Category: SHAILESH KAPOOR

By Shailesh Kapoor

If you have been watching Star Plus’ Mahabharat, you would know that the worthy show is nearing a worthy conclusion soon. The story is currently in the latter half of the epic Kurukshetra war, though the mindgames off the battlefield are equally, if not more, intriguing.

The sudden and decisive jump in Mahabharat’s ratings over the last two weeks has been heartening to see. From averaging 3.1 TVR in Week 25-28, the show jumped to 4.4 TVR in Week 29, and has held onto that number in Week 30 too. This is the period when the battle has gathered steam, and stalwarts like Abhimanyu, Bhishma and Drona have been killed, but not before providing high drama and excitement.

Conventional television wisdom may suggest that war scenes are not the most TV-friendly content, especially in the Indian context, where GEC viewing is still largely family-led. I’m not sure if Indian parents would want their children to see Bheem drinking Dushasana’s blood. Wars are essentially violent, and that female audiences have low thresholds for violence is a universally proven fact, both via research and science.

Yet, war is working. Not just in Mahabharat, but recent war sequences in Jodha Akbar and Maharana Pratap too have managed to pull in new audiences, and engage the existing audiences better. There could be several reasons for this, but the one I find particularly strong resonance in is: Adrenaline.

Several years ago, I heard a channel programming head remark: “Television is all about hormones”. The line has stayed with me ever since. It has eternal relevance, because it is based on how we, the human beings, are made.

Some recent work made me read up more on various hormones and their functions. I was seeking correlation with their impact on television and film content. Essentially, almost all the explanation came down to three hormones – oxytocin (the love hormone), endorphins (stress-reducing or the happy hormone) and adrenaline.

More than 90% of successful television and film content can be explained using one (or a combination) of these three hormones. Oxytocin gets its due when we speak of romance, chemistry and falling in love. Its impact extends to love that may not be “romantic” in nature, like a warm hug given by a mother to her child.

Endorphins reduce stress, and the comedy genre is known to activate the release of this set of hormones. Indian audiences have even coined a phrase for it, something that everyone who works with us is familiar with: Mind Fresh.

But adrenaline has been generally ignored. Being more “outdoorsy” in nature, this hormone tends to link closely to male content preferences, than those of female audiences in India. But increasingly, its impact is being observed in our work. This impact was strong enough for us to include the impact of adrenaline as a separate parameter in our content testing tool Ormax True Value earlier this year.

If you have been following the Commonwealth Games closely, you would have noticed that weightlifters are given a sniff of adrenaline by their coaches just before they step forward to make their lift. A battle scene, if executed well, can provide a milder form of that rush to the audience at home. (I have never sniffed that adrenaline, so not quite sure of the comparison. Wonder why it is even legal for lifters to do that!)

Indian content makers and analysts have ignored adrenaline for a while now, probably because execution capabilities to deliver the rush were missing in this marketplace. But that may be changing fast.

It’s time the ‘josh’ hormone got its due!

TV Trails is a weekly column written by Shailesh Kapoor, founder and CEO of media insights firm Ormax Media. He spent nine years in the television industry before turning entrepreneur. The views expressed here are his own. He can be reached at his Twitter handle @shaileshkapoor

By Shailesh Kapoor

In channels with original content (which accounts for 70% of all channels on-air), launch periods of new shows can be full of nervous energy. You can sense the vibe around the office. You see busy people all around you. Episodes have to be delivered, marketing campaigns are being planned and executed, media plans are being firmed up, cast members are on city tours and the PR team is in high-action mode, episodic promos are being planned for the post-launch week, etc. Urgency is the operating word.

An average launch would witness this cycle for about three weeks. With about 10-12 launches a year, a channel is in “launch mode” for about 35 weeks every year. That’s more than two-thirds of calendar time, and about 80% of actual working hours time, given that the other 17 weeks would tend to be slightly relaxed.

At the root of deciding whether this 80% share of annual effort delivers or not is, of course, the choice of content itself. Production, branding and communication are important, but marketing axioms tell us that no marketing or execution, however brilliant, can save a bad or an irrelevant product. Hence, spending time, effort and money on trying to make poorly selected content work is like hiring the best pilot to fly a faulty plane and hoping it won’t crash.

