and these are pretty much households we also have just to give you guys some example because India is moving fast almost 25 percent of our audience is card cutters these guys don't have traditional TV at home and they're pretty much here on a lizard in hand so they're pretty much on OTT platforms and they're watching all their content online so what we have done using technology is again very targeted connected TV reach and we also have live channels so live TV channels you can watch on our app on connected TVs and there we can give a lot of targeting capabilities to like luxury advertisers that segment just to give you an example is completely sold out I mean we get a hundred percent booking advance the month that connected TV targeted ads we want to run DI dynamic ads and solutions and it just replaces the TV feed with targeted feeds but to your point that segment is now 15 percent growing the fastest they're binging habits are pretty high I mean I won't give you exact numbers but it ranges significantly in hours and pretty much almost 30 to 40 percent higher than a mobile consumer because it's a family you are at comfort you're not kind of watching it from your own so yeah that's the future and while we have been obviously banking big on mobile handsets and smartphone growth and they'll keep driving the growth but as evolution happens in more purchasing power better devices coming in and obviously the prices of connected TVs are going down if you see the latest range from your likes of Redmi or your OnePlus I mean they're selling smart TVs at like 15,000 bucks 30 in screens whatever you want so yeah India is moving fast in that direction and it's enabled by likes of our friends in Gio who are obviously providing very fast data speeds at low cost and some data space for you I mean connected TV households are like consuming three to four GB per day and kind of on the front front forefront of internet revolution in India so yes that's the space to be and we are completely geared up to their experience and from our side even the product design we have a separate team for connected TV we have a separate team for mobile phones and so we can provide the best of consumer experience to these online users who are obviously the affluent part of the country so yeah it's the next thing to go after. Absolutely and I'm glad you mentioned about Gio I have a question for the audience you know in 2016 there was a research conducted out of 160 countries India was at number 159 in terms of data consumption right out of 160 we were 159 one year after the Gio launch which is let's say 2018 or 2017 can anybody in the audience tell me where are we in terms of data consumption in the world per capita data consumption I'll wait for your answers in the meantime any experiences of connected TVs yes and I think definitely seeing an opportunity for some parts of our portfolio where we've been struggling for a period of time in terms of being a bit more focused and targeted and you know we've always struggled with mainstream there and that's where I think we're seeing some definite benefits I mean it's early days but from a cost and efficiency standpoint but at least from indexing to our target audience and some things which typically are kind of emerging as high growth niches for us our typical mass marketing approach will not work we are seeing opportunities in connected TVs and you know kind of mediums where we can get these consumers who consume things like dark chocolate or sugar free you know things are which are which which are emerging as high growth niches which cannot be ignored any further so I think some of this is also getting accelerated through COVID so I think that's the time where mass marketers like us are realizing that a cookie cutter approach should not work so that's where it's coming handy but still lots to learn and of course pretty much similar to the way we've approached the whole space we've embraced it and working with partners so you know we do have some experiences of working with partners there some Z5 as well so I think we are seeing opportunities I think the other bit is regional and I think I was listening in a little bit early and the previous session was talking about you know the whole emergence of vernacular and regional and that's the other trend right where for mass markets we're starting to look at going deeper and deeper and we're seeing the needs to be more vernacular and localized in the way we adapt our messaging there again we're seeing an opportunity I think both at kind of very deep segments into kind of mass markets as well as the premium end of the market you're seeing significant use cases emerging obviously not yet as efficient but emerging right Karti sir we spoke about COVID right I mean it has totally changed the distribution channel and even during the lockdown you know banks financial institution who are working what's your take on post lockdown consumers especially for your banking industry so I I don't know if we are in a post lockdown scenario yet frankly my colleagues in the branches and at the front line have been equal to soldiers like the policemen or the nurses the doctors so I salute them obviously and at every institution every financial institution in this country they've but customers whenever they absolutely needed to come to a branch have come and they've been served but I think what we've used COVID to do is to more aggressively digitize even more and like I said we launched the ability for you to open your account completely virtually where even the KYC is being done remotely now therefore there is no need to meet physically at all zero contact therefore so on the back of that what we are seeing so for example uh one of the things we were concerned about was there are acquisition channels which is largely used to be largely physical what would they do now their customers also will be wary of meeting them physically the interesting thing that we experimented with and it just exploded was that