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Ep 7. Manav Sethi
156 Plays2 years ago
Manav Sethi, formerly of Eros* talks about his journey as an intrapreneur, entrepreneur and marketer and how he's always stayed ahead of the curve.
*When this episode was recorded, Manav was with Eros. He has since moved to Octro.
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Transcript
Introduction to Marketing Connect Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, this is the Marketing Connect Podcast. Hi, this is the Marketing Connect Podcast. Hi, this is the Marketing Connect Podcast, a show where we get up close and personal with some of the most celebrated marketeers in the country. We talk to them and discover nuances of marketing that we often miss. After all, we are a show for marketeers by marketeers. Listen in.
The ABCD of Successful Marketing
00:00:30
Speaker
Talk to any successful marketer in the country and they will tell you that the content that works for them tends to be on one of the following four pillars astrology, Bollywood, cricket, devotion, better known as ABCD in the marketing parlance. So today we have with us Manav Sethi of Iros, helping us demystify the pillar around Bollywood. Here is Manav for you.
00:00:53
Speaker
Hey guys, my name is Manav Sethi. I'm Group Chief Marketing Officer for India's biggest Bollywood studio called IROS. We've just announced our merger with a Hollywood entity called STX International, thereby creating India's first case study of Bollywood merging with Hollywood. We also run and manage one of the largest already platforms which has about 180 million plus
00:01:16
Speaker
Hi Aarav, thank you for this.
Insights from Industry Mentors
00:01:17
Speaker
Welcome to the Marketing Matters Podcast. So, so excited to have you. Thank you very much. So quick question. You ended by saying that you reached about 80 million people. So do you want to elaborate? How do you reach those people?
00:01:30
Speaker
It also as a group has two distinct kind of businesses. One is the studio business and the other one is the OTT or the platform business, right? Where in all the movies and shows go live. In fact, we are one of the entities which have also done pioneering work in short form content formats, where we have launched quickies, which are like 10 minute episodes. And we've also done some direct to digital premiers for short films as well.
00:02:00
Speaker
So as I said, and if you look at our recent quarterly earnings, it would realize that we have about 180 million plus registered users. And these users are the users who have come to our platform, consumed, interacted, engaged with content in some shape and form over time.
00:02:22
Speaker
And as far as the ODD platform is concerned, we are one of the earliest sort of ODD movers in this space. And I'm also very happy to share that we are the only partner on Apple TV Plus platform outside of any US entity. So we are the only international partner on Apple TV Plus.
00:02:44
Speaker
So that is the estimate of the vision that the shareholders have had and also the kick-ass execution in terms of content slate that has been built over time in terms of movies and shows. So Manav, I want to ask you a loaded question and I do not want to take this up or not. But you mentioned that you look up to certain people in the industry and the world around you to look for opinions and answers.
00:03:13
Speaker
So who are your marketing gurus? Who do you approach? Who do you go to for inspiration? If you have a problem, would you go and ask and knock on the doors? Or who do you spend time with? If you want to name some people, it'll be amazing. Yeah, so I think looking from India's standpoint, there are a few friends that I have in where I knock the doors.
00:03:38
Speaker
whether for marketing or on the price of business in general right Sami Nair happens to be one Sanjeev Gupta happens to be one. So Sami was the guy who you know pretty much build star in India and South Asia and he was the guy who hand picked me to launch OLD which is India's largest SVOD play with Ekta Kapoor. Sanjeev Gupta was the youngest CEO for Coca-Cola India and he was on my board when I was doing Ask Me.
00:04:09
Speaker
And Nachiket Antvedya was my CEO at Alt, again, right? And then Rajan, I mean, Rajan Anandan is such a treasure. And, you know, I mean, I have so far not met a guy who is so, you know, accessible, grounded, has a worldview and yet has micro views in place, right? So I think these are the few people who I've been lucky
00:04:39
Speaker
to sort of discuss thought leadership with. So is the case with Ajith, when he was at Hotstar as well. So I mean, a lot of intelligent people that the ecosystem has.
