Hello and welcome to CMC Markets on Friday the 1st of June and this quick look at the week beginning the 4th of June and it looks as if we're probably going to come off the back of a second successive week of declines for European markets. Some markets have outperformed others but it's not unusual when you come off a run of 8 consecutive weekly gains that you start to see a little bit of a pullback in risk appetite and obviously one of the factors surrounding the pullback that we're currently seeing is concerns over trade and I think they're going to take front and centre as we look ahead to the week beginning the 4th of June because we have a G7 meeting in Whistler next week this coming week and it seems quite likely that trade will be top of the agenda given that President Trump has finally pulled the trigger on those tariffs on steel and aluminium on Canada, European Union and Mexico now. All three sides have pledged to retaliate in some cases these retaliations have taken place immediately I think in the EU's case we may find that there is a delay until the 20th of June before these measures on US products take place and they are likely to be targeted if some of the speculation is accurate on states that are predominantly Republican dominated. So what does that mean going forward? Well I think obviously it's going to add to the uncertainty with respect to how this particular trade spat is going to play out. As it stands the Trump administration has already announced $50 billion worth of tariffs on certain Chinese goods now obviously we're looking at the EU, Canada and Mexico and I think the risk now is that there is a significant escalation over the course of the next few days. And Whistler, so what does this mean for the dollar, what does this mean for currencies because I certainly think in the context of equity markets we are seeing a little bit of a pullback, certainly the charts would appear to suggest that we're finding in the case of the FTSE 100 the UK 100 we've seen a little bit of a pullback to around about the 7,580 level, finding a little bit of support but what I think it was also actually quite encouraging is that the moving averages on the UK 100 are starting to point upwards the 50 and the 200 day so even if we do get a move lower I think it's likely to be contained to where the 50 and the 200 day moving average converge. Any different story on the Germany 30 or the DAX, what we've seen over the course of the past couple of weeks is a significant bearish reversal on the weekly charts which would appear to suggest that we could be at risk of a significant pullback there, I think obviously there are concerns that the trade wars or the trade tensions could hit Germany more than any other European economy given the exposure that its car makers have to the US market. At the moment we're currently holding above the 50 day moving average and finding support around about these twin lows here, the oscillator is starting to look a little bit oversold so I think how the market reacts around about the 12,420 level if we get there I think will be key to where we go to next. Overall we've got a number of key indicators coming out next week, we have the RBA rate decision, we have Australian first quarter GDP and I think first quarter GDP for the Australian economy will I think be largely determined by how well the Chinese economy has been doing and that does appear to after a little bit of a slowdown in the first quarter starting to be showing signs of picking up if the recent PMI data is any guide. We've got the latest Chinese trade data for May that's due out on the 5th of June and after a slowdown in exports in March the Chinese economy did show signs of picking up in April, saw a significant pick up in both imports and exports which suggests that the global economy is also starting to show modest signs of normalising in terms of the slowdown that we saw in Q1. Again the US-China trade story is going to play into this narrative to a certain extent so you may see a little bit of softness in the trade data as a result of that but I will be paying particular attention to China's exports activity to determine whether or not you're seeing a pick up in global demand. We've also got services PMI for May for France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK, obviously the US as well and there is some concerning signs there particularly in France and Germany of a significant softness in the services sector. We saw that in the flash PMIs a few days ago which came in at one year and 16 month lows for France and Germany and I think this could have a significant effect on where Eurodollar goes over the course of the next few days. Now that does appear to be some signs that Eurodollar may have found a short term base just above 115. Now why do I say that? Well basically if I look at a daily chart here I've removed all the lines so that it's very, very, so it's completely uncluttered. This looks like a bullish reversal on the daily candle. Now we do have non-farm payrolls later today as I recall this video so I think in terms of what the Fed might do over the course of the next few months we're going to get a rate rise in June. It will be a significant surprise if we don't but certainly in the context of where we go to next with respect to the dollar I think the strength of the payrolls numbers, the strength of the wages numbers won't dictate where we go to in June but they could dictate where we go to in terms of extra rate rises later this year and I think that will be the key determinant of where we go to next with respect to the dollar but certainly there does appear to be some signs particularly if we look at the dollar index as well on the daily chart of a bearish daily reversal on the dollar index. So I think as long as we stay below 95 on the dollar index we could see a little bit of a correction in that back to around about 93. Now if that happens then obviously we could see euro dollar start to head back towards 1.17.30 and even 1.18.30. Certainly that's the next key level that I'm looking at with respect to euro dollar if I put all the lines back we can also see why that 115 level is very very important it's a trend line from the lows that we saw in early 2017. As such it's a very very key support level also coincides with the 1.618 Fibonacci projection target of the entire down move from that double top triple top breakout that we saw in the early on the middle part of April so I think if I'm going to be looking at euro dollar in the round good support around about 1.15 obviously if we break below that we could look at to target around about 1.13 but while above that then I think there's potential for us to come back to 1.17.17 1.18.30 and potentially even 1.19.25 what else have we got next week we've got a couple of other fairly minor earnings reports from workspace group and AOL AOL world even not AOL they went they disappeared a long time ago but overall next week I think the key the key arbiters the key determinants will be obviously the resilience of that services data that we got out on the Tuesday and any further developments in trade talks and also not forgetting of course which I almost did how could I events in Italy now that they appear to have come to some form of arrangement with respect to a new government how that relationship develops with Brussels could be a also a key determinant as to how the euro performs over the course of the next few days and days and weeks so that's it for this week thank you very much for listening to Michael Houston talking to you from CMC Markets


Thank you, sir Martin. I can go on talking to you and it's so fascinating to hear your insight and you're not just a philosopher or a professor, you're actually using all that you are saying to build what you built in S4 Capital. Business point of view, working from home and around was first nature. It wasn't even second nature to our people. The average age of our people on the media side, the 600 people, the mighty hivers, as we call them, around mighty high with data and analytics and programmatic, the average age is 25, the average age of the 2,000 monks, of which I'm the senior monk, is about 32. And it was first nature, not even second nature. These are not, these are digital natives. They come from the platforms and Google and Yahoo and Salesforce. They don't come from the agencies, some of them do, but many of them don't. They come from the tech companies, the platforms, the software companies, the hardware companies. So it was second nature. Our profitability, I was looking at it in May, our margins have actually increased as we've dropped real estate, which is around six or seven percent of our revenues. And we've consolidated our properties. And our top line, you know, we went in cost, not revenue. No cost. And our top line, we went in, you know, we've committed to doubling the size of the company every three years, which that's organically, that's excluding deals, which means if you're mathematically minded, a 24% compound growth rate. So we went in with a budget for this year of gross profit, that's top line, net revenue increase of 30%. And in the first five months, despite COVID, despite COVID, we're up about 14 or 15% on a pro forma basis. So we've done very well, you know, with the ad holding groups down forecast to be down at least sort of 10 to 15, 15 to 20%. So we've done extremely well. And the delta between our business, which is purely digital, we're any interested in digital, and we're building a purely digital business, the delta remains about 40, 40% between what the holding companies do are doing in ours. And very interestingly, and finally, from a business point of view, the market, the stock market looks at us as being a proxy. And this is a grand statement. But if you look at the Credit Suisse circular that was issued yesterday, if you look at the circular that was issued by Jeffers a few weeks ago, we are our comparators are not the ad holding companies, you know, WPP. And I say this with some sadness, to be very direct about it, I am the largest personal shareholder still in WPP. And the stock is down by 50% in two years, whereas S4 currently is up about 165%. So the delta, and we compare, we are compared to the tech companies, to Google and Facebook. And I know it's a grand example. And it's a bit like comparing a peanut to an elephant. But having said that, we're regarded as being tech based and more than 50% of our revenues come from the tech companies. And so, from a business point of view and a rag, it's been challenging, but really interesting intellectually, if I can put it that