MxMIndia

Tag: Media Matrix

  • The much reviled television has everything to do with who the young, exuberant and unstoppable woman is is and how she got here, writes Paritosh Joshi

    Paritosh Joshi: Saluting Rosa Parks

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    The American Civil Rights Movement of the ’50s that spilled over into the ’60s and in many ways continues to resonate in the US and around the world had an unlikely heroine. Rosa Parks, an African American woman boarded a bus on December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama. Buses had colour segregated seating but vacant seats were only available in the ‘Whites Only’ section. Rosa took a seat. A little later, the Whites section too got filled up. The driver asked Rosa to vacate her seat for a White passenger which she refused to do. In that moment of defiance, Rosa wrote her name in indelible ink into Civil Rights History.

     

    As we prepare to celebrate International Women’s Day today, it is instructive to ask what Civil Rights Indian Women have been able to wrest from the stubbornly patriarchal social order.

     

    The picture is still hideously ugly. While the indescribably brutal rape and murder of a physiotherapy student in Delhi late last year turned the spotlight on sexual violence, the incidence of such crimes in the Capital, and probably all across the country, has actually escalated since then. This should not come as a surprise. Gender violence has less to do with lust than with the fundamental power equations that define a society. A tipping point lies in the future, when a woman’s status in her home, family, community and society will no longer be subordinate to a man’s. The male gender, made insecure by this inevitability, will articulate its insecurity and impotence by ever more egregious violence.

     

    Do the media play any role, (other than sensationalising such crime and milking it for salacious value), in the gender equation?

     

    Have you read ‘Freakonomics’ by Steven Levitt, a UChicago economist and Stephen Dubner, a journalist at NYT? In the preface to the book, or its sequel, ‘SuperFreakonomics’ reference is made to an interesting study by academics from some Ivy League University about the impact of television on gender relations in North India. In essence, the study compared a whole range of women’s health and well-being variables between a village that had access to satellite television and a similar one that didn’t. The results shouldn’t surprise anyone. The television village handily won on everything from Infant Mortality, Sanitation, Infectious Disease incidence, Per Capita Income and even measures of women’s empowerment like their participation in gram panchayat work.

     

    Wait a minute. Haven’t we spent years labelling television content, and in particular, entertainment programming, reactionary, regressive, strengthening gender stereotypes and social inequalities and so on? How come this paradoxical result? My sense? There is no paradox here.

     

    Television began to make serious inroads into the average Indian home only after the arrival of cable TV on the cusp of the ’80s and ’90s. From the staid, some would say sclerotic, fare offered by Doordarshan over the previous three decades, the world of Cable & Satellite offered a welcome to a chaotic, colourful, boisterous world of news, information and entertainment that was free of sarkari fetters. Female characters started to move from decorative roles providing occasional aesthetic diversion to roles of meaty substance. To its credit, Doordarshan in those early days was no shrinking violet. To wit, Priya Tendulkar’s feisty Rajani in the eponymous serial and Kavita Choudhary’s defiant Kalyani in Udaan are still fresh in India’s memory. While these portrayals may have aspired to an ideal that still remains distant for most Indian women, a more interesting, even subversive change was to arrive a decade later.

     

    Smriti Irani as Tulsi in “Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi” and Sakshi Tanvar as Parvati in “Kahaani Ghar Ghar Ki” managed simultaneously to become role models for a majority and objects of revulsion and contempt for a minority that saw them as embodiments of everything that was wrong with gender relations in India. I submit, with the greatest humility, that neither the majority nor the minority really “got it”. The characters perched on the uneasy intersection of social orthodoxy and economic liberalism. The joint family appeared, prima facie, to be alive and kicking. Closer examination revealed irreconcilable contradictions and deep fissures that threatened to blow the lid off the superficial camaraderie and gloss. And at the heart of this maelstrom, barely keeping things in a semblance of order, were our female protagonists. Docile, even subservient in their deportment, they revealed themselves as the very pillars of their ‘Khandan’ or ‘Parivar’. Even as the leading male characters were all shown to have feet of clay and the shifty ethics reminiscent of the Mahabharata’s Yudhishthira as a losing gambler. In a feat of scripting sorcery, (All Hail, Ekta!), the meek didn’t merely inherit the kingdom of Heaven, they won and fostered it right here on Earth.

     

    A generation of girls that was in junior school when KGGK and KSBKBT packed our living rooms has now graduated from college and entered the adult world. This is a generation that remembers the victories and discounts the obsequiousness. This is a generation that is unapologetically ambitious, singularly assertive and unabashed about its sexuality. A small town upbringing is no deterrent to her aspirations. She too cut her teeth on the same, new mythology that her metropolitan counterpart did. Today she uses Social Media to telling effect, building communities, establishing positions (that are occasionally battle lines) and expressing love, longing, exhilaration, frustration, loss, liberation with scant regard for political (or any other) correctness.

     

    And like it or not, that much reviled television has everything to do with who she is and how she got here.

     

    To this youthful, exuberant, unstoppable woman, India’s contemporary embodiment of the defiant, rebellious Rosa Parks, my warmest greetings on International Women’s Day.

     

    Paritosh Joshi has been a marketer, a mediaperson and a key officebearer on industry bodies. He is developing an independent media advisory practice. His column, Media Matrix, appears on MxMIndia, usually on Thursdays

     

  • The real game was hardly the burly gladiators of the two teams engaged in organized mayhem. It was what happened during the advertising break

    Paritosh Joshi: 49ers lost the XLVIIth (but I’ll get over it)

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    Since my son moved to beautiful San Francisco, I have thrown my lot in with its sports fans. Back in October ’12, I exulted with them as they celebrated the SF Giants’ World Series victory, grabbing the World Series back after just a year’s gap. When, on February 3, 2013, the San Francisco 49ers squared off against Baltimore Ravens at the Mercedes Benz Superdome, New Orleans, in the finals of the National Football League, the Super Bowl, obviously I was rooting for them. What a game it was, with 49ers conceding a narrow 31-34 victory to the Ravens.

     

    But the real game was hardly the burly gladiators of the two teams engaged in organized mayhem in that Louisiana battleground. It was what happened during the advertising break, (and to be fair, the halftime show featuring Beyonce), that the 47th edition will be remembered for.

