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Closing Keynote at hashtag#e4mNeonsOOH Conference 2025 I spoke on the balance between High Touch & High Tech The role of OOH in a digitally-driven media ecosystem is full of potential and possibilities. Following this, I had a fireside chat with Siddharth Dabhade, Chief Business Officer at Lemma, delves into the future of OOH in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. 🔑💡 One of the biggest shifts I’ve observed in marketing is the growing dominance of measurability as a sole criteria when designing campaigns. Another significant change is the algorithmic filtering of almost everything marketers invest in. This goes beyond just the consumer’s feed—it influences a much broader digital ecosystem. OOH needs to break away from being purely ambient—it should be direct, impactful, engaging, and unapologetically bold. OOH is the only legacy medium that has truly survived this shift because it co-exists seamlessly with digital. In today’s digital landscape, OOH is moving from the background to the forefront of consumers’ minds. hashtag#e4m hashtag#e4mNeonsOOH hashtag#OOH2025 hashtag#HighTouchHighTech hashtag#OOHInnovation hashtag#DigitalMedia hashtag#MarketingLeadership

In 2008, BlackBerry (then known as Research In Motion) had a market value that exceeded the then combined (yes combined!) market value of NVIDIA, AMD, Amazon, Netflix,Salesforce, and Starbucks. Get your mind to absorb that…. This is exactly 17 years ago…. BlackBerry, founded in 1984 by a pair of engineering students, Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin, was for years one of the world’s most innovative builders of communications products like two-way pagers and e-mail devices. In 2008, BlackBerry (then known as Research In Motion) reached its peak market capitalization of approximately $75 billion, driven by the popularity of its smartphones among business users and government agencies. At its peak, Blackberry owned over 50% of the US and 20% of the global smartphone market, sold over 50 million devices a year. The all-time high BlackBerry stock closing price was 147.55 on June 19, 2008. By the end of that year, amid the global financial crisis and intensifying competition from emerging smartphones like Apple’s iPhone, BlackBerry’s market cap had declined significantly. On December 31, 2008, it stood at $23.3 billion, based on a share price of $40.58. In contrast, Apple’s market capitalization at the end of 2008 was approximately $75.99 billion. While BlackBerry’s market cap at its peak in 2008 was roughly equal to Apple’s at the end of that year, by December 31, 2008, Apple’s market cap had far surpassed BlackBerry’s value. That’s how fast it happened and the rest is history … hashtag#brand hashtag#disruption hashtag#obsolescence hashtag#technology hashtag#blackberry hashtag#businesshistory

Lawrence of Arabia , one of the greatest movies of all time, released on 10th of December 1962. It was an epic production. So extensive is the canvas for its storytelling that for the opening 4 -1/2 minutes of the film, there is only a black screen! 4 -1/2 minutes of a cinema hall full of people listening only to a classical overture and medley of music. Only then, does the Columbia picture logo appear followed by the credits. 4 -1/2 minutes of a black screen – in the era of YouTube shorts, TikTok and Insta reels – is like a lifetime !! Short form compulsions have impacted news, entertainment, design, songwriting, food and fashion in good and bad ways. Any piece of content – whether image, video, sound or text – must be instantly, digestible and must compel an immediate, often superficial, response from the viewer. Basically, the result has to be a ‘like’, ‘share’ or ‘subscribe’. It has to be engaging enough to prevent stopping or skipping. Nothing must come in the way of the feed being interrupted. The platform format is as important if not more important than the message. The biggest positive way that short form has brought discovery to humongous amounts of content and its creators . Scrolling models are not search friendly and content developers need to have as much of a publisher mindset as of a content creator mindset. Everyone seems to talk about shrinking of attention spans and a growing inability to focus. Certainly our capacity to engage for long and to remain curious and interested and getting emotionally moved is somewhat depleted Audiences consume what the feeds recommend without engaging too deeply. The content creators and the audience both adapt to the rules of the game. Yesterday‘s class – Benhur , Godfather, Star Wars will look slow…and endlessly long…. Will talk of this and much more at the 2nd edition of BW Marketing World Momentum Conference 2025 where industry leaders and changemakers share valuable insights on how they are redefining the industry with their creativity and strategic thinking https://lnkd.in/dPp657rT hashtag#BWMarketingMomentum followed by hashtag#BWTheMerits Awards 2025! At Novotel Hotel, Andheri East Mumbai On May 27, 2025 Annurag Batra l Chetan Mehra hashtag#MarketingExcellence hashtag#ModernMarketing hashtag#BWMarketingWorld hashtag#BWBusinessworld

