Q1 So you’re from, you know, NIT Trichy, and then, you know, you did your, you know, IIM Cal. And how is it a civil engineer actually started getting interested in marketing?
Srinjoy (00:55.537)
So to be honest, civil engineering courses these days mostly act as giving you an analytical bent of mind. And so that was like the kick starting point. I used to look at a company’s books a lot during my 3G days. And then I found out that there is while a lot of things companies were doing would have direct impact in what the output they produce, for example the profit pools and whatnot. So for example, if you set up 20 factories, then you’re likely to get a 20 times increase in revenue. If you increase capex, you’re likely to get higher profit pools. If you can do good margin expansion, your profits increase. Marketing was always, I found, extremely random as a variable. Some companies did tremendously good marketing and got really good results and some companies did not. So that was very fascinating.
What it meant is that marketing really needs skills. Everything else is about execution. Execution itself is very difficult and completely get that marketing is skills like the likes of Nestle and Coke in India, P&G back in those days. The kind of marketing that they did, took a lot of skills and I could see that it gave them results, which is very interesting, I found out. So obviously when I went to B school read a lot of case studies as to what companies globally have been doing, what companies locally have been doing. So that was, think, very, very interesting that I found out. And it helped me understand marketing from a very different lens than what people do, which is more from a financial point of view. And also, if you read a lot of case studies, you understand all the ways you can do marketing and not necessarily the way marketing was done in the noughties, in the early teens in India.
So that is where I thought that this is interesting, right? Marketing is not just putting on great ad films and it is more about how you can add value to a company’s bottom line as well as the top line.
Q2 Okay. So what was interesting to me about your career in marketing was you have largely been in a startup ecosystem, right? So a lot of young companies, funded companies with Sequoia and stuff like that is really where I think you’ve spent a lot of time though you started with Airtel and things like that. Any specific reason why you wanted to take this route? Because a normal marketer typically goes through the traditional big company brands, company brands where they do marketing, but I find your profile to be completely different. So is there a reason? So is that something that excites you. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Srinjoy (03:47.163)
So it’s mostly all of these are listed companies only to be honest, not really. I’ve probably spent two, three years in a startup apart from that most of these were but they were not listed in India. So for example Tencent was put half a trillion dollars in general Airtel was close to now I think roughly 10, 20 or billion dollar companies back then it was a 10 to 15 billion dollar market cap companies and Krafton roughly is around three billion dollars. Right. So it’s the difference lies in I’ve always worked in digital-first companies rather than consumer based, e-com based companies. So that’s the difference. But it just allows you to learn different things at different scales. For example, what works a million dollar campaign in a company like Tencent has a very different meaning than a million dollar campaign in a company like Airtel because the scales are just radically different.
And also your objectives are different in a lot of really large established brands like Airtel. All you want to do is to expand your TAM on your fringes and on your core audience, you’re trying to extract more ARPU, which is realizations in modern-day terminology. Whereas for Tencent, it’s about exploring new geographies and everything else. Like in Krafton, it is about exploring new games and getting new audiences in.
So there is the little bit of a difference when you look at the size of the companies, their objectives become very, very different. In my startup, it was all about market building, market awareness, and taking it from there. So it was very normal to have 250%, 300% growth, even month on month, which is absolutely crazy. Whereas even for very large behemoths, even if you increase the top line by a single double digit or high single digit, even that is at a consistent level, it compounds your top lines very well over a 5-10 year period. So different companies gave me different exposures to the kind of things that you can pull off in marketing. It gives you a very wide range of things you can do. And it also taught me how marketing is done globally also, not just in India. Because if you restrict yourself to just India, it takes a long time to change your perspectives from traditional media, from TV into what is happening which lies at the cutting edge of where consumerism is right now, which is moving away from traditionals into digital right now. So that is where you as a professional you go exactly where learning is the highest. So as learning progressed I kept exploring and then finding things which helped bring value to both my teams as well as the companies.
Q3 So when, you know, when I was actually talking to you even before this podcast, one thing that impressed me a lot is the first point that you made during our discussion, said the importance of knowing finance for a marketer is very, important. And I rarely hear that from CMOs and head of marketing and anybody who is a marketing professional. So why do you really think finance and the art of knowing finance is important for marketers? And can you elaborate a bit on that?
Srinjoy (07:07.505)
So what I think is that the world is shifting a little bit. I think for me it’s more predictive than something which is happening right now as we speak in 2025. So the world is adapting a little bit.
So what used to happen is that previously in organizations there would be the Chief Financial Officer here and the CMO seated here and the strategy folks who decide the course of the company and give recommendations to the CEO who sit on top would be equidistant from both from the CFO as well as the CMO.
modern day companies that equidistance is no longer there. So they are more aligned towards the CFO. And when this happens, it happens mostly because as economies open up, we have gradually opened up since 1991. Now it’s almost like 30 odd years, right? As consumerism grows, marketing becomes extremely intense. Breaking clutter becomes far more difficult. It is no longer easier to just role out a campaign and think, hey, I’ve done enough and what not, right?
So when these things happen, you have to be able to understand the perspective of your CFO, as well as the CSO, who is the Chief Strategy Officer or your CSO leads, to be able to convince your CEO in a convincing way.
So that’s why concepts like return on marketing dollars, understanding your brand’s rookies return on capital employed, and the turnover, is how fast you are able to rotate your cash is extremely important for you to understand what your marketing budgets are. The second point is what you do with those marketing budgets, the ratio which goes into content creation, the ratio which goes into distribution, the ratio of what should go into sales and whatnot. All of these to have a very deeper understanding onto it helps you bring those large projects to your CEOs. And since I work only in almost listed companies, for me, the fiduciary duty is even higher because it’s not just yours, it’s also in a way to the board and the shareholders in general. So if you are proposing a $10 million campaign, if you have $15 million campaign, the impact of it should be in line with what has been discussed in con calls, what has been discussed you as a strategic business unit and what has been discussed as your company KPIs.
You can no longer sit just because you’re a large consumer brand, sit on your laurels and think hey whatever I do even if it gives me a little bit of a delta the movement will not be much. I look at some of the top FMCG brands what has happened to them like the direct to consumer brands which has come up in the last few years have completely disrupted them right completely disrupted them right.
If you look at for example like we can take many examples this is one example so folks are having to justify their brand spends even more severely because the CEO is going to ask direct questions why don’t I give promotional discounts in the channel right. And you need to have very logical answers. You can’t have logical answers if you don’t have a background in finance.
So that’s what my, IIM Calcutta education, which is known for its finance in general, really helped. It came in clutch. And I also come from a background in forensic accounting in general. So I understand how cash flows sort of work. So more than the P&L statement, it’s a cash flow statement that you look at to understand how these affect your margins. The second part is that I think, it’s been a long time since India has seen a slowdown in consumerism. And marketing is very closely linked to consumerism. And I think balance sheets of companies are really, really good right now. It’s far better than what happened in 2008 when I was in college and everything. Having said that, whenever a slowdown comes, the CEO is going to come out and say, hey, let’s let’s slash down budgets and what not. If you have a very deep understanding of finance, you have a very brilliant ability to figure out what campaign suits what certain campaigns will be for say, TAM expansion. TAM expansion for your viewers is you’re working on the fringes. You’re trying to expand more and more people who will do trials of your product. On the other hand, I think there are certain campaigns you do to extract more revenue from your existing users. There’s certain campaigns you do to launch your sub products or sub brands and whatnot.