     

    Adult American males (TV time spent at nearly 3 hours) and females (2 hours and 30 minutes) are among the world’s most enthusiastic television viewers. While the emergence of Cable brought with it a huge growth in Pay TV, America’s Network operators: ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox; continue to depend primarily on advertising revenue. And the biggest stage for advertising, from sea to shining sea, is the most anticipated, most viewed television show every year; the Super Bowl.

     

    So you already knew all that. But you probably don’t know this: No one knows exactly how many people watched the event that night. It isn’t a state secret or anything, just that they haven’t finished watching it yet.

     

    Yes, the match was settled in the favour of the Ravens that evening itself but that isn’t all there is to measuring viewers, certainly not in the manner agreed between broadcasters and advertisers in the US. Both agree that many viewers postpone viewing from live play out to a later point for a wide variety of reasons impinging upon their viewing convenience and comfort. This has something, but not a whole lot, to do with the popularity of DVR devices. In fact, it goes all the way back to 1976 and the Victor Company of Japan (more popularly recognized by the abbreviated JVC – Japan Victor Corporation). In September ’76, JVC launched the VHS recorder and birthed a global entertainment revolution. A powerful feature that VHS recorders soon offered was their ability to be programmed to record one or more shows when they were unattended. If circumstances contrived to make you miss a show, you could now record it for later viewing. Without really meaning to, the VHS recorder marked a great watershed for television: the era of time-shifted viewing had arrived.

     

    While the initial impact on viewing habits was minuscule, VHS prices came down rapidly and soon a recorder graced every American living room. Even we in India weren’t unaffected. By the late 1970s, our great international trading entrepreneurs of the day – Mr H Mastan Mirza, Mr Sukur N Bakhia, Mr K Lala and Mr V Mudaliar come to mind – introduced India to the VHS revolution. This wide adoption was already starting to measurably impact viewing behaviour by the 1980s.

     

    BARB, the UK’s Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board was set up in 1981. Before its first decade was out, BARB turned its attention to time-shifted viewing and began to wire up VHS recorders in sample homes in addition to measuring on-schedule viewing.

     

    Brings me to an acronym that you would do well to learn now; you are going to be hearing it a lot. VOSDAL. Viewed On Same Day As Live. Self-explanatory really but here is the corollary. Measurement currencies now measure time-shifted viewing for seven days after the original show ran on the FPC (Fixed Point Chart). This is VOSDAL+7, the statistic now widely agreed to be fair measure of the total audience garnered by a show.

     

    Our own viewing behaviour has begun to change at an accelerating pace. DVRs, first introduced to the Indian consumer by Tata Sky in 2010 are now offered by all DTH operators and, with the mandatory rollout of Cable Digitalisation in the top four metropolises, by the major MSOs as well. Adoption cycles will be slow to kick in but prices will keep dropping driving penetration up.

     

    By the way, DVRs are by no means the only technology disrupting the viewing habit. The emergence of second, third and even fourth screens are metamorphosing viewing into a parenthetical “television” experience that shifts it both temporally and spatially.

     

    BARC – the Broadcast Audience Research Council will begin to take its first baby steps soon. While the easiest thing to do would be to continue along the trajectory already established by TAM, it should be clear to stakeholders on all sides that this would be suboptimal and, in the medium term, a significant handicap for the medium.

     

    It is imperative that BARC recognize the need for building a measurement framework that goes well beyond VOSDAL. It will take time to bring consensus around any VOSDAL+ position on the measurement currency but the time to get it started is now.

     

    In the meanwhile, I am betting that Super Bowl XLVII broke last year’s viewership record of 108.7 million viewers. Any takers?

     

    PS: Only when I started researching this piece did I discover that VHS stood for Video Home System. Did you know?

     

    Paritosh Joshi has been a marketer, a mediaperson and a key officebearer on industry bodies. He is developing an independent media advisory practice. His column, Media Matrix, appears on MxMIndia, usually on Thursdays

     

  • For the IRS, it's a case of damned if you do and damned if you don't

    Paritosh Joshi: Heads, you win. Tails, I lose

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    The IRS is in a strange situation. If there are sharp changes in any statistic, it is accused of unspecified mischief. If there are no changes, it is pilloried for being inaccurate.

     

    The criticisms usually come in these flavours.

     

    1 Sudden, big moves: Publications launch new editions or prune existing ones on a regular basis. While there is no decision required when an edition disappears, the IRS needs to have a consistent view on incorporating a new edition into the study. Publishers clamour for inclusion no sooner than the edition goes to market. IRS takes the view that as a continuously 4-quarters moving total, it needs a whole year worth of data before the edition can be reported. This is not necessarily bad for the publication either. Basic statistics demand that if the readers actually picked up in fieldwork are below the ‘Normality’ threshold, they cannot be reported. A year’s worth of fieldwork gives every serious participant i adequate time to promote their new offspring so that it shows up in the study. Conversely, editions may sometimes be launched only tactically to preempt a competitor and may disappear once the short term objective is delivered. They certainly don’t belong in the study. Big moves happen when such editions go past the 1-year Rubicon and get reported.

     

    2 Little or no change: This one usually stems from anecdotal observation. A publication may have mounted a particularly visible, or even successful marketing initiative leading to an apparently significant impact on its popularity. The IRS seems unimpressed when the next quarterly round emerges. Easy to explain. Let us assume that a particular saw as much as a 10% improvement in the brand’s performance vis-à-vis the preceding three quarters. If it had on an average, 100 readers in the previous three, it now has 110. This is what the maths would look like:

    (100 x ¾) + (110 x ¼) = 75 + 27.5 = 102.5

    In other words, the ‘smoothing’ effect of the Moving Annual Total reduces the large Δ of 10% to a small 2.5% perturbation in the final outcome.

     

    3 Change in the wrong direction: Related to the previous observation, anecdote suggests an increase/decrease while IRS shows a decrease/increase. This is hard to explain without having some sense of the apparent capriciousness of Probability and Statistics. A simple random sample of adequate size yields convergent estimates of population parameters. However, samples can occasionally produce estimates that may have a wide variance from the underlying population statistics. These samples aren’t wrong. They just happen to be the outliers fully compliant with laws of probability. Such a sample will reveal estimates that are counter-intuitive but that doesn’t make them incorrect. If you never spot a estimate that seems to be out of kilter, you should be more worried about the reliability and/or integrity of a sample-based exercise than if you do, every once in a while.