Joseph Campbell, the American mythologist, writer, and professor is best known for ‘The Hero‘s Journey’ – a monomyth. In this seminal work, he outlined the essential narrative structure of a story: There is a call to adventure followed by a trial and transformation, and finally the return namely achievement of mastery and the eventual reintegration. The biggest challenge facing the content industry today is how to craft compelling these character arcs within platform mandates and in the shortest durations. Joseph Campbell‘s book “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” is perhaps the closest any theorist has come to a universal formula for storytelling. Campbell’s research went back thousands of years to show that human storytelling evolved in the oral era much before we could write. We have essentially been telling the same heroic story over and over again. In this universal myth, the seemingly ordinary man goes on a journey crossing over from the known world to the unknown. Campbell’s arc has three primary ingredients :– inspiration, relatability, and suspense. The engagement in the hero’s journey is chaotic suspense, grounded in empathy. With short form content, the crafting of characters in storytelling and the narrative arc that trace such stories is being altered dramatically , if not compromised entirely. I discuss all this and much more at the 2nd edition of BW Marketing World Momentum Conference 2025 where industry leaders and changemakers share valuable insights on how they are redefining the industry with their creativity and strategic thinking https://lnkd.in/dPp657rT hashtag#BWMarketingMomentum followed by hashtag#BWTheMerits Awards 2025! At Novotel Hotel, Andheri East Mumbai On May 27, 2025 Annurag Batra l Chetan Mehra hashtag#MarketingExcellence hashtag#ModernMarketing hashtag#BWMarketingWorld hashtag#BWBusinessworld

This interaction with my friend Ashish Bhatia -Editor & Head of Digital Marketing (Automotive) at the Commercial Vehicle & Auto Components India Magazines – happened a while ago and found its way to digital video and print. Part 1 of the interview appeared in the instant (May) edition of ACI magazine hashtag#marketing hashtag#digital hashtag#cv hashtag#consumer hashtag#automotive hashtag#lifetimevalue hashtag#product hashtag#promotion hashtag#data hashtag#human hashtag#motivators hashtag#entrepreneurs hashtag#scale

Leibnitz thought all human knowledge could be represented as symbols so that “anyone, anywhere, could understand everything, everybody understand anybody and anybody understand everybody “ ! If you are a genius of Leibnitz’s stature, I suppose, everything seems feasible! The characteristica universalis or “universal character” was to be a formal language able to express mathematical, scientific, and even metaphysical-concepts. Leibniz thus hoped to create a language usable within the framework of a universal logical calculation or calculus ratiocinator. Other moves towards this lingua franca include a suggestion by the American Tourist Association to introduce Red Indian HANDAGE, invented languages like ESPERANTO, systems of symbols and pictograms like SEMANTOGRAPHY, invented by Charles Bliss, which comprises a hundred signs, and ISOTYPE (International System of Typographic Picture Education), invented by Otto Neurath. The visual lexicographer Henry Dreyfuss compiled a data bank of all possibilities in existence. This he published as ‘Symbol Sourcebook.’ Buckminster Fuller wrote in the foreword : ‘Henry Dreyfuss’s contribution to a new world technique of communication will catalyse a world preoccupation with its progressive evolution into a worldian language so powerfully generalized as to swiftly throw into obsolescence the almost fatally lethal trends of humanity’s age-long entrapment in specializations and the limitations that specialization imposes upon human thinking …’ Phew !! Great ambition aside, unfortunately , the pictograms and ideograms we live with are -mostly-crude in conception, ambiguous in signal, and not impactful enough. The graphic Language for the Munich Olympic Games (attached) designed in 1972 is a brilliant example of how the world could be.