way, very interesting from a personal point of view, I feel better mentally, I have to tell you, I feel better physically, I don't have to rush around on planes, I've had more time to think, more time to take measure, and technology, as we're seeing now with you and the colleagues that we'll talk to in a few minutes, the it's a much more measured world in many respects. I mean, I'm fortunate, as I said at the first point, it's the privilege that have done better than the underprivileged, which is the sadness about COVID. But I have the resources, physical resources at home, to have some reasonable comfort. I'm not crammed into one room with other members of my family, as many are. And so, I have to say, it hasn't been bad. And it's taught us a lot of very important lessons, which we can come on to. Thank you, Sir Martin. You're a great example of turning every opportunity into a grand success. And in some way, you show, I wish, I wish, and I wish. What as far as achieved in a very short span, and with what COVID has provided us an opportunity for digital acceleration and your positioning as a digital communications, you know, ecosystem, if I may use that for others as well. Now, tell us, how is the marketing services landscape change in the last four months? Some of it was in the works for many years, but the last few months and weeks accelerated. So tell us how, give us granularity on why is, say, a certain holding company's shares down, and why are, you know, analysts looking at S4 and similar, there's no similar model, but purely digital model that's more promising. So, give us what's happening in the marketing services landscape. Well, I think, you know, I think all of these things come down to strategic positioning and execution at the end. I mean, you know, there was that big debate at business schools many years ago, or not so many years ago, about whether strategy was more important than execution. And then there were some professors that said it's all about execution, don't worry about the strategy. I think the honest answer is it's both. And we're very fortunate, you know, in a way, you know, out of adversity, in a way comes opportunity, that the Chinese characteristic of crisis is also opportunity, which everybody says.  I'm putting it very, very in a very tough way, but I think really, the pressure inside WPP and publicists and denser in particular is huge. And I looked at that portfolio two years ago, and there were three big growth areas. And I think the reason it's changed, and if you went back to my experience at Saatches, and I've sort of had three lives, Saatches, WPP, and now S4, Saatches and WPP was about globalization, Theodore Levitt, Harvard Business School, 1983, October 1983, I think it was about people in the world consuming everything in the same way everywhere, overeg to make the point, but it was the point. And then the beginnings of technology. So Saatches was about globalization, WPP was about globalization, and the beginnings of technology. And they were value-based models. They were about value. They were about market share and rather like P&G and Unilever detergents, you know, some of your detergent products might cannibalize another brand, one brand cannibalizing the other. But at the end of the day, you built market share. It was a very different concept. What S4 is about and the change, and you see it in the stock markets, you see it yesterday with the Dow Jones and NASDAQ hitting a high five times in a road, Google going through a trillion dollar market cap again yesterday along with Apple and Microsoft and Amazon. And what it's about is growth. So I looked at the portfolio and I said, where's the growth? WPP's portfolio, even at that time, was flat to up a little bit. Where's the growth? First party data, digital advertising content, and programmatic and data analytics. So I went about trying to put together a group and we've done, well, 13 mergers. We call them mergers because everybody, all the key people, and we have a great team at S4. We have the strongest team that I've seen, including people at Saatches and at WPP, as strong as the very best in those companies and starting to execute extremely effectively. We've put together four principles, and this is where I think marketing services has changed. Firstly, we're totally focused on digital because that's where the growth is. Even this year in COVID, in the teeth of COVID, digital spending will be flat. It will not be down. Even Group M and IPG's Magma Group talk about digital being flat, maybe down a smidgen, but traditional media, down 15 or 20% or 10 or 15, digital flat, the total media market down probably around 10, 12%, something like that. And digital, 250 billion out of 550, 600 last year will be 250 this year out of around 500 billion. So digital is where the growth is. Prior to COVID growing at 20%, I think next year 2021 will be back at 20% growth, with a market share going of media going to two thirds by 2024. We forecast 57.5% by 2022. So that's number one. Number two, the model has shifted. I would call it the Netflix model. The Netflix model is still the best model that I have seen. It uses first-party data and with the mixing of third-party cookies by Google and by Apple, a Google over the next two years, the importance of first-party data and control of first-party data by all our clients is absolutely critical. So it's first-party data driving the creation of digital advertising content, not necessarily. I mean, there's still a role for TV and there's still a role for brand films. Big ideas at the core of it, both traditional and digital, but it's an iterative process. It's like an election model, like an election without an election date, because you have everything coming at you 24-7.  So control of the advertising content and you distribute it algorithmically and programmatically. That's an iterative model like a loop. So that's the second thing, what we call the holy trinity model of data driving content and programmatic. Second, third, faster, better, cheaper. Agility is the key corporate attribute. All traditional companies, all CEOs, all CMOs, all CFOs, all CIOs, all CTOs complain in an analog company that they don't move fast enough and COVID-19 has made them jump and they are jumping. And we'll talk about that, I know with the panel, because I think it's something that everybody is seeing. So agility is key. Better means understanding the following companies. Let me list them, because I think it's really important. Google, Facebook, Amazon, Tencent, Alibaba, TikTok, the subsidiary of ByteDance, where Kevin Mayer has gone. Apple, Microsoft, Adobe, Salesforce, Oracle, IBM, SAP, Twitter, Pinterest, Snap, Netflix, Spotify, you can add Samsung, LG, those companies you have to know both as client and agency inside out. And what you do is you distribute, you've referred to use the word ecosystem, Anirag, that's the ecosystem in which we're operating. And cheaper means efficiency, not ZBB, because zero-based budgeting, I think, ignored the importance of innovation and branding. What it did was cut out so much cost that it forgot about the importance of innovation and branding. So it's efficiency, but it's in a different way. And then the fourth point is, and this is key to why the ad-holding companies are failing. The key is a unitary structure. I referred to the transactions that we've done, the inorganic growth, because we started from zero, I referred to them as mergers. They are mergers. What we say to the people who join us is not, do you want to sell your business? That is a nath of a tourist. We say, if you want to sell your business, go and talk to Accenture or go and talk to Densu or WPP. But if you want to join us on a mission, and, you know, if I am the senior monk, so I guess I'm missionary about it, if you want to join us on a mission to create a new age, new era, advertising and marketing services model, which is what we're doing. And secondarily, if you want to disrupt the status quo, join us on that. We're not going to pay the highest price. We're not going to do five-year earnouts as we did at WPP. That creates too fragmented a structure. What we're doing is creating a unified structure. Clients want the best people working on the business. Long answer to your question, but it's a fundamental. These are the changes that COVID-19 have accelerated. They haven't moved the needle, I think, significantly in the direction. It's just accelerated the change. So everything we saw before COVID, which was moving at a certain speed, that speed has doubled, tripled, quadrupled, quintupled, whatever you want to put it. And now the premium is on speed of action. You don't have the luxury anymore of waiting. Before COVID-19, if you were running, and this is an important point, if you were running what I call an uncontrolled company, that is a company where there is a separation between ownership and control. I mean, look at the board of WPP. None of the directors, none of them, whether either executive or executive, have a significant financial interest in the company. So there is a separation between ownership and control. You have to unify it. That's my view. But when you had a separation of ownership control, CEO on average would last for five years. McKinsey would say the average company in the S&P 500, the FTSE 100, last for 17 years. So you looked at your five years as a CEO. And before COVID, GDP was up two or three or four percent. You grew at GDP, or maybe a bit faster. You cut your costs a bit. You bought back stock. Your EPS went up by five to 10 percent. Maybe you pegged your dividend to your EPS growth. It was a comfortable life and a decent legacy. Now COVID-19 has meant all bets are off. You have to get cracking and change. So we are seeing inside, and I think this is the key thing about COVID, we are seeing inside companies a growing propensity or urgency to change. So digital disruption, digital transformation is the key thing, and getting on with it as quickly as possible has become the premium. It has become the thing that you have to do. Thank you. I want to go to a very basic content of advertising. Today, all of us in this ecosystem, in the business of creating brands, in the business of creating demand, do you think advertising can bring demand? Because the problem with COVID is that demand, I'm talking of India, has gone down. People are holding up. So do you see advertising bringing up demand? Let's say using digital because people are engaging more with all the digital platforms. Well, you know, there is this, and I think it's a thing. Again, many people in the advertising industry