     

    4 Further analysis produces contradictions and conundrums: My response to this one? Don’t. The IRS reports only those numbers that pass the test of statistical propriety. When you start attempt to dice down whatever has been reported at minimal granularity, you are working with samples that fall below Normality and can no longer be used as consistent and convergent estimates of population behaviour. This, tragically, is practiced almost entirely in the breach by the alarmingly large number of strategists, planners and the like who appear to have no understanding of Statistics.

     

    In exactly three months, we shall have another IRS release and notwithstanding these meek entreaties, the same rotten tomatoes will be hurled at it again.

     

    Comes with the territory.

     

    Paritosh Joshi has been a marketer, a mediaperson and a key officebearer on industry bodies. He is developing an independent media advisory practice. His column, Media Matrix, appears on MxMIndia, usually on Thursdays

     

  • Faceless, identity-less statistics – or the very centre of all analytical exercises? It's time to give viewers their due

    Paritosh Joshi: Ratings need reinventing

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    A story on this site published in May 2012, “TAM to cross 10,000 Peoplemeter mark soon”, signalled TAM’s intention to substantially deepen its coverage as India’s television footprint continued relentless growth.

     

    It brought to mind a conversation I had with senior TAM personnel a few years ago where they explained to me the mammoth scale of the data processing task that tracking viewership involved. Here is a simplistic way of looking at it:

    1 2 3 4
    Homes Viewers (Age 4+) per home Average daily time spent (seconds) Unique data points (1. x 2. X 3.)
    10,000 4 14,400 576,000,000

     

    A single day’s dataset has very near 0.6 billion unique data points. Given that ratings are released weekly, the ratings tables that you read are compiled after compiling information from ~4 billion data points.

     

    Let us now throw in a comparison with another medium we are all familiar with: Facebook. In September 2012, Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s acquiring its 1 billionth subscriber. Over a half of these are active in a given week and post at a steady rate of 3 updates a day. That’s 1.5 billion updates a day or 10.5 billion a week.

     

    In both cases we are talking about really large numbers. The difference is what happens next.

     

    TAM crunches all the 4 billion data points down to 1 second granularity viewership trends for each channel that it tracks. That gives you, say, 400 channels being tracked. Facebook, taking a radically different view, starts trying to triangulate what are the likes, dislikes, interests and affiliations of each one of 1 billion individuals.

     

    In the TAM view of the world, individuals are faceless, identity-less statistics who vote with their eyes for different channels and shows. In the Facebook view of the world, individuals are the very center of all analytical exercises helping the company offer individually tailored suggestions for everything from whom they should seek out to make friends with through what they ought to be buying.

     

    The difference is telling. The legacy medium places the content at the centre of the analysis plan, the new age one, the consumer. While the first plan crunches a large dataset down to a relatively compact tabulation, the second embraces the concept of ‘Big Data’ where datasets going into the Exabyte order of magnitude (an Exabyte is 1 billion gigabytes) are routine.

     

    Ratings have been around from times when mechanized data processing was in its infancy and the first task before any database manager was reducing and compressing voluminous data into a few large chunks that could then be subjected to analysis. In the specific case of television viewership, an easy was to construct a histogram that plotted the number of viewers against each channel and program. This histogram would then be projected up from the sample to the population to yield an estimate of the percentage of people who watched a particular program: the rating. Since this was the only way in which we had ever seen television viewership being tracked and reported we found nothing odd or inadequate about it. Even today, when digital media enable us to target individuals with very precisely defined characteristics, we still don’t challenge the rather coarse approach that ratings take.

     

    So here is a thought: It is time for television measurement to place the viewer at the centre of the measurement system.

     

    The advent of digitization in India’s television landscape throws up an interesting possibility. If a return path from subscriber to distribution platform is natively available, as it is in digital cable systems or is bolted on using various modes of internet access, as it is in DTH, it becomes possible to know continuously what channel the set top box is tuned to. Techniques like Data Fusion and Ascription (dealt with in a previous column that you can find here) make it possible to marry set top box data with respondent level Peoplemeter data thus magnifying it to large digitally connected populations, within defined levels of statistical error. It is now possible, provided we already have access to cable or DTH operators’ subscriber lists, to develop very good estimates of the viewership behaviours of individual consumers.

     

    In effect, we can tell, within defined levels of error, what an individual in a digital cable or DTH home consumes on television through the day. We now have a view that is viewer centred rather than channel/programme centred. This is where the ‘Big Data’ approach must come in. The massive datasets that are born of the union of Peoplemeter and Set Top Box data need Big Data tools to be managed sensibly. Mining the datasets using these tools can yield an unprecedented level of textured understanding and individually addressable propositions.

     

    And given that digital distribution platforms now have the ability to push messages and suggestions to the viewer, just like online media do, we can use such insights to deliver unique marketing messages, whether for broadcast content or for client brands.

     

    Come on then, BARC, put that viewer at the centre.

     

    Paritosh Joshi has been a marketer, a mediaperson and a key officebearer on industry bodies. He is developing an independent media advisory practice. His column, Media Matrix, appears on MxMIndia, usually on Thursdays

     

  • For a world grown fearful of the digital domain as a hotbed of intellectual piracy, Twitter was a telling contrast

    Paritosh Joshi: In praise of Agora Redux

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    If you have not heard of Dick Costolo yet, here is a prediction. You will. Soon.

     

    We will circle back to Mr Costolo soon enough but let me first offer you a vision of utopia. A place where the humble and the mighty are subject to the exact rules and restrictions. Where anyone can enlist anyone else’s help. Where acts of unalloyed altruism are not exceptions but commonplace. Where creative ideas are amplified and mighty causes ignite from small embers of righteous anger. Where the world, and your school/college/office cohort can all be debating clubs, often simultaneously. Where ideas blossom into enterprise and inequities into social upheavals.

     

    Unless you really have been living under a rock, these last few years, you know what I’m talking about.

     

    Twitter.