The balance of what budget goes into those is not something that you can no longer stare at your CSO or at your CFO and tell them, sir, tell me what the budgets are. You get a full budget and you need to be able to figure out which one gives you more ROE or ROI in general. ROE is a language that you should speak with your CFO to understand what sort of incremental benefits I can bring to my company’s top line and bottom line. So this sort of an understanding is no longer outsource-able, I can say to your strategy leads. You should do it on your own. Otherwise, once upon a time, a lead’s marketing CMOs would only have the job of maintaining the brand, figuring out some ancillaries like PR and whatnot. But apart from that, they would not. These days, because there’s agencies for everything and there is precise data prediction and analytics available to even the biggest of offline companies, you can make those analysis on your own. So if you have a little bit of a finance background, I think it really helps you understand how our brands function in general.
So these things really helped me and obviously it goes without saying because I’ve always worked in digital companies, the amount of data I had available at my fingertips helps me take decisions which I can analyze later to come back and do very easy postmortems and you become better as someone who does marketing while keeping finances in mind. So this is a prudency which I predict will come into CMO circles will come into CMO WhatsApp groups a lot in the next four or five years. It is just starting to enter into our, into our lingo, into our discussions as of now and has far reaching implications than just budgeting what budget goes into what campaign. It has far reaching complications as to how you think about how effective your campaigns are going to be and what not. So let’s see how the future holds, but you can no longer just silo brands from the financial impacts of what your campaigns are going to be.
Q4 Okay. So can you explain a bit about this? You made an interesting statement on how do you convince a CEO or a CFO or a Chief Strategy Officer on whether this campaign worked? What are the metrics? So can you give me an example of how do you approach that finance first thinking, which is very, very important? And if you can give me an example of how should a marketer start thinking around it, especially because it’s an evolving area, that would be extremely useful to some of the folks who are listening to this conversation.
Srinjoy (13:55.985)
Yeah, so one of the biggest deviates people usually have is that how much should you spend in distribution, which is whether you want to put this on TV, whether you want to put this on digital and what is what should be the spends and what ratio of that should be into creation. Right. So this in itself needs you to understand what is the incremental impact of just going for deep distribution. For example, basis projects. You know that there is a project on which you are expected to hit like 17 to 18 percent ROC and if your margins contract by around 2 to 3 percent in general then it comes to around 15 to 14 percent. So what you need to do is to talk to your CEO and say, if you give me an additional 1 percent of the ROCE since you have that leeway in your margins in general, I can get you an additional reach of X million which gives you a dollar value of Y million. So in case it gets confusing just to redo the math.
Say there’s a product line you’re launching which has an 18% to 16% ROC, they’re always in ranges, you don’t have exact assumptions and the chief strategy officer and finance officers have given you a 2% leeway to use that amount of budget to expand your total addressable market by X million which gives you Y million dollars in additional revenue.
If you have the confidence, basis your previous campaigns, basis your market understanding, basis your market research and the risk-taking ability of your business unit, you go and say, hey, if you give me one to 2 % more, it will decrease your ROC by this, it will not decrease your ROC, it will decrease your margins by this, but because I can extract more volumes out of it, I think I will be able to deliver slightly better ROCs. So net-net it will not get affected.
So what I did just now is that explain to my CEO that I understand that your ROCs which are dependent on your rotations, how many times you can rotate the same cash as well as your margins, how they interlink with each other, I understand that. So, at a quarterly basis, I can tune my marketing campaigns basis that.
Second, I do understand that if I crack open a new market, what sort of incremental revenues that I can bring in, even though they may not be margin-accretive. Margin-accretive is that when you go into a new category, they do not give you the same amount of margins. A very easy example is Netflix mobile. Netflix mobile is at 149-199. It’s not the same margins for Netflix as you do on a 4k plan, which is like 849, right? Different margins. But you get that new consumer, you get the volumes in, right? So very easy examples.
But once you speak in this language to your CEO, now you have a conversation going, right? Previously you would go and say, sir, can I get this India’s biggest superstar into the game or into your product or into your brand, he or she will unlock this many rural markets for you, this many tier three and this many SACs for you and hence your brand will be known. That’s not a language that they don’t understand, they understand that language, but that’s not a language that they can speak to their board or their shareholders. This is a language that everyone speaks. So it’s like everyone is speaking different, different languages, but once you accept that English is the most common language that everyone understands.
So in that table, finance, I think ROCs, Net Margins, these are languages that everyone understands. Now imagine that you are as a marketeer know this language as well. You suddenly have a superpower, right? You can speak French and English. That’s great, right? I mean, that’s fun for everyone. So now you have you gain the confidence of not just your CEO, but also your CSO and your CFOs, right? And it helps you bring rational decisions. The other thing it does is that say this goes south, say if it goes north and it’s great, you’ll get more budget next year as well.
ContraMinds Podcast (17:33.323)
Absolutely.
Srinjoy (17:39.291)
Say this goes south, you have your mitigation plans in place. So you know that you will mostly take a 2% hit in your margins, even if you ask for that budget, right? And then you will be able to explain to your leads that, these are the reasons why the budget is limited this year. It’s not because there’s a slowdown. It’s not because we don’t want to focus on this project or whatever. If you understand it very well, then you’ll be able to internalize that to your team very, very well. And the teams will also have these sort of expectations and what it does is that over a period of time, you build a series of cases and your company becomes so rich with these beautiful case studies through the years. Like ours is a very new company, but if you have been working for a period or a decade or whatever it is, these cases help you fine tune the predictability of your revenues and the predictability of your marketing impact very, very well.
Otherwise, will always have these discussions after an IPL. After an IPL, there are CEO comes out and says, I so much money IPL, what happened? You don’t want to get into those conversations. You need more, more, more strong and legitimate conversations to gain the confidence of everyone in the room. So that’s where I see the future of marketing being headed. There are ways you may like it or you may not like it, but adoption will be there. So you better adopt it. Yeah.
ContraMinds Podcast (18:58.648)
No, would think, Srinjoy, it’s very, very important coming from a marketing and analytics background. For me, this has been always…an important aspect and not often marketing talks this language. We talk about, I’ve been in meetings where the CMO talks about, I’ve increased top-of-mind-awareness, but the CEO will say, but my market share has not increased. Okay. So then, if you give me a metric which says top of mind awareness has increased, but the market share has not increased, which is a resultant of revenue coming into the company, the marketer does not get the respect of the board.
