MxMIndia

Category: MEDIA MATRIX

  • A weekly column by Paritosh Joshi, until recently CEO, Star CJ. Given his varied experience in the media and industry bodies, Mr Joshi will analyse issues concerning the business of media, measurement and research

    Paritosh Joshi: Who will cast the first stone?

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    You’ve got to give it to Aamir Khan. Any theme he raises through his cinema, and now his television show, instantly becomes the issue du jour. Dyslexia (Taare Zameen Par), rigid education practices (Three Idiots), anguish at the political establishment (Rang de basanti), morality of terrorism (Fanaa) and now in rapid fire succession the weekly episodes of Satyameva Jayate (everything from female foeticide to medical malpractice). If the worlds of the social media are anything to go by, people in the Media & Communications industry are particularly engaged in Aamir’s weekly broadsides. Minutes after the week’s episode goes on air at 11am on Sunday, Twitter is deluged with views and opinions agreeing, and less often disagreeing, with Mr. Khan.

     

    You would imagine, looking at the stridency of tone that characterizes a lot of the chatter, that we belong to an industry that has solid claim on the high moral ground. Does it?

     

    I became involved with the Advertising Standards Council of India (ASCI) about 6 years back. As a communication professional, I was conscious of the close and incessant scrutiny that our industry attracted and of the permanent Damocles’ Sword of statutory regulation that hung over it. The ASCI charter’s commitment to self-regulate resonated strongly with me and joining the Consumer Complaints Council, which gives force to the Self Regulatory Code of the ASCI, was a natural next step.

     

    If Awards Functions like the Abbys and Cannes are the Halls of Fame of the industry, CCC must qualify as its identification parade for the Rogues’ Gallery. Education institutions that claim their superiority, not based upon quality of education facilities they offer, but the acreage of their campus. Cooking oils that assure you of defence against cancer. Fairness potions promising enhanced employability. Malted beverages that deliver anything from height gain to better grades in the exams. A whole spectrum of beers and spirits veiled very thinly under guises of ‘Music CDs’, ‘Unique Events’, ‘Golf Equipment’ or ‘Soda’. Apparatuses that promise the benefits of a cardio workout by merely placing your feet in a harness and allowing them to shake about for a few minutes. Perfumes and deodorants that will instantly cause the user to become a sexual dynamo around whom people of the other gender experience spontaneous orgasms. Plastic beads and metal baubles that will ‘guard against the evil eye’, pacify irate planetary deities and result in a shower of wealth. Or in a particularly horrifying instance, a hospital that advertised radical hysterectomies as a permanent solution against pre-menstrual syndrome. We’ve seen them all.

     

    While some offenders are no-name businesses, the largest majority are big and prominent businesses that we all hold in high esteem. Indeed, we must look well beyond the brand owners to understand the circle of culpable accessories that enable the offending communication to reach the consumer. The creative work originates in an advertising agency. A marketing team approves it for release. A media agency sets up a media schedule. Multiple media outlets finally convey it to the consumer. In many cases, all the organisations that are involved through this value chain are members of the Advertising Standards Council by virtue of which they are presumably committed to the ASCI Code. While the complaint is made and upheld against the brand owner, the actual burden of guilt correctly lies with all the accessories that participated in the process.

     

    Interestingly, whenever the issue of legally dodgy, false, misleading or vulgar advertising crop in professional discourse, the ASCI is indicted forthwith, for its abject failure in bringing the perpetrators to book. Of recent days, the Ministry of Consumer Affairs has joined the chorus, promising a ‘National Consumer Protection Agency’ aka the other NCPA, to become the consumer’s paladin against advertising mischief. Apparently the phrase ‘Self-regulation’ is indecipherable to the average communication industry professional.

     

    Self-regulation begins by a body representing all stakeholders in a particular context agreeing to a code of ethical practice. This code is then widely shared with all stakeholders so that they may understand and assimilate its letter and spirit. Once this has been done, self-regulation transfers the burden of compliance upon the practitioner. The overseeing authority is not a policeman. It is a conscience keeper.

     

     

    This is an exhortation. A humble request. How clean is our own escutcheon before we pronounce moral judgment on all and sundry? Or as Aamir might say, “Apne ghirebaan mein jhaank kar dekha hai kabhi?”

    Paritosh Joshi was until recently CEO, Star CJ. He has been a marketer, a mediaperson and been a key officebearer on industry bodies. He can reached via his Twitter handle @paritoshZero

  • In Media Matrix, Paritosh Joshi discusses, analyses and deliberates on the fundamentals of key industry issues

    Paritosh Joshi: Unbundling the Living Room

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    An erstwhile colleague was talking about the proliferation of the second television set. In her assessment, as many as 10% of all C&S homes now have more than one TV. Listen close. 10% of ~100 million homes. That’s 10 million multi-TV homes in the country. From 1 TV for every 5 viewers, the equation has changed sharply, for these 10 million homes to 1 TV for every 2.5 viewers. Evidently there will be consequences. (And as you shall soon see, it is even better (or worse) than that).

     

    Whether you look at Hindi, English or any of the languages in which TV is offered in India, there is a common architecture that defines the structure of the market. Three pillars hold it up: big and hefty General Entertainment, massive Sports (shared across language barriers by offerings only in two languages) and wildly proliferating News with lots of fragile strands. Since Sports really has no local identity, focused as it is on the national obsession with Cricket, and News offers no heft, the defining feature of TV in every language is GEC. Dig a little deeper and the content logic of the GEC genre starts to become evident.

     

    GECs got blueprinted by the late 1990s. Indeed, you could argue that the basic template was in place even long before that, in the form of Doordarshan. Homes had one TV. Most people in the family, barring the housewife, would be away from the home for educational or employment reasons for several hours a day. The family would only start to congregate in the Living Room from about 6 p.m. as the members returned from wherever the day’s chores had taken them. By 8ish, there was a full house and smart programmers would be offering up delights that everyone would lap up without discomfort or embarrassment. The stereotypical picture of the Great Indian Family sharing and bonding before the Great Indian Entertainment TV Channel would now be complete. It was almost hard to discern where the khandan on TV ended and the parivaar in the Living Room began.