     

    I am generally an early adopter of major online services. To wit, HoTMaiL as it was originally christened, launched in July 1996 and my account dates back to October 1996. Facebook opened up to anyone with a valid email address on September 26, 2006 and I was there just a day before it became 10 months old, on July 25, 2007. By those standards, I was a real laggard getting to Twitter, only in its 31st month in January 2009. Having got there, it was not apparent to me what good a pretty basic service that just allowed you to post 140 characters at a time, 140 characters, mind, not 140 words, might do.

     

    While a large number of tweeters used their own names, there were plenty of intriguing, unusual ‘handles’ that others sported. Ashton Kutcher, then famously married to Demi Moore (the whole ‘cougar’ thing) was @aplusk. Amitabh and son went by @SrBachchan and @juniorbachchan respectively. Madhu Menon, the writer chef from Bangalore was @madmanweb. If @chetanbhagat used his own name, an anonymous young satirist sent up the celebrity author under @satanbhagat. Other handles referenced puns, double entendre and wicked wordplay. A great candour seemed to be at work here, with handles offering windows into people’s self-perceptions. A wit quipped, “On Facebook you tell white lies to people who are supposedly your friends. On Twitter, you share your innermost thoughts with absolute strangers”. When you have no fear of being judged, you are free from inhibition.

     

    Soon, a second aspect emerged strongly. Everyone wanted to share something. It was a worldwide ‘Show and Tell’. From Christopher Hitchens’s unapologetic, even militant, atheism and Paul Krugman’s disestablishmentarian views on US budget deficits through urban legends about the nature and history of Adam’s Bridge all the way through gambolling kittens and precocious puppies; even a cursory dip into the Twitter ‘timeline’ was guaranteed to yield at least a shiny bauble and often, a genuinely lustrous gem. A global team of prospectors was mining and panning the unfathomable vastness of the Internet, and giving away the nuggets they extracted.

     

    For a world grown fearful of the digital domain as a hotbed of intellectual piracy, Twitter was a telling contrast. Easy as it might be to filch and republish a 140-character tweet – and there were those who did that to be sure, most regulars would acknowledge another’s authorship by ‘retweeting’ (abbreviated to RT’ing) the original post. If compulsions of length or a desire to annotate resulted in an edit, this would be evident in ‘modified retweet’ or MT. RTs and MTs would occasionally yield a whole torrent of responses resulting in Twitter ‘trends’. Some might just be flighty memes enjoying their few volatile moments in the sun, others would presage a zeitgeist that was just rubbing its eyes and waking up. It made me think of tuning forks used in Physics laboratories. A fork tuned to the same note, even if it was in a different octave, would spontaneously begin to ‘sing’ when a sibling was struck. Twitter was a resonance amplifier.

     

    As adoption grew across geographies, age groups, social classes and cultures, unlikely interactions became commonplace. Conversations that began in the virtual world became so stimulating, the interlocutors frequently sought each other out in the physical too and the tweetup was born. This was one heck of a potent seed. Whole Arab Springs were ushered in by an extreme extrapolation of the idea. Twitter was a cohort catalyst.

     

    I often use the analogy of various forms of cutting instruments when talking about the need for a rich vocabulary in whatever language we use for expressing our thoughts. A limited vocabulary can still convey the intent but in only its broad contours. Such a vocabulary is like a woodcutters axe. It can hack, coarsely, at meaning. A wide vocabulary is like a scalpel or a sculptor’s knife. It can make precise surgical incisions or carve intricate Madonnas and Apsaras from marble blocks. The extreme frugality of 140 characters placed in the hands of the uncouth became a bludgeon, even as it turned into a purifying essence for sophisticated tweeters like @stephenfry and @bhogleharsha.

     

    And so back to Dick Costolo and his speech, which if you hadn’t clicked that link at the top of this piece and heard it already is also available here. Mr. Costolo likens Twitter to the Agora, the centre of the community in ancient Greece. It’s a longish oration but if you thought this article made some sense to you, the hour you spend hearing him will be very rewarding. I promise.

     

    Think of this as a really long tweet. Let’s hear it from you now.

     

    Paritosh Joshi has been a marketer, a mediaperson and a key officebearer on industry bodies. He is developing an independent media advisory practice. His column, Media Matrix, appears on MxMIndia on Thursdays

     

  • With shockers in the news every second day, the question arises – does media feed the frenzy? Paritosh Joshi takes a closer look

    Paritosh Joshi: Eternal Vigilance – The Price of Freedom

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    Twice last week we have been shaken to the very core of our being as unspeakable horrors unfolded, in a distant commuter town in Connecticut and then right here at home on a bus in Delhi. Anger, indignation, frustration, desire for vigilante leveling of scores outside the criminal justice system, fear, sorrow, resignation… they have all run their predictable, grim course as people vent a deluge of emotions that inevitably arise in response.

     

    There’s a subtext to the discourse that we cannot, even dare not afford to miss. In both instances, the media and their portrayals: of gun culture in one instance, attitudes toward women in the other; are being identified as a factor in amplifying and even glamourising criminal dysfunction. Anguished voices in digital forums are pointing at how a deranged mind of a bright if introverted high school student may have sought out his gruesome final fifteen minutes of media glory in a schoolyard massacre. Or how Indian films and television shows don’t merely condone ‘eve teasing’ but encourage it, thus building a slippery slope from where descent into the most perverted sexual crime is an inevitable consequence.

     

    What compounds the felony, in popular perception, is that the media are seen to be doing this driven solely by the greed for more eyeballs, even if it is at the cost of taste or common decency.

     

    Which brings me to a theme that I have dwelt on before and will continue to belabor, ad nauseam if need be, until things begin to improve. The theme of responsible self-regulation.

     

    Thomas Hobbes, John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were among the earliest philosophers to develop the theory of Social Contract. The theory attempts to explain why an individual in human society is prepared to surrender some of her individual liberties to become a part of a governed collective that in return protects her other rights and freedoms. The idea develops quite intuitively, predicated around the permanent vulnerability of an individual outside of the collective to all sorts of perils, natural and man-made, and how joining the covenant instantly trumps a large majority of them. Extending this Social Contract idea, the Media belong to, and are intended to serve, the community in which they operate and to which they must perforce surrender a few of their untrammeled rights in order that they retain most of them. If the Media are seen as engaging in dysfunctional behaviour, they open themselves up to the charge of defying the Social Contract and can be penalized by being docked all their rights and privileges within the democratic polity of the day.