So therefore what is important from what you are telling me is that it’s critical to look at return on marketing investment, look at margins, look at return on capital employed, look at return on marketing investments in terms of different distributions, how are your margins spread across your products. It’s very, very important to talk that language because it has got implications on valuations, it’s got implication on the scale what you are doing. And that I think is very critical for marketers to learn. Right? That’s really what you are saying.
Srinjoy (20:10.491)
Yeah, and you can see that people are noticing it, right? So I think even in the VC ecosystem, you can see that profitability certainly is the buzzword compared to top line growth and all. So these things move in cycles. I think these are just market cycles. I think we are headed towards a market cycle that it is important to have in-depth understanding of finance also in addition to marketing because that’s what gives you an edge. Otherwise, there’s too many CMOs running around in the country with very little understanding of how finance works. Hence, would find it very difficult to reconcile with the top folks whenever you get into discussions with them.
Q5 So you are somebody who is a big believer of content and context. Okay. And you’ve done some fantastic campaigns. saw the awards that you have won, you for some of the work that you have done. So can you talk about the importance of content and context and how have you been able to build marketing innovations in a… industry like yours where gaming, you you may say that, you know, yes, it doesn’t have enough attention, but you seem to have built, you know, not a MAU, but a DAU, right? Clearly, that’s something which you’re passionate about. So can you give me some examples of how you brought content and context to build customer engagement?
Srinjoy (21:32.837)
Yeah, so I have been very lucky to have worked with brands, all of which have really, really high DAU, like incredibly high DAU brands, right? And like eight, nine digit DAUs in general. So that is very special, I think, in my opinion. So what it also allows you to do is to work with content. what it means, content is essentially what? Content is just narratives, content is story, right? Now, when you do that, something different gets triggered inside your fans, inside your users. So instead of like whenever you start watching anything, be it an ad or a film or a content or whatever it is, your first instinct as a consumer these days, because we live in this overly consumeristic world, someone is selling me something. What content does is that it relaxes you. It says, no, no, hey guys, I’m not here to sell you something. For example,we’ve created many content around our top game called Battlegrounds Mobile India, which talks about friendships. I’m not here to ask you to download the game after you’ve seen that film. I’m just asking you to just watch this film and guess what? People really love it. People really enjoy it.
What it subconsciously does is that it endears people to your brand. This is something that I will definitely credit that gaming and a lot of social first brands did it first in India. And then people came, like we’re very used to seeing placements of brands in films. It’s very obvious someone stepping on a beverage that they know about, someone talking about driving a car that a brand that we know about. But what I think gaming brands and lot of social first brands did, they turned this into entertainment. And entertainment is not something Indians can ignore. They love watching content. Like if you are on a bus ride, which is one hour, and you know there’s a great episode of BGMI which has come up, you will watch that episode because you were anyways going to watch something on YouTube. So that is extremely important, I think.
The second part is context. So it’s not really, it’s an open secret right now that most folks in India are spending time, a large amount of time on Instagram and YouTube. Previously, this is like two, three years back, I would have said like, hey, Gen Z is spending a lot of time on Instagram and YouTube. Nowadays, it’s true even for my dad, by the way. dad, whenever he’s not watching OTT, he’s doing something on Facebook or Instagram or YouTube that is anecdotal evidence, we have actual evidence also where we see that majority in this country, the highest MAU products in this country are all social media led. So, I cannot get a guy or a girl to play my game all the time. So, there is a limit to the amount of video games that you can play in a day. What do you do when you are out of it and you still want some entertainment? Apart from OTTs, which is different, you go to social media. And guess what? When you go to YouTube and Instagram, I am there.
And you can’t be there again, ask him to download the game. He’s just played a game and you anyway so big, you will get people to download and all of those things. So you say, hey, there’s this nice feature that we made around, there’s this nice feature film that we made, is nice web series that we made, this is nice funny content we’ve made. So these are known as Instagram takeovers or YouTube takeovers, as is buzzwords in general. But at the heart of it is that your storytelling is so, so, so beautiful that people watch your content.
Which is where the metrics that we have that we follow here in Krafton currently in my current company are very different from metrics that other marketers follow. For example, most marketers look at impressions, reach, etc. We look at weird things like average view duration.
This kind of metrics that we’re looking at are AVDs, like average view durations. Then we look at number of shares and things like that. These are all geared towards your innate instinct, whether you are enjoying a content or not. So for us, views and impressions and reach are output metrics, which come if you are really good at AVD and shares and all that.
ContraMinds Podcast (25:24.258)
Yeah.
Srinjoy (25:46.225)
This corroborates with what YouTube is also doing and Instagram also is doing. By the way, if you put something on YouTube which is very high AVD and high shares, it will get high amount of views because that’s where YouTube gets its information that it’s getting viral. So again, going back to my statistics and analytical days, et cetera, that, where we crack down some of all of these things down to the D like back three years back in general and figure out this is going to be a strategy at least in 2026 – 2027 for the next four, five years.
So we figured out that if you don’t have great content then people at some point in time will leave your brand and then go towards a brand which is the more new and hip thing to do. Especially if you are a gaming or an entertainment brand. Maybe it is not so relevant for other brands but for us it definitely is. Secondly if it is a game or a brand which has a lot of stories to be told then tell those stories. And thirdly, if you are able to figure out that these are metrics which are helping you grow the brand, for example, AVDs and shares that I talked about, instead of impressions, reach and views, which are output metrics, then you should focus on that, right? So these are some also in a way I’m also telling you what my predictions are gonna be in the future, which has something that will address later on. But I think that give it four or five years, I think everyone will start talking about shareability of content – how many shares have you gotten rather than views because people have figured out that you can just get views through money like you can just promote any music video and it gets you views in general but are people really engaging with that video that you have put out are people really watching it for the entire 2-3 minutes or 6-7 minutes that you put it out for or people are just watching it for 2 seconds and you paid that 1 cent or 10 cent or whatever it is and then people skip on so that people are catching on to slowly but steadily…but that’s where the future sort of lies.
Q6 Great. So when, because you have worked in categories which are digital first or, you know, I would say social first, say for example, Krafton is a mobile gaming company. Some of what you just said is also very relevant for traditional brands, right? Say I may be a FMCG brand and I still believe that content still plays a role. And even if you talk about ADV and, you know, sharing, again, it’s very, important if you build content in a storytelling manner rather than the traditional advertising model. Would you agree that that’s the route that marketing is going to take over the next few years? Even if I’m a traditional, I would call it a “figital” brand.
Srinjoy (28:23.345)
This is small connection, Krafton is not just a mobile gaming company. We make video games for PC as well as for console. So we’re not just mobile, we’re mobile PC plus console. So we are a full-fledged marketing company, a video gaming company. So yeah, I think it would be relevant but I wouldn’t speak on their behalf. But given the kind of slowdown that I’ve seen in FMCG brands, the old traditionals, how they’re struggling with digital first brands on all fronts.
ContraMinds Podcast (28:29.838)
Sure, sure.