     

    Anyone who lived through the late 90s and early years of this millennium will recall vividly, as the stentorian authority of Amitabh Bachchan delivering his signature ‘Namaskar! Aadab! Sat Sri Akal’ echoed through domestic hallways in over a half of our country, he would have everyone jostling to find their favourite spot before the TV dabba. Once said spot was secured, it would be squatted on until the day’s K serials and such wrapped up.

     

    While all Hindi channels picked up the simple formula of family values and ‘rona dhona’ very quickly- thereby making them all look like reduced sized copies of the industry’s 500 pound gorilla, the regional players weren’t far behind. The model was perfected in Hindi and swiftly exported to markets in all regional languages.

     

    In the meanwhile, India was getting more prosperous as the economy saw half a decade of near double-digit economic expansion. At the same time, the telecommunications revolution was well and truly upon us. Call rates for mobile telephony fell in a frenzied race to the bottom. Handsets started developing capabilities far beyond the basic voice and text and shedding the boring monochrome screen for a jazzed up colour display. More onboard memory with scope of incrementing it further by more and more capacious SD cards, faster processors and rendering engines that took blur and dullness out of the mobile desktop screen enabled altogether new consumption possibilities on the tiny (but also growing fast) cellphone screens. Other screens were entering the repertoire. A second TV was seen as a mark of upward mobility. Desktop computers were becoming indispensable particularly in middle class homes with school- or college-going youngsters.

     

    Sources of AV content were growing far beyond C&S TV with young, urban consumers discovering the forbidden joys of ‘torrents’ that had reawakened, in a new morph, the only recently exorcised Napster. And there were so many alternatives on where the content, thus secured, could be consumed. The second TV would often come attached to a DVD player, or even a gaming console both of which did a commendable job of playing content. Even the little mobile device in the pocketwas rapidly becoming powerful enough to store and play not just songs and clips, but long form entertainment sourced from friend and stranger.

     

    The tyranny of the compulsory assembly before the glowing siren in the Living Room was being challenged by sundry interlopers big and small that were leading an uprising of person specific content.

     

    Oblivious to these tectonic changes in the landscape, programmers and channel heads, with their heads still stuck firmly up their <scatology deleted> outmoded notions of the ‘One big, happy family’ continued to design and programme General Entertainment. “Hey, you can have a car of any colour you want”, they incanted, “so long as it is black”. But who was listening? The young ‘uns had already found shiny, sleek, colourful new rides that they could scoot away in.

     

    p.s. for Programmers and Channel Heads: You may not have noticed it yet, honey, but someone just unbundled the Living Room.

     

    Paritosh Joshi was until recently CEO, Star CJ. He has been a marketer, a mediaperson and a key officebearer on industry bodies. He can reached via the comments board below or his Twitter handle @paritoshZero.

     

     

  • A weekly column by Paritosh Joshi, until recently CEO, Star CJ. Given his varied experience in the media and industry bodies, Mr Joshi will analyse issues concerning the business of media, measurement and research

    Paritosh Joshi: Ratings & readerships must come with a Statutory Warning

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    If you are reading this column with any professional interest, it is safe to assume you have done or been closely involved with one or more of the following things within the last year:

    • Sold media inventory
    • Bought media inventory
    • Planned a media schedule

     

    In any of these situations you would have to:

    • Define the target audience
    • Use widely used market research to assess and compare impact of the medium or media in consideration
    • Price the medium or media as a buyer or seller or assess its or their value for money for the advertiser’s planned media expenditure

     

    Inevitably, you would have to deal with television rating points, publication readerships, radio listenerships and the like. That’s where the fun begins.

     

    With the target audience.

     

    “Housewives SEC A and B, 5 lakh+ towns, UP,Bihar, Jharkhand”, one might say. “Men and Women, SEC A1, Top 6 metros” another might demand. Or even, “Women, SEC A1+, Mumbai and Delhi”. I have to add I am not inventing these, having heard them as specific asks or offers in situations I have been in close proximity to. To be sure, you could probably assign brands or media to all of them with not much effort. So far so good. It’s what happens next that makes no sense.

     

    Someone with access to the right research will actually produce numbers purportedly accurate to within a decimal point to size said target audience and the extent to which a medium or combination of media will reach it.

     

    This is bovine excrement, euphemistically speaking. Why, you ask?

     

    Because all media research is based on statistical sampling, not a person-by-person census of every reader, viewer or listener of show or medium. Statistical numbers are estimates. They work on the twin ideas that all large populations are distributed according to the Standard Normal Distribution, the good old Bell Curve that we are all familiar with. Put simply, the notion that in any large enough group, there are a few thin people, a few fat people and a lot of people of intermediate weight (thereby making you wonder what happened to all of us in the Media and Entertainment fraternity, or whether there’s also an ABnormal Distribution to explain it). And that if you were to draw an adequately large random sample from this normally distributed population, the sample would retain all the statistical characteristics of the population such as Mean and Standard Distribution.

     

    It can be shown that the minimum sample size required to ensure that the sample follows the behaviour of the parent population is 30. Samples of smaller size will exhibit asymmetries and other oddities of shape (things statisticians call measures of Skewness but never mind), that make them useless for drawing reasonable conclusions about their parent populations. As the sample available to extrapolate from becomes smaller, the error in extrapolation becomes larger, exponentially larger.

     

    Thereby bringing us back to the issue of ratings and readerships and such. Take readership and the Indian Readership Survey for a moment. About 67 per cent of India’s population of 1.2 billion, ~160 million households are represented by just over 2.5 lakh respondents. Put another way, every respondent represents nearly 1000 households. Things get even more interesting when you look at television metering.India’s 130 million (your guess is as good as mine on what the actual number is) are represented by ~8,000 meters.  Of course, TAM makes no claim to represent all India, so even if these 8,000 only represented the top 100 cities that have a 2011 population of 128 million or a population above the age of 4 of ~115 million people in over 20 million homes, there would still be only 1 meter in every 2,500 homes. We will get more generous and allow for the fact that TV penetration across the top 100 cities is 70 per cent. In other words out of 20 million total households, there are only 14 million TV homes. Even in this situation there is just 1 metered home in 2,000 TV owning homes.

