MxMIndia

Tag: Chintamani Rao

  • What this standoff has done is to expose the weaknesses of the system, the better to be exploited by those better placed to do so, writes Chintamani Rao (Republished with permissions from The Hoot)

    Chintamani Rao: NBA vs Republic TV – Pot calling the kettle…?

    Apart from being a former Chairman of BARC, Chintamani Rao has been a veteran mediaperson – working in advertising for many, many years (37!) and later in the news broadcasting (six years) as also a stint at RK Swamy Media after which he based himself in Delhi NCR as strategy and media consultant. This article first appeared in The Hoot, and we are republishing it with permissions as part of our continuing coverage of English news channels boycott of BARC ratings. Read on

    It was inevitable. It was only a question of who would be first to pull the trigger, and when.

    Two years ago, almost to the day, I raised the red flag – even before BARC started publishing data. Asked in a Q&A with The Hoot about the watermarking technology to be deployed by BARC, I had said (in part) the problem with it is that the broadcaster controls the switch. If you’re disgruntled and don’t want your channel to be measured you can simply stop watermarking, and the system will not be able to read your channel. That will distort the picture, and a major network doing that could hold the whole system to ransom.

    Last week it happened. All English news channels turned off watermarking, and with that BARC’s ability to measure and report their viewership. All except Republic, that is, which was the cause of the action. The other English news broadcasters want BARC, or someone, to take action against Republic for multiple placement of the channel on distribution networks – having multiple LCNs, as it is termed.

    Let’s rewind a bit.

     

    “He that is without sin among you…”

    As Republic was gearing up for launch the word went round in the business that it had acquired multiple LCNs on several distribution networks. Perturbed, the News Broadcasters Association (NBA), of which Republic is not a member, wrote to BARC not to report its data. NBA also complained to TRAI.

    Republic went on air on Saturday, 6th May. (Saturday is a good day to launch, because BARC’s reporting week is Saturday-Friday and you get a full week of data from your very first week. Data for the week are published on the following Thursday.) Accordingly, data for Week 19 (6th to 12th May) were published on 18th May – and all hell broke loose.

    Republic was reported to have had, in its very first week, a 51% share of viewership of English news channels. Unthinkable, and unacceptable.

    Times Now, long the undisputed leader in English news, had been widely expected to crash when Arnab Goswami quit. Everyone watched keenly but  week after week it remained no. 1, to the utter surprise and frustration of its competition. Then Goswami came back on air, now as the face of Republic, and – lo! – promptly that channel appeared on top while Times Now slid to second place. Worse, the viewership of Republic was 80% higher than that of Times Now, and twice that of the next three combined. No ifs and buts: Republic was it.

     

    “Yes, the same India Today which had done the same thing two years ago, when Healines Today was rebranded and relaunched as India Today.”

    Meanwhile India Today TV also complained, to both BARC and TRAI, about Times Now too engaging in the same practice, of multiple LCNs. Yes, the same India Today which had done the same thing two years ago, when Headlines Today was rebranded and relaunched as India Today. According to a Chrome Data Analytics report at the time India Today TV was on dual frequencies on each of 70 cable networks, giving it an additional 22% reach. At a cost, of course: by some estimates, 50%  over its normal carriage fee.
    Nor were they shy about what they had done. Ashsih Bagga, CEO of India Today Group, was quoted commenting on it, and expressing his delight with the outcome in viewership and market share. Alas, the glory was shorlived: the channel was no. 1 for one week, before dropping back to its usual place in the pecking order. An expensive, if happy, week.

    Times Now did not deny India Today’s charge, only justified it as a “defensive manouvre”.

     

    “BARC chose to do nothing about either complaint – NBA’s against Republic or India Today’s against Times Now – and for very good reason.”