Srinjoy (28:52.305)
And given how severe competition is and given how much value for money that customers and consumers are looking for, I think it’s only a matter of time. if you are, say, for a delivery service, there is 14 or 15 delivery companies which is going to exist, I think, in about five, 10 years from now. So your narratives will define your loyalty, your attention in general. You already see in… cabs for example cab aggregators as soon as two three aggregators do very well this four five who turn up in general some of them die out some of them get acquired and what not right so i think it’s going to be important for you to be very very good at content and be very very relevant with it so that you can build those retentions and those retentions will come from loyalty loyalties only come in if your emotions are triggered if your cognitive biases and emotions are not triggered you will not feel that loyalty towards a brand, right?
So for example, if you take classic international examples of Nike versus Adidas in general, there’s a reason why a Nike fan is a Nike fan. And a Nike fan never touches Adidas. I have seen it. And very, very rarely in general, because there will be debates on this otherwise, a Coke versus Pepsi. If given the opportunity, that person will always go for a Coke if he or she wants it, right? Why are these? Because they have triggered you at an emotional level at some point in time.
And these things can only happen in my view if you have content to suggest and push those narratives. If you just keep making ad films at some point in time, people will be like, I had quenched my thirst, but that’s not why I bought Coke for just to quench my thirst. There’s a certain feeling I get when I do this. When you fly your favorite airline, there’s a reason why you fly your favorite airline on your favorite route in general.
Having said that, are certain categories which are just commodities. Like to be honest, this mineral water, I’m not sure how many people have specific preference of mineral water unless they have it for health reasons or whatever it is. So I’m not sure about it, but certain super commodity brands in general, I don’t know, but certain objects which are highly involved, passionate about, for example, phones, airlines and everything. Like I was talking about delivery services, even hotels, etc. like that. There are ways that you build retention through cards and whatnot, but there are ways to build retention through marketing also, which happens through narratives. So maybe it’s relevant, but I wouldn’t speak on their behalf. I found it to be very, very relevant in digital, but it’s easy to switch. The switching cost is near zero, right? You switch very, very rapidly. It’s not like your bank that you hardly change your bank, right?
But people switch their wallets at your whim even. Like if I have to do financial comparison between banks and wallets. You don’t change your primary bank, but you change your wallet very rapidly. Right. People have changed their social media. I remember you don’t change your SIM card. I have been an Airtel user all my life from the start. I have not changed my SIM card as my primary number. Social media have changed. I started off with Orkut, I used to do Facebook. Then I was on Instagram for some time. I’ve seen Discord and Reddit growing the fastest in the last one year in India. So you never know. Right.
So how you need to feel something about a brand to stick to it over a long period of time. Apart from the utility which the product team is taking care of, what is your value to this is the narratives that you can build towards your brand. So that’s why I said it. And let’s see what the future holds, to be honest.
Q7 Great. So one point I want to pick up, Srinjoy, is you talked about the content bit. And you said not everything is about messaging. You have to build entertainment in your marketing. And can you give me an example of a campaign that you ran where you moved away from the traditional as a gaming company, as a messaging to entertainment and therefore it helped you build an audience. Can you give me an example of what you saw as a powerful example of what you did?
Srinjoy (33:00.593)
So I’ll come start from the beginning and give you some examples from existing industries and also my example.
So if messaging was that important, I think every kid here would know what messaging is Airbnb’s. Airbnb ka slogan kya? I know you know Nike’s slogan because it’s been drilled down for 50 years, but you don’t know what Airbnb’s is. Belong anywhere, right? So a lot of people don’t know what is Uber’s messaging also. We say what’s your destination. Lot of campaigns at the rate, right?
So I discovered this around four or five years back, but for a lot of digital brands, take India’s largest e-comm player, take India’s largest food delivery service, take India’s largest modern digital brands, they don’t know what is the primary slogan or what their messaging is. Certain things maybe they associate with certain, there’s certain brands you associate with trust. Like say if you say the HDFC bank stands for trust, SBI stands for Banker to Every Indian, those things you know.
But outside of Paytm which popularized Paytm Karo in a very very stand out example. I have not seen many examples of people having done that. So when that is the case what I do is that I go user first, go fan first, I go customer first. So you speak to your customers and you figure out what they want and tune your messaging to what they want at that stage of their use of the product. So we launched BGMI under a slogan called India Ki Heartbeat.
ContraMinds Podcast (34:23.822)
Hmm.
Srinjoy (34:26.929)
Which is very beautiful. So first it’s a very large statement because you’re saying India ki heartbeat, right? Not India ki heartthrob, which may be a superstar or whatever it is, right? So it might feel a little bit ki yeh tohda zyada nahi bol diya or whatever it is. But you know what gave us the confidence because this slogan did not come from us It did not come from our agency. It came from our YouTube comments It came from our fans because they felt that this game really stands for what makes their heart goes wow right. And that is a very beautiful insight that we picked on. Right. And we ran this campaign.
When we ran this campaign to accentuate this, there could be so many emotional films that we have made ads 30 seconds, 15 seconds and whatnot. Right. It’s very easy to do that. But we didn’t do that. We launched this game with a documentary. Actually, the documentaries are very archaic way of putting it, but it’s still there. India Ke Hardbeat. So it’s a three series set of six stories, which is spoken about in about three episodes. Yeah.
ContraMinds Podcast (35:23.062)
I saw that. I saw that. I saw that. Yeah.
Srinjoy (35:25.755)
They are telling you why they think this game is India ki heartbeat. They’re literally telling you this. And these are what? Like 8 minute, 20 minute odd videos? People are watching it. You see the amount of views. More important, see the amount of comments. Because views, like I said earlier, you should stick to one. You can get views, you can buy views. Look at the comments. Look at the amount of shares that people are talking. Same episodes that they’re on Instagram. Also you can check them out. So that was incredible. When you make a campaign,
ContraMinds Podcast (35:40.45)
You live here.
Srinjoy (35:53.307)
the logic, basis and slogans of that campaign, if it comes from your users, then you’re pretty much guaranteed a success because you’re making it for them, like it. What if your mom knows what you really like and your mom is going to make your favorite dish when you come home for summers, So chances are very rare. Second thing is, you know exactly how people are going to react. for example, will people react with empathy? Will people react with excitement will people react with intrigue? You know the emotional triggers also.
To every marketeer who is listening to this, they know that that is the one thing that people search for. Every marketeer’s dream is that if I know the emotion that this will trigger or no emotion at all. So first thing takes care of, ki no emotion wala scene nahi hoga. So you will definitely have an emotion trigger. Second, you also know what emotions will be triggered. So if you know what emotions can be triggered, then you can build engagement sub campaigns out of it.
Like, so say if you know that an emotion of nostalgia will be triggered. You can put in Easter eggs of nostalgia in it and ask them, what do you remember from your playing days? What do you remember from this, et cetera? You can put up these beautiful things and accentuate those words. So we did all of those with India Ki Heartbeat. We put emotional triggers in it. We put in beautiful pieces of nostalgia in it. And we brought out stories from all parts of this country. That when people saw those stories, they realized, this is me. And that is incredible.