Content selection, then, is the all-important starting point around which the 80% effort (and indeed 80% results) pivots. Prudent selection of themes and ideas, when backed by good execution, can deliver magic. But reckless and thoughtless selection of content is bound to create failures.

Having observed various channel cultures closely over the last six years, my estimate of the proportion of total time and effort that actually goes into content selection would be a generous 15%. Money-wise, it would be less than 3% (Here, I talk about money spent on content selection decision process, not on the content itself).

A rational mind would struggle to justify this dysfunctional scenario. It’s like the 80:20 rule with a twist, whereby what has 80% impact of your business gets less than 20% of your resources, while what has only 20% impact on your business gets 80% resources. Why should this be happening?

The umbrella reason comes down to the much-misunderstood notion of “gut-feel”. There is a general sense (and even broad agreement) in the industry that gut-feel should prevail while selecting content. And applying gut feel takes neither time, nor effort or money. Gut-feel is about key people having the ability to take the right decisions, based on their experience and understanding of the category and its consumers.

There is an evident problem with this argument. It is well known that 70% of all new content fails to deliver. So that’s the report card on gut-feel at an industry level. Some of the biggest blunders in our television history have been commissioned by the same creative directors and channel heads who were responsible for some of the biggest success stories. That says a thing or two about the ability of gut-feel to consistently deliver.

That’s where the notion of “informed gut” comes in. Discounting gut, especially in a creative business, is neither recommended nor realistic. But gut, when combined with good evidence, can create an environment where content selection thrives on solid principles that combine creative instincts and business (consumer insights and financial) truths.

Channels tend to sometimes take one of the two extremes – either go only by gut, or when failure rates peak, set a process where gut is given no credence and the entire selection process is driven by business truths alone.

Ideally, gut itself should be seen a part of the business truth. Creative heads with an open mind and a penchant for business deliverables should be able to espouse the idea of informed gut, given its inclusive nature and its essential win-win premise.

Informed gut can be spoken about, even understood. But to make it a principle of running a channel business in India is a tough challenge today. Hope the times to come show us some evolution in this direction.

TV Trails is a weekly column written by Shailesh Kapoor, founder and CEO of media insights firm Ormax Media. He spent nine years in the television industry before turning entrepreneur. The views expressed here are his own. He can be reached at his Twitter handle @shaileshkapoor

By Shailesh Kapoor

It has been an action-packed week for Hindi GECs. Three shows launched in the same slot on the same day, earlier this week. Monday, August 18, 2014 saw the action unfolding at 8.30pm, with the simultaneous launch of KBC on Sony, Nisha Aur Uske Cousins on Star Plus and Udaan on Colors. Zee TV had launched a new show in the same slot (Jamai Raja) two weeks ago.

We have had instances of a channel launching upto six new shows on the same day. But three big channels launching new properties on the same day in the same slot has to be a first in the nearly 25 years history of Hindi GECs. In a category where new launches have increasingly struggled to open well, this has to be counted as a very odd happening.

The equivalent of this would be three big movies releasing on the same Friday. Or three cola brands launching a new campaign in the same week. Can you remember either of that happening ever? Probably not. Which brings me to the point of this piece: Are we an under-coordinated industry?

Anyone who knows the way information flows in the Indian television industry would tell you that it needs no spy work to find out launch dates of new shows. The information is available everywhere, at the junior-most levels in channels and production houses. In any case, coming-soon promos for these shows have been running for weeks. That would be enough time to find things out.

Yet, when I see channels taking each other head-on, it indicates a certain insular approach towards the business environment. As it is, getting sampling on new shows is a tough task. If three new launches happen at the same time the same night, all are bound to feel the pinch, though some more than others. Building from a low base of viewership is possible, but lower the base, the more challenging is the build-up task.

There’s a lot of FPC planning that’s going on in GECs all the time. But it’s taking a more tactical form in recent years. Launching head-on against another well-promoted show is a strategic blunder, especially when an extra week would not make any discernable difference whatsoever.

But one can imagine why it’s happening. To understand this, let’s look at the probable outcome next Thursday, when the ratings are out. At least two, if not all three, shows may open below expectations, because of the fragmentation of new viewers in a highly unpredictable slot. However, show openings are marketing and communication KRAs, I understand. And that’s a department that’s likely to have the least say in the decision to launch head-on. In the end, all you can do to resolve this anomaly is a corridor discussion that borders on pontification.