     

    You see where this is going?

     

    As users slice and chop large aggregate populations and search for meaning in the samples that supposedly represent the segments thus generated, the available sample used to do the statistical prediction shrinks to a point where there is no predictive integrity within it. And yet, statistically naive people in every corner of our industry routinely use these frail foundations to build imposing edifices of brand and media transactions and planning.

     

    Then again, even the Taj Mahal is built on flimsy marshland that may eventually cause it to sink out of sight.

     

    So here’s the suggested Statutory Warning: “Irresponsible use of audience measurement may lead to impaired business diagnosis”.

     

    Paritosh Joshi was until recently CEO, Star CJ. He has been a marketer, a mediaperson and a key officebearer on industry bodies. He can reached via the comments board below or his Twitter handle @paritoshZero.

     

  • Good news must be paid for because it costs a whole lot to produce. You cannot crowd-source the truly significant story or editorial, notes Paritosh Joshi in Media Matrix

    Paritosh Joshi: Does readership have a future?

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    A few months back, I had the opportunity of hearing Mr N Ram of The Hindu speaking at an industry conference on the future of newspaper readership. His erudition and scholarship are legendary, his command of the language second to none and his rich baritone makes the experience an auditory delight. However, the central conceit of that day’s oration was anything but pleasant. In no uncertain terms, Mr Ram spelt out the impending annihilation of the print medium, not in the West, about which we have all heard, but right here in India. Interestingly enough, in the months that have passed since, I don’t seem to remember seeing a single repudiation of this bleak forecast.

     

    Right then, two words. Theodore Levitt.

     

    Let me cast my mind back a bit over the going-on-50 years I have spent on this planet. It is conventional wisdom, and an oft-repeated criticism of the younger generation, that nobody reads anything anymore. The comparison, always, is to the literate past when “everyone” read. Let me be clear. This whole notion is a great big ballyhoo. Reading, back in those days, necessarily meant one of the following, extremely short, list: (1) books (2) periodicals, including newspapers and (3) personal writings such as school work and letters: written or received. Reading and writing were not pervasive activities. Yes there were obsessive readers; I was one; but they represented a minority- a persecuted minority I might add being seen as bookworm wimps- compared to the red-blooded lads who spent every spare moment mercilessly kicking a ball, and as frequently each other, on the nearest available dusty lot. Kids did not wake up only to check overnight Facebook, Twitter and BBM messages and posts on their mobile devices. They did not surf for lyrics of the latest song by Lamb of God or August burns red. They did not go to bed after writing their blogspot or tumblr post for the evening.

     

    Messenger apps, social media, classwork, homework, leisure, amusement, resentment, sorrow, anger- there isn’t a personal emotion, engagement or venue where a 21st century denizen is able to function without reading or writing something. The Web does not talk to its users; I mean it can and does, but it is primarily enabled for people who can write and read. This must be understood: Web users better be literate at least in terms of basic reading and writing before they can get any substantial value out of it. Here’s an assertion. More people do more reading and writing (nearly incessantly in fact) in 2012, as compared to any previous period of known human history.

     

    Brings us to the daily or periodical print publication.

     

    Who needs newspapers and magazines any more? We have the social media to tell us exactly what is happening anywhere on the planet in real time, right? We heard about the Anna Hazare arrest and detention at Tihar, fire in the Bangalore skyscraper, the Fukushima Tsunami, the Black Wednesday market collapse; heck, <name random news event here>, long before even the TV news broadcasters had cottoned on to it. Yes, but that was the first, mostly unverified and unverifiable heads-up on the story vis-à-vis the detail and insight that we now have.

     

    Where did the insight come from? We waited until a few hours later when our trustworthy daily or periodical carried a fact-checked and properly edited version of the story.

     

    Mr Murdoch Senior, not the gentleman at the heart of all manner of brouhaha, the other one, says it simply and well. Good news must be paid for because it costs a whole lot to produce. You cannot crowd-source the truly significant story. Nor can you crowd-source incisive editorial commentary. And it does not matter how or where a consumer will choose to consume it. Mr Murdoch has backed word by action, putting first the Wall Street Journal, then the Times of London and then a whole sheaf of other Newscorp publications behind pay-walls. More and more people are paying. What is more, even publications that were the most vocal critics of the move: New York Times comes to mind, have themselves succumbed to the same gambit. Of course, the pay wall is by no means the only way to make online content pay for itself but it becomes a great example of how indispensable quality journalism is to Joe Public, even if it cost a few coins.

     

    The newspaper is not about paper; it is about news. The first is the physicality of a product. The second is the consumer benefit. It is fair to say that paper will continue to disappear from the newspaper. But news quite definitely will not.

     

    Theodore Levitt called the confusion MARKETING MYOPIA.

     

    Paritosh Joshi was until recently CEO, Star CJ. He has been a marketer, a mediaperson and a key officebearer on industry bodies. He can reached via the comments board below or his Twitter handle @paritoshZero.

     

  • This week, in Media Matrix, Paritosh Joshi discovers in Singapore what a great cable system like StarHub can bring to the party!

    Paritosh Joshi: Cable on steroids

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    This week, Media Matrix comes to you live from Singapore (ok, so ignore the hyperbole).

     

    Just last week we were expressing disappointment about the direction in which digitization appears to be headed with cable not being able to hold its own against DTH. This week, we will look at what a topflight cable system can actually bring to the party.

     

    I give you StarHub.

     

    Before someone points out that StarHub is Singapore’s monopoly cable operator and reaches over 99 per cent of all Singapore households, let me say it myself. While this certainly bestows advantages, StarHub also has to contend with a natural cap on the number of households it can service – just over 5 lakh by the way, with nothing left to expand to. For comparison, just the Mumbai (suburban) district has over 17 lakh households, lots of room for a good cable service to deliver compelling services and grow.

     

    Here is what StarHub Interactive’s landing page looks like. Just five icons but with loads of stuff tucked away under each.

     

    As you drill down, all manner of options become available. You can check the winning ticket numbers for various lotteries. You can also buy them. Under Movie Ticketing, you can find out films/screens/showtimes and also buy tickets. Under Finance, you have access to all securities and currencies traded on a range of regional and global bourses. That isn’t all.  You can set up your own portfolio, complete with buy/sell triggers, reminders and even connect to your trading account to execute orders.

