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Tag: Paritosh Joshi

  • 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

     

  • Mr Chowdhuri was recently with TV9 Kannada as National Head

    India TV appoints Sudipto Chowdhuri to head sales

    By A Correspondent

     

    India TV announces the appointment of Sudipto Chowdhuri as Senior Vice President, Sales. With over 21 years of experience, Chowdhuri will be responsible for leading the advertising revenue function of the business nationally.

     

    He has worked with brands like India Today, Zee Network, INX Network and Star News. His last stint was at TV9 Kannada as a National Head in 2011.

     

    Commenting on the appointment, Paritosh Joshi, Strategist, India TV said, “We are happy welcoming Sudipto and expect that his depth of experience will be catalytic for the strong Revenue team. We are confident that this will further accelerate the aggressive growth path Independent News Service is following.”

     

    Excited with his latest role, Mr Chowdhuri said “I feel proud to be associated with India TV, which is one of the most credible media brands in this country. I am sure it would be quite challenging and equally exciting to do business differently in a fiercely competitive genre like Hindi News,” he added.

     

  • For Paritosh Joshi, as he looks at the television and print sectors, it was a good year by any standard!

    LookBack 2012: Paritosh Joshi: It was roses, roses all the way

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    Robert Browning wrote many a memorable verse but for me, this line, with which he blasts into ‘The Patriot” is one of his most memorable ever. If this causes you to furiously Google the great poet and discover the lyrical beauty and ferocious power of lines like ”Inscribe all human effort with one word,  Artistry’s haunting curse, the Incomplete!” or ”That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture, The first fine careless rapture!” this columnist should be gratified of a good day’s worth of work.

     

    Where were we? It was roses all the way. Yes, you are entirely right in inferring that this is one more of those ‘looking back, looking forward’ type of pieces that Decembers every year are endemic with. That is where the similarity ends, I hope, for one reason only: most will leave you convinced that the past year was best put behind us and forgotten; such was the mishaps that it was characterized by. This one proposes to go exactly the opposite way and… you shall see.

     

    Television had a great year.

     

    Digitalization got going. If there is one event that marks a huge watershed for every aspect of our television lives, this is it. Long in coming; remember that CAS dates back to exactly a decade earlier; it is ‘der ayad, durustayad’, and having arrived in tandem with addressability, it couldn’t be better. Seeing the back of the era of choked pipes and content scarcity and heralding in broad pipes and contentabundance is going to force change right across the value chain. In the medium term, the next 2-3 years, expect a huge revival in investment interest in the business.

     

    BARC was born. Getting IBF, ISA and AAAI to agree to become equity partners in a joint venture that truly breaks new ground at the global level in the way Joint Industry Bodies (JIBs) work in the audience measurement space was in and of itself a huge win. The leaderships of all three deserve fulsome applause for steering it through crazy twists and turns. Given the huge dependence that so many broadcast businesses have, and will have, on advertising revenue, and given also the huge dependence many consumer businesses have on media buys that bring them audiences that will become consumers, everyone has a huge stake in building a reliable, comprehensive, accountable measurement system. With BARC, this becomes an objective that we can realistically aspire to.

     

    BCCC and NBSA built momentum. Every time our society is faced with issues that trouble us deeply, some attention will always turn to the role the media played in exacerbating or attenuating them. Most times, unfortunately, the media will be vilified for contributing to worsening the issue rather than fixing it. There will be accusations of irresponsibility, tabloid sensationalism, placing commercial interest above public good and so on. More than ever, these are the times when the media should be able to point to regulatory mechanisms that guard the consumer against media misdemeanour. We should all hope that BCCC and NBSA will grow into institutions that enjoy wide acceptance for dispensing fair and transparent self-regulation.

     

    Carriage costs headed south. Now this is an outcome of digitalization for sure, but it warrants a mention by itself. Why? Because an entire genre that plays the very serious role of the fourth estate, the News, was in near terminal jeopardy with the onerousness of this burden. You can almost hear the collective sigh of relief from News broadcasters as they look forward to an era of better economics and the ability to invest back into better news gathering, editing and presentation.