00:04:54
Speaker
So next question is on the similar lines, I was talking to another guest on the podcast and he said that he watches a lot of films and those films give him ideas for marketing.
Movies as Marketing Inspiration
00:05:05
Speaker
Like, for example, he mentioned that he watched this movie called Lagan with Aamir Khan in it and how the character could actually motivate his entire village to fight against a British with a common message, common theme. So watching films is a good idea in terms of generating ideas for marketing and enriching yourself.
00:05:24
Speaker
What other one-dimensional ways do you go about to learn about marketing? I think, see, marketing is one sort of domain which is very tightly built or knitted with consumer behavior, right? So I think for any marketer or for any marketing enthusiast, it is very important to sort of not only
00:05:53
Speaker
understand the consumer, but also do understand the underlying consumption shifts, consumption currents, right? Undercurrents which are taking place. And that could happen while you are, you know, standing in a Hirana shop or a grocery store, to when you are in a mall, to when you are talking to a 10 year old girl. I mean, I'll give you a very classic example that happened to me about a week ago, right?
00:06:22
Speaker
I mean, two weeks ago when my daughter's school got shut and suddenly they all were moved to a online, you know, I think they're using Google Meet. Earlier they were using Zoom. So I think, so she said, you know, why don't we have a video platform which is meant only for kids where you can't see anything except a kid's face, right?
00:06:48
Speaker
And I was thinking, wow, is that the next platform bidding to people? Maybe yes. Right. But if you, and now you try correlated, you know, with what Steve Jobs said, right? He said that, you know, usually consumers don't know what do they want. I mean, you have Uber as a example, you have iPhones as an example, you have e-commerce as a completely, you know, shifting trend, et cetera, et cetera.
00:07:13
Speaker
So coming back to your core point of whether a movie gives an idea or whether a book gives an idea or whether a blog gives an idea, I think marketing is one such thing where it is largely understanding of people and a lot of connecting of dots. But from a source of learning, it could be a movie, it could be a song, it could be
00:07:42
Speaker
a stand-up guy. I mean if you watch Hasmuk from Applause on Netflix recently, there are certain insights in that as to how a young boy from sort of hinterlands come to a big town like Bombay and makes it big.
00:08:02
Speaker
if you try correlating it, you know, with the ad film that Bhujt Khande does, and I still remember the one that I did for, maybe, Kaul, you know, which had Sofa in it. I don't know if you have... Thakurain Khas. I mean, exactly. Thakurain Khas Sofa, right? I mean, look at the deep inside, right? So, you know, as Samir used to say, I mean, the guy at Applause Now and Who That Star, right?
00:08:30
Speaker
India has a wide chasm between nagin and nargos.
Understanding Diverse Consumer Groups
00:08:35
Speaker
So you have English speaking sort of 200-300 million potential audience in the country, right? But those 800-900 million people don't consume, don't speak English as their first language, right? So I think for them, from a marketer standpoint, the entire thought process, the insight, the communication, the creative
00:09:00
Speaker
your USB, the value prop, I think all of that, you know, needs to be looked at from a complete game, right? Imagine if heavy call was making an ad in English, largely, you know, for English speaking audience. But then the DG and the comms, you know, really required
00:09:19
Speaker
pick that key inside that how when you give your sofa for repair, it is largely that furniture guy who really goes out and buys what it has to use. On one side you have Hindi speaking people which is the majority vernacular play and on the other side you have these English speaking guys who are smaller, 200, 300.
Data-Driven Marketing Strategies
00:09:44
Speaker
So I'm going to continue the conversation on that only. So as a as a person who manages a large ad, depends on OTD platform and production of content and international marketing spends, how do you how do you balance? You know, how do you choose? What do you want to put money on? Like, for example, right now, how do you know that this is where I put the money on? This is where the focus would be.