There’s nothing more beautiful in this world than you as a Nike fan seeing someone wear Nike shoes and put in a dunk on a basketball in general because you resonate to that superstar and the Nike promotes in general. Right. So that is extremely beautiful because people understand that this is exactly who I was and this is exactly who I want to be. And this is why I love this brand so much. And the results were tremendous. We recorded our highest ever views on a single day. There were many, many records being broken. We trended on YouTube effortlessly without a dollar spent. And I don’t know of many such instances, at least in India, where a brand launched with a documentary, but there it is. That’s one for the history books also. We now have a brand which launched with this documentary. So we do take content so seriously that we are ready to launch our games also with content. In a way, documentary is content. It’s not a 30-second film.
ContraMinds Podcast (38:15.342)
You are primarily a content company. Game is just one aspect of how you present that, right? So therefore, no, but still I’m saying, even if you’re gaming, I’m just saying there’s a lot of emotion involved in gaming, right? So content creates that emotion. So therefore to that extent, I think you use that effectively, right? That’s important.
Srinjoy (38:22.521)
No, no, we are not primarily a content company for sure.
Srinjoy (38:37.165)
Yes, yes, it allows you to maximize your storytelling the way you want it to be.
ContraMinds Podcast (38:41.24)
The way you want it. That’s the, I think that’s the analogy that I was talking about. I think that’s important.
Srinjoy (38:44.913)
And that will be very interesting in the future as well. I don’t really rule out seeing the top food delivery apps talking about how beautifully is food is crafted or stories around whatever it is in the future in general. I already see a lot of these things. People are really the top digital companies are already making a lot of content who have got nothing to do with entertainment. So I can see the future going in that direction, to be honest.
For example, we had these features that we had to discuss before the launch of a feature. We call these updates in VGMI and it sounds like a very boring name. We thought so too. So to release these updates, we started podcasts, right? Between the top players, e-sports players. But the thing is this happened two, three years back. This podcast have become in vogue, have come in vogue now. We did it in 2022. And by the time that we have come in vogue now, everybody and their kid is doing a podcast right now. We are not doing that anymore.
We are doing something else right now. We were collaborating. We believe the future is collaborating with internet celebrities. And these are not celebrities that we know about. For example, we collab with Purav Jha, CarryMinati and whatnot. So we move on very, very fast because we have to be at the cutting edge of trends because gamers, like I said, they have too many things at their disposal, too many choices to move on to. So they really need to understand that we understand their psyche. We understand their way of thinking. So that is where we are.
Q8 Great. So can you share with me, you are somebody who’s very close to understanding the insights about Gen Zs, right? And what have been your, you know, learnings that you can share with the audience on how do you see the Gen Zs as a, you know, as an insight, what are the things that you are seeing at which marketers should take note of?
Srinjoy (40:34.705)
It’s anyways very evident right now that Gen Z’s are the most difficult TG to market to. Mostly because first of all I think Gen Z’s are extremely self aware. Even though we might not give them that credit or someone might not but they’re extremely self aware. Their ability to research is incredible. Now with ChatGPT they can do research even better than anything that you can think of. And all the things that our generation sort of took for granted. Gen Z’s never never, you know, take them for granted and they evaluated all options and all choices that they have, right? Which makes them the most difficult to market to.
But there are two, three things that if you can hit well, no. Then you get Gen Z’s to collaborate with you, to work with you, to comment on your videos, to talk to you. And when you get that, I think that is very karmic in nature because when Gen Z’s come, they don’t come in singles and duos and whatnot. They come in hoards, right? So which is why a mega brand like Battlegrounds Mobile India emerges, right? So I could see the transition like from subculture all the way to pop culture when it happens, it comes in hoards, right? Same with the growth of Snapchat in India if you look at it, right? So many of these brands became really big, which a lot of people who are not Gen Z don’t understand. So the key to it is first speak their language.
I think language is a massive barrier. Like it’s almost like English and French to be honest. They do not speak the same language at all. To crack that language there many ways but you can do it if you follow it, can track and whatever it is. Second is that you have to do many campaigns in a year. You cannot think that I will do two campaigns in a year and Gen Z’s will give me credit for it and remember it and all of those things.
Because you’re thinking from your perspective, this campaign was so special, I’ll continue this all the way to July. Now we’re sitting in April. No, they don’t think like that. They will move on. Because Gen Zs are getting pampered like hell, like from all directions and on all possible medium, right? And they have their own crowds and then everything, right? The things which stay common from even our olden days of marketing to now is that the cognitive biases still remain the same that apply to Gen Zs that used to apply as well.
So you have to use those cognitive biases cleverly like fear of missing out, spotlight effect and then bunch of these. But those still trigger the same emotions that they would trigger. But the things that used to be granted back then like loyalty, for example, you can still get loyalty, but to keep up that loyalty, you have to keep delivering as a brand. So what is it that you value as a brand and do those values sync with the same values that Gen Z has not your company values. Your brand values should sync with what Gen Z’s value systems are. So if those match, then you get sort of really long loyalty, lifelong loyalty, I’m not sure, lifelong retention, but you get really high retention, know, high those D30, D60 odd retention products that you have, you get those. So I think these are some basic starting points, but every brand will have its own challenge.
You have your success factors, you have your failure points in general. The way to look at it is always be surprising. Do not beat it out. Like if you put out three pieces of content which are similar to each other, Gen Z’s will start losing interest in your channel faster than you can think. Right? So try and put out a content around animation. Let’s put out the next content with the internet celebrity that they never expect.
So these are things which really moved Gen Z. like you know, know, olden days we had this always be closing ABC in sales, right? So that’s why I say so with modern day marketing, it’s ABS always be surprising. Once you lose the surprise factor, if Gen Z’s have figured out no your chocolate brand, next ad you see chocolate sweet. They are not going to watch your ads as soon as they find that skip button. dude, skip this ad again. They’ll talk about celebration dude like Diwali I know.
This chocolate brand and Diwali, they do the same ads 20 years in a row. What special will you bring this time? Again, so these are, these are things that Gen Z’s are very clever about. I don’t know about other TGs in general, but I have generally found out that Gen Z’s are the most difficult, easy to market to. But, but some people say till now, maybe something even more difficult is going to come up as you go to Gen Y and whatever it is, Gen X and whatever is.
ContraMinds Podcast (45:16.686)
It’s called Gen Alpha.
Srinjoy (45:17.777)
Gen Alpha comes about, right? So then you’ll run into other issues in general, right? Because when I speak to my mentors, they say that you guys were the most difficult to market to do. They’re from a different generation, So basically, this happens with every generation of marketeers. You always crib that the next one is the most difficult to market to in general. But yeah, and I mean, that’s the reality of developing economy like ours, where consumerism is growing. Gen Zs have recently…
The difference between when I started my career and now is that Gen Z’s have now found their wallets. Previously they were dependent on their mom and dad’s wallets. Now they have their own wallets. So they vote with their wallets. Right. So never let a bad customer experience go awry. Speak to them directly. Like they have a lot of power, purchasing power right now. And if they belong to California, India, which is the top 60 to 100 million users of India in general, they have a ton of powers. You better listen to them. Right. So these are some beautiful challenges coming out. Now we are all adapting, but I gave like two, three basic understanding pointers where you can start with to work around some of these problems.