our sales people innovated on their own they took our digital account opening tools they sent URLs to lead them their referrals and they handheld them over the phone for account opening and we saw effectively organic acquisition therefore at near zero cost except for the intervention of our own sales people who were in some sense of the word sitting idle because they were not able to hit the street and meet customers but they were effectively meeting customers virtually and therefore we see that as an example of a like Anil also mentioned that there is no truly online this offline plus online marriage has allowed us to get far more efficient and effective and it is also allowed us to stay keep our sales force employed gainfully for example and we are ideating on the back of this even really arcane products like a mortgage which involves enormous amount reams of paperwork what we have done now is digitized a large percentage of it for that at least your approval for your home loan is happening online completely it's only when you need to get the check that we are moving to some paperwork even that we are working on trying to see how we can digitize that the thing is the magic for us unlike say Anil's product is that our product actually is was has always been digital it is our industry slugfulness that we have allowed so much of paper to proliferate the only physical thing that needed to exist even today needs to exist actually the car there is no other thing that needs to exist in a physical form so I think the meme about covid being the biggest agent provocator for digital transformation has been true for our industry for sure and I glad it happened for most of us it is it is for most of us all right I've got a lot of questions for you guys but I'm afraid we only have 10 minutes so let me do one thing when you know it's a lot of industry friends ask me to ask you three questions it doesn't happen that five grand marketers are on a panel and you guys are part of hunting list for a lot of people so I'm going to be slightly innovative I've created a small section which I call market market is rapid fire and I also have a small gift hamper okay one of you should get it and you've got to give me top of your mind answers for it um one line answers one word answers but top of your mind who wants to go first let me go with the lady first Sujatha are you ready sure yep I am okay first advertising dollars to YouTube or programmatic advertising YouTube is your competition spending more money or less money on mobile on mobile you said okay these are more merchant centric or customer centric we are both we focus very much on our client partners and the merchants like what's the biggest challenge with mobile advertising and reliability or ad fraud for anybody I don't think is an issue anymore um I think in our in our industry you know fraud levels and stuff all right any plans of launching visa advertising solutions in India we actually already have you know in in the hub so all right here so all right very quickly pick one contact less payments or digital wallet contact bigger competition in India in terms of rupee or master card actually the biggest competition is cash and we are all combating you know to to make india go cash so I'd say we all work together mobile advertising for branding or for performance performance global campaigns in India or Indian campaigns for visa Indian campaigns everything we do is we create here locally consumer education or brand building advertising consumer education everyone knows what brand what visa is but they don't know what it is so how do you use it how do you stay safe secure so education any day and last question to you credit card penetration in india now and in five years going to you know credit card is just going to be at the top and lots of other forms of digital payments and cashless payments as well all right fantastic I'm sure you did very well thank you okay here goes the fast one what percentage of your traffic comes from local versus desktop remarkably large percentage comes from desktop okay particularly the account acquisition journey we're finding that people are using web much more than the using the download of the app which is an insight I think that is useful to others as well that people are holding back on downloading the app until they're sure so that's certainly counterintuitive inside the deep game that's correct I think for most of the financial institution all right would you use mobile marketing for performance or for branding both but obviously much more for performance but certainly branding is all right would you invest in our cdp for customizing the communication or a better analytics platform I think first analytics and then we'll get to it okay do you think it's time to learn digital only banking products in India oh we've been at it since 2013 we launched the world's first hashtag based banking product so our product is and in fact 811 is a digital only product we added the debit card because we knew that battery still died first a pick one first advertising dollars to mobile advertising or mainline advertising now mobile customized creative or consumer privacy consumer privacy is certainly so at the cohort level customized campaign analytics or only ROI campaign analytics or only ROI I'm not bothered about what happened in the campaign show me the ROI no we're both okay English ads or vernacular oh Indian Indian cost per lead or cost per acquisition cost per acquisition okay customer acquisition or customer retention from Quotex app we are a challenger brand like Facebook likes to say we are 1% players so I think acquisition is our bigger challenge so we are very hungry for customer base therefore retention takes a relatively taxi but we spend a lot of energy on it all right and the last question for you artificial reality or voice services or creatives which has a better picture my guess is voice is good but hard to say all right thank you very much sir you did very well