look back to the past with rose-tinted spectacles. And I think this is a weakness. Life has changed. The definition of creativity has broadened. It is no longer Mad Men and Don Draper. It is no longer dominated by 32nd or 62nd TV commercials. And digital builds brands. To say that traditional is the only way of building brands is in my view a nonsense. It's a very narrow way of looking at the industry and has to change. It's not the total prerogative. Creativity is not totally confined to a creative director who sits in the corner office with the bonus and the Ferrari and is worshipped inside the agency. There are creative media planners and buyers. There are creative data analysts. There are created software engineers. The definition of creativity has changed, need I say, violently from what it was. And in terms of this recession, this is very different to anything else I've seen. It's not like the great financial crisis. It's not like the internet busted 2001-2. It's not like the crisis of 91-2, which many people on this call probably don't even remember, or going back to the oil price crisis of the 1970s. This is as near as you can get to wartime. And I think coming back to your question, it is wrong of our industry to suggest that in the teeth of COVID-19, the solution is to spend, spend, spend. Some of the people here in the industry here in London and in New York said the solution in the depths of it, as far as the West were concerned, although in America we are seeing a resurgence of cases, but in the depths of it in March and April said the solution was spend, spend, spend. I totally disagree with that. That was not the solution at that point in time. The solution, it was an existential crisis. Companies were threatened with being wiped out. And the unique thing about this is look at central bank fiscal intervention. I can't get, Anna, I talk to investment institutions. I can't get an investment institution, even the most powerful in the world when we talk to them, to give me a figure as to what the total fiscal infusion into the world's economy is. The world is about 75 trillion dollars of GDP. The US is about 23, 24. China's around 12, 13, 14. Japan I think is about five or six. The five big Western European countries are around two and a half, three and a half trillion. One big institution said to me, this is the range they put on it. They thought the figure was something like 15 to 30 trillion. Let's assume it's at the south end of that for a minute, around 15. I heard Vandeleum of the EU say that the EU fiscal stimulus was around 13 trillion euros. Which I think is on the high side, but let's say it's around 15. That's huge in the context of what's gone before. That is what is necessary to maintain and increase the economy. You've seen the Chinese in the last few days pumping a lot of liquidity into the system. The puzzle a few weeks ago was why the Chinese central bank, People's Bank of China, the PBOC, had not done it. Now they're starting to do it. I think it's because of the trade tensions. I think it's because of Hong Kong and Taiwan and the Philippines and Australia. Indeed, dare I say it, the tensions with India and the US, which worry me greatly. It's top of my concerns or amongst the top of my concerns, the complication between the US and China, which this bifurcation, this decoupling is a serious issue. But now, coming back to your question, is the time when our clients have to get their act together? It was not the time to do it in March and April. In March and April and May, it was a time to conserve. My view is, I write to all our people every Sunday. I've been doing it now for 15 weeks through COVID. I've said about probably the third or fourth week that I wanted to prepare S4 to emerge from the COVID-19 crisis at the end of June and going into July. I wanted to do, I wanted to conserve our financial resources. I wanted to maintain a strong balance sheet, which we managed to do, net cash, no debt. And as we've done a couple of deals, we bought a data and analytics merge with the data and analytics business in Argentina. Two or three weeks ago, we merged with a similar business data and analytics in Australia. Last week, we will be doing something in the third week in July around the Amazon platform in North America. So we have been active, but at a small scale, because I want to maintain the strength of the balance sheet. Now is the time to take advantage at precisely the time that the holding companies are laying off 50,000 people. That's what they're doing worldwide. And in America, the holding companies in the independent agencies are laying off 50,000 people. So there's a huge cull, a Darwinian cull, taking place in those companies. And what are we doing? We're hiring more people. We're cutting our indirect costs. We're cutting our real estate costs. And we're investing, we've gone from 2,400 people, small scale, to 2,600 people over COVID. So we're continuing to invest. We're continuing to hire at precisely the time. So the answer to your question is, just like we're investing in our seed corn, which is our talent, I think clients now have to start to open their wallets. This is the time to take about as because Q2 is a disaster. And we're going to see the results of the companies reporting in the next few weeks. And it will be a bloodbath. But Q3 will be relatively better. Q4 will be relatively better. And as we get into 2021, I think we're going to be surprised by the upside. And to give a shape to it, the Nike swoosh is not the right analogy. I don't think it's... There are some sectors that are V-shaped and we can discuss that. There are some sectors that are U-shaped, that are L-shaped. I don't think there are any chairs that are going out completely out of business. There are some that are really challenged, like the airline industry. But I don't think there are many chairs, if any. But I think overall, to confuse everybody, it's a reverse square root. So think about that reverse square root, a sharp downward contraction, a sharp upward correction, but not to the level that we were before. It's going to take some time, a year or two, to get... That's why I think the swoosh is not the right analogy, because the swoosh implies you're going to go past it. It's going to take time. But there will be sectors that do. For example, the tech sector, those companies that I mentioned, those 20 or so companies, they are V-shaped. The U-shaped tends to be one of the package goods companies, although Procter had an outstanding... Procter and Gamble had an outstanding first quarter. Unilever had a good first quarter, but it has its food service businesses and ice cream businesses that are being under pressure. But General has done well with its product portfolio. Nestle has done well. Lorel has done well. But when you look at all of them, Mondales has done well, very well. But when you look at them, it's there online that is really taken off like a rocket. I was listening to Levi Strauss yesterday, Chip Berg, the CEO is cutting the number of people in the business, I think by 15,000 people. He says to invest in innovation and marketing and grow the business. I think, again, that's emblematic of what should be happening now. Not in the teeth of the crisis, but now. Now is the time to take advantage of this huge fiscal stimulus. That's why the markets are where they are. Some people say they're too high.  The markets really in America haven't gone anywhere. But that's been the case for about five, six, or seven years. So the fiscal stimulus has really protected. So for example, here in the UK, what I'm worried about is what happens when the furloughs, the government has subsidized all businesses. If you retain your people, they would pay 80% until October. And Rishi Sunak, our chancellor, who's done tremendously well, came out with a £9 billion stimulus yesterday. Right direction. If we've taken no government money, we applied, but we were refused because we're doing too well. In Holland, for example, you would be given government subsidy if your sales were down by 25%. Ours are up 15%. So we can't argue that. But Sunak, the chancellor has put in nine billion. And if we had furloughed anybody, which we haven't, basically, if we kept them on, we would get a bounty, if you like, of £1,000, I think it is, as long as we continue to pay them for two months. Look, I think it's a good idea what he's doing, but it's not enough. And I turned on the television this morning, Swartbox, CNBC, Swartbox, and what do I see? I think Airbus is cutting its head count by a huge number. I mean, thousands of thousands of jobs. And I'm very worried about what's going to happen in the UK in terms of employment or lack of employment when the furloughs come up in October. Now, I still think, despite that concern, that now is the time to invest. We've been through, I know this is difficult to say, because I know in Mumbai and Delhi and some other parts of India, life continues to be extremely difficult. And COVID is still a big threat. But I think generally, now is the time, that all that money, that government money has started to be saved by the consumer. And I think to your point, what we have to do is to be in a position to get these consumers into a more positive frame of mind. And to do that, we will have to spend and invest. I'd look forward to doing another conversation. We have leaders of the marketing communication domain, leaders of corporates who had the marketing function or the business function waiting to do a conversation with you. And we have a very special person in Ms. Dupalli Nair, who is the CMO as IBM in India. She's worked before in many sectors, including travel services. She also worked in Marico. And she's very active if she's not working. She's teaching at business school. She's writing and she's using technology to make a difference. So I'll hand it over to Dupalli in a sec. But I just want to, I want to ask you this question and I want a short answer because Dupalli Vivek Sundar and everybody else is waiting. How do you get so much energy to reinvent yourself, to be so competitive? How do you, I'll write you a separate mail on that, two mails actually. But tell us, how does one reinvent oneself? You've turned every adversity into an opportunity. So give us something that people can take away and benefit from. Well, one thing is my mother's genes. So that's one thing. Number two, I didn't want to retire when I left WPP. And I just looked to be blunt with you, to be very blunt. I felt that the way, and there's a third element to this, the way that WPP or the chairman of WPP in particular, at the board