John Philip Jones and Mary Baumgartner Jones has jointly written a book Advertising at the Cross Roads. It seeks to answer the question — ‘Is advertising a strong force?’ The Europeans think advertising is not a prime mover, but reinforces collective sales stimuli. The US practitioners think it is better to make noise — be louder and more intrusive than the rest.

Currently, advertising for low-involvement products is untargeted and is broadcast. It seeks buyers. On the other hand, advertising for high-involvement products is targeted and is narrowcast. Buyers welcome the information carried in these ads. Agencies have to do both these.

Indian advertising is shifting in favour of high-involvement products, and narrowcast media. Low-involvement advertising will continue, but it will be a subsidiary component of the big picture.

In the world, the most popular card networks for payments are Visa, Mastercard and Amex. Russia has got Mir network. China’s network is Union Pay Co. India has developed Rupay network, India’s Rupay is promoted by NPCI since 2012. India promotes it aggressively. Visa and Mastercard are thus adversely affected. There are regulatory issues about Diners Club, Mastercard and Amex. There are sanctions against Russia and the card firms have boycotted it.

To foreign networks, we pay processing fees. In a period of sanctions, there is denial of service. Rupay has proportionately large share of use in 2020. Most users are debit card holders. They are poor spenders. People with purchasing power are not quite ready to do away with Visa, Amex or Mastercard. The crux of the issue is to persuade credit card holders to use Rupay cards. These cards must have acceptance abroad too. These must be accepted by e-commerce firms. In some foreign markets, because of the tie up with Discover Financial, Rupay cards are being accepted. There could be tie up with JCB. Still, this is not enough.

India can focus on UPI. Here India can tie up with Nexus like settlement agency. UPI has also signed up with Mashreque Bank for acceptance in the Gulf. Nexus network extends to 60 countries.

Singapore’s PayNow has tied up with Thailand’s PromptPay. It is a cross-country link. This is futuristic. Instead of relying on plastic, there should be focus on real-time fund transfers and to pay through QR codes.

Though regulatory mechanisms are yet to be pressed in, there is a move to make people earn interest on their crypto deposits or virtual assets. Already, we have considered one option of crypto investment called ETFs. Crypto fixed deposit or fixed income product is the second option.

The tenure of such deposits offered by some exchanges and investment platforms vary between a week and a year. These can be encashed earlier. These are risky products, as these are not regulated. It allows monetisation of idle assets. The transactions are made online. Your crypto holdings are lent to other users as a margin for trading. Even other exchanges can borrow from exchanges to satisfy liquidity needs.

After the tenure of the fixed deposit, the investor gets the principal back with interest. The crypto platform earns the spread between the borrowing and lending dates.

A crypto investment of 100 Bitcoin may earn 10 per cent interest, and thus the investor gets 110 Bitcoin on maturity. The interest earned is also in terms of cryptos. The earnings thus depend on the market value of cryptos on the said date. Demand-supply forces decide the interest rates. The rate of interest could vary between 3 per cent per year to 12 per cent, depending upon the crypto involved. Stablecoins, earn higher interest rates. Returns are promised, but not guaranteed .

One has to be cautious about the fly-by-hight operators. Investors too should invest only a particular percentage of their portfolio in crypto deposits.

A 30-second TV commercial should not have, as a rule of thumb, words exceeding 15 or 20 seconds duration. TV commercials must focus on visuals more than on words. A 30-second commercial should restrict the word limit to 30 or less words. Recently, it has been observed that Indian ads have been packed with more words, say between 40 and 50 plus words. In some ads, the word count touches 60 plus. The dialogue content of the TV ads is increasing. Jingles, VOs and dialogue — all these three use more and more words. In personal care brands, more words are used as in competitive scenario, they try to compare the brand to competitive products. Though TV ads are costly, in terms of the cost per person reached, these are very economical. Advertisers want to squeeze maximum value out of the message. Advertisers try to tap the rural market and rely on the dialogues to do so.

DevOps is a set of processes that synchronize to integrate development teams and processes. These bring high speed and accuracy in creating a relationship between development and IT operations. DevOps increases organisations ability to deliver apps and services at great speed. DevOps has a focus on secure design, development and delivery. DevOps cycle is Plan-Code-Deploy-Test and Release. It shortens the system’s development life cycle. It provides a continuous delivery with high software quality. DevOps is complementary with Agile software development.

DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development and IT operations. In a data driven world, DevOps is critical. It brings about seamless integration between development and operations teams. Thus it is a cross-functional combination. There is no universal definition of DevOps. Its key features are shared ownership, workflow automation and rapid feedback. DevOps engineers use software to solve their own team’s software engineering problems. They focus on communication, collaboration and integration of developers and IT professionals. In today’s cloud computing environment, in a virtual workplace, there should be integration. It makes business efficient as well as effective without diluting the user-experience. It reduces the time taken between committing a change to a system and the change being placed in normal production.