52 weeks a year, six channels and at least eight daily fiction slots in a day gives us total of 2,496 possible launch day-slot options. The number of fiction launches in a year are only about 50. What are the chances even two, let alone three, fall on the same day-slot combination? It’s a version of the classical ‘Birthday Problem’ (visit the Wiki to know more). The answer would be very low, less than 1% for two shows and close to 0% for three shows.

Yet, it happened. Only in India!

TV Trails is a weekly column written by Shailesh Kapoor, founder and CEO of media insights firm Ormax Media. He spent nine years in the television industry before turning entrepreneur. The views expressed here are his own. He can be reached at his Twitter handle @shaileshkapoor

By Shailesh Kapoor

MC Mary Kom’s biopic releases today. After the success of Bhaag Milkha Bhaag last year, the film, succinctly titled Mary Kom, is hot property in Bollywood trade. After all, Bhaag Milkha Bhaag was the first 100cr film that did not feature a big star in the lead. It was also the most-appreciated Hindi film in terms of audience word-of-mouth since 3 Idiots.

In a different and yet not-so-different world, Sachin Tendulkar will be releasing his autobiography, in November. Co-authored by Boria Majumdar, the book, titled Playing It My Way, is sure to make at least some young Indians read beyond Chetan Bhagat.

Evidently, the impact of sport on other media has increased in the last year or two. Traditionally, “sports” meant restricted live telecasts and news coverage of the same. Everything else around it was strictly ancillary. The only other place where sportspeople featured was the gossip column, when they dated a film star (at times, starlet).

While Bollywood has found sports in its attempt to find new stories, Indian television seems to have ignored this recent development. We are not a sporting country by any means, but that does not mean that we don’t have sporting heroes. Yet, no stories on television have covered them, their lives or the drama associated with sport in general. The last attempt of any sorts was back in 2009, when Sony aired a daily called Palampur Express. The show was based on a fictional character, not a real story, and had severe story-telling concerns, none of which were about “sports” as such. It went off-air within weeks.

In my growing up years, I remember watching the Bodyline miniseries with awe. The idea of recreating real sporting action with such authenticity was fascinating. Hollywood has also captured sporting drama in dozens of films, including the behind-the-scenes action in films like Jerry Maguire and Moneyball.

I understand that the economics of sports channels may not allow them to invest in fiction series around sports. But isn’t sports drama a part of the wider umbrella called “general entertainment”? We dish out talent shows by the day, but there haven’t been any that search for the next potential Indian cricket team member or the next potential Saina Nehwal or Sushil Kumar.

Sports drama can be excellent viewing for weekend audiences. It ticks most weekend boxes – it is male-skewed, it is kids-inclusive, it has a rush of adrenaline, and certainly a big scoop of inspiration.

A big network like Star, with equal interest in both sports and general entertainment, is best aligned today to bridge this need gap. A crackling sports drama or sports reality show can open up a new area of television programming in India. Otherwise, like it took a Richard Attenborough to tell Gandhi’s story, it would take another Brit or American to tell Dhyanchand’s story on TV or celluloid.

Bollywood has taken the first step. It’s time for television to follow and embrace the world of sport outside of live action. Anyone listening?

By Shailesh Kapoor

SAB TV launched a show called Chandrakant Chiplunkar Seedi Bambawala last month. The long, tongue-twister of a name is now the longest show title for an Indian TV programme in my memory (I have discounted inconsequential taglines while considering titles). Star Plus broke its mould by titling their new show Nisha Aur Uske Cousins. At the box-office two weeks ago, a film released with a title that made it virtually impossible for the film to be taken seriously – Raja Natwarlal.

As the environment gets more distractive and options increase, the impact of content titling on its success has started to increase too. A title may not be the most important determinant of a show’s success. That comes from characters, plot and treatment, of course. But a title can be an entry ticket or an entry barrier, depending on how it is perceived.

Very little understanding of what’s a good title is available. It’s one of the least-researched areas in content. Which is odd, given that it’s the first introduction of the content to its target audience. Titling is still seen as a vague creative exercise. It is nothing but that. It is a marketing variable, but one that marketing departments in channels have very little say in.