     

    On to Print now.

     

    RSCI began to fire. The Audit Bureau of Circulation and its National Readership Survey (NRS) had already signed truce with the Media Research Users Council and its Indian Readership Survey (IRS) leaving the IRS as the unified study of readership in 2011. However, the progeny, the Readership Studies Council of India really gathered momentum this year. A new vendor for the IRS will take over responsibility from the incumbent very soon and a dramatically transformed survey will land on your desks, with much more insight and depth of understanding than ever before, during the second half of the year to follow.

     

    Consolidation picked up. Smaller publications with strong local franchises are beginning to see the wisdom in hitching their wagons to the big stars. And this is no bad thing. In many instances, the new owners realize the merit in leaving the editorial stances largely alone while aiding in investments where they are sorely necessary, such as newsgathering and technology. The outcomes are beneficial to the acquired and the acquirer. Expect this to remain a theme for quite a while to come.

     

    Digital became plat du jour. Not just the big guns, even small publications in regional languages began to see audiences shifting to consuming their content on digital devices. Everyone is now conscious that 4G and Akash tablet in tandem represent a giant wave, one that they can ride the crest of or get inundated by. While everyone is still struggling to get a handle on the monetization models available to turn digital into cold, hard cash, the inevitability will focus many good minds on cracking this problem, and crack it they will.

     

    So there you have it. A good year by any standard! Since I began with Browning, I am tempted to end with him too, thus.

     

    ”we two

    With life forever old yet new,
    Changed not in kind but in degree,
    The instant made eternity-”

     


  • 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

     

     

  • One of the biggest problems that confounds market researchers is respondent fatigue associated with questionnaire duration. And intervier fatigue too, notes Paritosh Joshi

    Paritosh Joshi: Statistical Doppelganger

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    You know the columnist be facing a serious case of writer’s block if he has to resort to strange German words in the heading itself. Either that or, if you are in a more indulgent mood, maybe you’ll allow for the possibility that there is no other way to express it in the lingua.

     

    The Merriam-Webster defines ‘doppelganger’ as ‘a ghostly counterpart of a living person’. As best as I can tell the only time this word, or idea, made its appearance in popular culture was a 1993 film starring Drew Barrymore as Holly Gooding, “who moves from New York to Los Angeles after being implicated in a murder, pursued by what is apparently her evil twin”. (Source: Wikipedia)

     

    By now, you are used to this columnist’s propensity for stream-of-consciousness meanderings but incredibly enough this is not one of them.

     

    One of the biggest problems that confounds market researchers is respondent fatigue associated with questionnaire duration. It is generally accepted wisdom that questionnaires that run for much longer than 30 minutes almost always suffer from this problem. The respondent is not alone. Interviewers too suffer from fatigue, indeed even more so, considering that they have to keep repeating administration of the same instrument to respondent after respondent. However, the answer cannot always lie in forcing questionnaire length down by truncating further questions after the 30 minute Rubicon has been reached. Syndicated researches of all sorts, readerships studies for example, have a wide scope of discovery. The Indian Readership Survey picks up detailed demographic and socio-economic variables, product and category linkage and other media consumption behaviour in considerable detail in addition to its primary task: determining print readership for several hundred publications in over a dozen languages. The implications for fatigue all around are easily imagined.

     

    When researchers started thinking about this problem, they realized that in any set of responses to an instrument, there were many that bore uncanny similarities to each other. A deeper exploration began to reveal systematic correlations, if not causal relationships between ‘independent’ variables such as basic demographics and ‘dependent’ variables such as consumption of a particular product or media vehicle. By applying this analysis to large data sets, researchers found responses that were near doppelgangers (that word again) of one another.

