By Shailesh Kapoor
The most festive month of the year is here. The Navratri has started, Dassera is round the corner, and the month of October will be rounded off with Diwali. A large part of the commercial significance of this period revolves around the spending spree it fuels among consumers. Auspiciousness and celebrations come together in a period that’s an advertiser’s delight.
Print has been the medium that’s traditionally benefited the most from this period. With no cap on inventory or edit-to-ad ratio, newspapers can add pages and supplements endlessly to monetize the festive fervor.
Television has its own challenges. TV doesn’t allow you to add a front-page jacket and then another one on the top of it. Hence, the only two conventional ways to exploit the festive seasons are: By increasing the FCT available on the channel, and by launching big-ticket properties coinciding with the period. The former has been reasonably restricted in these days of the ad cap, putting all the pressure on the latter.
A line-up of festive properties this year looks as good as any year, especially on the films front. Most movie channels, across languages, have big-ticket premieres and festivals planned. The world television premiere of Sultan, scheduled on October 15 on Max, is the marquee event here.
On the original programming front, Bigg Boss will enjoy a festive launch, coming on October 16 this year. A series of fiction and non-fiction shows are lined up for launch too, but that would be the case through much of the year anyway.
Which brings me to the question that I end up asking every year around this time: Are our TV channels doing enough to monetise the huge opportunity around this festive season?
The gap lies in being able to create customized content for the festival advertisers. Just FCT-led exposure is tough to monetise, especially given the growing spends from the e-commerce category, which relies heavily on the more contextual digital medium for exposure.
In the early years of satellite television in India, Advertiser-Funded Programming (AFP) evolved as a secondary source of revenue for the broadcasters. As such, it always got secondary status at the broadcaster programming end, even as some of the top media agencies tried their best to bring AFPs into the mainstream. For a programming head at a channel, an AFP is content he/ she is forced to put on-air. It would never get the same creative investment that a “regular†programme will.
That could make some sense if your AFP is about an LG Microwave or a Philips Air Fryer. But the moment one thinks of a wider brand like Amazon, the opportunities of creating well-integrated, consumer-centric content, which creates entertainment and client value in equal measure, are endless. But there are very few such ideas floating around.
You cannot expect a brand or its agency to do all the hard work here. The channels have to set the ball rolling from their end too. Various sales structures have been attempted across networks to enable this, but most such teams have becoming coordination points, balancing sales and programming, than focusing single-mindedly on adding value.
Today, the internet is teaching TV a thing or two about customisation. Hope the TV guys are listening!