    BARC chose to do nothing about either complaint – NBA’s against Republic or India Today’s against Times Now – and for very good reason. They said they were aware of broadcasters engaging in this practice in the past too, and took the position that they “… measure viewership of channels basis their unique Watermark ID, irrespective of the platform the channel is available on or the number of instances within the platform.” And, quite rightly, that “BARC India is not the regulatory body for resolving issues concerning multiplicity of LCNs for a channel.” Unexceptionable, on both counts.
    In fact BARC’s policy already states that, “Regulatory issues pertaining to this, if any, would lie within the domain of the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting (MIB) and/or Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).”

    Reacting to what they saw as BARC’s inaction against Republic, all other English news channels stopped watermarking, thus effectively pulling out of the BARC system and rendering it unable to measure and report English news viewership at all.

    Now it is reported that TRAI will conduct an enquiry. Into what and to what end remains to be seen.

     

    Heads, they win; tails, we lose

    Matters are now rather interestingly poised. For all the sound and fury the anchors display on their nightly shows, English news is a very tiny genre in the overall context of Indian TV: less than 0.1% of total TV viewership. Even within the news category itself all of English news is only about 8% of the leading Hindi news channel, Aaj Tak – which itslelf is only about 9% of the leading Hindi GEC, Star Plus.

    So what does that imply for the current impasse?

    The most important reason for audience measurment is for advertisers  to know where to put their money. If the channel or the genre is important enough they manage without data because they cannot afford to miss the audience it delivers. That is what they did during the painful period of transition from TAM to BARC: they bought on the basis of old data.

    In this case, though, it’s not just the absence of current data: the whole category has been disrupted. Data up to Week 18 does not feature Republic, while data with Republic is available only for Week 19 and cannot be comapared with earlier weeks. So there is, in effect, no data at all.

    Nor is English news is central to any advertiser’s plans: it is just too tiny. There is probably not a single media plan in the country which would be disrupted in its absence. That is not to say that advertising on English news is useless: just that it’s not essential. And what it adds to a media plan – frequency, impact and delivering a focused audience – it does at a relatively high cost, getting as it does 22-25% of what advertisers spend on news channels for delivering a tiny fraction of the news audience.

    The affected broadcasters are caught in a cleft stick. Unless a knight in shining armour – the government, TRAI or the courts – charges in to their rescue, they have two choices: make some face-saving gesture, get back in, and risk having the Week 19 kind of data again; or stay out and risk advertisers pulling out in the absence of data. While they have acted as a subset of the NBA all of them are also members of the IBF, the biggest shareholder in BARC, and a couple of them are on its board. What they do have going for them is of course the clout of the news media, which can often induce matters to take an unpredictable turn.

    BARC, on the other hand, is not immediately affected. The largest part of its revenue comes from broadcasters, and of about 900 TV channels in India only 6 are in English news. Their broadcasters cannot afford to pull out of BARC fully because all of them have other channels, for whcih they need the data.

    BARC’s other source of revenue is media agencies, on behalf of advertisers, who can afford not to buy English news. This means the absence of data on English news will not materially affect the value and usefulness of BARC data to its subscribers, and therefore will not affect BARC.

    If TRAI does uphold the complaint against Republic and orders it to operate on a single LCN, it is highly unlikely that the broadcaster will snap to attention and comply: they are bound to fight any adverse ruling through all the appelate processes available to them. In other words, whatever Republic is doing or has done is not going to change in a hurry.

    For the present, then, BARC is safe, advertisers are unaffected, and it is the English news channels which have something to think about: they got themselves into this situation and they have to dig themselves out of it.

     

    But that is only for the present

    What this standoff has done is to expose the weaknesses of the system, the better to be exploited by those better placed to do so.

    First, that BARC can be held to ransom. This time it has been challenged by a small genre that does not materially affect it or its other stakeholders, but what’s been done once can be done again: next time by a single broadcaster or a group of them whose absence is keenly felt and forces BARC to the negotiating table.