Q9 How important is market research for a brand like yours? For a traditional brand, they invest so much in market research, right? But for somebody like you who heads marketing for a gaming company like yours, how important is market research?
Srinjoy (46:42.961)
Your market research is everything, but the way we do market research is completely different though. We do not talk to agencies and get those agencies to scout potential candidates, put them in a closed room, feed them chai and biscuits, go to the other side of the glass wall, listen to them talking, et cetera. We don’t do that. Unfortunately, it doesn’t create fake results, but probably you won’t get those deeper insights, et cetera.
ContraMinds Podcast (46:47.04)
That’s exactly what I wanted you to talk about.
ContraMinds Podcast (47:11.192)
It’s not authentic. It’s not authentic.
Srinjoy (47:13.083)
So it’s not possible for everyone, but for us the easiest way is to just play a game with others and you can tune into your headphones and listen to what they are saying. Secondly, we are really blessed to have a community of players who are as involved as us in making our products better. So they leave their feedback on our YouTube comments, like anyone who’s listening and go to Battlegrounds Mobile India, Instagram and YouTube channels. You’ll see that they talk about their life problems, their game problems, the things that they love about their life, the things that they love about their game and also feedback on my content.
For example, if I post a great ad, they will come and write it. When do you see people write that this is a great ad? Nobody writes that explicitly. People hardly comment, to be honest. Thousands and thousands of comments. At a monthly basis, we process close to 2-3 lakh comments in general. That’s a lot of data you have at your disposal to talk to.
ContraMinds Podcast (47:57.998)
Correct.
Srinjoy (48:09.425)
Then we have so many games played like an incredibly large like close to a billion or games played per month in general. So you can listen to a lot of data that can come out of it. The thirdly is that there’s no estimation which needs to be needed because we are a digital brand. So we get accurate data. So there’s no 47 to 50 games played. There’s literally 47 games played.
There’s no average time spent of roughly 90 minutes. It is like average time spent of 87 minutes, right? So because we get very precise data, we know exactly how to talk to people, how to get things done and get things moving in general. So that works out, I think beautifully, right? So market research is super duper important, but the way we do market research, at least the liberties that I get to do market research in a digital first brand are very different. And I will honestly say that I’m super privileged to have these options with us because to me it just is a cheat code right?
If there are 10 marketers in the room I just literally have a head start of 100 meters in a 1 kilometer race. It’s just if you have a very easy cheat code to exploit you should really talk to your users much in general. All I have to do is to instill a heavy culture of listening to your users. Not that I didn’t enjoy it. If users and fans enjoyed it then they should do it right.
And the proof is there in the pudding, like almost 80 to 90% of our videos go viral, like the tremendous amount of participation, both in shares as well as average view durations, which is very admirable for a brand in general. For an influencer, you can still get high AVDs, but for a brand to get these kind of AVDs and shares is incredible. And views and impressions, if anyone wants to check that, it’s very high views and impressions. That’s always there. But that’s something like if you…have market research abilities the way we do, please, please invest a lot of resources. When I say resources, I mean mostly time in it. The results will follow.
Q10 Okay, and you are a big believer of virality, right? Because that’s something that’s close to your heart. I’ve seen some interview of yours where I think for you, it’s like a first love. And the way you’ve built consumer engagement for some of the brands is really starts with the promise of virality. So why do you think virality is important? And why should you think marketers need to have a focus on virality?
Srinjoy (50:36.879)
Yeah, firstly, it’s mostly because of the industry that I work in. So in my industry in gaming and in entertainment, if you are, there’s a saying go viral or go home. So if you are not viral, you’re pretty much going to be dead in a few moments. Like we all grew up playing Counter-Strike and Dota right through our college days, 2005 and 2008. Do you think a lot of people are playing Counter-Strike and Dota right now? No, But Think about it, in my college I don’t know a single guy who did not play Counter-Strike and Dota. Everybody used to love playing those games. They’re no longer that big in India that they could have been in general.
So, virality is the art of keeping something relevant and at the top of your mind’s awareness for a long period of time. And I’m not talking about the misunderstood definition of virality, which is like I need a spike in general. So, IPL’s first year, IPL was rapidly viral, but IPL managed to… keep its popularity throughout the years through amazing techniques and whatever it is. So, virality is not just that. Virality is that how can you break something down to an extent that you understand the causes for the virality and those are replicable. Sometimes they are not replicable. You do the same things twice and thrice and people are not going to listen to you.
So, you can replicate those over a long period of time and those can translate into business results. So, that’s something very beautiful we’ve managed to do in Kraft and in gaming, if you can do this, this literally translates to an enormous amount of revenue and user base. The reason I think it’s important is that if you use science, you can break down virality to certain factors. Like till today, I still find people talking about virality in terms of number of views and impressions. Hey, this video went viral. It has 50 million views in general. Views is mostly an output metric, like I said. Check out the number of shares.
If someone gets like 50,000 to 1 lakh shares on Instagram, it catches my attention because I know it’s going to go to the trending page. So, Virality has a lot of signs behind it like I discussed. So, there is AVD, is total time spent. Total time spent is different from average view durations. Number of shares, number of comments. Then there is something called randomness in comments. So, if everybody is commenting, say somebody is promising free iPhones. Then type free iPhone in comments. Everybody’s typing free iPhone, free iPhone, free iPhone. So the algorithm rejects it. Even it might have 10,000 comments. So there’s something called randomness or the complete, the total change in comments that you see. So how rich your comment section is, how granular your comment section is, all of this contribute to a huge amount of views. So we broke all of this down to a science because we had that data with us because we have been a viral brand for five years. This again gives us a little bit of an edge.
But I think your question was that if you’re starting out now, how do you start? So that’s…
ContraMinds Podcast (53:31.758)
So, since you’ve broken down the signs of virality, if you were to tell me there is a mental model or a framework of virality, what are the four or five things that a marketer should look at?
Srinjoy (53:43.941)
Yeah, very simple.
So first is that make your content shareable. Right. And with every ad agency is the first page in the first day, will write a shareable content etc. Nobody really does it right. Everybody watches the content. Sorry, creates a content to make it interesting, but people don’t make content to make it shareable. There’s a difference by the way. So think about Instagram. So all of your viewers, just close your eyes and think about Instagram for a second. What is the most deepest action you can take or you have taken in Instagram and you have shared it with a friend that button, right? That’s beautiful. So that button is extremely valuable. It is the most valuable button that you can think of. And guess what? That’s something that you and Instagram both agree on.