It’s easy to justify a ‘bad’ title, because there will always be enough examples of shows that worked with a certain kind of title and vice versa. That they worked despite the title and not because of it is a point that’s rarely understood.

There may not be any tenets cast in stone, but there certainly are guidelines for good show titles, that we sense over many years of content and communication research in the Indian market. Here are five of them. Unfortunately, work ethic demands that I stay away from giving examples for them. But you should get the drift.

1. The marriage of simple and catchy: Keep it simple and stupid? In the entertainment business, that won’t necessarily be a recommendation. There needs to be a sense of attractiveness (commonly can “catchy”). But, the catchiness should not come at the cost of simplicity.

2. Avoid homilies and random musings: It’s amazing how some titles can be so “creative” that they communicate nothing. Innumerable TV and film titles fit this category.

3. Enough of song names, please: It may have worked for some shows, more memorably for Bade Achhe Lagte Hain. But the excuse to use a song name for a TV show title is now simply an excuse of being lazy. Songs that were never even popular in their own time are now being used as titles. And in some cases, this “own time” happens to be the 50s and the 60s!

4. Communicate the genre: The biggest marketing task a title can do is to communicate its show’s genre effectively. Choice of words in a title can be critical to communicate the heaviness or light-heartedness of treatment, the emotional tenor and the content bucket the show broadly falls in. I’ve often seen misleading titles being justified by that very standard and very lame explanation: It will be taken care in the treatment of the promos.

5. When in doubt, use character names: In fact, you can make that: Unless in doubt, use character names. Over five years of show tracking (Ormax Showbuzz), we’ve seen that shows with character names (lead or the lead pair) generate 35% higher unaided recall in their pre-launch week on an average, compared to those without one. Importantly, such titles force the promo writer to write character-building promos. For fiction content, that’s pure gold.

By Shailesh Kapoor

In many ways, the 1982 Asian Games (also called Asiad) in New Delhi had a major role to play in India’s television history. They marked the advent of colour broadcasting in India, and also initiated a culture of viewing live sports broadcast, a pleasure unknown to most Indians till that point of time.

The 17^th Asiad is currently underway in Incheon, Korea. But you would be excused for not knowing much about them. The Asiad event, which India once gave great importance to, has progressively lost significance over the last two decades. There is little media coverage, and virtually no viewership.

Even the Olympics, which have gained more prominence over the last few years thanks to India’s medal count moving from a zero for many years to a record five in 2012, record scant viewership.

Even if we look at the comfort territory, i.e., cricket, viewership has moved away from Tests and even ODIs, to the IPL. Evidently, we are becoming a country of leagues. With a high-investment property in Indian Super League (ISL) lined up, this trend would further consolidate in the coming year.

But the shift is not from nation-vs-nation sport to sporting leagues. It is fundamentally a shift from sports to sports entertainment. Consumer research in the sports category reveals the insight that watching sport, per se, is not always an entertainment experience. Purists, who follow sports to the last detail, are a handful in number, ranging from less than 15% of the total viewer base for cricket to less than 5% for most other sports.

For everyone else, tuning into a sports channel is primarily an entertainment-seeking activity. You are hoping to be dazzled by some high-octane action, a twist in the tale, some humour and even some song-and-dance. And yes, while you are at it, you will also like a particular team to win.

A purist (and I am one, when it comes to sports) may scoff at the state of affairs, but in what has been a one-sport nation so far, if this is what we need to build any kind of sports awareness, then so be it.

Where that leaves our handful of sporting heroes, who win laurels for us at International meets, is questionable. Saina Nehwal is arguably India’s greatest sportsman in the 2010-14 period. Yet, her awareness and popularity remains abysmal in mass India. Badminton is not an entertaining sport to watch, and to make matters worse, it is considered by many viewers as a fairly easy sport to play (and hence, no big deal in winning top honors in it!).

We are the crossroads of a sporting revolution of some kind. While a section of the sports fraternity is busy developing genuine talent in boxing, badminton, shooting and the likes, a large section of viewers are happy watching sports like popcorn fare.

Only time will decide which of these two directions will we head in. Both of them, however, are a major improvement on being a cricket-crazy one-sport nation.