00:10:09
Speaker
So I think even when I was doing e-commerce, and I think these are the insights that I built in those days as well. I think I was one of the few marketers in the country who was spending 80% of the marketing budget on digital at large. That is one. So I think I was very clear that if the consumption is happening on digital platforms, if your primary
00:10:35
Speaker
guy is consuming online, then why is it that you would want to go about catching him in an offline media environment? And I still have an anecdote. When we were doing Ask Me Bazaar and Ask Me Scaling Up, we realized that in our media plan, usually when you go and buy media every agency will say that the prime time is 1900 hours onwards. So you start buying your spots usually in prime time at least, that's what you
00:11:05
Speaker
try to do, right, with whatever much you have. But we realized that our peak consumption in the traffic happens at 2200 hours. And when I started, you know, correlating it with other e-commerce platforms as well, the similar trends were emerging with them as well. And that's when we said internally, yeah, why is it that, you know, I should be having a single spot
00:11:32
Speaker
at 9 o'clock 9 30 or 10 o'clock right because my guy is already buying this he's not watching TV in all probability that's one second we also realize that you know these are the guys who had possibly added the SKU in the cart or they were browsing a lot you know at that time
00:11:48
Speaker
and maybe buying later, but they were not buying it on their move, right? They were in a stationary, so Wi-Fi was the primary mode of consuming the internet. So we realized which means that they're largely at their homes, right? And we all know that India is a single TV household, right? Which means that you may be doing these browsing on your device, sitting in a room where possibly you don't have a TV, which means that you're not looking at my ads at all, right?
00:12:15
Speaker
So why should I be spending on that time band? So I think that's the play where data plays a lot of role. And for a marketer, which is why I lay a lot of
00:12:29
Speaker
emphasis on data, that for a marketer today, unlike a traditional FMCG world, right, where you were selling soaps and shampoo, there was a lot of seasonality that came to you on the table. So we all know that, you know, a glycerine soap, which is, let's say, a pear's orange soap, sells more in winters, whereas pears, aloe vera or oil,
00:12:58
Speaker
Alan So sells more in summers. It's a seasonality, right? So any new guy who would come, he would rely on this. Whereas when you are doing an ODD play, when I was launching ODD, right? I mean, I pretty much broke the notion that India doesn't pay for content. Imagine launching a platform, you know, with only 22 shows. All of those are made in Hindi, right? And all of them are behind paywall. Nothing is free.
00:13:25
Speaker
Right. And you're asking people to play. So coming back to your point, I think it is lot. So choosing where to spend, choosing how to spend is, is a function of, you know, your A with experience, of course, you build certain hunches, you build certain
00:13:42
Speaker
You know, again, go back to my statement of connecting the dots. You have learned certain things. You try to correlate them with the consumers. So you try doing a lot of experiments when you are sort of launching something in a territory which, where in something has never been done before, was never done before. When Ask Me was launched, they were, you know, Amazon of the world, shortcut of the world, which were catering to a very premium TG, right?
00:14:09
Speaker
trying to sell a relaxo jakbal to a guy in Aknaub and trying to sell a Nike shoe to a guy in Ortheast who has propensity to pay but can't buy because Nike will not open a store in Shillong. So then you try correlating not with whatever knowledge that you have acquired so far but you try to question everything and try to rely on what your progressive data brings back to you.
00:14:39
Speaker
And that is
The Role of Consumer Feedback
00:14:41
Speaker
something, I mean, look at your social channels right now. I mean, earlier days, if you recall, for every consumer feedback to happen, you had to do a primary research, secondary research, ORG marks of the world were built around this, right? Today, if you follow your social channels, if you follow your app store reviews, your play store reviews, you know every minute how your consumer is reacting, what are his pain points.
00:15:10
Speaker
And I think that is very, very important and rest on a marketer's shoulder to really, you know, deep dive and look at those, again, you know, balls which are lying out there to be captured. That is, again, only step one. Step two is how do you make them as a factor of improvement and production? So if if your delivery, which was supposed to happen, you know, on a particular day and not happening, then
00:15:38
Speaker
the guy saying is not yet delivered then you just can't stop it saying okay we are looking into it right he needs to know when is it gonna reach him which means that at your back end you should have had a process in place where the ticket is tied with the logic 16 the logic 16 is talking to the outsourced partner outsourced partner has a system in place which gives him the real time almost real time startup as to which city with center
00:16:05
Speaker
the contentment is and in how many days or hours it is gonna reach him. So that within next three hours you can go back to your disgruntled consumer saying dude, here is it that you have 100 bucks voucher accepting the delay and here is it definitely that your stuff will reach you.