     

    Contemporary syndicated studies involving large discovery areas (implying long questionnaires) have operationalized this learning.Questionnaires are divided into multiple parts. The first part, that picks up all the classificatory variables, typically demo-, socio- and psychographic variables is administered uniformly to all respondents. The other sections are administered to a subset of the overall sample. For instance, if there were two segments beyond the classificatory unit, the sample would be divided randomly into equal sized halves. After all data are in, the following process is undertaken:

     

    Responses to questions in the Classification segment are administered to both respondents on the basis of which they become a matched pair. Then, Respondent 1 is administered Segment A but skips Segment B while Respondent 2 skips Segment A and is administered Segment B. Finally, Respondent 1 ‘donates’ his responses on Segment A to Respondent 2 who ‘receives’ them and Respondent 2 ‘donates’ his responses on Segment B to Respondent 1 who ‘receives’ them. This donor-recipient process is called Ascription. Missing data is ascribed and fills in the blanks, in a manner of speaking.

     

    Testing of the ascription model involves administering the entire questionnaire to both respondents, then checking the extent to which the actual and ascribed responses vary from one another. A well-selected match would have a high statistical fit. Research agencies around the world have been spending a lot of development time developing such ascription algorithms.

     

    Finally, whole data sets are married to one another using a similar process of respondent level matching and ascription. This kind of large scale merging, technically called Data Fusion, is being employed in various markets to stitch Readership, Listenership, Viewership and Digital Media consumption habits together to deliver a comprehensive view of the manner in which multiple media collide and coalesce in the lives of consumers.

     

    Here in India, we are at the cusp of a lot of exciting development on Ascription and Fusion. Expect this column to tell you more as it happens.

     

     

  • Anant Rangaswami's book took on – inter alia – the ASCI. Paritosh Joshi has a reply

    Paritosh Joshi: ASCI is not an Elephant though it might be a herring… a red one

    By Paritosh Joshi

     

    If you are an mxmindia.com habitue, you couldn’t have missed Anant Rangaswami’s thought-provoking “Elephants in the Room”. And if you have already dived into it, it won’t be long before you reach page 96, where a presumptive elephant called the Advertising Standards Council of India resides. Presumptive because no matter his vigorous prose and evident disenchantment with this institution, many of the barbs he directs at it are perhaps better directed elsewhere.

     

    Let’s enumerate the infirmities that Anant cites.

    – ASCI does not have a professional management team.

    – ASCI is unknown to the very consumers whose interest it is supposed to protect.

    – ASCI is toothless. Its decisions have little penal and no deterrent impact.

    – ASCI is slow to react, making whatever actions it does take infructuous.

    – ASCI doesn’t use technology effectively.

    – ASCI doesn’t adequately engage its principal constituencies, most critically the Media.

    – ASCI only functions under duress, such as the imminent arrival of the National Consumer Protection Agency, but is otherwise largely inert.

     

    If I was to read back through the chapter, I may yet spot some more but these constitute a daunting enough list to work my way through, so off we go.

     

    ASCI is a Section 25 company. It exists solely for promoting the cause of Self-Regulation in Advertising thereby ensuring the protection of the interests of the consumers. Unlike similarly incorporated entities that work as special interest lobbies or sports administration bodies that almost by definition have a very large operational throughput and often, substantial revenue sources, ASCI is a lean, low-cost body. The two operating but mutually autonomous components of the ASCI system: the Board and the Consumer Complaints Council, both depend upon voluntary and essentially pro bono effort. ASCI does not contribute to advancing the success of any business. It actually goes about censuring businesses that fall out of line. I also serve in another Section 25 company whose outputs directly impacts the ability of an entire industry to sell its products and even that company finds it impossibly hard to find funding for its activities. I wish our constituents were enlightened enough to see the self interest in generously funding ASCI to the point where it could have a top-notch professional team to advance its agenda. To be fair, the lean Secretariat that ASCI runs does a reasonably competent job of keeping the complaints pipeline, such as it is, well administered.

     

    ASCI does not have large bags of money to splash out on consumer communication. It does, however, use its public-spirited objectives and, more pragmatically, its Board members’ contacts and influence, to secure pro bono advertising inventory to air creative pieces also generated pro bono. Is this enough? Heck, no. Can ASCI use new media? Surely it must and here too if someone has a great idea, (s)he must reach out to ASCI at the contacts that I provide at the end of this piece.