as well, handled it, because I decided to step down to resign. I felt the way they handled it was, if I was English understatement, poor. And the market value of WPP subsequently is now halved. I'm not saying that the two events are necessarily totally related to one another, but I think they are related. And I said in management today last week, that I think the circumstances were, the way I put it was slightly unfair. So that is a motivating force as well. And there are lots of examples. And I won't quote them because they're far too grand to quote. But there are a lot of similar examples where I think boards have made terrible mistakes. I'm not saying this is one of them, but it could be. And so that's the third element. There you go. Thank you, sir Martin. Look forward to having another conversation with you and I'll, I wish you luck with what you're doing, but that's for you. Thank you, Anna. Thank you. And thank you for the opportunity. Over to the Pali and the Pali is a fantastic panel. And you know, she has her charming ways to do it. So over to you. Thank you, Anurag. And sir Martin, you're here as part of the panel, and you need no introduction, but I want to now use one term, which is young sir Martin. Okay, so we have young sir Martin with us. And I'm going to introduce my other four panelists, very stellar reputations in the Indian marketing fraternity. First, Shalini Rao, she is the CMO now at Bangalore International Airport Limited. She's an expert in strategic marketing and brand building, customer experience, digital transformation. She's responsible for branding, communication, marketing there. And prior to joining Bangalore International Airport Limited, she was a brand consultant for Tata Sons. She has headed global marketing in the Taj Group. We all know of Taj and marketing at Tetra Pak India and Mars India. So Shalini, thank you for joining us today. And after Shalini, I want to introduce Vaibhav. He is a very young, very, very smart marketer. He is vice president and head e-commerce at digital and digital marketing at MaxLife Insurance. He has expertise in new product development, incubating new business lines, redefining customer journeys, absolute expert in insurance. When I spoke to him, you know, for the prep, I was so thoroughly impressed. And he's been selected as a 30 CMO Super Honor Roll by IMAI and 100 smartest digital marketing leaders by the World Marketing Congress. And Vivek, Vivek in his lovely vibrant blue t-shirt today. Vivek who's also worked for Ogilvy before. He's an industry veteran with 30 years of experience. He joined Pity Light Industries as a CMO in January 2015, looks across, looks over all businesses. He's responsible for market planning, implementation and brand development. He's also worked before at Philips. And then of course Sundar, my friend, Sundar Madakshara. He's the head of marketing Adobe India. He leads all businesses and routes to the market planning there. He's responsible for building Adobe brand strategy and awareness in India. Partners very closely with the country leadership team to grow the Adobe business in India. He's had 24 years of experience in sales and marketing. And, you know, he's also worked for Hindustan Unilever with Roviza SAP and Infosys. But Sir Martin, you stand the youngest here. And, you know, as is customary, we always tend to ask the first questions to the ladies, but I won't. You know, I'm going to ask the first question to Sundar. Sundar, you've been the Adobe, you know, CMO for a while and you have the vantage point of speaking to most top CMOs in the country. Therefore, you know, I want you to share. And, you know, we spoke to Sir Martin about all the stuff that's happening across the world. But what I want you to do is to share with us what are the CMOs telling you about what's happening in India in the digital transformation domain in this current context. Thank you, Vipali. It's wonderful to be a part of this panel. So welcome to all of you. And it's an honor to be with all of you. And with Sir Martin Soral on the same panel, I was for a moment, I was just feeling that it would have been so great for me to just attend this event and listen to all of you. But I think I read a pot, you know, a long time back and it stuck to my mind saying that your attitude will determine your attitude. And that is so true. You're right. In my current role, I have the privilege of speaking to marketing folks across many industries. It's great to see how people from the same industry are reacting very differently to the challenges that they face.  And what each of that potentially stands for. The first one shred is SHRED, the first one is S. So I think there are a bunch of people and, you know, the alluded to that point earlier was about people who are wanting to seize the moment and accelerate. The people who said, look great that the old rules don't apply anymore. Let me look at my world in a different way. Let me seize this as an opportunity and then sort of move ahead. That's the first category. An example of that is a holiday resort. It's headed by a friend of mine and I was trying to reach out to him, met the lockdown and all of that happened. And he said that he was very busy. He honestly is very busy and he's not able to meet. I say, look, you guys must be the laziest people in this world or nobody's going to be coming to your resort. So what are you busy working on? He said, that's precisely the time. We believe that, you know, we want to make a digital transformation happen when, you know, in these circumstances and we want to accelerate it. We want to achieve what we would have probably taken two years to do it in two months. So when this is all over, we are representing ourselves like a new company. That's the first one, S, which is seizing and accelerating the opportunity. The second one is about H, which is hearing and listening. I think people want to hear and listen to the customers that much more. This is a time when a lot of these segmentations, the traditional way we've approached the market positioning has had to change. But that's the second thing in terms of hearing and listening. The next one, the third one is on reimagining the world. I think many people are saying, look, my customer journeys, I have thought about their buying cycles, their imperatives has completely changed. So let me reimagine my business. My business is not going to be the same. The fourth one is on empathy. I think, you know, today you hear more people talk to you with more empathy. The first thing people ask you is, how are you? And how are you doing? Are you safe? Are you with your family doing a helping? I think that comes from a genuine concern that we all have for each other. And that's coming out more. I'm glad that marketers are able to sense this and say, look, we need to talk to our customers with more empathy. But the last one is data. And this is the trickiest thing you and I know that the data is, you know, the past data that we have might not be fully usable now because a lot of these things have changed. So you can keep on analyzing, but the data will not be useful to the entirety. But it has got very important prognosis about how things are going to move up. So I'm seeing people, you know, listening to their customers on a more daily basis, collecting data more frequently than they were. And coming to conclusions and saying, you know, this is what I want to do for the next 30 days. After that, I don't know. But I'll chart my way by looking at data, burying my decisions in fact, rather than just making it out of this. So trend model is five broad buckets into which one from I feel more sense. Wonderful, Sundar. And, you know, I would like to add to that because at IBM, we speak to CIOs all the time. And what I want to say is that there is an acceleration of transformation happening. You know, everybody is recognizing and Sir Martin also referred to that, you know, and the other thing that is happening in top enterprises when we service at IBM is that it's happening at scale. So it's not just at the startups, it's not just at the unicorns, it's happening at very, very large enterprises.  And now, Shalini, I think one of the unique things that you're doing, Shalini, is despite the fact that airport has not been used, you know, in the last 100 days or so, you know, you do not have fliers coming into the airport, you are still, you know, continuing to communicate. And I want you to therefore share with everybody, you know, how are you making sense of this mayhem that is happening? What are you doing currently and why? Why is it that you think it's important for us to engage with the fliers even just now? Thank you, Sir Pali. So a couple of things that I think taking forward from what Sundar said as well. What we realized is when this whole crisis hit us, and I guess it hit us pretty hard because suddenly from, you know, X number of fliers a day, 100,000 a day, we suddenly went to almost zero. And we realized that there were two things that were coming up at that time and very classic consumer behavior market insight. People were worried about how and when they were going to travel again, and there was a desperate need for information. And we realized that just from the sheer deluge of questions that we were getting on our call center, on our website, personally, and we said that this is a great time for us to continue to engage because suddenly all the old mediums are taken away. Nobody on ground, nobody in restaurant, nobody shopping, nobody doing anything. And we went out and said we have to engage because you're going to come back and travel again. But you're going to come back with a very different set of expectations and you're worried. So reassurance and information with two things we picked up. And we said, okay, let's actually go out and reassure you and tell you everything that we're doing. One, while waiting for you to come back. And it's been about 30 days now since we've restarted domestic operations at least. And just reassuring that it is a safe way to fly. There's a whole bunch of things that we're doing to keep you safe. So it's okay to come out. And the second is so much changing on information. So we actually created something called Voice of BLR. And we literally give out FAQs. We've tied up with the government. So we're just beaming out information saying, this is how we're engaging. And there's a third angle which came up actually by chance, which is really this whole thing of nostalgia. You've been in the travel business. I've been in the travel business even earlier. People are dying to travel. People are dying to get back. They're missing their holidays. So we tapped into that.  