okay let's go ahead with the amil amil first question first advertising dollars to tv youtube oddity or programmatic tv is mobile advertising a key metrics on your management as good till the management level is mobile advertising a key metric on your what's the biggest challenge for mobile advertising I thought this won't be a choice um for all all right um listen to this one is it a good choice to move problematic advertising in house no for your brand do you believe in the view free attribution or only click through attribution that's one of the biggest allies that we face in the industry vtr vtrs all right pick one e-commerce marketplace or direct consumers dtc connected tv or linear tv connected catberry or orio both mobile branding or mobile performance both higher cpms or ad fraud they're inversely proportional higher cpms targeting through cookies or device ids device ids fantastic that was great and finally to manish yes manish how often do you review your mobile stats 10 times a day fantastic that's a good answer bigger revenue revenue potential avod or s1 uh both are equal in india okay as per your estimates average number of otd platforms on indian metro consumer three okay future of shoppable content on the otd platform in india very high okay pick one short format video or the long format we're doing both so yeah both okay hindi or vernacular content on the otd hindi leads vernacular the future that's where the growth is coming all right impression level transparency or ad variability i think both matter to a marketer viability like anil mentioned vtrs are very important so we are focused on driving viability and impressions obviously are important all right already specific content or the tv content on the otd is which would you rate higher so tv acquires and otd specific content gives us subscriptions okay um number of otd players in india in the next five years i think there'll be 10 or 12 but like i said the market would be concentrated in top three or four that's the international trend all right and the last question this is a tricky one for you manish ad spends effectiveness on z or z five i think objectives are different but z five is more effective in cost per reach or cost per transaction if you look at it from that way and very targeted so yeah as you evolve as your advertising goals evolve it's it's a function of very long but yeah effectiveness and efficiency is higher on digital forces tv fantastic i think most of my guests did very well and i think i'll give a hand to all of you not just one of you we guys did very well um and i think we've done with the time uh request to audience do let me know how good how did you like i was the one of the feedback for this section and thank you everyone thank you guys um you will receive a goody happy very soon firstly i want to thank all our panelists for taking out the time and being here and spending time to share your insights your brand story and we have to say this is one of the most innovative and interesting moderation of a panel we really enjoyed it as a team enjoyed it and the audience have enjoyed it so thank you so very much and yes if you or all of you are i'm sure on twitter or any social media platforms if you'd like our guest to say a few words on your questions help me go ahead and ask them that tagging them with my house tag three days with that i want to thank all of you for being here on screen with you once again from the entire thank you very much


The Global Cyber Threat Environment, Module 13, Understanding the North Korean Mindset. Objectives, once you have completed the readings, lecture, activity, and assessment, you will be able to describe the concept of siege mentality and how this mentality prompted North Korea to develop asymmetric military capabilities, including cyber weapons, articulate how the Korean War and subsequent division of the Korean Peninsula contributed to North Korea's siege mentality. Welcome to Global Cyber Threat Environment, Module 13. The title of this module is Understanding the North Korean Mindset and will be given by our guest lecturer, Dr. Han S. Park. Dr. Park is a retired professor of public and international affairs and the founding director of the Center for the Study of Global Issues, GLOBUS, at the University of Georgia. Dr. Park's areas of specialty include political development, globalization, and comparative politics with an emphasis on East Asian studies. Among his numerous publications are North Korea, the politics of unconventional wisdom and human needs, and political development. He has been deeply involved in a number of peacemaking initiatives with North Korea. Under his leadership, GLOBUS has hosted several track two seminars with participants from North Korea, South Korea, and the United States, most recently in October 2011. Dr. Park was also instrumental in realizing former President Jimmy Carter's trips to Pyongyang in 1994 and 2010, which may well have averted a possible military confrontation between the United States and the DPRK. He has been relentless in his efforts to alleviate the nuclear tension on the Korean Peninsula, making more than 50 trips to North Korea since 1990. His work has been widely praised, and in 2010, Dr. Park received the Gondi King Akita Community Builders Award in recognition for his extraordinary global leadership through nonviolence and reconciliation. Past recipients of this award have included former South African President Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rehman. After the Second World War and ensuing Cold War era, we have had a lot of developments in weaponry and the means of destroying enemies. Now some countries use more heavily non-conventional weapons such as weapons of mass destruction and cyber attack. So I like to use North Korea as an example. What sort of mindset prompted North Korea to turn to this unconventional weaponry? North Korea comes from, in terms of the mindset, from the concept of siege mentality. A siege mentality is one