     

    It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to conceive of the endless range of possibilities such a service could deliver in India. Remember that vastly more consumers are familiar with the TV ‘UI’ – the good old remote – than with the user interfaces offered by browsers and apps.

     

    Also, each of these services will find participation interest from whole categories of vendors. Financial intermediaries wanting to develop retail interest in a wide range of saving, investment and insurance products will compete to be on the platform. Every personal and domestic service provider will crave for the customer base. Banks will offer payment gateway facilities to encourage use of credit and debit cards in a more secure environment than the open internet. The nascent Indian homeshopping industry would positively lap up the possibility of concluding transactions in real time. Each of these will be an income opportunity for the cable platform operator, providing an additional B2B revenue stream and accelerating amortization of capital investment in high quality digital infrastructure.

     

    But is the cable community listening?

     

    Post Script: Regulatory Overreach

    Those who have been involved with the Television industry long enough might recall Mr. Pradeep Baijal, Chairman- TRAI from 2003 to 2006 commenting to the effect that once the last mile to the consumer’s home became competitive, there would be no case left for tariff regulation and the TRAI would switch to forbearance as it was progressively doing in its primary, telecommunication domain.

     

    What has actually happened is quite the opposite. The Authority has got ever deeper into tariff regulation. Funnily enough, the entire thrust of the regulatory exercise is in the wrong place. We will deal with what is wrong with TRAI’s television tariff regulation strategy in a subsequent piece but does anyone else share this view? Please use that comment box below. I will be waiting to hear from you.

     

    Paritosh Joshi was until recently CEO, Star CJ. He has been a marketer, a mediaperson and been a key officebearer on industry bodies. He can reached via his Twitter handle @paritoshZero.

    Media Matrix appears every Thursday. Due to an oversight, we didn’t carry it yesterday… sorry!-Ed.

     

  • Media Matrix by Paritosh Joshi, until recently CEO, Star CJ, analyses issues concerning the business of media, measurement and research

    Paritosh Joshi: Wither Digitization?

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    We are down to just over a month for mandatory digitisation in the 4 metros. Newspaper stories suggest bullishness among DTH players even as major cable providers signal some nervousness and even seek extra time to get all their ducks in a row.

     

    Let me say this bluntly.India will lose a massive opportunity if all the spoils of digitization went to DTH.

     

    But first, a quick look back. To the beginning of this developing story.

     

    India’s economic liberalization and initiation into C&S television happened almost simultaneously. Even as Peter Arnett on CNN was telling the world about the bombing of Baghdad during Operation Desert Storm in early 1991, Dr Manmohan Singh and Prime Minister Narasimha Rao were getting busy with preparing the blueprint for India’s economic liberalisation. Almost by some divine providence, television and the economy were both getting set to kick into high gear in tandem. As the period since has shown with impressive consistency, as television has grown wider and deeper, so has the economy.

     

    Inevitably, technology has reached the point where the legacy of the analog system must be superceded by digital technology. The change is not sudden, having begun with the Conditional Access System (CAS) in 2002 and gathered momentum with DTH’s arrival in the form of Dish TV in 2005. While CAS was unable to make much headway, even in markets where it was made mandatory, DTH saw accelerating growth after the launch of Tata Sky in 2006, and then an operator explosion, starting 2008.India now has as many as six commercial and one public service DTH services, more than any other major market in the world.

     

    By definition, DTH services cover a very wide footprint, typically the entire Indian subcontinent, and often extending to points well beyond that. This provides great advantages to multi- or pan-national audiences, but is of little use to broadcasters or content owners who target a more tightly defined audience, be it based on ethnicity, language or geography. Also, since the service is delivered via satellite and doesn’t have a native return path, return paths have to be bolted on separately using a terrestrial or cellular telecom network, or an independent vendor’s internet service as is being tried by Indian DTH operators.

     

    Terrestrial digital cable services, on the other hand, frequently bundle television and internet services on the same cable and, by implication, have an inbuilt return path from viewer to platform operator. This creates a range of opportunities in terms of bringing transaction based services, payment solutions and so on that are accessible from a simple TV remote. Indeed, the best of breed in many parts of the world now offer triple play (TV, Internet and Basic Telephony) or even quadruple play (triple + Cellular Telephony) off a single connection.

     

    In addition to their versatility, digital cable systems simply have much more bandwidth to accommodate more content and services than satellite transponders. This advantage will become more significant as more genres and channels move from standard definition to high definition (or SD to HD is common parlance). HD channels use 3 to 4 times the bandwidth of SD and as setup costs of HD fall, broadcasters will be looking to deliver better viewer experiences with the switch.

     

    Amongst all the issues we have raised above, perhaps the most significant is the possibility of localizing television. Every city and town in the country is, potentially, a distinct television market. There is local news to be reported. There are local stories that must be told. There are local merchants who must advertise to their customers. And there is plenty of creative talent that is raring to have a go at tapping into these opportunities. If only there is a platform that can support them.

     

    That platform is not DTH.

     

    Paritosh Joshi was until recently CEO, Star CJ. He has been a marketer, a mediaperson and been a key officebearer on industry bodies. He can reached via his Twitter handle @paritoshZero

     

  • A new weekly column by Paritosh Joshi, until recently CEO, Star CJ. Given his varied experience in the media and industry bodies, Mr Joshi will analyse issues concerning the business of media, measurement and research

    Media Matrix: Valuing Audience – Part II

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    Remember the 5 weepies that you were forced to watch because of your spouse? The maverick British automobile journalist? The irritatingly intrusive news editor? If you do, we met last week. And even if you don’t, I’m going to try and make this week’s 870 words stand on their own feet.

     

    We signed off last week wondering about whether audience quality, and not just quantity, could be measured objectively. And whether current systems of audience measurement pay enough attention to measuring audience quality. The questions were tainted by an assertion that “In the relentless focus on audience volume as the prime metric, we have lost sight of audience quality”.

     

    Why does audience quantity take precedence over any other measure, particularly in a market such asIndia?