00:16:24
Speaker
So I think those are the things that, you know, requires a lot of you guys.
Manav Sethi's Professional Journey
00:16:30
Speaker
So Manak, also, do you want to quickly talk about your journey, like from the time you pass out of your college till the time? Sure. So I think, you know, after my MBA school, I was the second or third guy to be hired from the campus. Right. And I was very happy and elated to join a company which was in two software automation solutions. I was very clear that I'm not going to go in the old
00:16:53
Speaker
economy world because tech and this is you know 99 this is 2000 2001 and internet was you know sort of still coming up with we had seen few of the markets crashing in the US and so my first job was in financial automation solution sales I used to sell banking automation solution those are the days when banks were you know implementing core banking and branch banking solutions and
00:17:22
Speaker
So I was hired from campus to lead the North market for that. Very happy, very hated. But when I look back now, I realize that it was a mistake in the sense that I never had a boss. I was reported into a guy who was sitting in Bombay. So it was incumbent on me to learn on the trade, learn from my mistakes while I'm doing those.
00:17:46
Speaker
But thankfully, that guy was very good that he would encourage me. We would get on calls. And those days, they were still not video calling, not become scalable. So we would get on calls. He wouldn't mentor me. So I mean, looking back, not that bad, right? But it also sort of built in self-reliance, self-quotienting, self-assurances as well.
00:18:11
Speaker
Within one and a half years, I got poached by a competitor then, which was again into financial automation solution. But the scope got expanded right from banks, gotten into capital markets, was looking at the broken solution, deposit back office solutions. We were then implementing the largest NMS for IFCO, which is network auditing solution. They had a smart card business. So a lot of exposure into a lot of new domains, right? We used to sell SAP.
00:18:40
Speaker
I sense is EAI was a big raise then enterprise application integration. So did a lot of stuff then, right? But then I was itching to go in the TrueBlue.com world. And that's when I got hired by Webdonia. So Webdonia started as a local language internet platform. And I think we were way
00:19:05
Speaker
ahead of our time. If you look at what daily hunts and others are doing now and the kind of value, you know, the, we guys are giving them, I think we were way ahead of time. So we sort of build, you know, local language, internet solutions. So in those days, if you recall, Rediff and India Times, the entire ability to write your mail or chat in 11 Indian languages is something what we powered.
00:19:33
Speaker
For the very first time, I remember I was closely working with Microsoft and we did a project, Ardekum in Haridwar.
00:19:43
Speaker
Right? So virtual RT was, you know, sort of, and remember these were those days when, you know, VAS was still, you know, at its time, wallpapers, ringtones, astrology, what the hate, you know, hate is. Reliance had put its bets on CDMA network. Right? So, and India Times had launched 888 and, I mean, those were the couriers.
00:20:09
Speaker
But also those were the days when the VAS was grappled with the telcos largely controlling the ecosystem. So while I was working for Webdunya, I was working very closely with India Times and we saw enough not only powered on the
00:20:30
Speaker
Consumer internet side, but we also worked a lot with the enterprise side on the BCCL side. So we built there. We automated their entire agency booking system, right? When in old days you were required to walk into offline store to give a classified ad.
00:20:47
Speaker
And because the print run had to happen at a particular time, so they would not accept an ad beyond a threshold. So if you want to add to go out tomorrow, you had to sort of go to an offline outlet to give that ad maybe a day and a half earlier. So we sort of automated all of that integrated with their SAP and stuff like that.
00:21:09
Speaker
So while I was working very closely with India Times, Reliance Entertainment had formed. I think the first thing that they did was acquire ad labs from Anil Ambani's side. This was around the same time the split had just happened. And Rajesh had moved from India Times to lead the entire entertainment initiative. And he handpicked me to be part of the corporate strategy role.
