What Rajiv Bansal teaches about privacy-first marketing

I'm an armchair sports fanatic so I can be heard in the HT newsroom you know talking to people passionately about cricket and other sports. From startups to really large tech companies Samsung, Logitech, how have you sort of seen the way they interact with the customer, they understand the customer and sort of are able to react? What has your experience been across these companies? When we think about startups and when we think about large companies, they operate under very

different constraints. In a startup you have a lot of opportunity to go build whatever you want, but you have a lot of constraints in terms of the resources you have to execute it. So everybody's wearing multiple hats. When you think about large organizations, generally you're following a path which you know somebody's laid down for you from a top-down perspective, but then you have a lot of resources to execute on it. So you can't change in a large organization the company's strategy

on a day-to-day basis, but what you can do is you can execute on it with a lot of resources. And in my experience both have pros and cons, and particularly in my case since I've experienced both, I can bring the learnings of a startup as well as the learnings of a large organization. For example, in a large organization you really learn how to operate through organizational structures, and with quality, with KPIs, things like that, which you would not hope to do in a startup because

there's just so few people. Everybody's just trying to have a mad rush to do things. How have you seen the last one and a half years pan out in terms of putting your vision in place, and where do you think, what are the few one or two pillars that you think that we need to go from here as we sort of go into the next year? We came up with a four-pronged strategy. We talked pretty openly about our strategy because our strategy is organized around our strengths and weaknesses,

so if somebody can out-execute us on our strategy, all the part to them. Our strategy is essentially got four pillars. The first pillar is we believe that on digital in media is going to be about deep consumption, and deep consumption is about personalization and audiences. So we are going in and a developing the right interface for audiences to go access content in a personalized way, and b building the data infrastructure that is required to actually personalize content at that

large scale of consumption. The second thing we're going into is local languages. So we plan to be in every major Indian local language in the next few months and years. And what that means is we will be literally taking and scaling up our ability to deliver content across all these different languages without really going and multiplying the people. So we are going and investing in a lot of technology infrastructure along with completely changing our editorial processes to be able to do that. And also,

a lot of audiences which are going to come on board, especially in India, are not going to be literate. So video becomes an incredibly important source of consumption for them. So we are going and investing heavily in video. The fourth thing is we inherently believe that content of quality is valuable and journalism needs to be supported and audiences are willing to pay for it. And so we fundamentally believe in subscription for news. And so those are four pillars that we're really going after. And that forms the cornerstone of our strategy.

Fantastic. So this is what you're leading here is a news media business, which is inherently, there is some probably difference to some of the businesses you've led before. How do you, what are the different sort of challenges that you see? Is there a difference in approach? Or do you think inherently, the consumer remains the same? So there are a lot of similarities that you can draw from before. All I've done many, many different industries. I've done TV three times in my career. And one of the reason I've done

TV three times in my career is because people watch TV every day. Similarly, people consume news every day. So from a consumer habit perspective, news is something we all consume every day. When we think about news, it's inherently different from a lot of different consumer products, because A, it happens all the time. Second, in order to be a trusted source of news, you need to have trustworthiness and authenticity in your processes. And getting news out second by second, minute by minute,

getting it accurately, getting it with the right grammar, nuance, with all the fact checking, and still being first, that's really, really hard. So one thing that spending one and a half years in the HT newsroom has made me appreciate is the amount of work and effort that goes out to get news out every second and every minute. And that's definitely been a great learning experience. A lot of the fundamental pillars of consumer products in terms of being consumer-centric

still applies. I think as a news media industry, we've essentially moved from a format, which is a print newspaper, which had a lot of thoughtfulness behind it, because you can actually open up a print newspaper without looking at the page number and get to the right section. We moved from that thoughtful format into taking and cutting and pasting that on websites, which is what all news media organizations do. And in doing that, we've inherently undershot consumer expectations. So one thing that really

applies for me in this particular case is bringing my product experience to the news media industry, taking the product back to consumers, and really closing that loop so that what we're doing and delivering in terms of news is essentially what consumers want. The Rajiv Vansal we are used to is the Hindustan Times Rajiv Vansal. I mean, what is it like outside office? What are the things you love to do? Well, I'm the only guy in my house. I have three daughters. And so I have three daughters,

I have my wife. And so as a result, I'm the diversity factor in the house. And just having the different energy in the house when I get into the house is great for the rest of the people in the house. And so that definitely takes up a bunch of time. I like to dabble in a lot of things. You know, people who've visited my home can attest to the fact that I have pretty poor karaoke skills. And I certainly indulge in those. I'm an armchair sports fanatic, so I can be heard in the HT newsroom, you know, talking to people

passionately about cricket and other sports. So yeah, I keep myself pretty busy.