    Second, the practice of multiple LCNs is out in the open. It’s not financially viable on an ongoing basis but is a useful way to get a temporary blip in ratings for the launch of a new show, for example. It distorts the data but BARC will – even if rightly – do nothing about it. So, unless there a law or a court ruling to prevent it, it’s here to stay.

    The advantage of a system run by a vendor – like TAM – is that the vendor has no role in the business except to provide data. They are answerable to the industry  and the survival of the system depends on their being able to keep the stakeholders satisfied.

    On the other hand, the problem with an industry-owned and –driven system like BARC is that the players have interdependent relationships outside of the measurment system and have conflicting stakes in the business. Worse, in the case of BARC the ones being measured not only control the system, but also individually have the power to opt out of it at will. That cannot be a sustainable situation.

    BARC as an entity is not responsible for the shenanigans of broadcasters, but those very broadcasters own (60 per cent of it) and drive it. They are the plaintiff, judge and jury. Unless it finds a solution outside the judicial system in which affected parties – which would most often be the constituents of its own shareholders – can approach an objective, independent body of third-party experts, the audience measurment ecosystem can look forward to the proverbial interesting times.

     

    Chinatamani Rao is a Strategic Marketing and Media Consultant living in New Delhi NCR. He is a former Chairman of BARC and has served on the IBF and NBA Boards.  He has headed Times Global Broadcasting and India TV as also RK Swamy Media Group, MAA Bozell, McCann after spending nearly 11 years at Ogilvy as Executive Director and earlier as Associate Director at Lintas for six years. He is a PGDBM from XLRI and graduated from St Stephen’s College, Delhi

     

    This article first appeared in The Hoot at http://www.thehoot.org/media-watch/media-business/nba-vs-republic-tv-pot-calling-the-kettle-10106. Republished with permission form the publisher and the writer. 

  • Can we effectively regulate media in India? Indeed, should the media be regulated? And by whom? Chintamani Rao discusses the issue

    What form of Regulation in India?

     

    Observer Research Foundation, a New Delhi-based think tank, held a seminar last week on Perspectives in Media Regulation: Lessons from the UK, with featured speakers from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, London. The question, as always, is, can we effectively regulate media in India? Indeed, should the media be regulated? By whom?

     

    By Chintamani Rao

     

    The on-going debate on media regulation is in many ways the stuff of the coffee house debates of the sixties, in which jhola-carrying intellectuals diagnosed the ills of the world and prescribed remedies, while the rest carried on running the world in their own ham-handed way.

     

    The best indication of this, at last week’s seminar, was perhaps in the presence – or otherwise – of a member of the broadcast regulatory body, TRAI. The hosts indicated their seriousness by having Dr Vijaylakshmi Gupta give the keynote address, obviously to set the Indian context before we heard about the UK. Dr Gupta indicated hers by reading out prepared platitudinous speech and then leaving immediately.

     

    And so the coffee house debate carries on….

     

    In a discussion on regulation on another occasion I wondered why the media have a say in whether they wish to be regulated: were the banking, or insurance, or telecoms or airline companies asked if they do? The Chairman of the News Broadcasting Standards Authority answered that was because the media is special, not like any ordinary business, and has a role of national importance. Unlike banks and insurance and…?

     

    If you break the broad regulation issue into its component parts, it comes down to two distinct aspects: ownership and content. Issues of ownership include both, the who? question- who should own the media; and the what? question – what they should be allowed to own, i.e., cross-media ownership.

     

    The ownership question has no real answers. The discussion at another seminar a few weeks ago was perhaps typical. A senior journalist who had recently had a fairly public falling-out with his corporate employers, was critical of non-media corporates owning media companies. He was also not in favour of media conglomerates; owner-editors; journalist-owners; and of government or political parties owning media. I said I couldn’t disagree with what he had said, and asked who then, in his opinion, should own the media. No answer.