in which the person who has this mentality feels life is threatened, fearful, and surrounded by hostile enemies whose primary goal is to destroy and kill you. So this kind of mindset is called siege mentality. When North Korea comes from that, a siege mentality person will be overly protective, usually weaker country like North Korea. You have to turn to weapons of mass destruction and cyber weaponry. So siege mentality, where does North Korea come from that? You see, Korea, the peninsula itself is a very beautiful piece of land, peninsula and so forth. Long history is filled with Chinese empires attacking and occupying the Korean peninsula and eventually ended up with the colonialization by Japan before the Second World War. So Japan occupied Korea and colonialized Korea. And Japanese colonial policy was very, very aggressive, very inhumane, very disruptive, far more than British and any European, Colombian policies. So there, North Korea and South Korea all together before the division of the country suffered a great deal from Japanese colonialism. Even they are forced to change their names or adopt Japanese names, Japan wanted to have second class citizenry in Koreans and Chinese. So with that, that is the beginning of siege mentality. And then we have the division of the country, forcefully by the United States and Soviet Union to two victors in the Second World War. Half of the Korea 38th parallel above the North became the two-factor colony of the Soviet Union and the South two-factor colony of the United States. The Cold War period, throughout the Cold War period, these two world hegemonic powers manipulated Korea extensively. In the case of North Korea, the Soviet Union could not control the communist bloc that handedly, as the United States did, the free world. So the communist world was divided between Mao Zedong's China and Stalin's Soviet Union. So North Korea was subjected to two-factor colonial policies of these two superpowers in the communist bloc. China policies were pretty exploitive, manipulative. There comes the siege mentality. And then we have the Korean War itself, where some 18 countries got involved, many casualties including many Americans. Millions of Koreans perished. Fifty-some-thousand American soldiers were victimized. So in this situation, Koreans developed a great deal of anxiety and sense of insecurity during the three-year-long Korean War. After the war ended, the hot war ended, we have had a still today, 2018. We still have the Armistice Agreement signed in 1953. So some 60-some years, we have had this unending Korean War, where arms race became the norm. And American troops stationed in South Korea to this state, tens of thousands, today maybe 29,000 ground troops wearing American soldier uniform are serving in South Korea. So this situation, inter-Korea competition became much more security competition. There comes the arms race. The world itself had the arms race during the Cold War era. The Soviet Union and the United States collectively accumulated tens of thousands of nuclear warheads. And in addition to all kinds of conventional weapons that are extremely sophisticated, the world is saturated with weapons, weapons of mass destruction and sophisticated weapons. That's the Cold War. The inter-Korea, the two countries got divided in the meantime, and North Korea representing one and South Korea representing the other. So the Korean Peninsula itself became the hotspot in terms of arms race. And the war has always been a possibility. U.S. South Korean soldiers, they were doing annual joint military exercises. And North Koreans were scared of that. And they're alarmed by the fact that these exercises can evolve into actual attack. When I visited North Korea so many times, when I'm there, when these joint exercises are taking place, then I see the entire country kind of darkened and sirens all over. Nothing is normal. So that prompted the siege mentality I'm referring to here. And then you have South Korea, with the help of United States, has been developing enormously militarily as well as economically, especially economically science and technology. And South Korea has become a model, successful, developing system. Joined the OECD club, actually developed a country that is South Korea. North Korea, because of their nuclear ambition, that continues to be under pressures and sanctions by the United States and the United Nations, unable to cultivate any kind of development, very backward system. That's another source of significant siege mentality. We're dealing with this situation, North Korea, no economic base, the enemy across the border, South Korea, aided by the United States, developing greatly. So the siege mentality became a permanent, arrested mentality. So here North Korea had to do something. So what they did was making nuclear bomb. They successfully did that. They lasted many decades. They developed with their indigenous technology and science and material. They are manufacturing, they have manufactured dozens of nuclear weapons. They have scientific development reaching the point where they made by themselves ICBM, intercontinental ballistic missiles. So they're claiming that they have the ability to attack the United States with the nuclear weapons. They believe that they have that ability. The suspicion that North Korea might have that ability is widespread in the United States too.  So here North Korea's anxiety, that mentality got heightened and they're making not only nuclear weapons but cyber instruments. That's where we are. So we have to know where the mindset, all policies are made by mindset. We have to understand, we have to study and we have to realize what kind of mindset North Korea is coming from, what kind of environment, historical context may have prompted that mindset. Quiz question one, true or false. North Korea developed a siege mentality as a result of being surrounded by aggressive neighboring countries like China and Japan. A, true, B, false. The answer is A, true. Quiz question two, true or false. Most geopolitical experts agree that the presence of U.S. military forces in South Korea has significantly contributed to the underdevelopment of its economy. A, true. B, false. The answer is B, false. Activity using websites like the CIA's World Factbook build a presentation about modern day North Korea. Include such facts as the country's population, a breakdown of ethnicities, and its GDP. What industries and natural resources are most prominent in North Korea's economy? Who are its largest trading partners? What type of government does North Korea have? Who are the main political power brokers? Include an assessment of what the future holds for North Korea. Do you believe that North Korea's current political system will continue to exist indefinitely? Or is its government weak and susceptible to revolution?