     

    A particular example of Media delinquency is on display when horrors, such as those of recent memory, are squeezed for all they offer by way of ghoulish ‘entertainment’. We all remember the classic but usually entirely rhetorical “Is bhayanak apatti ke baad aap kya mehsoos kar rahe hain?” type question asked to unwary and naive survivors of disasters. Even in the current events cited above, the victim’s and the perp’s relatives have already been sought out and interviewed at a stage when their lives have abruptly upended most cruelly.

     

    I see tokenism too. A few media houses have organized public vigils and little quasi-political rallies where they will have plenty of ‘grief’ on display, complete with slogans, banners and similar appurtenances that need to be worn only so as to demonstrate bnafide intent. This is not going to cut it.

     

    In fact, nothing less than a public mea culpa by the Industry as a whole particular issued by the leading News and Entertainment broadcasters, followed by an unequivocal commitment to introspect on and develop prescriptions for what ails their ethical systems, will suffice in the court of public opinion.

     

    What if no such acknowledgement is forthcoming?

     

    Well then, start preparing yourselves for that most unfortunate and liberty-destroying outcome: a government-appointed and -empowered media watchdog.

     

    Paritosh Joshi has been a marketer, a mediaperson and a key officebearer on industry bodies. He is developing an independent media advisory practice. His column, Media Matrix, appears on MxMIndia on Thursdays

     

  • The strength of the Indian SEC is attested to by its utility and durability over the last quarter century, but it may finally be past its 'best by' date. Enter, the NCCS

    Paritosh Joshi: Open Secret: The New Consumer Classification System

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    How many times a day do you use a phrase beginning “SEC A…”? Yes, dozens. Not surprising either. You are in the business of Media & Communications in India and you have spent absolutely years hearing and using SEC.

     

    Socioeconomic Classification has a storied history as a major tool of market research. SEC, as it is universally abbreviated has several advantages over predecessor systems that were typically based on personal or household income. For one, most respondents have a variety of reasons to be economical with the truth in reporting it. The more wealthy will tend to damp it down, the less fortunate inflate it. For another, it has long been known that income by itself has little predictive value in understanding buying and consumption behaviour. Marketers, market researchers and other social scientists, confronted with the inadequacies of income based systems have long sought, and long been eluded by, the perfect system that can explain consumer behaviour. They began to sense promise when they examined the Chief Wage Earner’s (CWE’s) occupation, though. It became clear that people of similar occupation and occupation level had more in common with one another than those that were dissimilar. Systems evolved that were predicated exclusively on CWE’s occupation. The UK, by way of example, evolved the NS-SEC (National Statistics- Socioeconomic Classification). Some countries; India was among the pioneers; went further, developing systems that used two classification variables. Our system used the CWE’s Occupation and Education to determine the socioeconomic class to which a household belonged.

     

    The strength of the Indian SEC is attested to by its utility and durability over the last quarter century, the system having been launched by the Market Research Society of India (MRSI) back in the mid 1980s.

     

    But here’s the bad news. It is finally past its ‘best by’ date. And nobody has told you.

     

    For the last few years, researchers and statisticians have found it ever harder to explain observed behaviour with the SEC. This triggered a joint exercise between the MRSI and the Media Research Users Council (MRUC), the joint-industry body that publishes the Indian Readership Survey to develop a system to replace the SEC. The joint exercise required a lot of very talented analysts and statisticians to test a range of alternative structures using single or multiple classificatory variables to dice the data. One candidate, the winning candidate, paired Education of CWE with Durables Ownership. A pre-specified list of 11 assets is presented to a respondent and all that the system needs is not the specific items ticked but the number of items ticked. Hard is it might appear prima facie to believe this might have some practical application, you end up with a system with very good discriminating ability. The base dataset used to test the validity of all models in reckoning was successive rounds of the Indian Readership Survey. Voila! The New Consumer Classification System (NCCS) was born.

     

    Now here are some cool things about the NCCS.

     

    It is truly Pan India, covering urban and rural audiences. Unlike SEC that was only for urban India.

     

    It discriminates the most premium audiences much more sharply than the predecessor.

     

    It is naturally adaptable. If the current list of 11 durables is no longer able to discriminate in a few years, it will change the list. Indeed, the system is committed to revisiting the list with a pre-specified periodicity.

     

    While the IRS has now started publishing its tables classified both by SEC and NCCS, very few users seem to have actually started looking critically at the NCCS tables. Don’t you want to be the early adapter?

     

    Paritosh Joshi has been a marketer, a mediaperson and a key officebearer on industry bodies. He is developing an independent media advisory practice. His column, Media Matrix, appears on MxMIndia every Thursday

     

     

  • Why do we still persist in thinking that channel brands can be all things to all people?

    Paritosh Joshi: Channel brand or Programme brand?

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    In my early days in broadcasting, I would frequently wonder about this very question, mainly because I saw plenty of media weight put behind individual shows and nearly nothing on the channels that housed them. This may not have been strange by itself but for the suggestion I heard frequently about how shows would perform differently depending upon the ‘platform’ on which they ran, said platform connoting the channel.

     

    The issue came back earlier today when I read about the sale of advertising inventory for Super Bowl XLVII topping $ 225 million. Small explanatory note for those not particularly interested in American sporting traditions. The Super Bowl is the Championship game of the American Football tournament conducted by the NFL, the National Football League. The 47th finals will be played on February 3, 2013 in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome, New Orleans, Lousiana. It is the biggest sports event by far of the US sports calendar and attracts major advertising campaign launches including the legendary launch commercial for Apple’s Macintosh computer during Super Bowl XVIII, January 22, 1984. (Stop already. The punters are getting impatient).

     

    Here’s the interesting twist. The event does not belong to a single broadcaster but, since 2008 when Fox carried it, actually rotates between Fox, NBC and CBS in a three-year cycle. XLVI was NBC, XLVII will be CBS and with XLVIII, it will be back at Fox. None of this rotation makes the smallest whit of a difference to Super Bowl.

     

    Cast your mind elsewhere. KBC has run on two major networks. “Friends” and a number of other marquee shows have sometimes been on two networks at the same time albeit with different seasons. Audiences have supported these shows with consistent enthusiasm. There may be a small ‘platform’ effect but in the main, these shows seem to be agnostic to it.