     

    The point is not to find fault with this speaker. It is, rather, that this is an unresolvable issue, in which every answer raises fresh questions.  What is necessary is not to limit who may and who may not own, but transparency about who does. It calls, as with most things in India, not necessarily for new regulations but first for implementing existing regulations.

     

    The other aspect of the ownership question is cross-media holding: born of the concern that media conglomerates, through cross-media domination, can drivepublic opinion. That’s a theoretically sound concern, but in practice doubtful at two levels. First, it is questionable whether in the pluralistic environment that is India even the largest media conglomerate can actually drive public opinion.

     

    Second, what is the efficacy of such regulation? Even in the highly regulated and media-rich United States the media business is oligopolistic. And yet, going back to the first question, it is doubtful if any of the six dominant houses is in a position to actually drive public opinion.

     

    The real issue in cross-holding is, to my mind, not when a single company owns properties across print, TV, radio and the internet, but when a broadcasting network owns distribution channels. For a content owner to be in a position to control what gets to the viewer, and so be able to choke the pipeline for its competition, is a serious travesty of consumer rights. In India every major broadcasting network owns distribution platforms, the two biggest networks have collaborated in a joint ventureto distribute content, and there is no law to protect the consumer. That is a serious issue for the regulatory authorities to address.

     

    The real, vexed question is of content regulation. Can we? Indeed, should we? Self-regulation or statutory? And, all the while,a government that has been trying for five years to regulate audience measurement wants you to believe that it is committed to self-regulation in content! It is the same government that in its previous term tried to create a broadcast regulator who would be not a constitutional authority but be hired and fired by the government. The proposed structure also required each broadcaster to have on its rolls a Content Auditor who would screen content and tell the Editor what to drop or modify and – incredibly – inform the broadcast regulator if the Editor didn’t comply.

     

    The UK currently has no regulation of print media. The response of the press to the Leveson enquiry and the consequent government proposal is to resist any regulatory mechanism, which is to be expected. But it must be said, in fairness, that the News of the World scandal, though huge, was a ‘rarest of the rare’ case that was effectively exposed and dealt with swiftly, which is a great deal more than we can expect. Whether one NOTW should lead to from no regulation to statutory regulation is debatable.

     

    In the US, too, there is no regulatory mechanism – self- or government. It depends entirely on good practice. The Editor is responsible, and owners typically take a back seat on editorial decisions. Would an editor carry content prejudicial to the owner’s interests? Probably not, but in a robust media environment you can’t stop the rest of the world from seeing you.

     

    In India broadcasters, in particular, have made moves to self-regulation by setting up the News Broadcasting Standards Authority (NBSA) and, for entertainment content, the Broadcast Content Complaints Council, both under the aegis of the broadcast industry bodies. A necessary limitation of such self-regulation is that it is limited to the members of these bodies. In the case of news, that means 53 channels of 23 NBA member broadcasters. The other 150 known news broadcasters in the country are beyond the pale.

     

    The effectiveness of self-regulation is often questioned because, even if you don’t doubt their intent, self-regulatory bodies do not have the statutory authority to penalise offenders. Members themselves often don’t accept the rulings of the regulators they have created. Indeed, the first time the NBSA indicted a broadcaster the peeved member quit the NBA in protest.

     

    Dr David Levy of the Reuters Institute had an interesting take on the matter. Effectiveness of self-regulation, he said, is a function first of culture: far more than of legal guarantees.In other words, some of us are made that way, and some just aren’t. The implication that we are incapable of self-regulation may raise some hackles but let’s face it, that’s fundamentally true.

     

    The very idea of statutory regulation, on the other hand, is anathema. Those of us of a certain age have actually lived through it in its extreme form, nearly 40 years ago, and can’t begin to contemplate what it might be like in this multimedia age.

     

    So where does that leave us, between the devil and the deep sea?