The “—er positioning”. When your products , service or reason to be are just like another brand ’s except cheap-er , small-er, bigg-er, thinn-er, sharp-er, light-er, fast-er, or even bett-er, you are in trouble ! Denise Lee Yohn called it the “-er position” and it is inherently an inferior place to be. Not only does it relegate your brand to subordinate status , you are bound to use another brand as your reference point Your brand possesses only comparative value, rather than having its own inherent value. Your value proposition becomes:“just as good as Brand X, but _____-er.” Great brands : -Don ’t operate in a reactive mode -Don’t jump on to every bandwagon. -Are bold and confident. -Create a consumer mindset. -Shape cultural reference points. -Identify powerful ideas on the horizon and discover ways to advance them. They lead and create industries instead of a reactive approach chasing transitory trends. Lead rather than be one more in a crowded field of “- er “ brands.

Douglas Richard Hofstadter is a living legend and genius. He has done work across domains but his work on the sense of self in relation to the external world is fascinating. His book “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid”, published 1979, won The Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction,and The American Book Award for Science. In the 1970s he wrote of the ‘Letter Spirit’ domain” – a region in which mysterious factors endow typefaces with personalities. Where the essence which distinguishes one letter from another becomes distilled to reveal how one ‘a’ becomes another ‘a’, or when an ‘a’ ceases being an ‘a’ – and loses its personality. In his words : ‘… a sense of essence, in essence, is, in a sense, the essence of sense, in effect.’ His “gridfonts” are about using the most basic of grids – this particular version can generate at least 88 different versions of the letter “a” By the way , Hofstadter’s Law is “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.” The law is stated in Gödel, Escher, Bach.

The origin of ‘Satyamev Jayate’ सत्यमेव जयते नानृतं सत्येन पन्था विततो देवयानः । 
येनाक्रमन्त्यृषयो ह्याप्तकामा यत्र तत् सत्यस्य परमं निधानम् ॥ ६ ॥ satyameva jayate nānṛtaṃ satyena panthā vitato devayānaḥ | 
yenākramantyṛṣayo hyāptakāmā yatra tat satyasya paramaṃ nidhānam || 6 || – Mundaka Upanishad Verse 3.1.6 “Truth alone wins, not falsehood. By truth, the Devayanah (the path of the Devas) is widened, that by which the seers travel on, having nothing to wish for to where there is that—the highest treasure attained by truth.” (Those free from deceit, delusion, fraud, pride, vanity and falsehood and having no desires, go about to where the absolute truth, the highest treasure covetable by man and attainable by the important aid, truth) This is in many ways a great prescription for the modern age. Information is more abundant today than ever before in history. But so is misinformation, disinformation and confusion. The pursuit of truth – in life and business means appreciation of perspectives with a benchmark of verifiable facts. In every sense this is also the “scientific method” of hypothesis-test- validation.

Since Alex Osborn of the advertising agency Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborncame up with the idea of ‘brainstorming’in the late 1930s, business has been busytrying to wed creativity to commerce. Unfortunately the very nature of business tends to stifle creativity as the very competition it fosters establishesone of the biggest blocks : the fear of making a mistake. Brainstorming emerged in the 1950s with a great fanfare. It has genuine advantages at certain stages of problem solving. For one thing, it’s a handy reminder of how rigid we get and how hard it is to free ourselves of rational bindings. Brainstorming is the technique in which a group tries to make a dent in a problem, by very rapidly throwing up a barrage of ideas. The rules of the game require that it be played in a short period of time, usually signalled by a timer, that all ideas be written immediately on a blackboard or flipchart where everybody can see them; and that – most important of all – there be no censorship, no shooting ideas down at the time they appear. No idea, no matter how preposterous, expensive, irresponsible, or even stupid it may seem, is rejected at the time it’s expressed. In his famous work “By Design: Why There Are No Locks on the Bathroom Doors in the Hotel Louis XIV and Other Object Lessons” Ralph Caplan wrote: “… for any group used to working rationally, it’s very difficult to brainstorm without practice. For me, brainstorming is almost always agonizingly difficult, because I have a tendency to want to edit things on the way out. So a lot of ideasnever get out.” – Ralph Caplan