Talent Travails on Telly

By Shailesh Kapoor

It’s about 25 years since the start of the satellite television industry in India. While 25 years is a long time, the industry would still qualify as being fairly young when benchmarked against more traditional sectors like FMCG.

One of the most interesting facets of a new or young industry is how it builds its talent pool in its early years. This aspect has been of particular interest to me for the television, film (even younger) and digital content (newborn) industries in India.

In the ’90s, in the first decade of the TV industry, talent pool creation was largely organic. While some senior hands from other sectors were hired at the top levels by most networks, especially the foreign ones, the bulk of the talent pool was created by hiring young people in the creative field, erstwhile working with ad films or features, often at assistant levels, or by hiring media planners and buyers to staff up the sales function in TV channels.

If one had to describe the overall feel of the talent pool in that first decade, they were a bunch of young and semi-maverick people passionate about working on something that was new and growing.

It’s difficult to say when exactly that phase ended and the next one started. It would have been somewhere in the 2001-2004 period. The next phase, which lasted for about seven to eight years, that is, till the turn of the decade, involved two key shifts. By now, media was becoming a lucrative option for senior resources in FMCGs, consumer durables and other such marketing-savvy sectors to consider. The top layers of several broadcasters witnessed entry of such “outsiders”.

The impact of the “outsiders” was evident in the processes and the marketing focus they brought in. The content creation side of the business, however, didn’t change much, and continues to operate much the same way even today. The failure of the “outsiders” to impact the way the production side works (not what they create, but how they work to create what they create) is probably the missed opportunity of this phase.

The second key shift in this phase was related to the geometric (not exponential) increase in the number of channels and hence the demand for talent. While senior hires in big networks happened from outside, the middle level witnessed a lot of demand and not even quality supply. Dangerously then, we saw promotions before they were due. Executives with less than a decade of experience, and not necessarily a glorious career backing them, were put in roles that they were just not ready for. Not that they knew it then, or for that matter, realise it even today.

As a result, there was a huge loss from the idea to execution stage, i.e., from the top levels to what goes out to the consumer.  Many network heads carried this frustration with them, of just not being able to get the next level to see where they are coming from.

This problem, if we can call it that, began to ease off around 2010, as the young lot that was promoted too early learned the ropes and grew with experience.

Now in the third decade, there are two talent challenges the industry is facing. One of them is the reverse of the demand problem from the last decade. With the number of new channels drying up, there are not that many jobs being created within the sector anymore. We see a lot of shifts between networks, but for someone to grow up the ladder is becoming increasingly difficult. There’s just not enough demand for senior level broadcasting jobs today.

The second challenge is one that digital poses. Many on the creative and the marketing side of the broadcasting business are being lured by opportunities that digital content could offer in the coming few years. There is also a sense of frustration with the status quo on GEC content, triggering the shift to digital faster than it would have happened otherwise. The next year will be a defining one for digital content in India. And how many make the transition from TV to digital content will be interesting to track.