     

    Giving statutory penal authority to self-regulatory bodies has its own set of issues.The only viable answer seems to be co-regulation. I see a system in which a self-regulatory body such as the NBSA conveys a verdict and recommends a penalty to a statutorily authorised one, such as perhaps the TRAI. If the statutory body does not agree with the recommendation, it must respond to the recommending body through a laid-down process, and the two come to an agreement.

     

    That media owners protest against any and all forms of regulation is not surprising: who wants to be regulated? Every time content is mentioned in the same breath as regulation, even a limit on advertising time, they get all excited about Article 19, freedom of speech, democracy, et al. While no one doubts the sanctity of our constitutional freedoms, there can be no such thing as unfettered freedom. The trouble is, the press think everyone should be accountable and subject to criticism and control – the legislature, the executive and the judiciary; indeed, both Church and State – except themselves.

     

    There is no perfect solution. The best solution is one that protects consumer interest, and that necessarily means some measure of control while enabling and protecting media freedom.

     

    Chintamani Rao is an independent marketing and media consultant. A former news broadcaster, he served on the boards of both the IBF and the NBA, and was involved in the creation of the NBSA.

     

     

  • That the ad agency has designated, informed people and institutional memory is only one of its advantages over a crowd. The other is that if you make bad decisions you can always blame the agency and fire it. You can't fire a crowd, says Chintamani Rao

    Guest Column by Chintamani Rao: No safety in numbers with Crowdsourcing

    By Chintamani Rao

     

    ‘Unilever to boost reliance on crowdsourcing with eYeka’ – News item

     

    “[Lowe] have created a very strong creative vehicle that’s extremely well defined and portable. But their work has created a problem for them, because it makes Peperami the obvious candidate for crowdsourcing.” That’s how a Unilever London spokesperson explained it when, two years ago, the company fired the advertising agency on Peperami, in favour of crowdsourcing.

     

    Some compliment! Can you see the agency head calling in the Peperami team? “Folks, I’ve just returned from lunch with John Client. Peperami is tracking superbly on every parameter. You’ve created one of those rare great brand properties that will stay with the brand for many, many years. Unilever have paid you the ultimate compliment: we’re fired. From now the public will make the ads.

     

    “Jean, pop the bubbly. I’m proud of you guys. You are our A Team, and here’s an A Team challenge for you. I am assigning you to our biggest Unilever brand: get fired on it within the year. A special Christmas bonus if you make it. Cheers, and more power to your elbow.”

     

    If the idea itself is strange, the outcome is bizarre. Unilever received 1,185 entries and selected not one but two submissions (Both of which came from laid-off advertising professionals: a copywriter from London and a former creative director from Germany. So much for the crowd.), and announced that they would combine the two ideas to make the new campaign. “We’re certain the two ideas will be a successful campaign,” said the Peperami marketing manager. That, from the company which taught us that every advertisement must be based on a “Single Selling Idea” – the first of the ten Unilever Principles of Great Advertising.

     

    Whether Unilever’s winning Advertiser of the Year at Cannes that year was because of Peperami or despite it we don’t know.

     

    Meanwhile, Kraft Foods in Australia crowdsourced the name for the new cheese variant of its iconic bread spread Vegemite, and chose – hold your breath – iSnack 2.0.

     

    “The name Vegemite iSnack 2.0 was chosen based on its personal call to action, relevance to snacking (I snack, get it?), and clear identification of a new and different Vegemite (2.0, wow!) to the original,” said a Kraft spokesperson. “We believe these three components completely encapsulate the new brand.” Consumers didn’t, apparently. Following a furore, Kraft rather tamely put out a list for people to choose from, and equally tamely changed the name to a blase Vegemite Cheesybite.

     

    Around the same time Frito-Lay in India sought ideas for new flavours of chips. To the credit of Frito-Lay it must be said that they weren’t chintzy – on the contrary, they generously spent more than they might have had they done conventional market research instead. For four shortlisted flavours they awarded a prize of Rs 5 lakh each – a total of Rs 20 lakh or over US$ 40,000, way more than Unilever London paid to get a new idea for Peperami. The prize for the ultimate winner was Rs 50 lakh (over US$ 100,000) and 1 percent of sales revenue.