     

    In the meanwhile, another phenomenon is playing out in the world of television, the effective disaggregation of channel content. DVRs are an important spur to this but even sans recorders, consumers also enjoy access to their favourite content online. Piracy it undoubtedly is, but try saying that to a consumer who searches Google for Balika Vadhu Episodes and finds over 4 million results on YouTube.

     

    So how do channels remain brands in the future? Give up the obsession with “General” anything. Brands are about a single-minded commitment to delivering a particular consumer benefit. If you are a comedy channel, well then, deliver comedy. Golf? Cooking? Action? You get the point. These are the kind of brands where the viewer can return to time after time with certainty of finding a particular type of content that she is looking for. Not to mention that these channels don’t need to depend excessively on high cost, big brand shows so long as the content delivers the goods.

     

    The entire evolution of Cable TV in the US, in massive contrast to the legacy Networks: ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox; is in how they have moved to carving up the market along ever tighter benefit propositions. I am particularly fond of a Fox Sports specialized channel, Fuel TV. It does content on only seven extreme sports: Skateboarding, Snowboarding, Wakeboarding, Motocross, Surfing, BMX Biking and UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship). None particularly expensive to source, all with small, committed and substantially overlapping audiences. Just the kind of audience-content combination that can build a tight brand-consumer relationship. And what a wonderful job Fuel TV has done to achieve just that.

     

    So why do we still persist in thinking that channel brands can be all things to all people?

     

    Paritosh Joshi has been a marketer, a mediaperson and a key officebearer on industry bodies. He is developing an independent media advisory practice. He can reached via his Twitter handle @paritoshZero

     

  • Broadcasters' abject pusillanimity and advertisers' cussed monomania has made it an awful place where perhaps media agencies can help clear the mess, writes Paritosh Joshi

    Paritosh Joshi: Advertisers their own worst enemies?

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    If you have been keeping track of estimates of the television advertising market over the last several years, using FICCI Frames reports or Media Partners Asia publications or any one of a gaggle of consultant and investment banking firms’ projections, you would cite a year-on-year growth rate of anywhere between 7 and 15% for the last half decade.

     

    If there was an empirical way of verifying this; there isn’t, by the way; the actual numbers would probably fall within this range. Which brings us to a simple question. Is this rate of growth good, bad or terrible? To answer this question, you need another data point. How has the footprint of television grown over this period? When I joined the industry in 2005, conventional wisdom as well as empirical surveys held that India had about 80 million TV homes.

     

    The same sources also suggested that this number was growing by upwards of 7 million homes every year. This growth estimates reconciles fairly well with the latest estimates: over 130 million TV homes now. During this period, the GDP Real’s as distinct from Nominal growth rate , barring the last couple of years, has been in the high single digits. The Nominal growth rate, that doesn’t correct for inflation, has stayed in the teens.

     

    Another way of putting this is as follows. TV households have very nearly doubled their Real incomes and more than doubled Nominal incomes during this period. And the number of TV households has itself grown over 60%. Aggregate all this up and you can reasonably infer that the economic opportunity represented by TV homes, which is after all what advertisers are after, has well nigh tripled during this period. In brief then: TV advertising revenues doubled. Economic opportunity that the advertising chases tripled.

     

    That should settle the question about the quality of the advertising revenue growth rate rather unequivocally- it has been terrible.

     

    And I haven’t come to the bad news yet, but stay with me a moment.

     

    A very large proportion of the revenue growth has come not from better yields or systematic price corrections. It has come from a steady expansion in advertising inventory sold by the broadcasters. Since 2004, the Cable Act places a cap on permissible advertising inventory for a licensed TV channel at 10+2 minutes per programming hour; this to be comprised of 10 minutes for commercial advertising and 2 minutes for channel promotion. In actual fact, and surely you have noticed this every time you watch TV yourself, channels routinely run much more advertising than that. I could name genres that go as far as half an hour for every programmed hour.

     

    However it wasn’t always like this. It got here by the proverbial slippery slope. Starting with generally high compliance with the stipulation at the outset, a given broadcaster might find herself in the situation of having to increase revenue but not muster the courage to secure it by increasing prices. Instead, the broadcaster might say to herself, “hey, let’s slap on a couple of extra 30 seconds spots every hour at the same prices. We will get the revenue we need and no one need be any wiser, after all even the viewer is scarcely likely to notice”. That unpleasant trick called JND – the Just Noticeable Difference – was used repeatedly in its most egregious form, to slice out more and more content time and replace it by a cancerous expansion of commercial time. And the consumer, not being brain dead, was noticing. The broadcaster chickened out of the hard decision and the consequences weren’t pretty.

     

    What happened to the advertiser who refused to pay a modest and fairly earned price increase? His commercial started out in a great place, a 3 BHK you might call it in Mumbai residential terminology but was squeezed, in agonizing progression into a I BHK, a studio, a 1 room chawl, a Dharavikholi and finally a dugout between the platform and the tracks. Eventually, the advertiser’s relentless focus on Efficiency squeezed every last smidgen of Effectiveness out of the commercial, turned it into roadkill. Advertisers scripted their own misery, if somewhat indirectly.

     

    We are in an awful place today. Broadcasters’ abject pusillanimity and advertisers’ cussed monomania has left both in an abyss. Neither appear to have the  gumption or the clarity of thinking that will enable them to emerge from it. So let me thrown down the gauntlet to the third participant in this daisy chain, the media agency. As the intermediary in the transaction, you should most clearly see the trouble we are in. And prescribe the remedy which is so obvious.

     

    Diwali is the season when we clear clutter and cobwebs and give our homes a fresh, cheerful lick of paint. Isn’t it time to do just that to our advertising inventories?

     

    Paritosh Joshi has been a marketer, a mediaperson and a key officebearer on industry bodies. He is developing an independent media advisory practice. He can reached via his Twitter handle @paritoshZero

     

     

  • If you have an idea that will make sense to someone, express it clearly. Producers accept and even embrace the endless variations in the tapestry called humanity

    Paritosh Joshi: No money to buy media? Make your own

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    I advise a startup in the Personal Finance space. Like many businesses at a similar stage, their ambitions are running ahead of their resources. An area of particular antsyness is the inability to advertise their service.