And welcome to On the Waterfront with Melinda. I'm your host, Melinda Moulton, and today my guest is Gary D. Carlos. And I am so excited to have him on my show because a couple of weeks ago, Gary had me on his show, and now the tables are turned, and we're going to find out all about Gary and his life and his work in Burlington. So thank you, Gary, for being on my show today. Oh, more than welcome. Thank you. I'm honored. Well, I so loved having being interviewed by you. You're a terrific interviewer, so I hope I can do half as well as you did with me. I want to start out by allowing you to share with our viewers a little bit about yourself. Where did you come from? Who was your mentor? Talk about your early life. Sure. I was born in Dunkirk, New York, which is along Lake Erie. I just lived there for the first year of my life, and then my family moved to New Jersey. My father had just graduated from Fredonia State College as a music teacher, and his first job was as a music therapist in a neuropsychiatric hospital in Skillman, New Jersey. So we were living in Hopewell, which is right next to Skillman. And that was a very, it was an amazing job for him, but also probably within that, I'll tell you a story that probably shaped a lot of who I am today. So like many fathers, my father would take me to work with him. And so I can remember one day where we were maybe three years old, we were walking in one of the buildings, getting to where he worked, and we would walk down the steps. And at the bottom of the steps was literally a cage. And in the cage was straw on the floor and a naked man in that cage, someone with probably profound disabilities. And then we made a left-hand turn into this big hall where my father worked with people who had pretty severe disabilities. And most of the world had given up on these people. And then, so my father as a music therapist introduced music to them. And the smiles on their faces, the joy that he brought to them, the connection that he made with each of them, that they mattered to him was really, in many ways, it kind of seeped into my brain, so to speak. And so years later, when I was much older and thinking about what I wanted to do with my life, and I remember the day when I decided to become a social work major in undergraduate school, a lot of that focused back on that day with him, just seeing what A, what love can do, and B, what music can do. It's a universal language and can bring joy to the most difficult situation. So that was my early life there. We moved to three different places in New Jersey. I literally was brought up in probably East Brunswick, where my father was the music teacher at East Brunswick High School. And I ended up having him as my teacher for four years. It was quite a nice time for us to be together. So, yeah, so that was my early life. My father is one of those people that certainly I looked into about how he handled life. He always was not only just a music teacher, but he also was a leader within the music field. And when he would have quartets, he would play night clubs. He was a jazz saxophone player as well. And he was always the leader of the group. He'd negotiate the contract with the bar owner, or, you know, he was eventually later in his life. He was the president of the music union in New Jersey and, of course, was the band leader. And so, yeah, so he was certainly a played a big role in my, my life in many ways. Love children, love working with people, brought joy to thousands of people through music and through who he was as a person. Yeah. What a beautiful story. Did you ever get into music? Did you follow your father's? I did, you know, I was a saxophone player as well. And, but, you know, I think there's musicians and there's people who appreciate music. And I fall on the appreciate music side of things. He had a gift. He probably had in his head over 400 songs that he could play at any point in time. If you said, you know, play Moonlight Serenade, he could play Moonlight Serenade. It was that kind of night. So it was a great story. It's probably another one of those times where your life fears to the left or right. So it was a summer school for music. My father was, you know, during the summers, he would have a music class and a band. And so I was in it playing first alto and we were playing the song Moonlight Serenade. And so he, I knew, he knew that in that song was quite an alto sax solo. And so here was his son's coming out, so to speak. It's like my turn comes, I stand up, start the solo, and I could not get a note out of that saxophone other than a squeak. And about 30 seconds into the squeak, I sat down defeated. He must have felt terrible at what was going on. I don't know, it was either my jaw was tight or the reed was not right, but anyhow, or there was a leak in the padding, whatever. But it was, it happened. It was one of those things that happens. But I think in many ways that kind of symbolizes how I was not going to be the jazz saxophone player that my father was. And he was so good that it would have been hard for any son or daughter to try to replicate what he was able to do with that instrument. He was an amazing saxophone player. So I moved in different directions, but certainly influenced a lot by him. You certainly had moved into a direction that your father guided you to with all of your service, your selfless service to our community.  