DevOps is a term used in multiple contexts. It is a combination of specific practices, cultural philosophies and practices, change induction and tools. It improves an organisation’s ability to deliver apps and services at high speeds. It enables business to work faster and build better apps. There is faster development of new products and easier maintenance.

DevOps is complementary to Agile software development. It is similar to Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle or the Agile approach. Whereas DevOps brings two large siloed teams together, Agile brings smaller teams together.

The tools used in DevOps are referred to as toolchains. These are expected to fit in coding, building integration, testing for feedback, packaging, releasing automation, configuration of infrastructure and monitoring.

DevOps focuses on life cycle of continuous development, integration, testing, monitoring, feedback, deployment and operations.

There are frequent incremental changes, and DevOps engineers rarely code from scratch. They must understand the basics of software development languages — say Python, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Bash, Shell and Node. These are most recommended programming/scripting languages. They should be familiar with development tools. They should be able to create a new code or update an existing one.

DevOps is flexible with both cloud and enterprise infrastructure. Azure DevOps is a suite of related tools that allows software team to track work, manage code, run builds, deploy apps and manage tests.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provide services when you practise DevOps at your organisation.

Scrum is a framework used by teams to manage their world. It implements principles of Agile.

A DevOp engineer must be able to configure and manage databases such as MySQL and Mongo. He should master DevOps automation tools and CI/CD processes.

The total DevOps market is estimated to be $6.6 billion. It will grow over the next decade.

A development engineer must know containers which enable him/her to generate apps and install them on servers from laptops. A development engineer must have grasp of programming languages. He/She should know the basics of Java, Perl, Python. He should know scripting or writing code to automate repeatable processes. He/She should be aware of DevOps tools such as Ansible, Chef, Doctor, ELK Stack GIT, Jenkins, Puppet, Selenium and Splunk. He should have knowledge of testing tools.

We need DevOps with security or DeVSecOps. There are security concerns of clients especially banks. There are mission critical applications. The cycles are short. Security functions should be addressed earlier, rather than at the end. It is called DeVSecOps. It is actually a superset of DevOps. The ability to do source control is important, especially Git tools or GitHub. One should have knowledge of Linux. There is threat modelling, security testing, incident management.

DeveSeCOps engineers are being paid more, than their DeVOps counterparts.

In a DevOps course, you learn DevOps essentials, managing source code — Git and GitHub, understanding and using Build tools, containerization basics using Docker, continuous Integration using Jenkins, continuous Testing, Docker commands and use-cases, kubernetes, configuration using Chef and Ansible, continuous monitoring using Nagios and AWS DevOps Services.

The growth in digital advertising has been steady, at 25-30 per cent year-on-year, barring 2020.

Online video is a dominant part of digital advertising. There are long-form videos on OTT channels to short-format video on social media. In fact, short-format video is highly popular in non-metro markets. Video has traditionally been used for brand building. We are witnessing the rise of video-led commerce that is driving everything from awareness to purchase. One can now include shoppable features on videos social commerce too is exploding in India.

By 2023, ad spend on digitalis expected to match that of TV. Digital ad buying system must have transparency. There are so many middlemen between the publishers and marketers (advertisers). We must bring a lot more efficiency into digital advertising. We can do so by introducing decentralised blockchain technology. There is no uniform measurement metric in the industry. Still brands do invest in digital advertising because it benefits not only in terms of brand awareness, but also in brand sales.

Ad spends on e-commerce platforms are zooming ahead. Brands are able to draw a lot of insights from market-places like Amazon to target consumers. YouTube mainly provides entertainment. It may not generate a lot of data on the purchase behaviour of a user. Of course, Amazon has to work on video advertising inventory. In this area, OTT platforms and YouTube are ahead of Amazon.

Orbit Ventures Fund is Mumbai-based fund which plans to invest $15 billion in India to manufacture chips. It has formed a consortium with partners that include wafer foundries, Indian corporates, PSUs to invest $3 billion to manufacture analogue chips in Dholera, Gujarat. There are two other ventures — one to make digital chips in collaboration with a foundry in Taiwan, and the other to manufacture memory chips in collaboration with IDM fabLess. The name of this company is ISMG Analog Fab which has applied to set up a semiconductor eco-system.ISMG Analog Fab has tied up with Tower Semiconductor, Israel-based, which is taken over by Intel. ISM is short for India Semiconductor Mission.

There are other three companies — Vedanta (with Foxconn) and IGSS Ventures (Singapore-based) and ICMC. ISMC has submitted a proposal for semiconductor fabs. ISMC plant will initially make 65 nanometre chips, which will go down to 45 nanometres. It will have a capacity to make 40,000 Wafer Start Per Month (WSPM). It accounts for 20 per cent of country’s market.

They will have a tie-up and support with Assembly, Testing, Marking and Packaging (ATMP) and Printed Circuit Board (PCB) players to build a semiconductor ecosystem. Commercialisation of plant will take 4-5 years which is the global standard.