Instagram also thinks that’s my most valuable button. You also think it’s my most valuable button because when you share with something, it’s something deeply personal, not the like button, right? So I think track your shares is something that I will do. Make your content shareable.
Second is that please start your content in an interesting way. The first five seconds are very important in your first five seconds. If some huge dopamine hit is not coming, a huge important thing is not happening. People will skip your videos at least in the first 30 seconds. If you’re not able to grab your users attention, they are not going to continue doing or watching that. Right? So these are two things that you can easily do.
The third and fourth metrics are things which are very difficult to achieve, but these are called hacking your AVDs. So when I say hacking your AVDs, it’s very difficult as a creator to do that by the way. Say you have around 30 minutes of content. You cut out and you reject things continuously to make a six minute video so that you value the users time as much as you value yours. Like I have known teams where they have put in their videos where the marketing team has not seen the entire video because the video was 30 minutes long. So why it in? You should put a six minute video and say for the long version click here whatever it is.
Then you get to know, right? The third is being honest with your objectives. I think a lot of people are not honest with their metrics in general, like because it’s become easy because YouTube and Instagram gives you the route to sort of increase your views by paying money. You sort of don’t stay honest to it. And on TV, you never really know what the metrics are. Who is watching your ad on mute? You don’t know. I have known in recent times, like this is anecdotal a little bit. I’ve gone around to many houses. People are watching IPL on mute and doing their own things like laptop work, TV mute IPL etc.
So you don’t know what impact you’re doing, what driving. Again, you can never really trust all the data that you get from TV in general. So you should only look at data which you can trust. If your starting point, make sure your content is interesting, make sure the idea is interesting, make sure insight comes from a user, comes from your users who think about it deeply. So for example, if you’re a food brand, and you are selling products which are unhealthy and you know your users technically do not like unhealthy products you will never make it big even in advertising at least you can make it big by giving discounts and free stuff and whatever it is but in advertising you will never make it big if that is your pulpit in general the reverse is also true if you are making a food brand and you know people love eating you because it’s just so god damn tasty if you start bringing in healthy stuff then i’m gonna listen to you right they’ll be like…So you need to nail your insight absolutely spot on and understand them at a very deeper level etc.
So that’s why I said that…
…if you’re FMCG you know the best market research you can do is to we used to say that in our day, go and stand there. So you go stand by the shop and observe your users. What do they do? What do they say? etc. like that. Someone comes in and say I want that cake. I say you don’t take this cake, take the other cake etc. He or she says no no I want this cake because of this etc. Because mummy boli hai because it more palm oil in because it is whatever it is people say. But you get to get real insights which you won’t get on the other side of the mirror in your AC room that a market research agency is conducting for you. So beautiful ways you can do. If you are running an airline company, do you the kind of stories you can gather by just standing at the check-in counter? If you are a brand manager for an airline, just go stand outside a check-in counter. Insane stories you will get.
Amazing stories if you’re a brand manager of a automobile automobile company go to showrooms people are expressive Etc like that if you find it difficult to gather the easy hack that I have the comment section of my video if you don’t have access to that you can always do that right so with any brand like if you’re a food delivery You can always tag along with the delivery rider and go visit say it says sir, we don’t but what did like about this that we came and gave you the delivery in fast…or we reimburse you when something goes wrong or whatever it is, just tag along and meet like 5-10 customers in general. These are again easy things to really, really do. So what I said was a cheat code earlier in this podcast may not sound like a cheat code just because I gave you five examples in five completely different industries where you can talk to real customers in a real way. So you get these things done, you can become viral if you want to. Like if you’re an aspiring brand trying to break it into the food industry or any other industry, you can always make it big, to be honest.
Q11 One of the questions that I have for you is, what do you see is the future of agencies given that marketing is changing so much with so much of proliferation of media? So how do you see an agency to be a partner for a brand in the future? And what do they need to do to be a real partner?
Srinjoy (59:24.465)
Yeah, think so. Capabilities have not changed much for ad agencies at least. Right. So what I mean is that ad agencies were making ad films 10 years, 20 years back. They’re still making 30 second and 60 second ads right now. There are certain agencies which are doing some good stuff right now. But very soon agencies might get briefs as to can you create a full episode for us? Can you create a thoughtful video for Diwali for us? Video on the 30 second? No, no, no. A full on episode about our users who celebrating Diwali in their home town you know, drinking their favorite beverage or whatever it is, right? These kind of agencies might get briefs. Can you create animated content for us? So these are capabilities that agencies because for 20 years change takes time or 20 years they’ve been sitting and they’ve built huge executive leaderships building 30 second of films, 30 second of films for 20 years in general. They might struggle a little bit, but there are certain agencies who are extremely agile, have their sub agencies who can build animated content, long form content and whatnot and a
Srinjoy (01:00:33.429)
put a code, scan it and see I will win or or is people do.
Srinjoy (01:00:53.337)
maybe something more than that. You watch this ad, if you can find this video on YouTube, you get something else. You can do this with our product. You go to this shop, you find this way, you go to this retailer or like if you have a showroom in a particular mall, you go this, you do that. So a lot of these interactive ways will come about which will allow agencies to create a deeper connect with users. But usually you shy away from doing that because you think the user will not enjoy it… then you have access to creating digital properties. You can create a website full of Easter eggs and say, website and find this, you get a full free one year worth of coke or whatever it is you get or whatever it is.
So beautiful these possibilities are coming up which I think agencies will have to put into the campaigns which are engagement led in general. The final thing I think that users are really really passionate about what brands they use and they can get easily dispassionate about a brand if a sub-brand comes in. Essentially, I’m trying to explain competitive intensity in a different way, but this difference is important.
Hear me out.
So I have seen a huge amount of disruptions since COVID in existing industries than I’ve ever seen in my last whatever 20 odd years. In these three, four years, the disruptions that I’ve seen, the existing behemoths, the kind of market shares that they have lost.
Be it airline, be it entertainment industry, look at the consolidation which is happening in TV as well as in OTT. Be it FMCG, be it gaming for example, the way gaming has been disrupted, be it films, be it automotive. So the kind of disruptions which are coming your way are so severe that agencies will have to adapt to find way more clutter breaking stories if they have to stick to ads in general.
So no longer will the conventional ads or normalize stories that you do, etc. As a result, I have seen the quality of ads has also increased. I think I have it’s been some time since I saw a very, very plain vanilla ad of a product being rolled out. Every ad nowadays has some funny twist to it or trying something different in general. So that I find is very cool and moving in the right direction. But I think agencies will have a lot of catching up to do.
Srinjoy (01:03:14.417)
Apart from these are things that your viewers and listeners already know, is reliance on analytics.
You need to have very hard-coded understanding of analytics, use of artificial intelligence to give very strong pitches where you end up trying it. You reach the pitch with your website ready. Because it takes me literally five minutes to create a website nowadays on Claude. So if your pitch preparation takes an hour, can you not dedicate five minutes to do that? So pitches will become far more advanced.