     

    ASCI is a self-regulatory organisation. It is not the police. The power of self-regulation lies in ‘Naming and Shaming’, not penalty. Do the perpetrators of mischief get named and shamed enough? I don’t think they do. Again, keep in mind that ASCI does not have advertising budgets to publish its monthly ‘rogues gallery’ but it does issue the decisions of the Consumer Complaints Council after every meeting. If someone has a great idea to ensure they become much more visible, yup, contact ASCI.

     

    ASCI’s CCC now meets fortnightly, up from a monthly that it had maintained for 25 of the ~27 years that it has existed. Can it meet more often? Should video-conferencing and other technological means be investigated? Remember that the functioning of the CCC depends on close adherence to a well developed ‘due process’. The Board is certainly getting its arms around all the possibilities and ensuring that they pass standards of legal propriety before institutionalizing them. Some changes have already come in. More will surely follow.

     

    If the ‘Naming and Shaming’ system works better than it does today, the possibility of being thus shamed should become the biggest deterrent that a marketer must fear and respect before (s)he does something that falls out of line. Also, ASCI must evangelize the principles of the Self-Regulatory Code, most critically with recruits at entry levels in Media, Advertising and Marketing businesses. Does it do enough? No, it doesn’t. Again, ideas, ideas.

     

    The suggestion that ASCI only functions under duress is a low blow. When it was set up in 1985, it was truly an idea ahead of its time, promoted by a bunch of right-thinking people who recognized the perils that lay ahead. The remarkable durability of the Code, albeit with periodic additions to address specific areas of concern, is testament to the thinking that went behind it. Interestingly, global best practice suggests that self regulators often exist in very productive partnerships with statutory consumer protection bodies. The putative NCPA doesn’t have to become an ASCI competitor; it could very usefully become the appellate, penal body, dealing with situations where ‘Naming and Shaming’ have failed and more onerous forfeits are imperative.

     

    Finally, the ASCI is now, and for all times to come, a work in progress. The best way of making it better is for all good men and women to come to the aid of the party.

     

    Here are the contacts:

    Advertising Standards Council of India

    Tel: (022) 23521066/23516863

    Toll Free Number : 1-800-22-2724

    Fax: (022) 23516863

    Website: www.ascionline.org

    E-mail: contact@ascionline.org

     

  • Presenting three reviews of Anant Rangaswami's 'The Elephants in the Room'… by Kurien Mathews, Paritosh Joshi and Pradyuman Maheshwari

    Must-read book on advertising

     

    Trying not to see
    By Kurien MathewsWikipedia describes Elephant in the room thus:

    “Elephant in the room” is an English metaphorical idiom for an obvious truth that is either being ignored or going unaddressed. The idiomatic expression also applies to an obvious problem or risk no one wants to discuss.

     

    It is based on the idea that an elephant in a room would be impossible to overlook; thus, people in the room who pretend the elephant is not there have chosen to avoid dealing with the looming big issue.

     

    All of us in advertising, for almost as long as I have been in it, have suffered and have been greatly affected by ignoring or not addressing some very obvious truths that have been staring us in the face. Forget about addressing it; we never even spoke about it, and went about our lives pretending that everything was just fine, and if there was a problem it was just temporary and would soon go away.

     

    Around the time I joined advertising, nearly three decades ago, everything was in fact just fine. No too many elephants in the room. If they were there, they were baby elephants, the playful kinds.

     

    In those days talent was good and abundant. Advertising was glamorous. Money was plentiful. Clients respected agencies, and thought of us as people who generally knew much more than them. We wined and dined. Almost everything was done in English, and then translated. Commercials were broadcast on one channel. No one asked for discounts. It was fun with many other such wondrous things in place.

     

    In his book, Anant Rangaswami speaks of many, many Elephants in the room today. All carefully chosen. All well articulated.