The company has applied under the semiconductor incentive scheme. In the first round, there are five applications.

A jewellery firm Rajesh Exports is another company to have applied under the incentive scheme. They have set up ELEST which plans to set up a display fabrication plant. It will further advance to a state-of-the-art AMOLED display panels. Vedanta too has applied to set up LCD display facility.

Under the incentive scheme, the government is offering 30-50 per cent of the capital cost of the project.

Three companies have submitted proposals for semiconductor fabs and two companies for display fabs. The total investment amounts to $20.5 billion.

Retail investors not very well-versed in investments indirectly buy a pool of individual stocks in a mutual fund. Mutual funds are managed by professionals who try to maximise the value of the fund for the investors. In a way, it is an indirect way to invest.

Exchange Traded Funds are commonly known as ETFs. They hold a basket of assets of securities, say bonds, shares, money market instruments etc. These ETFs often track on the underlying asset, or reflect the composition of benchmark index. These funds track a particular index.

ETFs have attributes of mutual funds and stocks as these can be traded like stocks on exchanges.

So far we dealt with various types of ETFs, say bond ETFs, currency ETFs, inverse ETFs, liquid ETFs, gold ETFs, index ETFs etc.

Of late, we have a new class of ETFs — Crypto ETFs. These are basket of virtual assets, say of several cryptocurrencies. Crypto ETFs too are traded on exchanges. Traditional funds are handled by asset management companies (AMCs), whereas crypto ETFs are not. Crypto ETFs are handled by crypto exchanges or some wealth management companies. It is not necessary to have a demat account for crypto ETFs.

The US Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) allowed first crypto ETF to be listed in October, 2021. In those days Bitcoin touched $65000 plus. Crypto ETF did not directly invest in Bitcoin. Instead, it bought its futures contracts. A future contract is a legal agreement to buy or sell a particular commodity or asset or crypto at a pre-determined price at a specified date in future. Crypto futures are derivatives of crypto currencies.

Globally, several such Crypto ETFs have appeared. Some invest in virtual assets directly and some through futures.

Some focus on stocks of companies into blockchain technology or crypto-related areas.

First US ETF attracted $1 billion investment within a short time.

Crypto ETFs divide ownership of itself into shares held by shareholders. They allow you to diversify portfolio without owning the asset.

In Canada, they allow you to invest in crypto ETFs which directly invest in cryptos. In some European countries too this is allowed. However, the US does not allow this route.

India’s first crypto ETF could be launched in GIFT City, Gandhinagar, Ahmedabad.

Indians can invest in regulated crypto ETFs abroad, Indians buy these as they do while buying foreign-listed stocks and ETFs. They can avail of RBI’s LRS route.

Alternatively, Indians approach a local crypto exchange or wealth management firm. These offer ETF-equivalents. They are just a bucket of crypto assets and cannot be traded.

ETFs are index funds. They hold the same securities in the same proportions as a certain market index or bond index. ETF-equivalents guide you to decide which token to buy and in what proportion. Here index is arrived at by considering token’s market capitalisation and popularity.

Zero-click hacking enables a hacker to sneak into a device, say a phone or computer, even when the user does not open a malicious link or attachment. The ploy is used by the government agencies more frequently to snoop on activists, journalists and others.

The zero-click snoop companies include NSO Group, Paragon, Candiru and Cognyte Software.

One step that reduces the chances of zero-click attack is to keep the operating system updated. There are other methods — uninstall messaging apps (these are gateways to breach the device), shut certain social media accounts. However, these measures are not practical.

A zero-click attack may not leave traces the device. Sometimes, such an attack does not go as planned. Then traces are left on the device which can be identified.

A Saudi Arabian women rights activist Loujain’s iPhone had a mysterious fake image file mistakenly left behind by the NSO spyware which alerted the research workers. Citizen Lab contended that the computer code left by the attack on her phone was direct evidence of the NSO built surveillance tool. It led Apple to alert others around the world, and provided the basis of Apple’s November 2021 lawsuit against NSO.

Indian Performing Rights Society licenses and collects royalties on behalf of lyricists and composers. The total music revenue is Rs.1800 crore. Of this, 70 per cent comes from streaming. Almost all of it comes from advertising. Every time a song is streamed, a label or the rights owner gets anywhere between 4 and 10 paise per play (against an estimated 50-90 paise globally). This is not substantial. The business, being free, remains small.

Streaming has been the silent saviour of industry. YouTube as a streaming brand makes bulk of its $20 billion revenue from advertising. It paid in 2020 over $4 billion to the music industry globally.

YouTube Music has 50 million paying subscribers world over. Globally, streaming firms keep 30 per cent of subscription revenues. The balance 70 per cent revenue is shared by music publishers (10 per cent), recording firms (53 per cent). The recording firms pay the artists.