     

    It is time to stop complaining and start acting. I mean that literally.

     

    act·ing/ˈaktiNG/ noun: The art or occupation of performing in plays, movies, or television productions.

     

    But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Back up a bit then.

     

    On more than one occasion this column has spoken of bought, earned and owned media. Indeed, just last week, you read about what Felix Baumgartner was really doing – creating a large, owned media opportunity for Red Bull.

     

    Now it is one thing for a large and successful multinational to stage such an expensive production so that it can communicate its brand story to millions of current and potential customers but that is clearly not what the wee business I advise can do. Which shouldn’t come in the way of building the audience it needs.

     

    There’s this thing called the internet. Um, I almost forgot. You are reading this on that very thing, aren’t you? And Mr. Rajan Anandan told us last year that we are on course to have 300 million Internet users in India by 2014, up from 100 million when he made his prediction in September 2011. Tens of millions of these users regularly access YouTube and Facebook. Use them right and you have all sorts of possibilities staring at you right there.

     

    Thanks to my kids, one of my regular destinations on YouTube is Smosh. Get this. The boys who started it in 2005 were 18 years old at the time. At 25, they run a channel with 5.6 million subscribers and 1.8 BILLION video views to date. For comparison, Lady Gaga’s channel has a mere 1.8 million subscribers. Difference? Smosh wasn’t built on the back of the financial and marketing budgets available to a Universal Music imprint called Interscope.

     

    Now it is true that from their very first parody take on Pokémon, Smosh was making some rather impressive video but the real secret of their success was the endless amplifying power of the meme. Cultural anthropology is, if grudgingly, accepting memes into mainstream thinking. On dictionary.com, a meme is defined thus: “a cultural item that is transmitted by repetition in a manner analogous to the biological transmission of genes”.  How many years have they been around? For as long as human civilization has, it would be fair to say but with the caveat that, thanks to the internet, their speed and power are at levels impossible to imagine even 10 years ago. A meme is a contagion. Unlike biological contagions that need physical transmission of a vector via a host to a recipient, memes leap from mind to mind via digital connections at the speed of light.

     

    So you are not Smosh. Do you still have a chance at doing this meme thing? Let me introduce to you the ‘long tail’. For long, the world had to live with only a few options and a lot of people being compelled to make all sorts of accommodations to adjust to these compromises. No longer. Producers accept and even embrace the endless variations in the tapestry called humanity. On its part, the great god Google fulfils the obscurest wish by putting supply and demand together.

     

    Back to YouTube and amateur video. If there is one common theme that I find running through compelling amateur video it is this: authenticity. If you have an idea that will make sense to someone, express it clearly. Pat Condell is, depending upon your position, a venomous racist or brutally candid, but armed with nothing more than a simple video camera and with a blank white wall for a backdrop, he has scored over 43 million views- and counting. (You’ll find an extreme example of authenticity here: Jazz for Cows).

     

    Happily, the power of authenticity does not stop just with getting the initial viewers for such content. Social media, or at least Twitter, are informed by the same extensive use of authenticometer. Honest content carries a warm aroma of being authentic. Generate an honest video. Upload to YouTube. Tweet and ask, humbly, for retweets. And be prepared to be pleasantly surprised. After that, of course, it is the power of the idea and if it will become a meme, at least for the precise audience to which it is addressed.

     

    Which is why I said, stop complaining and start acting.

     

  • Agencies, which splintered into creative and media specialist entities over a decade ago, earn the bulk of their income from fees and incentives and almost nothing from media commission. And yet, the commission doesn't stop

    Paritosh Joshi: Agency Commission – an anachronism that must be retired

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    There is an advantage in writing in column that only you, my dear solitary reader, read. I can say well nigh anything, no matter how controversial and get away with it!

     

    The title is up there, you’ve read it and must now wonder what it is that I am really driving at. Fikar not, as an old uncle used to say, all will be clear.

     

    But first, a little history.

     

    The idea of a commission agent is old and well established in the annals of commerce and commercial law. A commission agent acts as an intermediary on behalf of a principal, buyer or seller of a good or service, and earns commission based on transactions concluded. Advertising agents emerged in 19th century USA to sell inventory on behalf of newspapers to businesses interested in placing advertising. This arrangement developed as newspapers had no other modality at hand to sell advertising space, their personnel being devoted principally to creating and publishing the product. Observe the nomenclature. Not brand or marketing agents but advertising agents. Advertising was a product on offer by the newspapers. While several advertisers crafted their own advertising communication, there were always those who did not have the creative flair to and sought the agent’s help. Creative execution that we identify as almost central to the advertising agency was, incredible as this sounds, a capability that arose to fill an extant gap. Considering that the agent would only earn commission on advertising actually published in the principal’s newspaper, there was a real incentive for the agent to do whatever it took to get a client in, including producing the creative material, at little or no cost to the advertiser, given that the main income was being derived from the newspaper.

     

    As advertising grew and the creative task expanded in scale and complexity, there was a progressive realignment in the role played by the agent, shifting its primacy from the seller- the newspaper, to the buyer- the advertiser. Strangely enough, the commission system worked so well that it wasn’t considered necessary to change it. Newspapers would bill advertisers an amount grossed up for the commission due to the agent. The agent, having collected against the invoice, would retain 15 percent as advertising commission and pay 85 percent to the newspaper.

     

    You might think that this “commission agent for advertising” arrangement belongs to some prehistoric period and that would be wrong. As late as the 1990s, many major newspaper groups, at least in India, did not have an in-house, advertising sales team.

     

    When media choices were few and advertising targeted local audiences, this arrangement worked commendably well. As brands began to grow across broader swathes of the market, audiences could no longer be covered by a single publication and agencies had to assemble plans involving multiple outlets or platforms.

     

    This is the world of marketing that we all know well. Multiple media options, brands and audiences that must be mutually matched to deliver optimal results for all the constituencies in an efficient, and effective, manner. Clients, who ultimately must pay the bills, took the agencies toward compensation systems driven more and more by actual in-market brand performance and less and less by standard commissions. The standard commission supposedly earned by agencies on media spends was seen as a large discount available as a right to advertisers who wasted no time in ignoring it completely and paying agencies just enough against media bills to actually settle up the media owners’ 85 percent, leaving little or nothing by way of commission. It was not exactly a state secret but – and this is surely not something that media owners should be proud of – they turned a nelson’s eye to a value destroying transaction happening beneath their very noses.

