Lalatendu Das on AI and automation and social media

and now we're joined by Lalitendrai the CEO of performance Lalitendrai welcome to the show thanks for having me how you doing today very good okay I've realized here that we've just sort of dived into Facebook and the rest of it what I'd love you to do I mean you run McKinsey labs you know you're a veteran at TCS you've been around in a nice way right just give us a sort of 30,000 feet view of kind of where social media actually fits in with digital I think this is where the future is I say that with confidence because this is where the consumers are and just but if you look the reason consumers are there is because social media is innovating maybe much faster

than many of the other media channels right from the days I think we are old enough to know the early form of Facebook myspace or code which was essentially networks we joined there to just share exchange I you know double clicks right I mean you guys been around yeah at the start of this right yeah then certainly short from video came now all marketers would agree with my esteemed panel here video is the thing right now now we are seeing commerce being part of social and very soon maybe metaverse time will tell but what we need to take away is the innovation that is happening in the space that gives me a lot of optimism and do you ever feel sometimes that that social media should be exactly

what it says on the tin social and that all of you corporate wallows are sort of gate crashing something that you shouldn't really be gate crashing do you ever feel that way not really for me social doesn't need to be just about having chit chat it's probably much more for example co viewing enjoying getting entertained socially maybe buying something socially by watching a common you know influencer-led content so it is what it is because people have started to adopt those behavior that is kind of expanding the worldview of social yeah I suppose it's you know as Ashish was saying it's sort of horses for courses YouTube information to your point that attendry video but just when you I mean treat me as a client

right I'm not sure I could before I can afford performance but maybe you'll get well yeah maybe you'll give me a deal so and I I honestly don't know enough about it I waste a lot of my own personal time on Instagram or I think I waste my time how do you help what what's the kind of idiot me being the idiots guide to social media how do you think about it first of all you are not because you're a user as you told me of social media so it is as intuitive as that I think for brand leaders like yours the most fundamental thing that brand leaders needs to understand is the marketing funnel on social media is inherently different from what you used to have in offline media let me give an example in mainline media

you used to do awareness campaigns on TV or print then you do some you know offline events to do engagement route traffic to your store you make the sale on a store right physical retail store or branches or wherever it is that was the kind of norm 20 years back cut that to social media right now maybe you are swiping up your Instagram feed you certainly see a nice influencer-led makeup event going on and you certainly started liking hey that works for me certainly you start seeing a click to whatsapp link just below that product in whatsapp you see your product catalog you make the payment done the purchase what you saw in this is the traditional funnel is getting fused into a shopping event right

it's all getting linked up exactly okay and that's the beauty of social media and that's how I would say all brands needs to see each interaction in social media as a potential transaction opportunity I see so so social media on its own is a kind of funnel if you like and and everyone's invested to engage people and now they're trying to plug in different tools and techniques and do you have you cast your mind forward a little bit to web 3.0 and you're uniquely qualified to talk about this what are we going to see happening in web 3.0 blockchain NFT all of this yeah no this is this is an interesting space but there's a lot of misconception so if you

indulge me for 30 seconds let me just set this right with three is a set of technologies right it is blockchain it is crypto it is smart contracts the application thereof is a NFT or a metaverse or so on so forth metaverse was ambitious idea we now have facebook as meta and so on so forth time will tell how much metaverse is going to go get accepted but the underlying technologies are real blockchain is getting adopted in financial services for international payments smart contracts are already there right in terms of advanced banking or financial products and crypto is already there in terms of security you've talked about identity crypto it is one of the enabler of identity so with 3.0 is already here

the further social applications of that be it metaverse or NFT some time to go and in that sense do you do you kind of remain optimistic about I mean if social media to an extent is like the wellspring and we all remember we were engaged by my space and then you know facebook version one do you remain optimistic about social media or do you think it will sort of fall away or how do you see it changing if at all

I think social media is going to stay that's because there is inherent need of humans to engage interact whether I'm interacting with a real person or virtual I don't know but I need to interact so that for social media is going to stay but in what shape and form I think that would depend on the technology and the adoption the convenience and the experience that platforms deliver okay so I mean nobody knows that's quite right right let's end to end to you but everyone has been quietly dodging the question around is this thing bad or good

I saw Tom Hanks the other day was asked you know did he do Instagram he said it's a massive time suck and bad for you where do you stand on this because is he I mean I appreciate it's neither good nor bad but where do you stand on this I think social media is good for a discerning audience but for younger children and all I think we need to have some kind of regulation on the content that goes in because that creates a negative effect if you're not

you say that Lala tendria and I'm not I'm not going to put you on the spot too much but we all got kids or some of us have got kids and they spend a huge amount of time on it what are corporations doing so I hear you on regulators what should corporations be doing to play their part because they're implicit to an extent aren't they when you think about corporates I think it is platform owners you just need to make sure that are right child safety or is limit related screening

of the content that goes in in this because that's that's the thing that you anyway promise right as a content and from a brand perspective also being very strict or maybe discerning again on where you want to advertise on along with what kind of content I think those social responsibility I think goes hand in hand with any business in major brands okay fair enough now let's you again uniquely qualified to talk about data I mean this whole thing ultimately is data talk to us about how you think about social media and data and and how you help your clients

yeah now I think data is the cornerstone to make the sense out of social media for example we look at identifying the right audiences right who do you target that's where you start data journey then you start measuring right if you run a campaign how much was it taken up how many people actually viewed what's the number of impression now you have conversion APIs on social media how do you know what offline transaction actually happened because

happened because of the campaigns you run online and how do you get that data in right and lastly if you think how do you actually measure the conversion at each funnel right so that you can get better at this for example in performance we have recently launched a product called creative AI which essentially tracks the consumers response to various creatives you create and it predicts what metadata you should have in your creative to improve to improve the conversion in the funnel and those metadata can be in terms of color in terms of CTA in terms of messages in terms of how much product positioning that you should do versus should not all that goes in right this is all data

all next level stuff but let me ask a very relevant question for trailblazers audiences should social media given its effectively data in disguise should it even be part of marketing of course why not it's just unconscious maybe we'll get on to this with G2 a little bit the way marketing started out is very different now to the very data rich environment anyway we're not here to answer that show a couple more questions before we let you go that doesn't mean that we are doing their monopolies. Yeah we don't need to artificially punish someone because just because they have a great product. Rather I think as if you think from a regulator perspective how do we increase the incentive for innovation. Let there be more players.

Let there be more choices for consumers. That's an extremely diplomatic answer and I think you win the prize for for you know that the the the champion for the free market. Lalitendrai how many LinkedIn followers do you have? Around 8000. Oh Nikhil. Home straight. You've been a fantastic guest. 10,000, 8,000, 1,000. I'm too embarrassed to say we'll get on to GC. Thank you so much for being on Trailblazers Lalitendrai. Thank you Jasper.