     

    These Elephants started emerging, one by one, somewhere in the mid 90s- perhaps with the arrival of satellite TV and the birth of the AOR. Suddenly the sacrosanct 15% was thrown out of the window. Before you knew it, agency revenues started shrinking and the demands on them started increasing. Simultaneously, the brighter MBAs found that there were other fun jobs that paid better, and then the vicious downward spiral of low pay, lower quality talent, suicidal discounting and the need to find revenue at any cost started.

     

    Soon more Elephants started appearing in the room and by the beginning of the new millennium the room was beginning to fill up, fast and furious.

     

    But no one cared. No one wanted to talk about it either.  If there was the odd murmur, it was quickly rubbished. Ostriches, all of us.

     

    In ‘The Elephants in the room’ author Anant Rangaswami not only points out to all the Elephants so glaringly visible to him, but he does so without holding back or being polite or gentle. He tells it like it is. He names names, speaks of incidents, and at places proposes action as well.

     

    If you have anything to with the business of building brands then this book is a must-read for you. While it is about serious business it is a fun read. Best of all, it is free - comes only in the form of an e-book, which can be downloaded from www.firstpost.com

     

    Kurien Mathews is Chairman & Managing Director, METAL Communications Pvt. Ltd, Director, Rage Communications Pvt. Ltd and Director, Conscious Food Pvt. Ltd

     

     

    Trumpets and snorts: A book review of sorts
    By Paritosh Joshi1984. That was the other book with a date in it that popped into the mind. A book that caused a proper noun, Orwell, to be recast as an adjective, Orwellian.

     

    And so to “Elephants in the Room – The Future of Advertising in India, 2016”, Anant Rangaswami’s self-published book launched with minimal fanfare on November 19.

     

    Prognostication is often grim business. With a date in the name, you are sort of prepared to deal with dystopic speculations on where Advertising is headed. The author doesn’t disappoint. This is sentence no. 1. “Let’s not fool ourselves; it’s going to be a tough few years ahead”.

     

    It is not unusual for business professionals at a certain stage in their lives to turn to writing and wish to be published. A few decades spent winning more business battles than they lost and they fancy themselves to be keepers of recondite truths that are hidden from the little people. Hindsight, a self-congratulatory attitude and a desire to elevate banality to wisdom compel them to couch their “insights” in prolix prose.

     

    Anant’s book, refreshingly, is at the exact opposite pole.

     

    The ‘elephants’ that populate this book are incipient problems that the Advertising industry will face over the next few years. The author has the journalist’s insatiable appetite for conversation. From the lowly Account Manager to titans that bestride the narrow world like Sir Martin and Sir John, he talks to them without fear or favour. His inquisitiveness is unbridled and uninhibited. The ‘elephants’, therefore, are distilled from empirical knowledge and documented anecdote, not idle speculation. From the endless hand-wringing over talent scarcity, through the challenge that digital specialists pose to the traditional creative agency to a near future where many of today’s marquee names from the advertising industry may retire, each ‘elephant’ warrants a chapter where the author attempts to lay out the problem as he sees it, a prognosis of where it will go next and prescriptions that may alleviate or remedy that problem.

     

    What makes the exercise utterly unusual is the author’s unabashed willingness to name names, individual and corporate that are the protagonists in this unfolding epic. To be clear, there is not one reference that might be considered libelous or intemperate, though there will be several that will cause people to squirm.

     

    Now while the author is almost consistently objective in his assessment, he is human enough to let some deeply held beliefs; they are logically constructed so they cannot be labelled prejudices; show through. One such, which I have had the pleasure of debating with him on many occasions, is the role and functioning of the Advertising Standards Council of India. He devotes a sizable chapter to the theme and in the interest of full disclosure I record my vigorous disagreement. There will be a rejoinder in these columns soon.

     

    Here is my big problem: The urgency that informs the book, while making it a real page-turner, does it a huge disservice. This is not a rash pamphleteer whipping up a mob to frenzy but a thoughtful commentator’s significant contemplation of important questions that plague, arguably, the wider Communications industry and not Advertising alone. Identical or analogous problems exist, inter alia, in the broadcast industry. And none of these problems will suddenly disappear in 2016. Media & Communications professionals, particularly those holding senior responsibilities would all be well advised to read what Anant has to say in “The Elephants In The Room”, now and for many years to come.