00:21:37
Speaker
So and those are the days when I was also studying law after my MBA. I had done it part time from a fact in the university. My one paper is still remaining. I have unfinished law education. But what that taught me and what that allowed me
00:22:01
Speaker
you know, when I look back, I think, right? MBA with law gave me the ability to move from a pure play sales alliances to a strategy. So I joined Alliance to be part of the corporate strategy team that worked on launching businesses across FM radio, the pack, which was into online gaming, big data, which was into online social network, then big flakes, which was into online DVD rental business.
00:22:28
Speaker
And of course, we launched lines, big motion pictures, big music, et cetera, right? We also acquired animation business and, you know, sort of built a huge animation studio. And while I was doing corporate strategy, I was also heading the mobile TV initiative. In those days, Qualcomm had a technology called Mediaflow. Nokia was working with DVBH. And there were, you know, competitive technologies like SDM, BT, et cetera.
00:22:52
Speaker
But one of the key meetings, it turns out that Reliance Communications has a sub-1 meter satellite imagery. And in top 20 cities in India, because they were working on FTTB model where fiber was to be terminated on the building. And do remember that ARCOM is the largest or top three guys which owns optical fiber in the country.
00:23:19
Speaker
because they were looking at a FTDB kind of a model, they had sort of done a lot of GIS surveys. And sitting in their knock at DAKC, they would know that Atlantis building on Turner Road in Bandra has X number of floors, has this particular socio-economic segment. They knew the lat-long, right? And
00:23:43
Speaker
And they were using all this info largely for the enterprise of services, because they were doing the network planning and how the SLAs for the services, et cetera, they would meet, right? That's when I recommended that why don't we launch it as a consumer platform? And everyone jumped on the idea. We were lucky to get a million dollars from Anil Ambani's office to start working on this plan. And that's when I assumed the operational role.
00:24:12
Speaker
And so I sort of, uh, you know, started to build a big map, uh, from scratch, hired the very first guy, got my lab to the AKC, uh, you know, hired 20, 30 key guys, uh, to work on it, hired a team of partners who would go out with the GPS data, collect lat long for yellow pages
Digital Platform Development
00:24:35
Speaker
and all. Right.
00:24:36
Speaker
And so we started to build that entire platform from scratch. And within two quarters of working on it, I had Navtech prior to being acquired by Nokia willing to invest $5 million in the business. Good base, ADA said that we don't need the money. Let them come back once we are looking at formal money rates and once we build certain value. It's a lot easier to do so. But then 2008,
00:25:04
Speaker
happened we had just launched and the entire you know money market flip we were told that for all the new economy businesses you got to go and raise money and that's when we consolidated all the new economy businesses within Reliance Entertainment and went out meeting all the potential investors to raise money. Of course you know with with a significant
00:25:28
Speaker
shareholder in the lines on the other side, it was not easy for any other P or VC guy to jump in at least in those days, right? That's when I last got, I went to Money at Just Dial and I said, Money, you have best of the best offline Yellow Pages business. We have built this online platform, created Yellow Pages database at long. It is a perfect marriage waiting to happen. So within, I think, two to three weeks of doing the due diligence,
00:25:56
Speaker
They sort of put in a term sheet for a position of business. But again, I think Reliance was non-committal to let go of that play. And the idea was to merge it with the radio business because radio is a local business. But then I was not sure what to do. That's when me with my technology head, I stepped out.