And so the digital space, therefore, to go over completely, to be able to deliver that. And interestingly, a very small statistic. We've grown our followers almost between 10 to 20% at a time when we were not flying. And that was quite interesting for us to see. And of course, I told you the story about 6.4 million views on my contactless film because we were just giving out information. So yeah, so that's what we're doing. I think I'm seeing a common thread of the pivot that almost every marketing organization has had to do and CMOs are leading that. And with that, I want you to tell us that you don't communicate just with the end consumers, the area of businesses that you have at Pidelight. You're also going down and talking to carpenters, to contractors, to workers in the building industry. How are you engaging with them? So Shalini told us about the flyers, which are, let's say, slightly upper socioeconomic space. What are you guys doing? And how are you digitally engaging with the strata, which is not typically known to be somebody that we engage with digitally? What are you doing with it? So, welcome everyone. It's my pleasure to be on this distinguished panel, Mr. Martin and all my esteemed colleagues. For benefit of listeners so that you can understand what I'm going to refer to, Pidelight is a billion dollar company in adhesives and construction chemicals for brands like Fevicol, Dr. Fixit and MC. We are both in B2B and B2C space. The brand which I'm going to talk about Dr. Fixit and Fevicol are used in consumers' homes for furniture making and waterproofing, but they're not bought by them. They're bought by contractors, carpenters and waterproofers who use it in their homes. At the outset, before I answer your question, I would like to make an observation from what Sundar was discussing. I think we must distinguish that IT enablement is different from digital transformation what we are seeing in COVID. Just enabling your processes to be digitally enabled is just IT enablement. The real digital transformation is we do when we actually make a meaningful difference to brand deliveries to our customers by mapping their consumer journeys and making a meaningful difference there. And let's talk about the consumer and the customer journeys we have of contractors and waterproofers and carpenters. Now, these are the people who are not very educated, but everyone has a smartphone and our processes of connect with our contractors were already digitally enabled. What has this pandemic done is that it has accelerated the whole transformation and the connect program. You know, if I can say Diwali, the first question which you asked from the package goods company and services company which we are, this COVID has actually converted naysayers into believers in the company. That's one. Second is it has actually accelerated the digital transformation at a very rapid pace. What was happening earlier in our company in one year, we now planted within 60 to 90 days and we have formed crack teams of young people to do it. Now quickly answer your question, what did we do in this time with the contractors and waterproofers and carpenters? Very simply, we converted all our meetings with them from offline to online. We did training with them digitally on phones through films and meetings. We did new product launches, we did safety training for COVID. We also knew that they were struggling in their business to enter into consumer homes because consumers are very, very safety conscious. So we trained all our contractors, carpenters on safety, COVID safety program, we certified them, we gave them the safety kits and we actually enabled their business and we are continuing to be training all these thousands of contractors or carpenters. Third interesting thing we observed was that consumer attitude, behaviors and consumption is changing in these times. Consumer is becoming more value conscious, our consumer is repairing more at home, they're spending more time at home and in India, which is not a DIY country, they are doing more DIY themselves because handyman are not available. So observing that we use digital marketing means to reach to these consumers. We have promoted our art and craft to parents and children and hobby teachers aggressively in these times with art and craft videos, art and craft kits available through e-commerce platforms and content and we have promoted DIY videos. So in summary, if I can say that digital acceleration has really helped us to reach out to our carpenters, contractors, waterproofers, masons to engage with them, to connect with them, to educate them and to support them in their business. I think supporting these underprivileged working class is a real opportunity we saw in these times. Wonderful Vivek and thank you for outlining that message as to what digital transformation is. At IBM, we like to communicate that to our audiences. We like to tell all CXOs and CIOs that it is about the perviziness of data, usage of data in terms of how you make decisions, how you empower your ecosystem and your employees to be able to take decisions on the basis of data, how you embed AI everywhere and of course do it with security and with the privacy concerns. With that, I want to move on to Webhub and Webhub, I have been a CMO at an insurance organization also. You and I have that in common and from that experience, I know that the partnership that you have with your CIO, with the IT team, when it comes to e-commerce is key to winning in the market more than any other industry. I can say that about insurance and financial services. However, you and I also know that while everybody is talking about transformation, it's not always possible and it's not always so quick on account of the legacy systems that we have. While we would like to do everything at super speed, but it's not possible. What has your experience been at MaxLife and what steps are you taking therefore to prepare yourself for the future? Thank you, Deepali. Good afternoon to all the panelists. Good afternoon, sir. It was quite a pleasure to have some of the themes that you picked up. I personally picked up a couple of interesting actionables that I take back from that 30-minute interaction. Deepali, honestly, I represent the BFSI category here. Traditional category, especially in a country like India, has always been extremely reliant on people meeting people, people coming to offices in branches, finding their bosses who drive them for sales, then going out, meeting new people, and then trying to pick up checks as we used to say, convert customer prospects into customers. Extremely traditional business, a very old category of life insurance, 170-year-old business, actually a category. Now, interestingly, Deepali, transformation was not a need to have for us. It was almost a survival for us. I completely agree with Vivek that it was not about automation or digitization of processes, but almost a transformation in terms of the way we envisage our consumer onboarding journey, our distributor onboarding journey, and the way our distributors interact with customers. And I'll spend some time on it. So really, and if I honestly speaking, a few years back, we had done this integrated customer journey, and that time it was nice to have. That time it was a nice to have a marketing item to have to do an integrated consumer journey and arrive at some consumer personas. And we arrived at three very distinct consumer personas when it comes to a category like life insurance, a safety seeker, a support seeker consumer in this country, then a well-informed consumer, and then an independent consumer. And we can just plot these three personas, unique personas on need for human touch, and let's say a wide access of awareness towards the category. And typically an independent persona would come where he has very low need for human touch and a reasonably decent awareness of the category. And then it is at that stage that we as a life insurance company took a call that we should invest heavily in a V2C business, starting with digital advertising, onboarding, and digital acquisition. Once again, a very nice to have element, right? Good to show in a board meeting, important from valuation perspective, but guess what? As things spanned out in the last quarter, looks like the COVID situation and the fear of being sick, the fear of dying actually, I mean, for lack of a word, has what has caused an unprecedented growth in the number of people searching for life insurance on Google. Right now, the first quarter of FY 21, interestingly, there is a 84% search growth. Yeah, yeah, term insurance or life insurance, right? My brothers in Hong Kong and Singapore and Malaysia actually because that's what happened there, right? COVID has hit everyone, but our friends in Hong Kong are experiencing flat search on life insurance. Our friends in Singapore are experiencing about a 5% growth. Our friends in Malaysia are experiencing a 6% growth.  We are a unique country. We respond to different situations, different stimulus in a very different manner. And guess what? We suddenly are bombarded with demand.  I mean, we haven't experienced that kind of demand honestly. I mean, we were not, I mean, for, I'll be honest and can it here, we were not actually ready for this kind of a demand.  