    • Almost every product category has low penetration, or in more technical terms, low Category Development Index
    • Marketers’ primary priority is to reach the widest audience to build awareness about their product/category to stimulate demand
    • When width becomes paramount it is easy to see why quantity always wins over quality

     

    The arrival of satellite television inIndiain the early 1990s was the first intimation of accelerating media proliferation. An unregulated regulatory environment in its early years and limitless viewer demand for exciting, entertaining content fuelled a torrent of channels, and indeed genre innovation which continues unabated over two decades on. Coupled with rising incomes in a domestic consumption fuelled economy and steadily growing literacy, India also saw simultaneous growth in the print media and, with the advent of better telecommunications in the last decade, the ‘new’ or digital media. Making systematic and reasoned choices in this era of abundance was no longer the simple exercise that media planning used to be in the stone age of media scarcity that preceded it.

     

    Enter- the media agency of record.

     

    The challenge for advertisers was just this: how to reach the largest audience at the least cost. Inevitably, the agency’s singular task was to stitch up defined audiences across multiple vehicles at the lowest CPT (cost per thousand) or CPRP (cost per rating point). Conversely, advertising sales personnel at all media outlets were under pressure to offer packages that were compared relentlessly on cost almost to the exclusion of everything. The age of quantity had arrived.

     

    We will leave the hurly-burly of the media market for a moment and look at how audiences are actually measured and how these measurements are consolidated into reports.

     

    Television measurement involves peoplemeters; devices connected to domestic TV sets that keep track of who watched what, when. These peoplemeters, once installed in a home, track TV consumption around the clock, through the week, across months and years. These days, most have inbuilt communication apparatus that enables them to transmit their observation record to a central server without human intervention. The central facility now consolidates thousands of individual viewer readings into audience ratings, again with little human intervention. Ratings report second by second ebbs and flows in audience aggregates. Cross sections – by second, minute, hour of any other time interval become more important than how a particular individual, or household, or even demographic, spent a day interacting with TV.

     

    Other media, most prominently print, are measured by large scale media surveys like the Indian Readership Survey or IRS. Thousands of households are contacted across the country to map print, TV, radio, digital and other media consumption along with detailed information on usage of a wide range of consumables, durables and assets (such as personal transport). Here too, the system is geared to deliver cross sections of readership, listenership and so on, rather than examining how an individual, household or defined demographic consumes across media and product categories.

     

    In days of yore when data tabulation, summarization and analysis was done manually, examining and interpreting research information, whether for  TV or any other media, on a ‘longitudinal’ rather than ‘cross-sectional’ was practically impossible. While individual cases might be studied, purely for anecdotal value, there was no practical way of subjecting, large parts of, or the entire sample itself, to cross-sectional study.

     

    WithMoore’s Law having given us exponentially growing computing horsepower and data warehousing, this impediment no longer exists. Imagine an individual’s TV consumption across a week. From spiritual or yoga type programs in the early morning, through news and business during the day to action, drama, music, talk and comedy in the evening night, she has a wide range of content on her plate. And when you start looking at her ‘TV timeline’, and start comparing and contrasting it with the thousands of others, you will find others that are rather similar, somewhat similar or rather dissimilar to hers. Simple, least squares type, approaches can scan across timelines to find patterns of behaviour.

     

    In much the same way, the entire mix of product and media consumption of individuals or households, rather than cross sectional tallies, can also be run on respondent level data in studies like the IRS.

     

    Shifting attention from cross sections to longitudes or timelines – of moving from a cross-sectional view of audiences to actually understanding how they behave and what they consume across time and place is the difference between understanding audiences as quantitative aggregates or behavioural phenomena.

    Paritosh Joshi was until recently CEO, Star CJ. He has been a marketer, a mediaperson and been a key officebearer on industry bodies. He can reached via his Twitter handle @paritoshZero

     

  • Media Matrix is a weekly column by Paritosh Joshi, that started last Thursday. Given his varied experience in the media and industry bodies, Mr Joshi, until recently CEO, Star CJ, will analyse issues concerning the business of media, measurement and research.

    Media Matrix by Paritosh Joshi: Valuing audiences

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    Media advertising has been priced based upon audiences that it reaches for a very long time. Audit Bureaux of Circulation were set up in Western Europe and North America by the early years of the 20th Century and even India’s own ABC has a hoary past, dating back to the 1930s.

     

    However, circulation audits only revealed the number of ‘revenue’ copies i.e. sold copies of a particular publication. This was not a particularly good guide to how many actually read it. Specialist publications may have sizable circulation but very few readers. Conversely, a general interest publication may appeal to many people and be shared around extensively.

     

    This was a serious deficiency. Market Research was a rapidly evolving discipline that offered a solution: readership surveys. Initially starting out as proprietary studies of individual publications, it soon became clear that for widespread use, they would need to be conducted at the industry level. Such studies, run by a ‘syndicate’ of clients have since been referred to as Syndicated Research.

     

    It was evident, even at the dawn of the age of measurement, that it was not enough to have a single number that represented the sum total of all readers. At the crudest, you would have to segregate males from females, children and teenagers from youth and adults. You would also want to discriminate on income-high, middle and low and by geography: rural or urban, state, district and town. These ‘demographic’ variables used to identify ‘segments’ have since become a staple of audience targeting.

     

    Brands and products would make specific media choices based upon the volume of a particular audience segment they delivered. Typically, the price of reaching a thousand individuals with a specific sized insertion became the basis of comparing a medium’s ‘efficiency’. This measure, variously called CPT (Cost per Thousand), CPM (Cost per Mille- mille being Latin for thousand) or simply the Mille Rate became the universal yardstick for evaluating the print media.

     

    Television began to grow in significance, first in theUnited Statesthen inEurope, after the end of World War II. Broadcast over the airwaves, television offered no ‘paid sale’ opportunity. Funding television could only be done two ways. Public broadcasting systems would be funded by the government exchequer and private broadcasters would have to earn revenue from advertising insertions. The pre-existing analogy of the Print media made it clear that television needed an audience measurement system. It was also recognized that viewers showed greater volatility than readers appeared to do, thus necessitating a much higher frequency of measuring the habit.