     

    The process is now complete. Agencies, which splintered into creative and media specialist entities over a decade ago, earn the bulk of their income from fees and incentives and almost nothing from media commission. And yet, the commission doesn’t stop.

     

    Time we gave it a decent burial.

     

    Paritosh Joshi has been a marketer, a mediaperson and a key officebearer on industry bodies. He is developing an independent media advisory practice. He can reached via his Twitter handle @paritoshZero

     

  • Recent years have seen the Indian Broadcasting Foundation learn to pull together and several baby steps have been taken in this new spirit of bonhomie

    Paritosh Joshi: An ‘Upfront’ season for India

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    For seven years, I had the proud privilege of working for News Corporation. Now, while the visible face of any media company is the content that readers, viewers and listeners consume every day, the invisible aspect which converts all these consumers into revenue is every bit as important to their success and sustainability. You might win Pulitzers and Emmys faster than you can build cabinets to show them off in and yet go ti..(oops), belly up. Conversely, you may ignore those pyrrhic victories and go after what matters to the shareholders: a sensible return on their capital. Before you turn the ferocity of your righteous indignation upon me, reminding me of the social responsibilities that the Media bear, let me reassure you that we are of a mind. However, even for the successful performance of its magisterial role as the Fourth Estate, the Media first must be solvent. Friends again?

     

    Back to that Newscorp theme. In 2008, I decided to figure out how ‘Upfront markets’ actually function and to watch and learn, secured an invitation from the Fox Cable cousins in their lofty Manhattan perch at 1211, Avenue of the Americas. American television businesses work on an annual creative cycle that kicks off, right after the slow summer, in September. Content teams are ready with their lineups for the year to follow and advertising sales teams prepare to take their shiny new inventories to market. The exercise is conducted with much pomp and ceremony. Client and Media Agency grandees from across the country assemble for a week of hectic negotiation, and even more hectic partying, in the Big Apple. Fox, ABC, CBS, NBC and all the lesser siblings pull out all stops to showcase new offerings. And before the Upfront week is over, anywhere up to two-thirds of the available inventory for the next 12 months will have been sold, leaving the balance for ‘Scatter’ and ‘Make good’ requirements.

     

    How does a major network like Fox approach the exercise?

     

    Strategy teams collate the preceding year’s sales data to stack clients up by volume and value. The analysis teases out only the spends on Upfront buys and arranges all client accounts in diminishing order based on Yield (based on CPT). The stack is now broken up into quintiles. This is when things get really interesting. Accounts in the top quintile must be applauded for being staunch allies. Conversely, accounts in the bottom quintile must suffer penalty for being, well, cheapskates. This is easily done. When the ad sales team goes into a negotiation meeting with top quintile clients, it is armed with the authority to pass on discounts to them that will enable them to enjoy CPTs below what they paid in the previous year. These are typically medium sized clients with not much negotiating muscle but their analyses would have told them how they were shafted in the previous year. They will hold out for some relief, and will be well pleased when the broadcaster finally ‘yields’ and gives them a good deal. At the opposite end, the bottom quintile clients, usually the country’s biggest advertisers counting big FMCG, giant retail and mega auto among them, will be hit with a demand to raise CPTs at least to the fourth quintile or else get locked out of any Upfront deal. This will lead to noisy kicking and screaming frequently involving the Media AOR behemoths but, to use Bibi Netanyahu’s memorable phrase, it is a Red Line.

     

    By consistently sticking to this approach, the big four have steadily grown revenues in the high single digits, and sometimes even better, right through a period when network television in the US has actually seen shrinking audiences as it conceded more and more ground to cable.

     

    In the meanwhile, here in India, we add 1 Crore, yes, 10 Million new television homes year, or over 40 million new viewers in the C&S 4+ audience. And yet, an off-the-record chat with any network CEO in India will reveal flat or even declining CPRP, much less CPT (which we don’t compute anyway). Always, the explanation is the same- plaintive bleating about competitive intensity and how it is ruthlessly exploited by the extortionate M’s who shall not be named, to squeeze their prices down ’til there’s nothing left to speak of.

     

    Why does this ‘Upfront’ approach work in the US and not in India?

     

    Upfronts are not a divinely ordained ritual. Some clear thinking and creative minds in the American television industry came up with them as a way of securing the basic economics of the participants, one year at a time, and then persuaded all their peers to join. From time to time, someone will have second thoughts about whether it serves their individual interest best to be a part of this herd behaviour, and inevitably there are stragglers. Eventually, the long-term wisdom of staying together wins out and they return to this watering hole.

     

    In India, in stark contrast, the television industry has been defined more by rifts, suspicion and even open hostility. Broadcasters have been prepared to spite one another’s faces by cutting off their own noses. However, recent years have seen the apex body, Indian Broadcasting Foundation, learn to pull together and several baby steps have been taken in this new spirit of bonhomie. Witness, for example, the News and General Entertainment Content Self-Regulation bodies. Or a shared commitment to realizing the Broadcast Audience Research Council for overseeing future television audience measurement.

     

    The Upfront process offers big benefits:

    1. Broadcasters write in enough revenue to defray, broadly speaking, all variable costs for the year (and if they are doing very well, fixed costs as well). Scatter revenues will become the jam, the bread & butter having already been secured.

     

    2. Clients have to take decisions within a very tight timeframe. The ability to string out a negotiation endlessly until a broadcaster’s spirit is broken is summarily taken away.

     

    a. Big clients with large media inventory appetites cannot risk everything on buying Scatter as there may simply not be enough left on the table. Also, whatever is left will likely be offered in a seller’s market scenario.

    b. Clients get the opportunity to see how good the quality of the advice their Media AOR offers really is. A well chosen buy – sponsorships come to mind – will yield benefits like gangbusters and demonstrate the agency’s chops.

    c. Clients get to do ‘Comparison Shopping’. All the wares are at one place and one time.

     

    3. Broadcasters’ creative and sales teams are challenged to convert their glib talk into concrete action in a pressure cooker environment.

     

    Actually, I could riff on.

     

    The only question is: Will the broadcast industry man up?

     

    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