And hopefully, you know, as the next, and I know this sounds very different from what we've been hearing in terms of how different industries have, you know, fared, but I'm pretty confident that, you know, as we move into the next quarter and a couple of quarters further, it will start showing in the results and some of the earning per share kind of, you know, price point that you will see for the category of insurance in general or life insurance specifically. So, so honestly, it's been a very interesting last 100 days for us. I'll be very honest. I mean, enabling our distributor, enabling our customer to completely think digital and come on board with us has been very different. Brand trust is about, you know, some of the key metrics, what experience we offer than just the human being who's representing the brand in front of the customer. So what that has done is suddenly the distance between the prospect and the brand has suddenly been shortened, right? Because now there is it's not necessary to the having an intermediary who goes and represents your brand to a consumer is not a mandate, right? Suddenly, consumer is wanting and willing to access, you know, directly with your brand. And guess what? 32% of the traffic that comes on my platform today is actually searching for COVID. It's trying to end out if my policy covers COVID related deaths, right? I mean, and really, it's a very engaging conversation that it becomes from there on. So, really, I'll tell you the big changes that the last 100 days is a significant improvement in the user interface to start with, which was, I think, significantly ignored in the category of BFSI. I know user experience comes, you know, something that is core to all of us, but I always believe that, you know, the first step to user experience is to create a decent user interface for a for a distributor enabling form, you know, the kind of focus that we are putting on user interface. Because remember, now there is no human being training human being, right? Yes, there is a laptop or a phone, mobile phone on which the training is happening between 50,000 agents and, you know, the youth bank that is selling our products, and we need to train these folks on the new products, right? So that's been very interesting. The user experience has been core to us. The system, I agree, Deepali, that's always been a case, I think, with anyone, all vintage advertisers, vintage manufacturers, legacy system has always been a problem. I'll tell you, frankly, from a from a digital advertising perspective, I think the advantage is that the digital advertising platforms are somewhat get agnostic to these legacy platforms. You don't need to be smart enough to know what signal to make, right? Right. Solve the signal. You solve the platform, right? The way we try and look at it, because you know, all those legacy systems is something is a long-term process. So really, for us, the focus has been from a digital acquisition perspective to solve the signal and not the platform. Great. Sir, Martin, let me come to you. You know, you've heard four different CMOs belonging to four different industries. One theme of digital transformation is running the same, but how they execute in their companies is very, very different. And I want to underline what Vaibhav said, that it's not just, you know, customer experience and the good design sensibilities, but it's the sturdiness of the user interface, you know, that also matters in times like these.  Are they ready for the changing needs of the CMOs that you heard today? Well, so Deepali, are you talking about the old or the new? I'm talking about the new. I'm talking about the new to the young Sir Martin. Well, let's say the old Sir Martin would be, it would be, you know, the ad-holding companies are past their cell, baby. And what's really interesting about your panelists, you know, Sundar, Shalini, Vivek, Vaibhav, they're all actually, interestingly, when you dissect it, they're all indicating very similar things. I mean, one of the big things we've seen during the last 15 weeks is this shift.  The tech companies, by and large, have kept their spending intact. They might be shifting money from live sporting events, where they had big commitments, or when the Olympics would cancel and postpone Euro 2020 was postponed, the IPL, whatever, money was shifted into purpose campaigns, the sort of things that Shalini talked about, information campaigns. Many of them were not good because, you know, if you remove the logos or the names, you wouldn't know who was informing, it was all the same stuff. But putting that to one side, the intentions were the right intention. It wasn't just virtue signaling. So I think what we're seeing, and you see it, sort of, it's iconic in the four experiences that we're hearing here, is this shift to one-to-one communication, personalization at scale, dynamic creative, which is what we're getting at, I would say this, wouldn't I? I'm talking my own book with our Holy Trinity model of first-party data. You heard it in space here, the importance of, you know, with, which we haven't touched on, Google nixing third-party cookies over two years, Apple taking it effectively out of your hardware, the key. And, you know, if you think about the insurance industry, I was talking to somebody from the insurance industry only yesterday, huge first-party data. How do you utilize that to build a relationship with the consumer or the enterprise? In addition, most insurance companies work through a direct sales force or financial counselors. You know, Warren Buffett, GEICO spends about $1.2 billion to develop the GEICO brand at the consumer level, and actually, he evaluates the CEO in his annual evaluation at margin before ad spend, because he doesn't want the CEO to cut the spend, whether it's traditional spend or online spend. So, I think the first thing that you see, you hear, is this switch that's happened from, there has been budget cutting, but traditional has lost out to digital. Interestingly, here in the UK, I was talking, we've just signed an LLI with a really interesting company here in the UK, and I was talking to the guy who runs it, and he was saying how television was so much cheaper here because of the lockdown, the audiences have expanded, the costs have gone down, and yet, television is inflexible, you have to make the commitments, you have the up-fronts in America, it's a very rigid system, online is much more flexible, and it's sucked money in, so that's one thing. Second thing is agility.  I think the third thing is the importance, come back to the importance of data, this is absolutely critical, and most companies that we deal with, and the tech companies are different, by the way, because the tech companies tend to have built their companies in a very short period of time, they don't have analog systems, often they've grown organically, rather than by acquisitions, they don't have different CIO and CTO systems, so data and pooling the data, we've seen an explosion during COVID, literal explosion, in interest in data and analytics, and interestingly, it's not in the marketing budget, this is another important thing, which I'd like to hear what the panel thinks on what you think about this, there are three functions to me that have become important, not just the CMO function, but the CIO function, and the CSO function, the chief sales officer, so sales, marketing, and IT come together, let me just give you one specific example, the banks, most of the major global banks spend about 10 to 11 billion dollars a year on IT, that IT goes through the IT function, but a lot of it affects consumers, and is consumer facing, often the CMO doesn't have control of that spend, or any influence, forget about control, any influence, so the CIO and the CTO goes in a direction, and the CMO goes in another direction, it has to be unified, and I think those three things happen, so those are some things, and let me just, one other thing I think was really important, in an Indian context, Facebook's move, I would say in the insurance industry, the biggest threat to the insurers, I mean you said it by yourself, you said about Google and Google search, it's Facebook, Facebook knows, has all the data, they have all the signals, they have the direct relationship with your ultimate consumer, and financial is just going public on the Hong Kong stock exchange, with this great froth in the Chinese market, and Jack Maher and Alibaba and Daniel are taking advantage of that, another example, the platforms have the information, Facebook's move with GEO is huge, it's huge, so. I agree, and let me answer since you asked me that direct question, I think what you said is music to my ears and to companies such as IBM, because we are experts at working with the CIO and the CMO and the CSO together, IBM tends to bring them together, and one example that I want to give is State Bank of India in the country here, which is the largest bank and the numbers of mind-boggling Sir Martin, we work with them, so their whole app, which is really sturdy, and has millions of downloads and millions of usage on a daily basis, has been built end to end by IBM, so that's music to my ears what you say, because that's what the business IBM is in, and thank you for summarizing and telling us what you're really talking about, and my second round of questions to the CMOs that I have over here, and I want to go back to Vivek, so Vivek you already spoke about the fact that digital transformation is happening, and that it's accelerated, so what does the future look like, very quick answers from the four CMOs before we wrap up. So very quickly, first thing I would like to say is that digital transformation that we talk, we often refer to digital advertising, it's not digital advertising alone, we as CMOs are not only responsible to take the message of the product to the service to consumers, we also responsible for fulfillment, so given example Dr. Fixer, if you don't only sell the product, we actually sell the whole waterproofing service to the consumer till the end, which takes few weeks, so we start with TV advertising, then whole lot of digital advertising for lead generation, and then fulfillment, so for digital transformation, I would say that CMOs are not only investing in digital advertising, they're also investing in the ecosystem around the whole fulfillment value chain, which could be the CRM system, which could be a SAP system, which could be linked to your employee data master, which could be analytics and which is the call center and the state-of-the-art dialers. Since you asked me the question, what does the future of digital transformation look like, I would like to talk about four pillars of four things. The first thing is continuing the theme of that, the digital transformation is beyond marketing, the VR, for example, in grid light are investing a lot in what is called IoT manufacturing, the digital factories as we call them, or a supply chain transformation in terms of track and chase or procurement automation, so this is one key aspect because when we digitally transform a supply chain and manufacturing, we'll be truly a digital company. The second big investment which will come will be in the area of analytics and not just enablement. For example, if when we actually automate a sales and field marketing, we are going to be using, and we're using currently, we're going to be increasingly using intelligent sales call data to make sure our productivity is more and we're able to sell the right thing to the right customer. For a B2B customer, I think analytics can be and will be very wisely used for right pricing to our B2B customers or to actually place the CRM system on top of our SAP system and ensure that we have one customer view and we're able to get analytics data on our B2B customers to ensure that the sales process to the B2B customers is