     

    And finally this. I wish, I really wish, that I had bought this book and not got it gratis as I left the launch party. Content creators, particularly when they create content as important as this, have the right to demand fair economic value for their work. Now Anant will almost certainly see this as his responsibility towards the industry he calls home, we will be unable to show our appreciation and gratitude if we can’t pay for the cry of the conscience keeper.

     

     

    Elephants in the Room: Essential reading!
    By Pradyuman MaheshwariI’ve read the book twice over. Well, actually, two-and-a-half times. First to decide what part to pick for an extract… that was a pdf which Anant shared with me a few hours before the formal launch. I did a rapid read, like the ones you do when reading those tomes that come out from government or regulator documents posted online.

     

    So how many enemies will I make, Anant asked me at the launch. I muttered a couple of names but also told him that the book was brilliant. And unputdownable.

     

    The half-read was when I had to actually pick the extract. I decided on two to give MxM readers a perspective on what to expect from it. The first on whether it should be a suit or creative who should head an agency. And the other on Goafest.

     

    The last time I read it was after Paritosh Joshi suggested the idea of this joint review.

     

    The Elephants in the Room is not an academic account of what ought to be done by the industry. It’s no white paper. Yet, in its chatty style, it highlights all that needs to be stated about the business. Racy in style, it’s almost like some of his blogs on Campaign India put together. Except that here they are longer, and the issues are dealt with in detail.

     

    I tend to agree with his views on industry associations – the AAAI and ASCI specifically. There is much scope for improvement, in fact what’s needed is an overhaul. The Advertising Club also needs to get into activities that attract the youth. And above all: Goafest. Why have it in Goa in April?

     

    So, my sub-140-character review continues to be what I gave on the morning after the launch: Unputdownable. If you’re in the biz of advertising, download now!

     

    I wouldn’t want to get too much into the book, and would urge readers to download it off Firstpost, but I have two peeves about the book. Or possibly three.

     

    The first: In the attempt to make it quick-and-racy, I think Elephants in the Room rushes through some of the issues that impact the business. For instance, corruption. I could list a few more.

     

    Second: The focus is Creative. It delves into digital, talks a bit about media, but it’s essentially the big creative agencies and gods who have been discussed.

     

    And, third: why the hell has Mr Rangaswami not priced the book. Why offer it as a free download? Printing a book doesn’t take an arm and a leg. I would’ve been happy to have MxMIndia publish the book. Or possibly Firstpost could have.

     

    The Elephants in the Room is an excellent book. It’s essential reading for all those in advertising, and all those who deal with creative folk and creative agencies.

     

    Pradyuman Maheshwari is Editor-in-Chief and CEO, MxMIndia

     

     

  • 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

     

     

  • Mandatory digitization will hopefully herald an era when choice, not compulsion will decide what is watched, writes Paritosh Joshi

    Paritosh Joshi: Who is Nilam?

    By Paritosh Joshi

    May be the name doesn’t ring a bell when you read this but before the day is over, it is reasonably certain you will know Nilam. For instance, you will know Nilam isn’t a ‘Who’ but a ‘What’. Nilam is the cyclonic storm brewing off the coast of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh that is expected to cross the coast later today.

     

    This morning, I did a quick scan of the major Hindi and English channels to see what they were covering as lead stories on their 6 o’clock bulletins. Barring DD News, either they were on a non-network slot (think Slim Swift, Baba AvtarParmatma, Arthro Go or something similar) or, more ironically, Hurricane Sandy. While it is hard to debate the significance of Sandy given that it has impacted the crucial Eastern Seaboard of the world’s sole superpower and an area of interest to many Indians given that they have friends and relatives residing there, it seems like terrible editing if the terror lurking in our own neighbourhood is ignored in so cavalier a fashion.