What brought you to Vermont? Yeah, so I went to Cain University in New Jersey for undergraduate school and social work, and then started, I went to graduate, actually another one of these turning points in life. I had been accepted to Columbia University graduate school of social work and got a full scholarship. And I was all excited. I was going to go to New York City. The thread that I was filing was community organizing. And about in June of that year, I just graduated from school and I called Columbia because I hadn't heard about the full classes yet or where I was going to live. And I wanted to get more information about all this. So I called the office and they said, well, hold on a second, Mr. B. Carlos, we want to check something. So they, there's a pause on the phone. They come back and they said, we have made a terrible mistake. We put your acceptance papers in the rejected file. We have given your scholarship to someone else and we can only offer you half of what we were originally going to give you. Well, I was crestfallen because there was no way I could afford Columbia on my own. And so I never went. And I ended up going, working in New York, New Jersey for three years as a social worker in the corrections department. And they had a community-based correctional center there. Then at the end of that, I went to Michigan State to graduate school in criminology because I, all the things that I saw in the correctional system, which bothered me, I wanted to do something about. So I thought if I get my PhD in criminology, I can help reform the correctional system. Well, after a year, when I walked into graduate school, I found myself sitting with about 18 other police officers. It was the most conservative graduate program that you can imagine. It was not for me. So I finished a year there. At the end of that year, Eugene McCarthy happened to be giving a talk. He was running for president as an independent since 1975. And he, and I was captured by his vision of what the country could be. And so my partner and I decided to volunteer for him to get him on the ballot in Michigan. And then off we went. After that we were asked to go to Maine to help him get on the ballot in Maine. We ended up visiting 23 states around the country with him, helping get him on the ballot across the country. And in the end, we went back to Washington DC and was on his staff until election day. In fact, on election night, I was in a hotel room with Eugene McCarthy and a few of his other staff watching the results come in. And they weren't, it wasn't pretty. Where he was doing quite well, but as a third party candidate at the end, people had to decide do we vote for Eugene McCarthy? We believe in, or do we vote for one of the other two candidates? I guess it was Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford to knowing that that vote might matter. So he ended up with less than 1% of the vote at the end. And then from there, I had to decide, well, where do I want to live? And a friend of mine had invited me up to Vermont where she had moved. And a bunch of my undergraduate friends had moved since 1972. So I went to visit them and fell in love with the city. I remember we had lunch on Lake Champlain in June. And you look at the lake and the Outer Rhondacks and this great city behind it. And I said, oh my gosh, I've got to move here. So I did and finished my graduate work in counseling up at the University of Vermont. And it's been a love affair ever since then. Wow, how exciting. So you actually got your toe dipped into politics in a really big way. I did. And I wrote about that. I have an unpublished book that I wrote that actually, all the stories that happen in a seven or eight month campaign when you're traveling around the country and the election laws and all that kind of stuff. It's a nice manuscript that I have from those days. When I moved to the old north end of Burlington, within five years I was running for city council in Burlington and was fortunate enough to win. And I spent three terms on the city council in the early 1980s, part of the early progressives that were moving into the city and working with Bernie. How exciting. Bernie's rise in his career. Amazing. Absolutely amazing. So this gives me, this gives our viewers a real good background on how you sort of ended up where you ended up in your career starting from the very beginning and the influence of your dad. So let's let's move into a little bit about, about what you've done since you came to Vermont. Share with our viewers some of the extraordinary work that you've been doing in, in what you've been here for almost 45 years. Yeah. Yeah. 45 years minus 10. I was in Washington from 93 to 03. I was chief of children's mental health for the federal government. But most of my years have been in, in Vermont and in human service administration. There was a point in time in my life where actually, you know, it was, I had to decide what I wanted to do. I was on the city council for three terms. I had been at the same time I was on the city council. I was a service at the university of Vermont in the counseling center. And it's thinking of running for mayor of Burlington. And then my daughter Emily was born and. Emily has special needs and I, I realized that I couldn't take that risk. That risk in politics with my daughter just being born. So I decided that I was going to focus more on the administrative side of human services where I could make a decent living. Hopefully do good for the community in the state. And I started with the department of mental health and I helped shape a children's unit there. I helped design a children's mental health system and became deputy commissioner of mental health and developmental disabilities for about six years. And then from there, I went to Washington for 10 came back to Vermont. And for a while had a consulting business. That was focused on. Training up people to be savvy leaders in, in community systems. And being particularly sensitive to communities that were in a change mode that were moving from one point to another. And then after a number of years of doing that, I was asked to help out the turning point center of Chittenden County for a couple of months. They were in between executive directors. So a friend of mine who was on their board said, could you help us out for three months? And I said, I'd be more than happy to do that. I walked into the turning point center of Chittenden County, which is a recovery center for people when recovery from alcohol and drug addiction. And I fell in love with what was happening there.  