By Shailesh Kapoor

Performance of Bollywood films on television is a fascinating topic. It’s well-known that no direct correlation exists between box-office and television performance. Yet, a lot of movie-buying happens based on box-office collections. If one dig deeper, there are box-office measures that can be used to predict the ratings of a film’s premiere telecast. The single screen to multiplex box-office collections ratio is one such measure. Films that tend to get a higher percentage of their collections from single screens tend to work better on television, despite their overall collections being much lower than certain other multiplex-centric film.

It is not very difficult to see why this should happen. Television audiences, especially the film-viewing ones, are skewed towards lower SECs and the smaller towns. They represent a mindset that’s closely mirrored by the single screen theatre audience. Their entertainment choices are more escapist in nature, with comedy and action being the driving genre, though a dose of traditional family values is always desirable.

Last week, Akshay Kumar’s recent release Entertainment premiered on Zee Cinema and scored a whopping 5.5 TVR. To put it in perspective, this number is higher than the ratings of Kick and Singham Returns, the two biggest box-office grossers of this year, both in the mass action genre. It is 60% higher than the ratings of Dhoom 3, the biggest Bollywood grosser at the box-office till date. Ratings of hits like Queen and 2 States dwarf in front of Entertainment’s 5.5.

Entertainment performed miserably at the box-office. It opened below par for an Akshay Kumar film and had no takers at the end of its first week, going on to be a certified flop. If you have seen the film, you would understand why. It’s a long 140-min slapstick comedy about the relationship between a man and a dog (playing the titular role). It could have been fun, but the jokes are all heard-before, and the film takes itself too seriously and tries to tell a story around an incredulous, spoofy premise.

In one of the many nonsensical scenes, when the dog’s pulse drops to zero on the operation theatre table, Akshay Kumar magically revives him by a giving him a hard thump on the chest. It’s almost as if someone else made a good film about a man-dog relationship and this film decided to spoof it out.

Yet, on television, all this and more is, indeed, Entertainment. Akshay Kumar is a very popular star with the masses, but his better work in recent times (e.g. Special 26) does not rate too well. But a film like Entertainment doesn’t even need a star. It has this element of sheer idiocy that is not worth the price of a movie ticket, but a good freebie for a mind that perpetually feels the need to de-stress.

There has been a lot of talk in recent years, about how some films are designed for you to ‘leave your brains at home’ when you come to watch them in the theatre. I wonder where you are supposed to leave your brains when you are watching such films at home itself!

In a parallel universe, in the same industry, the infotainment genre, which was largely driven by one type of programming for a long time (survival genre shows led by Man Vs. Wild) is now espousing more intelligent (though entertaining in no less measure) content. National Geographic has been actively pursuing its ‘Entertain Your Brain’ proposition with good success, with shows like Brain Games and Science Of Stupid.

But even as television gets smarter on that side, mass numbers continue to baffle you at times. The irony is not lost on me. Neither is the dichotomy of it all.

By Shailesh Kapoor

Though largely an uneventful year for Indian television content, 2014 has seen some channel launches, after almost four years of status quo. Zee launched Zindagi mid-year, followed by Sony’s launch of its third GEC Sony Pal, and later this month, Epic goes on-air. We all know that Zee has its second (or third, if you count Zindagi) GEC in the incubator.

Classically, back in the 90s, a channel was called a GEC (General Entertainment Channel) if it had something for everyone in the family. It was “general” enough to have a mix of content that should cater to a fairly generalized collective need. The term GEC is India-specific and was perhaps coined by the advertiser community to give a handle to the set of mass channels that existed at that time.

Over time, as the number of ‘GECs’ increased, advertisers and planners started using GEC 1 and GEC 2 as reference terms for the top ranked and second tier GECs.

However, look at things closely the way they exist today, and you would know that it’s time to question all the parlance surrounding the term ‘GEC’. Here are some thoughts, for example:

1. Zindagi’s offering is anything but ‘general’. In fact, it’s a very differentiated, specialized-content based channel. Even if it did 100 GRPs, could it ever be called a ‘General’ Entertainment Channel with such content?

2. The same argument applies with even more force to Epic, where the offering is catering to a content need that’s incredibly sharp and therefore, irrespective of its audience size, niche.