modernized and this is where, as Sir Martin said, the CMO connect with the chief sales and the sales part of the organization become very, very strong. The third part which is about performance marketing and data and Sir Martin spoke about it, but I want to really connect the three dots which he outlined for us, which is data, content and actually the programmatic. For example, in Fixit, since he asked about the future, we're going to be intensifying our effort in performance marketing to make sure that the lead generation is connected digitally through technology to the fulfillment process completely and we are going to be using metadata far more through web scrapping to ensure that we actually get far more useful and productive. For example, we can scrap the web data to know data around consumers' loan when they're buying loans in the market for homes or the RERA data which is there. Last but not the least, in these times, consumers are becoming very, very health-conscious and they are shying away from the direct physical contact. Therefore, we are investing and we have to invest far more in direct to consumer channel, D2C channel, so we call them. In this context, our investment in e-commerce strategies has become really, really critical and in this context, it is not just about being present and selling, it is all about the content generation, it is about tying up with vendors, it is getting a supply chain ready to actually respond in supply. So, I would just like to mention two points here and on top of everything in the future about digital transformation, I think I would like to first also talk about data since so much is being talked about and the whole thing about cookies. I think players like us who are actually sitting on top of what I call proprietary data on our customers and our contractors, we have to be very, very careful about sanctity of data when we use the performance marketing and data stacks and the data protection norms have to be followed. And secondly, I think as marketers, we have to really find marketing talent which is specialized and is knowledgeable to take our agenda forward. We can't do everything ourselves and this context in marketing services firms, we have to increasingly find specialists. It is not enough just to have one journalist agency in advertising or journalist in media or journalist in digital, those days are gone. In digital also I need to have a social media specialist, I need to have a Ecom specialist, I need to have a CRM specialist, I need to have a B2B specialist, I need to have performance marketing specialist. So, I think the specialization of talent and tying up with the ecosystem are two critical aspects we must be mindful of when we do digital transformation in the future. Webhub and I are smiling because you sound like a financial services salesman. Because we also sell services not just products. Yeah, exactly and you know, but I must say that financial services have traveled this path perhaps a little sooner than you know the manufacturing companies, Vivek, you know, so that is there and that's where you should look for talent from by the way. You can hire from since you said it. Well said. Yeah, so Webhub and Shalini and Sundar, I'm going to request you to be really quick because we have run out of time. But Webhub, I want you to talk about apart from the things that Vivek said, what are some of the other concerns that CMOs need to be worried about? Again, Deepali, I will try and be category specific because I'm experiencing them firsthand right now, right? Instead of giving a generic answer. We as a life insurance, you know, transitioned from a face-to-face selling to what we so as home-to-home selling, right? H2H or as some of our folks call it heart-to-heart selling, right? Where the interaction is completely digital. So honestly, the one, the couple of things that keep me awake in the night, one, the volume of data being generated and its security, right? Honestly, that is something that is on my mind because you have for, you know, large, large scale distribution interacting with prospects where I cannot or my systems are not completely embedded, right? In that we want to be not ready for these kind of businesses, right? So that's something that keeps me awake in the night in terms of security. The other thing that keeps me really awake in the night is because there is the first level of underwriting, right? In insurance business, right? It's all about smarter underwriting and the first degree of underwriting usually happens when a distributor meets a customer. Now with that, with the dilution of that meeting happening, right? And then looks like that's the way forward. My systems and my ML and AI engines have to be extremely smart to identify any kind of frauds that can hit me, right? So that's where we are investing heavily right now for the last one month in trying to, you know, up the game on our existing algorithms to pick up these frauds on mortality or, you know, in terms of the insurance, the big ticket item really for us is the big challenge. I think that all life insurance are now facing, I feel, and you know, when I talk to my peers is that suddenly, you know, the proposition has become as important as the relationship. We've been a category that has been for long driven by relationship selling. You knew Mr. Sharma, I'm just giving a name who used to be your, you know, good old friend of your father, of, you know, some uncle who would come, you would meet, you would trust him and you would just go ahead and sign up an insurance policy with him. I think that has transformed in these days because the consumer is not, you know, in physical. He always has access to this little mobile phone where he's always comparing as he's listening. So the proposition has again come to the forefront. So I think all insurers are right now. I see really working hard to up the game on the product or the proposition or a service that we offer along with the relationship or the engagement. So I think the two, three things that we are picking up, but I think the good news is all of these are actually oriented towards making the customer win. Long-term perspective actually, this will turn out to be really, really good.  I think marketers need to update game and learn about these things. And of course, come to IBM, tell me on my Twitter, I will tell you all the stuff you need to read.  And you and I spoke about it.  I think I will do the revenge flights that everybody's talking about revenge shopping. Okay. But I want you to really talk about how are you looking at managing this ecosystem that you have inside the airport. And Vivek also referred to the ecosystem. And I can tell you that with SBI, you know, we've seen that their success really lies because they've orchestrated the ecosystem really well inside their app. You know, and Shalini, I want you to highlight that and talk about that. So, you know, coming to the ecosystem, the one word I'd use is collaboration, because I think that's what we've seen in the last two months, particularly because, you know, at the risk of getting whiplash, we all had to move over to a completely different way of flying. So we've got a complete end-to-end contactless process, something that not too many airports across the world have yet. And we've done that in collaboration with, let's say, CISF, with all the airlines, with the concessioners on the ground because we've got a contactless payment, contactless X, contactless Y. So while contactless seems like a buzzword, we actually had to literally roll it out in a span of about three weeks before flyers actually came back. And the only way that was going to happen was FNB concessioners, airlines, CISF, all others, our own operations team, everybody had to come together. And so I've seen collaboration happen at a very different level in the industry. And I include government. D2TA had to give permissions for certain old stamping, etc., to be taken away because we had to move to contactless. So this has literally been everybody in the ecosystem coming together. To make this happen, and all you were driving was reassurance and a safe customer experience because that's what at the end of the day is going to count. And the second one is something that Sir Martin referred to, which is the whole thing of the Netflix model, the whole intimate communication, whether you'd like it or not, that is going to be the medium of tomorrow while we are doing contactless. So for example, we have the quadripleano, you've experienced it. But we said at this time, the quad is sharp, people are not going there.  And I see a lot of brands doing that. So I think we're going to have to change our models and be very agile at figuring out how are we delivering that experience, but probably through a completely digital medium. So I think I said this to you, we would have been considered a landlord at one point in time, but it's really now we're a conductor of an orchestra. How do you put everybody in together to deliver that kind of customer experience in an extremely collaborative fashion. And yeah, you know, when I used to be with Mars, the whole idea of a conductor of an orchestra was how we describe marketing and I'm actually seeing it come alive on the ground pretty much. So those would be the two big things that I think even marketers need to think about because no longer can we say it's me versus you or it's win-win, everybody's got to come together to deliver. That's the only way the consumer is going to come back up and buy again or fly again or anything. Sundar, my ultimate question to you before I ask Martin one question and I'm requesting you to be brief. So what should the brands do now? What is your message to the brand since you speak to so many CMOs? What do you want to say to them? Yeah, so, you know, I just want to go back and say these two things. One is, I think the topic of empathy. We're just coming across in everything that we spoke about and empathy just for your customers. And it's also the employees number one who closes to you and you need to display that. The second thing is about the suppliers, the point that they make sort of alluded to people like your partners and people who are, you know, you're the community at large and of course their customers. And we're very genuine in whatever we want to talk about and authentic in the way we want to communicate. So that'll be one. Second thing we do about prioritization. You know, we've got so many things to do and a lot of wild ideas that are coming. If you just look at what each one of them, Shalini, make and I've got big, actually was to