     

    Here is why Sandy is, in a ghoulish way, a better story to run than Nilam. Dramatic footage of capsized yachts lying on highways, Manhattan’s Times Square under knee deep water, uprooted trees against the backdrop of the White House and the Capitol: racy stuff compared to the Indian Meteorology Department’s satellite imagery of a grey blotch on a grey background that is Cyclonic Storm Nilam.

     

    Our television news genre has an unfortunate reputation for tabloid and sleaze. Perhaps, news is the only genre where the (older) audience actually remembers the days of Luku Sanyal, Dolly Thakore and Preet K. S. Bedi with a wistful air. When news was delivered in measured tones, not harangue and cacophony. We also remember, with much warmth, the arrival of TWTW*, a path-breaking discontinuity that brought colourful, exciting images from around the world to our generally drab screens. A kinder, gentler era.

     

    After the genre started getting private participation with the advent of satellite TV, a few things changed for the better. For one, the Government, and by implication, the party or coalition in power was no longer seen exclusively through a hagiographic lens and was routinely subject to searching questions and even scathing criticism. For another, stories were better edited with anchoring and on-site reportage alternating on the screen to keep the audience interested. Finally, the typical story duration was shorter and pithier, avoiding prolix rambling that often characterized the Sarkari predecessor’s presentation. Channels were few but were fronted by editors and anchors of distinction and authority.

     

    Unfortunately, the idyllic period was also ephemeral. It wasn’t long before an assortment of unsavoury arrivistes with bags of money and dubious agendas saw the endless opportunities that the genre presented. All it needed was a licence from the Ministry and a transponder on a satellite and you could be well on your way. Threat, extortion, blackmail- it was suddenly possible to turn all manner of villainy into a broadcast business.

     

    The swelling ranks of participants in the news genre revealed a fault line – on one side were the serious players with long-term interests in delivering honest and fair journalism to the consumer, on the other, the cads and bounders with nary a scruple. A slide began that continues, and even accelerates unto this day.

     

    The analog cable plant had serious capacity constraints. A typical headend would offer a 550 MHz capacity with room for barely 50 channels. It was only a matter of time before platform operators discovered the lucrative, carriage fee opportunity. Most news channels were free-to-air and only earned advertising revenue. This could only be secured if the ratings and distribution reports picked them up. Clearly, ratings could only come if basic availability had first been ensured. In droves, then, news channels became willing victims of the menace.

     

    If carriage fee was not a nightmare enough, TRAI’s ever growing laundry list of regulations seemed designed exclusively to injunct broadcasters in ever more onerous ways even as platform operators were at almost complete liberty to run amok. The television news business model was under mortal attack.

     

    What could it do but pull out all stops as it battled back from the corner? The rapid rise of tabloid sensationalism and unglorified sleaze should, in this context, be read as more something to be pitied than censured.

     

    Why is it that we seem to be in a news cul–de–sac while more developed countries produce a wide range of high quality news outlets?

     

    I have, even before this, suggested examining the Ofcom’s ‘Fit and Proper’ test as a model for examining whether a particular entity should be permitted to receive, or continue to bear, a broadcast licence in the news genre. I am not suggesting the establishment of a government regulator for broadcast. A ‘Fit and Proper’ test for India can and should correctly be developed and administered by the News Broadcasters’ Association (NBA) in cooperation with the News Broadcasting Standards Authority (NBSA). The government’s licensing bodies should work with NBA and NBSA in ensuring that every new aspirant is subjected to the test and even legacy broadcasters are subject to a re-evaluation at specified intervals.

     

    In the meanwhile, midnight tonight will herald a very special dawn for India’s television industry- the arrival of mandatory digitisation in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai. It is possible that the government may yet develop cold feet at the penultimate moment but that will only postpone, not cancel, the inevitable. This watershed is very good news indeed for the news genre. Once the cable plant goes from deficient to surplus capacity and passive viewers transform into active, demanding consumers, the single biggest cost challenge to the genre will begin to abate. Hopefully, we will enter an era when choice and not compulsion will decide what is watched and the ball will be squarely back in the news producers’ and editors’ courts.

     

    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.