00:26:19
Speaker
And that's when I dabbled with few startups. I started to work on advising a few early stage companies. And while I was doing that, two of India's largest Yellow Pages companies merged, namely Infomedia and edit. Astro group of Malaysia, they had written the round of investment. And that's when they hired me to sort of bring in the digital
00:26:47
Speaker
sold for the company but then as so you know which happened to be our largest shareholder by then got mired in the 2d scam and they took a cautious call to exit country at large right and after that and but that was a great experience when we uh shut that down then Kami who was working with Ekta Kapoor as a group CEO for Balaji telephones they were looking at launching India's first SCOD play and they
00:27:15
Speaker
smartly so in the hindsight, they took a cautious call not to hire any guy from the broadcasting side. They said, we need a guy who understands digital, who understands digital marketing at a scale, who has done customer acquisition at scale. That's when he reached out to me and said, why don't you, why don't I come on board and launch Alt? To me, that was the logical next step because you've done classified yellow pages and local search and you've done
00:27:41
Speaker
e-commerce and marketplaces, video on the internet, you know, is something that is still a phenomenon, right? And that's when I, you know, sort of moved from a 60 million annual marketing budget to, I remember the first year, all marketing budget was $7 million. Imagine in $7 million, and I used to have a team of about 150 people that asked me, and I think that all I had at its peak, I had a team of about 15, one five.
00:28:10
Speaker
But amazing experience, amazing experience. So imagine that you are actually working on breaking the notion that Indians don't pay for content. And I think we successfully did that. And that's where my joy lies. So launching brand, platform, and I think we launched with seven shows, if I remember, six Hindi and one Tamil, Maya Tharaya.
00:28:38
Speaker
And so we launched that. We scaled it. And within two quarters of launching Alt, we had Reliance GO coming up and picking up 24.9% pay for about 419 rows in the company. So that was the true estimate of success of what we did. And two, three things that we did very unique from marketing standpoint, because I didn't have humongous budget to spend.
00:29:08
Speaker
And I wanted to create a top end of the funnel, right? Because people on one side were consuming Netflix and Amazon Prime and on one side, you know, here I was, we started to give one episode free on YouTube. We said, because if you don't have humongous budget to spend on print, on TV, et cetera, how do you broad base the funnel? How do you reach out, right?
00:29:32
Speaker
And you realize that YouTube is still the largest, you know, the lowest common denominator when it comes to mobile video, right? I think why don't we leverage on that platform to build a platform? And I think that worked very well for us. And Google also wanted to showcase it as a study then. And when I left ALT, and again, I left ALT largely because I had launched about 22, 25 shows. We had launched.
00:30:02
Speaker
We launched globally across some 20 plus markets and it had acquired the leadership position. I still remember App Any report that came within two quarters of our launching. We were the top three paying OTT apps in the country. So did that and then it all happened.
00:30:28
Speaker
So the entire journey has been very, very interesting. In fact, I asked me, I did a couple of pioneer things as well. We were first to do a sort of marketing integration with AID, right? We did a campaign called Ask AID, which actually won a bronze MV at GoFS as well.
00:30:49
Speaker
No, you can go on YouTube and you can check those videos. I think every video got some tens of millions of views without us paying a single penny. So those are all organic views. AskKID was one. Rocky and Mayur. So I think when Rocky and Mayur were known only in the offline world, I did a campaign with them wherein we said, let's find 1000 best places to eat in the country. So we sort of created a crowd.
00:31:13
Speaker
you know, campaign where we said, okay, if Rocky and Mayu say that the best butter chicken in Delhi is at Moti Mahal, right? According to you, which are the next three best butter chicken places? Or if the best chart in Lucknow is at Hazrat Ranch, where do you get the best chart, right? You would be surprised to know that within, I think, again, a quarter or two of that campaign goal life, my searches on food grew up by 20%.
00:31:40
Speaker
which means more leads for restaurant partners who are on our team. They did similar things with Winkle Khanna because she's known for her interiors and her niche. Books happened to her later. And we sort of, with Glitch, started to create lookbooks. So when video blogs was stopped, we were actually doing all of that. So with Rocky and Mayu, Twinkle Khanna,
00:32:09
Speaker
We did videos which are largely on the vertical specialized commerce led video. So a lot of earning there. So isn't this coming back again, right? I mean, a lot of people are now starting to do vertical videos again, right? I mean, all these channels are opening up, comedy coverage, films coverage, food coverage. So I don't think channels are also coming back. No, that is absolutely the logical course, right?