     

    A solution was found in asking randomly chosen viewers in a ‘panel’ to maintain a viewing diary. Diaries were collected weekly and collated to determine the ebbs and flows of viewership. Since the panel was relatively stable in composition and size, viewership was reported as a relative measure – the rating point. A rating point equals 1 per cent of the total audience. A show watched by every person on the panel would have 100 rating points. Since panels were constructed to mirror the overall population- being a representative random sample – the relative measure could be used to estimate the broader behaviour of the population. Inevitably extending the cost efficiency analogy from Print, it was only a matter of time before the cost of reaching 1 rating point began to be compared across shows. CPRP – cost per rating point – was born.

     

    And that is pretty much where the art and science of valuing audiences has rested, for over half a century.

     

    Now think for a moment about how you consume different media. There’s that television show well past your normal bedtime that compels you to stay awake until midnight – on a Tuesday. That automobile magazine with a big feature by a maverick British journalist that you spend a small fortune on every fortnight. And those news shows run by the world’s most intrusive interviewer that irritate the hell out of you but you watch with an almost masochistic regularity every night at 9. On the other hand, there are those 5 newspapers that are barely glanced at on your office desk, the daily weepies that you are forced to deal with as your spouse devours them every weekday or the fashion magazines that somehow land up in the bathroom stack. Surely there must be a difference in how they are evaluated by a media planner who somehow knows of your media habits? There should be. There aren’t.

     

    In the relentless focus on audience volume as the prime metric, we have lost sight of audience quality. Is it possible to objectively evaluate quality? Do current audience measurement systems pay adequate attention to measuring it? We will deal with these issues in Part II, next week.

     

    Paritosh Joshi was until recently CEO, Star CJ. He has been a marketer, a mediaperson and been a key officebearer on industry bodies. He can reached via his Twitter handle @paritoshZero

     

  • Introducing a new weekly column by Paritosh Joshi, until recently CEO, Star CJ. Given his varied experience in the media, as a marketer and on industry bodies, Mr Joshi will analyse issues concerning the business of media and marketing. And more!

    Introducing: Media Matrix, a new weekly column by Paritosh Joshi

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    A young man who currently works in one of the Big Three television networks dropped by for some career advice last week. After graduating from business school, he has spent almost five years at the job, the first two in Ad Sales and the next three in Marketing. He feels like he is beginning to stagnate and has raised the issue with his boss. Boss suggested that he move back into Ad Sales.

     

    What would you advise him?

     

    If he planned to be in the broadcast industry for the long haul, say the next decade, I suggested that he stay in Marketing. If it was just the next two or three however, he was likely better off shifting back to Ad Sales.

     

    Seems cryptic? Hang on, we should soon see why.

     

    Marketing’s role at most Indian broadcasters only comes in when all aspects of the channel, show or event have already been finalized. All that remains is to build awareness of the impending launch to try and ensure the quickest possible pace of sampling among viewers. Talented creative agency is called in and briefed. Wit, emotion, action and drama are poured in and out pops a striking, often award winning, campaign. All that remains to be done is splashing out a large sum on a media plan and the job is done.

     

    If you learned your Marketing at one of the putative Universities of the discipline, P&G or Unilever or one of the beverage majors for instance, you would expect to lead, not follow the process and centre every decision at each stage on the consumer. It would probably offend you to be treated merely as a deliverer of advertising and media campaigns. Given the circumstances, you would want to shift closer to either the Content or the Ad Sales side of the business, where the action really was.

     

    Things are going to start changing. As soon as July 1, 2012 actually.

     

    For as long as we’ve had C&S TV inIndia, going on 20 years now, the biggest impediment in its expansion has been limited bandwidth due to analog delivery. With capacity of less than 70 channels delivered at indifferent resolution and scratchy audio, the biggest challenge before a channel is to get distribution at whatever cost. Once this hurdle has been negotiated, it enters a relatively limited range of options available in any given genre. The rest depends on casting as wide a content net as possible. Almost every channel tries to be all things to all viewers.

     

    Mandatory digitization arrives in the big metros on July 1. In a fell swoop, channel choice is set to grow three-fold or more. Costs of distribution should fall rather sharply, removing a significant entry barrier and opening doors for many more content providers. Inevitably, the days of every channel wanting to be ‘One size fits all’ must give way to specific consumer needs driving product design. International channels already show this precision in proposition and content. Comedy Central makes no bones about what it stands for and will stay close to the promise. Fox has a whole portfolio of well-designed channels that identify and then single mindedly go after a tightly defined benefit.

     

    And make no mistake. This is the direction where all of Indian television is headed; the era of the Marketing-led broadcasting business.

     

    Paritosh Joshi was until recently CEO, Star CJ. He has been a marketer, a mediaperson and been a key officebearer on industry bodies. He can reached via his Twitter handle @paritoshZero

     

  • It doesn't really matter which industry you choose, every one of them will eventually be a job in the media, writes Paritosh Joshi

    Paritosh Joshi: So you want a job in the Media?

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    MBA from a leading business school in the American Midwest, two years with a boutique investment bank in Boston and then this young man lands up for a chat about what he needs to do to get a job in the media.

     

    It is still easy to think there is a clear demarcation that sets the media apart from the rest of the world. Aamir, Ashton, Arnab and Aishwarya are in the Media. (They don’t even need surnames to identify them). Media people ‘need no introduction’. Us grunts have nothing worth introducing and thus, don’t need to be introduced.

     

    Or is it so simple?

     

    There were the Media people but they were few and readily identified as such. M J Akbar dazzled us with his insight in columns for a newspaper he edited. Rajat Sharma put people into the dock, quite literally, as he hosted a talk show. Derek O’Brien got all of us furiously scratching our heads even as he quizzed school kids. Madhuri Dixit sent testosterone levels into orbit merely by counting from 1 to 13. And Lalu had to invoke Sridevi’s cheeks in search of a universally comprehensible metaphor for Bihar’s roads.

     

    Then Tim Berners-Lee came along and changed everything, although for years after he thought up hypertext in an obscure corner of CERN, we would scarcely have known it.

     

    By the late 90s, regular blokes discovered that it was possible to find a wider audience for their periodic rants on WWW than they previously could muster around a water cooler or in a cafe. The web log, then portmanteau-ed to weblog and finally truncated to blog was born either in 1995 or 1997 (you can find an interesting history here).