Penetration into new industries will become much easier because AI allows you to learn everything about an industry minus the experience, everything that you can actually learn about industry in literally as little as it gets. So you can make incredible pitches in general. And so that’s where I think it’s going to be a very revolutionizing sort of a period for agencies where larger agencies will disintegrate. There’s going to be coagulation in general. We already see this reflecting in awards. If you look at the top three awards in India that had awards in India. Newer agencies are winning more awards than before. And then somebody announces the winner and then they Google it. It’s already being very, very evident in general, but it will be a very exciting space for me as a marketer to track over the next couple of years at least.
Q12 And how do you see the marketing department of the future? Because you are in a cutting edge industry, right? So the marketing department that you see today and what you saw in the past and what you’re going to see in the future, how do you expect marketers to therefore re-skill themselves and prepare for the marketing department of the future?
Srinjoy (01:04:53.647)
Yeah, so I think definitely marketing folks need to understand the creative process better. When I say not just creating a great narrative or a plot line for your ad, but they need to understand how film editing works. First of all, how a shoot works, what happens in a shoot and what happens on an edit table. Usually brand managers I know from before would come down for the shoot and leave, take a flight back on once the shoot is over. I think more more brand managers will get involved on the editing table with their director. Not just there to sit and tell him that sir, my bottle is looking right? Not that. But more than that. Like how is the narrative coming along well? Are you taking the right scenes and cuts and whatnot? So that’s something which is happening.
Secondly, because they have to be creators, they need to learn the basics of filmmaking and film editing and basics of Photoshop. Everyone in the team should ideally know the basics of Photoshop so that they can create basic edits and everything on the fly in general. Apart from that, and this again sounds like a laundry list and sounds like a rather long and arduous list, but it’s already happening. So I have folks in my team who know all of these things, right? So they need to understand analytics very well. So for example, learning Tableau is almost a precondition here at my team, which is a very highly developed statistical software in general. But with AI, you can just learn it very fast. This is not very difficult, right?
You need to be able to work with large volumes of data on Excel to find actionable insights etc. Because those old ways where you did some work, you’re waiting for the analytics team to give you a report, we used to call those MIS reports once upon a time. MIS report aayega, pata chalega, kaisa result. Nobody wants to that anymore. Everybody is like, okay fine, you have access to that data, just pull the data, run your Pivot, run your Vlookups, find out the results, present the results and tell me the mitigation.
Why does it take four or five days to do that? At least in digital first companies, this is a norm where you have to be very good at the creative side and understand everything from the pre-shoot, the pre-production to the shoot, to the edit table so that you know what music goes with whatever it is and everything else that I talked about. And you have to be very good on the analytics side. It helps you plan the next campaign also very, very well. So this is where the marketing teams wise might not be different, but the skillsets that a brand manager would need to have in the future are very different. And consequently, this next set of CMOs will come out from the senior brand managers will also be extremely multi-talented. I may not say multi-talented, but at least have all the skills and deeply talented in marketing. So you need to just the basic skills of how to run an MIS, how to run a query, SQL query to get data out. You need to have the skillsets to understand how editing goes. What are the top music that goes on with what content and whatnot. And you need to understand your core of marketing, which is what is viral, what is not, how to fit your brand ambassadors to whatever it is and all of those things.
So the skill sets will be very, very different in the future, the future marketing teams, the way I see it. And I think it’s good for everyone, to be honest. The more ancillary skill sets you have, better conversations you’ll be able to have with everyone. And no longer will people look at you and… I will give this marketing as a black box. I’ll get this as an output and I’ll again throw in. That won’t happen. So already a beautiful set of these changes have been seen in almost at least the top 10-20 startups of this city here. And many more changes are coming. But this is something which is definitely happening. This is not even a prediction. So because I see modern day marketing teams being so agile with both the creative sides as well as the analytic sides, etc. This is happening and it’s real.
Q13 Great. So I’m kind of wrapping up our conversation with a quick rapid fire. So the first question I want to ask you, Sanjoy, is what does success mean to you?
Srinjoy (01:08:55.953)
Omega, I’ll see my consumers happy.
Q14 Beautiful. What is one piece of advice that you got which you value even today as you come to work?
Srinjoy (01:09:11.253)
Experiments. Learn experiments. Experiment irrespective of your age. You experiment when you are 18. You experiment when you are 70. Keep experimenting.
Q15 Nice, beautiful. What’s one piece of advice you would give to a 18 year old in college?
Srinjoy (01:09:31.453)
If you do what you love then you’ll love what you do. So figure out what you love doing exactly. Just because there’s a marketing podcast and you’re listening to this while you’re running on a treadmill or whatever you’re doing right now, it doesn’t mean you have to do just marketing. If you like, I don’t know, flying planes or whatever it is, collecting stamps, do that. You’ll be very, very happy for the rest of your life. So really do what you love. It’s extremely important because we as a generation, we’re really… got sidelined into engineering or doctor or whatever it is when we were growing up etc. You do what you love, you’ll really love what you do.
Q16 Nice. So if you were to invite for your dream dinner, three people, who would you like to invite? They can be alive or dead. And why would you invite them and what would you learn from them?
Srinjoy (01:10:23.665)
So one would be Travis Kalanick because I think Travis did what people thought was impossible to do in a business context around the world and he did it across. He did it in US and people say you can do it in US obviously you can’t do it in South America. He did it in South America. In India I remember my dad said oh you’re gonna teach cab drivers how to operate navigation. This is 2008-2009. He he impossible. I have seen. Now look at it. Every person, whether it is auto or extra driver knows how to navigate. Right. So he did what I thought was impossible. Globalized cab sharing, which is absolutely incredible. Second is I think Steve Jobs in a lot of context I think Steve Jobs has been an inspiration for a lot of marketeers who wanted to break through and then I don’t follow all everything and I don’t agree to everything he says, for example. But it’s there. Then third one is… So third one would be Eric Schmidt of Google. I think with the founders, they had incredible technology. I think Eric Schmidt really took Google to a different levels. And if you read his books, etc., he understood how a business functions.
Sometimes not just necessary to have the genius who just knows how…which is just how this thing works, the tech works, but also how do you monetize it in general. So those would be sort of my… So really, really like three guests. It’s not possible, I know, but it’s just like, you gave me a fantasy land to wish for. So I wished for the fantasy land in general. So those are like.
ContraMinds Podcast (01:12:08.28)
Great. I’m sure it’ll happen one of these days. So, so thanks a lot. Thanks a lot, Shinjoy. I think it was a lovely conversation. Lots to learn. I think not the traditional marketing podcast that I have actually been. Different points of view. Obviously you work in cutting edge industry. Therefore the views that you had, the examples that you gave were very, very interesting and thanks for your time. It was lovely having a conversation with you.
Srinjoy (01:12:37.851)
Thank you so much. Thank you so much. It was lovely to be part of Contra Minds. And I hope your viewers and your listeners had a great time listening. And they learned a few things which will leave some food for thought on their plates. So thank you so much for having me. It was indeed a pleasure.