prioritize what is important to them and answer to that probably the most important thing. So for Shalini, it was information for a bar for a week. It was about a supply chain, but it was about the query that was coming about coronavirus, whether it's being covered or not, right? So I think that is that's very, very important. And I think I really like the point about adding fulfillment as an important part of that digitization. Because sometimes we might imagine or imagine what in a very different way, imagine what is just full of digital leaving out the very, very important part of fulfillment out of it, which I think is super super great. So thanks for those insights and thank you so much. Thank you. And so Martin, so the last question that I have from my side to you before we take on the audience question is that we heard from the CMOs. We heard from you. And you know what my impression is that there is huge need for personal leadership in driving this transformation and accelerating this transformation. What is the personal leadership trait that you think it's going to be the most important one in time to come? Or just now? Okay. So I want to thank all the panelists first for vindicating our strategy. So I go back to the battlefront, reinvigorated if I or even younger than I started this thing. So that's one thing that there are two things I want to say firstly on these leadership trades. The first is change agent. And I say this is our self interest as well because we we operate most effectively where there are change agents inside the company where there is disruption for change and COVID-19 sadly as I said before plays to that strength. So one is change agents. The second thing is you have to take back control. I'm not saying you on this call but generally the marketing community lost control from about 2008 because it was low growth worldwide because there was very little inflation and still is very little pricing power. There was too much focus on cost and finance and procurement. My view it became too powerful. And they cut because of zero base budgeting and emphasis on cost. They cut the internal resources the demands today of first party data the Netflix model that Shalini referenced as well which I think is the best model and which Mark Pritchard of Proctor the CMO Proctor is putting in 1.2 billion consumer profiles in-house content if necessary and programmatic. So take back control. This is against agency's interest. This is why in part the old agency model is outdated. If you think you can do this better in-house do it. There are three models in-house embedded that's where we put our people in your premises and then outsourced. If in a 24-7 always on world the brief the agency briefing process doesn't work. It doesn't work. You don't have three months to create a film. It's yesterday. This is like the Brexit voter in the UK. The Brexit voter wanted to take back control from Brussels. Take back control. I think it's a wonderful message and I do think and I like that idea of taking back control and I also believe totally in that messaging and I want to sum up before we take on one or two questions that we have from the audience. I want to sum up and say I think the importance of data got spoken about the importance of data security got spoken about importance of analytics got spoken about and what Sir Martin said about the new model of the marketing services organizations emerging and I really like what he said take control and one of the important things about taking control I my message to the marketers always is learn more and this is the time to learn more about technology technology solutions technology solution providers you know we at IBM for example are talking about the integration of design and technology together and that's going to change the space also and you know we have this whole we have 16,000 people by the way that you employ across the world in our customer experience design team you know who service by the way marketers and the customer experience you know interested CIO so with that message you know I'm going to take on two questions one of the question that's been asked and Sir Martin of course since you're with us I'm going to request you to answer that delight our audience the Sri Ranga who said that what is the right skill sets for the CMO in the COVID era I know you said take control but I think for the younger guys who are wanting to become CMOs what are the three qualities I would ask his question to you that you think are extremely important for being a CMO. Well we've heard I think firstly having an understanding well let me sort of back up for a minute you've heard from four people on the panel well five people including Dipali our chair our chairperson you've heard tremendous wisdom and insight and let me be very very direct when I see companies spend one month two months three months four months five months five when I see companies go into a review process for three four or five months I think it's I'm going to be very direct I think it's insane yeah the world is moving at lightspeed we've just heard great intelligence from the five of you you know more about marketing in your industries than any agency probably will ever know you know the people who can deliver what you need whether it's in-house embedded out so the first thing is speed of action right agility I come back to that that and and COVID-19 just ratchets it up even more and when we come out of COVID-19 all your competition as you well know are going to be pushing in the same direction so I would say you said three things agility is one I think Shalini said talked about the orchestra I think that's critical too I think understanding the interrelationship within an organization I mean I the difference between S4 and WPP is we're fully integrating you know Shrini who ideally love and we're all sad about Shrini's mom and we all you know wish him long life and wish his family long life but you know Shrini is the country manager in India he has to orchestrate which is very difficult to do because you have you know good people are difficult in fact the better people are in the agency business the more difficult they are to work work with so and good people are difficult which is a bad thing to say because that means good people will average people will be difficult because they think my doing so they'll be good so I would say integration of functions we talked about sales we talked about marketing we talked about it and then I think I think I would say persistence you know I'm really keen on persistence because organizations tend to be highly political and I think as a result of that you have to be very persistent so agility integration persistence and then maybe I shouldn't say this the other thing is I'd add a fourth learn code and learn Chinese okay those are those are five very interesting messages and I think there's a sixth one you know which is Sir Martin for you you're going back younger so it's about the company that you keep so keep company with us so let me wrap up with that I think we can continue this conversation on Twitter they're very very interesting insights that happen and I'm really grateful to Vivek Shalini Sundar and Vaibhav for bringing in their insights Anurag thanks for giving all of us the opportunity by bringing Sir Martin here and Sir Martin really really pleasure talking to you and your insights that you're sharing years of wisdom you know brought home to us I don't know about that Deepali you should be in the advertising business on the basis of what you just said but one thing I should say I'm delighted to continue the debate with anybody and everybody on the call particularly the the the the five of you at martin martin of s4capital.com so yes anybody wants to continue the debate let's do it thank you very much thank you Deepali for sharing it thank you Vivek Vaibhav thank you Shalini thank you Vivek thank you very much thank you Anurag thank you Anurag thank you thank you for team with yours now tell me what to do I'm done thank you guys for listening to me and let's continue the conversation with Sir Martin and on our Twitter handles all of us are there now we'll end Anurag over to you thank you Deepali since we're discussing digital transformation one of the you know interesting and important things that Sundar said you know which I also read in last year I remember in HPR article about digital transformation as we all know digital transformation is not about you know digital marketing it's not about only implementing digital into your processes it is also about so much about you know human beings and I think one of the key aspects of digital transformation for organizations today is to take away the human anxiety element because a lot of people across sectors are you know very worried about their jobs about upskilling reskilling and things like those so I think one of the aspects that get kind of you know undervalued and missed while we talk about digital transformation is the human aspect and as Sundar said we are all moving towards a digital economy but COVID has at least kind of taken us back to our human roots where you know we are more empathetic to each other where we are asking each other first about our health before we talk about business so I think that's a fantastic thing I hope we all remember to stay like this once COVID is behind us thank you Sir Martin for joining us thank you Dipali Sundar for having championed this entire conversation and having made this happen and before I go I think just to sum up three four things that Sir Martin said which have been spoken about quite a bit over the last few months and years data content programmatic these are going to drive the shapes of businesses and as we can see the old definition of you know which are the companies that will have digital leadership has significantly changed today you have a Netflix coming from nowhere Google has grown become a media tech you know we have this term I mean there were technology companies then came marketing technology now there's media tech and everybody is encroaching into the other companies domain you have companies like Tesla which are kind of changing the technology and the auto space so digital transformation really is going to drive our lives and the shape of digital transformation would change but thank with that thank you everyone for joining us thank you to all the panelists again till next time stay safe and we look forward to seeing you soon again take care thank you you know well thank you thank you thank you so much take care


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