3. Sab TV’s content filter (light-hearted family entertainment) is very specific as well.

4. More than 95% original programming time on Star Plus today goes to fiction content targeting women audiences. Is that ‘general entertainment’?

5. Movie premieres, that were a core part of the GEC offering in the 90s, are now increasingly being seen on movie channels instead. Does that make the GECs less ‘general’?

It may seem a matter of semantics, but the implications of these semantics can be substantive. By clubbing all channels airing fiction and non-fiction content as ‘General Entertainment Channels’, we have created artificial segmentation of the content market. Channel V today is far more general in its offering than Sab TV is. But because it was historically a music platform, it has clubbed into another artificial category: Youth GECs!

Now all this would not matter if the cost of getting 1% audience to watch your ad on all channels were the same. But it is not. CPRP (Cost Per Rating Point) wildly fluctuates across these artificial categories. GECs have a distinctive advantage over most other Indian language channels in this regard. And this advantage borders on being unfair.

BARC can do well to discourage this artificial segmentation by not providing any of these handles (GEC, Youth GEC, etc.) in their planning tools, and even prohibit their data bureaus, as and when they come up, from doing the same.

And while I wait for that to happen, I leave you with a question: Think hard and name the one Indian channel that you think has the most ‘general’ entertainment to offer to the country at large. Ask the question around too. Some of the answers may surprise you.

By Shailesh Kapoor

The contempt our social media elite have towards mass Indian television is well-known. Barring an odd Bade Achhe LagteHain, all fiction content on Hindi GECs (and most non-fiction too) is frowned upon by the upper echelons of Twitter. Even then, I was surprised by the attention MasterChef India going vegetarian in their latest season received over the last week.

MasterChef India has never got media attention in the past. But earlier this week, a story in The Economic Times suggested that the show going vegetarian this season could have much to do with one of its two principal sponsors – Amul and Fortune (The Adani Group).

Anyone who knows how Indian television works would laugh that conspiracy theory off. MasterChef India is not an ‘advertiser-funded programme’, where the creative control is shared between the channel and the advertiser.

Twitter picked up the news, and soon, it was the hot topic of discussion, with a largely negative sentiment surrounding it. Not that Star Plus would be bothered. They would know that those commenting are not the target audience, and more importantly, they have little understanding of the real target audience.

When we see the decision of turning the show vegetarian from the viewership lens, it makes perfect sense. I must clarify that I’m as non-vegetarian as one can get, and would have personally liked to see a non-vegetarian-only MasterChef. But TV shows are not made for individuals, are they?

If you’ve been brought up in a progressive, cosmopolitan environment, it would be impossible for you to understand the issue at hand. That would have been the case with me as well. But over the last five years, we have conducted extensive research on food and lifestyle television. The disgust that the sight of meat can generate in certain audiences (and by “certain”, I mean 30-40%) has to be seen to be believed. We have had live examples of upper middle class housewives instinctively turning their faces away from the screen when something as basic as a bowl of chicken pieces is shown. We’ve seen this happen across India, city after city.

I know there are studies that suggest that the consumption of non-vegetarian food is increasing in India. But there are many caveats on how to read that data. A lot of this consumption is infrequent, once in a fortnight, for example. Also, a lot of it is ‘out of home’. When we talk Hindi GEC, we are talking of ‘family viewing at home during dinner time’. All three parts of that phrase (family, at home, dinner time) support a vegetarian idea.

In MasterChef Australia, meat is called ‘protein’ and if you fillet a fish well, you are ‘respecting’ it. In an episode a couple of seasons ago, a trout was called ‘lucky’ because it was going to be cooked on the show. In the latest season, when there was a vegetarian challenge, where all ‘protein’ was removed from the pantry, half the contestants cooked Indian!

It’s easy to argue that Indian television channels should be ‘progressive’ and help India’s outlook evolve towards a more global one. I would totally support that point when it comes to issues related to woman empowerment, education, health, gender equality, sexuality, racism and the likes. But maybe we can leave food out of this? It has no social impact whatsoever. And there is a deep, religious aspect to this all, which should not be questioned in all fairness.

Like always, the choice of viewing or not viewing is with the one who controls the remote. I think we may do well to respect the viewer before respecting the ingredients.