     

    Then blogger came along in 1999, bang in the heady days of the Dotcom Boom and setting up a blog became Luddite-proof. From the very beginning, the blogging community had a wide range of interests and capability. The largest majority would create an account in an idle moment never to visit it ever again. A few would invest time and effort in their posts and endeavour to reach out to an audience with regular, engaging updates. Remember that these were people operating far away from the conventional notion, but what they were doing was indisputably publishing.

     

    Everyman had just stormed Fortress Media.

     

    It began with the written word. Soon enough, authors had found ways of adding pictures to their words. And the web was becoming more clever all the time. It was able to transport not just text but sound and video too. Also, devices to record audio and video had started to shrink in price and size even as they got massively more powerful, thus putting near professional quality sound and image acquisition within reach. Events unfolded at a rapid pace thereafter. Amazon pioneered a lightweight handheld device for reading digital publications. The Kindle was a runaway success and for the first time, books could be self-published by anyone with a good idea and capable penmanship without ever being imprinted onto the dead-tree medium. Soundcloud allowed wannabe speakers, singers and instrumentalists to distribute their art and craft without surrendering themselves to the crafty gnomes of the music industry. Youtube opened doors for every standup comic, ballerina, burlesque queen and cute kitten to show off its talents on glorious Technicolor video.

     

    But wait, we were talking about an investment banker contemplating a career in the media. So what’s with this long riff about what we now refer to, rather condescendingly I might add, as User Generated Content?

     

    Well, it wasn’t just individuals that got inspired to start using the all new powers of WWW to talk to their “Audience”. Businesses of every stripe saw the opportunity too. To be rather more honest, what they saw was consumers – happy and irate, sounding off about their brand experiences in these wide open spaces and were left with little choice but to deal, for better or worse, with what they were getting. Surely we’ve all heard the now almost apocryphal story of Coca Cola’s attempt to take down a fan page on Facebook that spectacularly backfired? To the point where they had to pretty much say ‘Let bygones be bygones and let’s be friends’? (Moral: Don’t clobber, co-opt).

     

    You see what’s happening here. Companies and brands were becoming broadcasters and publishers.

     

    At no time before in the history of our human civilization has communication across every conventional fence and barrier been so easy, inexpensive and by implication pervasive or ubiquitous. And barring the rare exception, individuals and entities find it more productive to be participants in this endless feast of reason and flow of soul than mere mute spectators. There’s even a taxonomy to describe different levels of involvement with media: Paid media are, as the name suggests, those that you have to buy access to. Earned media are where the media voluntarily carry news or content about you. Finally, owned media are, again as evidenced by the name, those that you own and control. Who doesn’t want earned and owned media?

     

    And what was it that we were talking about when we began this ramble? Ah, yes. A job in the media.

     

    I told the young man, he could stop looking. After all, every job- FMCG, Banking, Automobiles, Telecommunication, <insert randomly chosen industry name here> eventually, was going to be a job in the Media.

     

    Paritosh Joshi was until recently CEO, Star CJ. He has been a marketer, a mediaperson and a key officebearer on industry bodies. He is Strategic Advisor, Ormax Media. He can reached via his Twitter handle @paritoshZero

     

  • A weekly column by Paritosh Joshi, until recently CEO, Star CJ. Given his varied experience in the media and industry bodies, Mr Joshi will analyse issues concerning the business of media, measurement and research

    Paritosh Joshi: How to make a really spectacular mistake

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    In all our lives, there are tales of misadventure that we bury away deep and try our darndest to forget all about. Today it’s time to ferret out just such a story from the not so distant past and see if there’s something, anything, we might learn from it.

     

    The year was 2007. Private Television broadcasters were trapped in a financial vice. Costs were on a tear as good content: entertainment, sports or news, commanded big premia. Revenues crawled as new entrants into every genre constantly expanded advertising inventory and made price increases difficult. While advertising revenues were still growing, a lot of the increase was attributable to ever-laxer controls by broadcasters on advertising duration leading to flat, or even declining, yields. As an advertising sales person myself, back then, I asked for an analysis of Average Spot Rates (ASR), a very commonly used and easy to compute yield metric, across key genres and channels for the previous three years. My hypothesis, which proved agonizingly right, was that the bulk of revenue growth for channels was coming from selling more inventory and little or none from better ASR. Obviously, I wasn’t the only one seeking such analyses and soon the issue began to dominate all conversations between broadcasters.

     

    Here was what the broadcasters were seeing:

    • Television penetration was galloping along, adding up to 10 million new homes, up to 45 million viewers of age 4 and above, every year.
    • Cable penetration was growing by almost an identical figure, having moved up from under 30 million homes in 2005 to over 47 million in 2007.
    • GDP was up 9 per cent for 2007 over 2006 and maintaining healthy buoyancy.
    • Distribution revenues were not a source of any joy as platforms had begun to seek carriage fees to monetize the chronic scarcity of capacity on a decrepit analog network. In the meanwhile, TRAI was binding broadcasters hand and foot where it came to wholesale pricing of their content to platform operators.
    • Media agencies were relentlessly using the dreaded CPRP (Cost Per Rating Point) to pummel advertising prices down. Even category leading broadcasters were unable to exercise pricing power in the face of CPRP maths.
    • While more broadcasters constantly entered the market, the demand side represented by the media buying agencies was getting ever more consolidated. Already, the top two agencies controlled very nearly two-thirds of the advertising spend on TV between them. They had achieved this, primarily, on the back of their ability to extort low prices using their virtual oligopoly combined with the willingness to drop commission rates to low single digit percentages. While the standard terms of trade indicated a 15 per cent agency commission on TV advertising, the media majors were actually working on less than 5 per cent, passing on the spread as additional discount to the advertisers.

     

    It was clear to broadcasters that the situation could no longer be permitted to drift but what were they to do and how? A team of planners from across broadcasting organisations was asked to develop a recommendation. Everything had to be done with considerable secrecy, lest word get out and the project be stillborn. The plan was in. Voila! We would all, every last one of us, collectively impose a 25 per cent surcharge.