And no matter how many times we're beaten down, wanted to do something for themself. And this, this safe place that was created. Was what gave them the room to grow their recovery. And so that three months ended up eight years. I had a lot of wonderful people, amazing people, talented people. And it was interesting at the same time I was doing that. My wife, Barbara and I had taken a little vacation to Manchester, Vermont. Took a history tour down there. And I saw I was about 62 years old when this was going, all this turning point vacation. And I, in the middle of the history tour, I'd said to Barbara, I said, I mean, I could do this in Burlington. Nobody is doing any history in this great city of ours that I happen to love. And I'm, I'm a history, I have a lot of interest in history. And my father besides being a musician was a Abraham Lincoln aficionado. He probably had 50 to 70 books of Abraham Lincoln that he had read over his lifespan. So I loved history. And so I came back to Burlington from that vacation. And thought, I can put together a history tour of this city that I think people would really enjoy. And having been on the city council, you know, steeped in its history. And so I did. And because I took that three month gig that turned into eight years and was full time, I did the tours on the weekends for all those eight years and connected with the road scholar program, the holiday program at the University of Vermont. And then my own tours and it's been a wonderful thing. I've just enjoyed doing it. It's got me even more close to the work. It's got me even more close to the history of the city than I ever thought, but I would, I, I'm always reading about something new about the city. And yeah, so here I am almost nine years later. Still doing those history tours and still loving them. Well, Gary, we're going to move into that in a minute, but I do want to tell our viewers that you did receive some major federal and national awards in recognition of your outstanding service and leadership in human services, vice presidential hammer awards for government innovations. And the first national wraparound award for changing public policy to promote wraparound. So I want to congratulate you on that. And for your accomplishments and for your service, helping people to reclaim their lives. It's noble work. And for that, we all thank you. I'm going to move now into your business that you have now called Burlington history tours. And I became exposed to that through Facebook primarily and was not really aware of what, you know, I'm hoping that all the history that we have down here at Main Street Landing is part of your tour. Because we do have a lot of history and we did a video on the history of the Burlington waterfront, but why don't you, why don't you walk us through what it would be like for somebody if they wanted to, to, to take your tour? What, what's the progress and what would they see? So I, whether it's a walking tour or a band tour, and I don't give both some people just, they're not able to walk that, you know, that many steps around the inner part of the city. So I have a van and holds up to 10 people, but we start at Battery Park. There's so much Lake history that, that we, that's right there in front of them.  And then, and then talk about Champlain coming into the lake at one time and had a profound impact on where things ended up because of his visit. I mean, he brought guns. And they had, those Indian nations had never seen a gun until Champlain came into that, that lake in years and years ago. And so, so we start there. And then we come through the French and Indian war, the Revolutionary War, a lot of it happening right on the lake in front of us here and right in Burlington. And then I talk about the early development of the city. And then the war of 1812, you know, there were 4,000 soldiers wrapped around Battery Park. It was the jump off point for any conflict with Canada during that, the war of 1812 and the battle of Klatsberg as well. And I focus on some of our Civil War generals, because we have the statue of the King, the King of England, the King of England, the King of England, the King of England, and the Civil War generals, because we have the statue of General Wells in Battery Park and talk about him a little bit. And then I go down, if we're in the van, I would go down into the, where Burlington began as a village, down at the bottom of what we call Battery Street today and King Street, that area there. And there's some significant homes, Dr. Pomeroy's home.  