Three of this year’s illustrious IMPACT Person of the Year nominees present at the event – Prasoon Pandey, Director, Corcoise Films, Deepak Iyer, Managing Director of Mondelez India and Rajan Anandan, Vice President, South East Asia and India, Google - engaged in a lively discussion on ‘Future, Innovation & Digital Transformation’ with Annurag Batra, Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of the exchange4media Group and Businessworld. Here are highlights from what they said:
Prasoon Pandey: “Making a commercial has got nothing to do with whether you’re making it for Digital or any other medium. Maybe the commercial is like a painting. You do paint on canvas, you do paint on walls or on paper. When people come to us and say, I need a Digital commercial, I tell them that it is the same commercial that is playing on Television, in a movie hall or even online. The question really lies in – who am I talking to? There are opportunities in every medium. The real issue is, how do you grab the audience’s attention?”
Deepak Iyer: “Nothing enters my house unless my wife knows the brand. So only trust is what finds its way in. One day, she showed me something on a screen and asked me, ‘What do you think about these shoes?’ So I asked her what brand it was, and she said, ‘It doesn’t matter; it’s being sold on Amazon.’ That’s a huge insight. What Amazon has delivered is trust. We need to create disruption like this.”
Rajan Anandan: “I believe AI and machine learning will impact every industry. Last week, Alphabet, which is Google’s holding company, launched the world’s first driverless taxi service. So, basically you can order a cab and it will show up without a driver. It is the world’s first true application of artificial intelligence. So far, machines can do a lot of things better than humans. The one thing that they cannot fare as well in is the area of creativity. If you think about the act of driving, you don’t need to be a creative genius to drive. We don’t know whether it is five or 10 years from now, but machine learning will dramatically impact every industry.”