00:32:34
Speaker
I mean, what we looked at way back in 2014, 15, if you realize 15, 15. I mean, with TikTok now coming up, I mean, those are the days when there were no video influencers, right? Instagram was still shaping up. Instagram was a novelty then, right? I think it is a logical course today, right? Because people don't want to trust as far as the reviews are concerned from someone who they don't know.
00:33:04
Speaker
And today, a consumer is also smart that he knows that reviews for a particular restaurant may be motivated or influence reviews. So you might as well follow someone who you trust for food, who you trust for clothing, who you trust for fashion, who you trust for furniture, who you trust for fitness, which is why all these scalable recurring forms of consumption are vertical.
00:33:30
Speaker
across food, lifestyle, health and fashion. That's where you will see a lot of video-led commerce and consumption triggering up and it is slowly logical. So that brings us to the next question Manav.
00:33:47
Speaker
Obviously, we are living in, you know, super different times than anybody would have predicted with the coronavirus around
Impact of COVID-19 on Marketing
00:33:54
Speaker
us. So the world as we knew it till about two months ago is now obviously changing. So as a marketeer that, you know, has the pulse of the market, what do you think is going to happen in the next six months? Do you want to gaze in the crystal ball and say,
00:34:13
Speaker
So I don't think no one has that answer, number one. But what we have seen so far, spaces like entertainment, spaces like education, spaces like health, and spaces like gaming. These are the few verticals which have seen uplift in consumption in the online form. And I think these will continue to grow, and these will also allow certain models to come up. I remember I was talking to this journal yesterday
00:34:42
Speaker
who was asking about that how, you know, this will shape up the TV versus OTT place to which I said, but it is any which way is a structural shift, right? We are any which way is moving from TV as a household device to mobile as a personal consumption device, right? What COVID will do is that because it has already made next 10s of millions of people taste OTT, right?
00:35:08
Speaker
So that trial trigger which was waiting to happen and which people were not willing to do, possibly because they said, oh, we'll do it once we are free. Today they are free, and which is why they are spending more time on the ODD platform, and which is why they are discovering the flexibility, the non-appointment viewing, the plethora of content, the shows that they may have never even seen the trailers of, the entire spectrum of shows, as I said, nagging through our code.
00:35:38
Speaker
So I think those are the new consumption patterns, those are emerging. And in certain cases, these will become scalable, new, normal. In certain cases, these will acquire significant minority shareholding as far as the consumption is concerned. At least till such time that this persists, you will be a lot more empathetic. You will be a lot more utility-led.
00:36:08
Speaker
Okay. You will be lot more, uh, you know, social responsibility led. Right. So I think that to that extent, it'll change the number one. Number two, it will also start reflecting in your media mix as well. Right. So, I mean, you and I both know that the print, I mean, you didn't have the print circulation happening, right? So the print has taken a lot of it, right? TV has taken a lot of it because no new shows are coming in. No new episodes are coming in. Right. Which means that the.
00:36:38
Speaker
Digital has become a forefront. I mean, I've been watching Netflix in the recent past continue to taking mastheads on YouTube, which was not the case earlier. So I think those shifts will happen. You will see a lot of efforts on retention programs because you know that acquiring new customers in today's day and age may not be the case.
00:37:03
Speaker
I think for a ODD platform, if you realize, we've always been sort of plummoxed with too much choice. So the content discovery has been talked about, has been a challenge. Today, for a marketer, it allows a significant opportunity because never ever it has happened at a show like Narco's or a show like Ghandi Bhat or a show like Bodhi.
00:37:33
Speaker
has been watched by 100% of potential TGs. You carve out a potential TG. You show your comps to them. But in those days when you were launching two new shows every month, your velocity of communication, creatives, and comps were such that your focus on older shows was only as much. Today, because no more new shows are coming in, no more new content is coming in,
00:38:01
Speaker
you have that opportunity to take those hidden gems and bring it out and take it to their audiences. So that's where a lot of focus on detention programs. So I think to that effect the communication and the communication strategy and hashtag. You just heard the latest episode of the marketing engineering podcast, a show for marketeers by
00:38:31
Speaker
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