     

    Needless to add, the plan asked for way more resilience from broadcasters, particularly the small and vulnerable ones, than they could muster and in a classic predator-prey drama, they were arm-twisted on the pain of the death-of-a-thousand-cuts by M-this and M-that into abject capitulation. The plan unwound within 72 hours leaving a lot of us with unpleasantly puce visages. An awful mistake had been made. I could tell you the whole ugly story of who shafted whom, when and where but sadly, in a reversal of the trope, if I told you, someone would have to kill me.

     

    Now here is the really terrible story. Most everything that made the revenue story look grim in 2007 for broadcasters still looks exactly the same in 2012. Indeed worse in many cases, like for the anæmically bloated Hindi News genre for instance.

     

    What is the broadcast industry doing about it? Can something be done about it at all?

     

    First, until TV advertising is valued based on a relative, rather than absolute currency, pricing power will remain solidly with the buyers. Until we shift from the iniquitous CPRP to the universally accepted and economically fair CPT (Cost per Thousand contacts), this will not happen.

     

    Second, all stakeholders in the BARC (Broadcast Audience Research Council) process would be well advised to apply their might to moving it from idea to execution.

     

    Hmm. Someone will have to kill me after all.

     

  • A weekly column by Paritosh Joshi, until recently CEO, Star CJ. Given his varied experience in the media and industry bodies, Mr Joshi will analyse issues concerning the business of media, measurement and research

    Paritosh Joshi: Not another piece about the Ratings Battle

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    You’ve already read enough of those so I’m not about to inflict one more upon you.

     

    However, if this week’s piece sounds like a lesson in elementary Economics, so be it. You were warned.

     

    Prices are not divinely ordained. As Adam Smith taught us, people enter a market when they wish to sell or buy goods or services. A process of negotiation follows. This depends at least as much on perception as it does on objective reality (whatever that is). An Alphonso orchard owner in Devrukh Taluka of Ratnagiri District believes that the output is plentiful, demand is scanty and he will be fortunate to sell his output at whatever price the Arhati (broker) offers him. You, in Delhi or Mumbai believe that unseasonal rains destroyed the crop, all good produce was immediately exported to grace the plates of Sheikh Al bin Mighty in wealthy Saudi and you must feel grateful for a dozen prized fruit at Rs1,000. So much for objective truth. The story can have a very different outcome if you add just one ingredient: inquiry. The orchard owner (who now owns a cell phone) calls up his office boy cousin in BKC who shares the street price in Mumbai… Yup, you can infer the rest.

     

    When people sell goods, they have the ability to warehouse their produce. I can sell my mangoes today or I can choose to hold on to them ’til tomorrow in the hope of a better price. When people sell a service, this is not possible. As a daily wage worker, I cannot carry forward my 10 hours of work from today and then do 20 hours for a higher realisation tomorrow. In general, therefore, services are far more perishable than goods. Their instant or near-instant perishability frequently translates to service providers being extremely vulnerable to extortionate price negotiations with buyers. This is where things begin to get really interesting. When the ‘perceived’ nature of a service becomes exceptionally rare, the price it commands becomes truly astronomical. A brilliant lawyer who wins suits for megacorporations and global telcos bills over a Million Dollars a week. We all pitch in, indirectly and sometimes directly, to pay a few exceptional, and exceptionally fortunate, cricketers eye-popping sums to bowl or bat. MJ, Elvis, Frank and Janis continue to weave musical (and commercial) magic from beyond the grave, their services having been warehoused to meet the needs of our hungry ears for years and years. Heck, even weight loss advisors called AM or VL pull down zillions to help you lose what you should never have gained. Most times, these incalculably precious eminences share a common secret sauce. Their raw material, which was admittedly of rare quality, has been honed and polished to a rich lustre by various players in the Media & Communications industry. They have in fact crafted the ‘perception’ of exceptional rarity that translates into astronomical price. They are the impresarios, the image-makers, artisans of myth, masters of smoke and mirrors. In a word, they are someone like you.

     

    If you were an extraterrestrial, say Ford Prefect, the galactic hitchhiker from Douglas Adams’s eponymously named trilogy in five parts, who happened to stumble upon the Indian M&C industry, what might you see? A bunch of talented creative minds building wonderful brand successes for their clients? Or a bunch of neurotic, insecure sales people unable to defend fair profit margins and constantly prostrating themselves before the extortionate buyer up the value chain from them?

     

    More likely the latter than the former, I have to say with the deepest regret.

     

    The very people who create images for their clients, thereby making them immune to the vagaries of elastic demand and endowing them with that ineffable je ne sais quoi, are the same people who have reduced their own business to a commodity-esque fish market.

     

    How did this come to pass? A friend worked for HTA Bangalore. Ivan Arthur, then NCD and already a legend of the industry, was visiting the office and decided to drop in on a Saturday morning. Said friend was toiling away getting press advert artwork pasted up in studio to hit material deadline for a Sunday Deccan Herald insertion. Ivan asked friend what she was doing in the office on the weekend. Friend meekly acknowledged demands of tyrant client who expected agency to be at his beck and call… around the clock. Ivan offered these three comments:

    Weekends are meant to regain the intellectual and emotional energy expended during the week, so that the professional can come back fresh and rarin’ to go on Monday.

    If you don’t respect yourself, why should anyone else?

    Abject surrender before the client is not only unjust to the agency; ultimately it is unjust to the client too.

     

    Read this metaphorically rather than literally and then address these questions to yourself. When the first agency offered to drop its commissions from 15 per cent of gross, (17.65 per cent of net billing) to some smaller number, the agency took a huge step back for the industry. When those commissions kept heading south for many years to come, a whole generation’s future in the industry was blighted by the long shadow of the small League of Damned Arbitrary gentlemen. I hasten to add that this kind of extortionate bullying of service providers was not just about agencies; the broadcasters succumbed to it too.

     

    No wonder then that as an industry, we have brought ourselves to this parlous place.

     

    We have cheapened ourselves.

     

    Paritosh Joshi was until recently CEO, Star CJ. He has been a marketer, a mediaperson and a key officebearer on industry bodies. He is Strategic Advisor, Ormax Media. He can reached via his Twitter handle @paritoshZero