I show them the Follett House, that beautiful, where Pomerolo real estate is, talk about that history. And then we weave up to the university eventually and the history around that, General Lafayette visiting. And then the three public cemeteries, where Ethan Allen, Ira Allen are buried and any Civil War generals in Lakeview, Ira Allen and Ethan Allen are in Greenmount, which is sadly a forgotten cemetery in this city. And I'm very troubled by how the city is not kept it up. But that's another story for another time, perhaps. But yeah. And then we entered Ethan Allen's homestead. It's about a two and a half hour van tour. It's about an hour and a half walking tour of the downtown area. Great history, much bigger than sides of the city. So how do people, how do people sign up? Well, they would, most people, TripAdvisor is big, my biggest fan. People go to TripAdvisor, they're gonna vacation in the area and they'll see, I think I have almost all five stars. And so they would just send me an email. I have a website, going to historytours.com. Yep. And they would usually send me an email or call me and then I'll make their reservation. And I'll meet them at Battery Park at 10 o'clock one day of the week. And away we go. God, that's fascinating.  This is the ninth year I'm right now. Yep. November will be nine years. Wow. People from all over the world. Come to do your Burlington history tour. I, you know, yeah, I've met people from all over the world and, and then many Burlington citizens too, that have an interest in their history. But I, it's amazing. So tell our viewers what it costs to take your tour. So if it's a walking tour, it's $40 per person. If it's a van tour, it's $45 per person. That's so affordable. And so to my viewers, I don't care how long you've lived here. I'm sure Gary has a lot of information that, that none of us know about the history of the city we love. Visit his website at Burlington history tours, all spelled out.com. Is there a number that they can call you do, or do you prefer to do? You know, they could call me at<PHONE_NUMBER>.  Let's talk a little bit about this history museum that you're talking about. Well, you know, yeah. So one of my, I think the city is missing something. And that's a museum. I mean, there is so much history in this city. I'm not going to be able to do tours, you know, for into the infant item. I mean, my day will come and we really could have a wonderful museum that, let me give you an example. I gave a, I was giving a lecture a couple of years ago on Civil War generals of Burlington. And I was mentioning General Wells, who the statue is in Battery Park. At the end of the lecture, a gentleman came up to me and he says, Gary, the picture you showed of General Wells when it was unveiled in 1913, the 50th year anniversary of battle of Gettysburg that Wells was a part of. He said, my grand, great grandfather is in your picture. And he showed me where his great grandfather and he said, every soldier that attended that event that day received a book of all the soldiers that Wells led and a medal was given to them. And he had the book and the medal with him. And I said, oh my gosh, this is amazing. Well, that book and that medal should be in a museum for others to see. This gentleman went home with those who knows whatever happened to them. Another time I'm, you know, there's what we call rock thunder or Otsi Otso out on the lake between Juniper Island and Shelburne Bay is a little outcropping rock outcrop as a lot of history, both from a Native American point of view, a rock-and-rock rock that's a little bit more complex than the one in the River Rock. And we've talked about it. It's a lot of history and history and history and about conquering nation as well as the Revolutionary war. Well, there's a long story. We don't have time for the story. But a couple gentlemen had dove in that right near that rock and pulled up cannonball. And those cannonballs should be in that museum. They're not because we don't have one. museum that would be tied in with Ethan Allen. Well I think it should, they think they should have a relationship for sure. I think it should be downtown, it should be a place, you know, much more in the center of the city versus Ethan Allen's homestead. Well why don't we collaborate on that? That would be a fun project. I would love to do that. And I think I want to tell you as my husband always wanted to do a history of Lake Champlain in like an eight part series for Vermont Public Television. And you know, he's a filmmaker and a producer and he, you know, it's a dream of his is to do it like an eight part series on the history of Lake Champlain because it's so rich and amazing. And so I think you need to come together and collaborate a little bit on how to maybe to make that happen. I would love that. And see if Vermont Public Television would be willing to maybe help to produce it and there could be some fundraising opportunities too. But I'll hook you up with Rick on to talk about that because this history needs to be told. It did. Absolutely. Absolutely.   I think you two could be a great team. So I want to just thank you for all that you've done for this community and all the service you've done helping people find the bright light in their lives and move through from the dark into the light. And so I want to ask you, any interest in running for mayor? Is that crossed your mind? Well, yes, it has crossed my mind over the years, but, you know, life takes you in different places and things like that have to queue up just right in my mind and for different reasons it hasn't. So I'm good with that. And the other thing I wanted to ask you is were you on the city council when I was coming through with my project? Let's see, I was on from 82 to 88. Yep, so you would have been there during the Alden years? Yes, that's absolutely right. I would have worked with you and we would have seen each other and we wouldn't have been, you know, made you landing. And so you and I have known each other for decades. And by the way, to our viewers, we were born in the same year. We both are 71. And I think I'm just a couple of months older than you. But you look a lot younger, so we'll leave it at that. You look fabulous, Gary. So I want to thank you so much for your time. Thank you. And we'll talk again. And I so look forward to taking your tour and to get it to you better. We'll, we'll, we'll commit about some stuff here. We've got some good energy going. That's great. Thank you, Melinda. Appreciate the opportunity. All right. Thank you, my friend. We'll talk soon. Okay. Yeah. Bye bye. Bye bye.