     

    Frito-Lay were truly generous, but in any event, what they did was essentially to solicit consumer opinion on a new product, which might otherwise have been done by conventional market research. But meanwhile other marketers like GE, General Mills, Pepsi, Dell and Starbucks have been seeking everything from product and service ideas to, reportedly, inputs on agency selection and media placement.

     

    Crowdsourcing shops have come up which will brief the crowd and filter the solutions, as Idea Bounty did for Peperami. That’s awfully interesting. Suppose one day Lowe had told Unilever London, “You’ll be delighted to know we’ve increased the creative strength on your business. We’ve fired your entire creative team. Now, instead of being limited to a handful of people under our roof, we’ll put our briefs on your brands out on the Internet and get ideas from hundreds, if not thousands.” Might they have saved the Peperami account? I don’t know about you, but I can’t see a delighted client congratulating the agency on its farsighted initiative.

     

    Now Unilever has taken a big step in the direction of crowdsourcing, saying, “A key role for us as marketers is to create magic and to excite people with innovative ideas.” I always thought a key role for marketers and related professionals was to actually develop the ideas that create the magic, but perhaps I’m wrong.

     

    Proponents of crowdsourcing cite the ‘wisdom of crowds’, propounded by Surowiecki in his book of the same name. “I don’t think people realize how powerful the crowd can be when engaged on working on a good idea,” says one. Perhaps, but this is not the crowd working on a good idea; it is a multitude of individuals independently developing ideas. They’re not building on each other’s thoughts; there’s no cross-fertilization of thinking.

     

    Diversity, independence and decentralization are three of the four “elements required to form a wise crowd” that Surowiecki lists: “Diversity and independence are important because the best collective decisions are the product of disagreement and contest, not consensus or compromise.” But 1,185 responses to a brief from perhaps as many people working independently of each other do not constitute collective thinking, and are not the product of disagreement and contest.

     

    Surowiecki’s fourth element is aggregation: in this context, the marketing management of the company deciding – singly, collectively or sequentially – among the shortlisted submissions. So it is finally down to the quality of decision-making. If you decide on iSnack 2.0, it doesn’t matter whether the submissions come from the crowd through a crowdsourcing agency, or from known people through an advertising agency.

     

    That the advertising agency has designated, informed people and institutional memory is only one of its advantages over a crowd. The other is that if you make bad decisions you can always blame the agency and fire it. You can’t fire a crowd.

     

    The writer is a Strategic Marketing and Media Consultant

     

  • Sandeep Sharma to take over from Chintamani Rao as head of RK Swamy Media Group. Mr Rao to take on an advisory role in the group.

    Sandeep Sharma joins RK Swamy Media Group

    By A Correspondent

     

    The R K Swamy Media Group has appointed Sandeep Sharma, former head of sales and marketing at Times Global Broadcasting, as President. Mr Chintamani Rao, who held the position until earlier this week, is likely to move to another role within the group.

     

    Confirming the development, a spokesperson for the RK Swamy/Hansa group indicated that Mr Sharma joined the organization on Monday, March 26.

     

    Speaking to MxMIndia, Mr Sharma said he’s looking forward to leading the four companies under him – Media Direction, Hansa Media Services, Digital Direction and Hansa Outdoor and Hansa Media – to newer heights. “I have a great team working with me and we hope to grow in a big way,” he said, that his first priority to familiarize himself with all aspects of the group’s businesses.

     

    Mr Shama, a chemical engineer from IIT Bombay, has an MBA from the NMIMS, Mumbai. In a career spanning 22 years, he has worked with Times Global Broadcasting (as Senior VP – Sales and Marketing), at Star India (as VP – Sales and Business Head) and Lowe Lintas (VP, Unit Head).