Tag: Shailesh Kapoor

By Shailesh Kapoor

He came across as arrogant flashy, unstable and repulsive on some occasions, and creative, entertaining, knowledgeable and noble on some other ones. The sixth edition of Bigg Boss will undoubtedly be remembered as Imam Siddiqui’s season. Almost half the footage in the show seemed to revolve around him, since his entry in the middle of the season. Love him or hate him, you can’t ignore the fact that Siddiqui was the big idea for the show this time.

Yet, he didn’t win. Soap star Urvashi Dholakia made it a hat trick for TV heroines, after Shweta Tiwari and Juhi Parmar. Why would the “entertainer” not win the title? Why would audiences not vote in plenty for someone bringing them back to the show night after night?

As the tagline of Aamir Khan’s last release went, the answer lies within. Imam Siddiqui not winning Bigg Boss is a fair and accurate reflection of our society’s moral response to television today. To understand this, we need to start at the very beginning.

Back in the ’90s, in the nascent years of satellite television (and even before that in the DD days), edgy content was available in plenty. A lot more serials covered business settings, where malicious characters schemed to twist big deals in their favor. Women were often working in these serials, or were at least social butterflies doing the kitty party circuit. Yes, there were positive, idealist characters too. But the layered characters (like Neena Gupta playing Ketaki in Khandaan) got the audience rooting for them.

Over years, the ambitious Air Hostess (Kitu Gidwani) and the beer-guzzling Tara were replaced by Tulsi, Akshara and Priya. These are strong characters in their own right, but outright positive ones, with no shades of grey at all. During this period, the villains became even more menacing and unidimensional, scheming and plotting all the time. Television, over the last 15 years, has separated the black from the white, the way our cinema did in the ’70s and the ’80s. Only an odd “grey” character made an impact, such as Dadi Sa (Balika Vadhu) in her earlier avatar.

With such consistent segregation of the good and the bad being dished out to them over decades, the audience too got conditioned to responding to TV characters in binary forms: Good or Bad. They lost touch with the grey. At any point of time,  a character had to be either 100% good or 100% bad.

This slotting today cuts across all television. Imam Siddiqui is “good to watch”, but that doesn’t make him the positive-type good. He was clearly the villain of Bigg Boss. A villain, who may display his soft side once in a while, but remained a villain nevertheless. Imam Siddiqui was “bad”. Probably 200% bad.

You can enjoy Kancha Cheena for his antics and his menacing characterization. If the director decides to kill Kancha Cheena at interval, you will be mighty upset, and if you could, vote for him to stay till the climax. But will you want Kancha Cheena to kill Vijay Dinanath Chauhan and prevail in the end?

Victory of good over evil has been a truism in our culture for centuries now. We may deny it, even contest it, but we’ll never want to obliterate it.

And hence, Imam Siddiqui will never win Bigg Boss.

Shailesh Kapoor is founder and CEO of media & entertainment research and consulting firm Ormax Media. He spent nine years in the television industry before turning entrepreneur. He can be reached at his Twitter handle @shaileshkapoor

By Shailesh Kapoor

We are all aware, and I assume, deeply hurt by the events that have unfolded over the last three weeks. The much-bullied media has played a pivotal role in keeping the pressure going, and that should lead to steps that serve us better in the years to come.

However, in this age of information and opinion overload, we tend to generalize things way too easily. Over the last seven days, there have been several media debates, across television, print and the Internet, on the role of entertainment in “promoting” sexual assault against women, by portraying women in a way that’s essentially misogynistic in nature.

I am all for sensitizing the country at large, and media is a key stakeholder in this process. But to divert a serious, purposeful discussion on rape and sexual assault to item numbers, vulgar lyrics and portrayal of women in serials, is simply a case of misplaced priorities. More than anything else, it is damaging because the core issues tend to get swept under the carpet in the process.

There are a few examples that I find worth highlighting here. The first was about the Honey Singh song that sprung out of nowhere on December 30. The lyrics are outright pornographic, and will never make it to the mainstream, e.g. a live concert, a music channel or FM radio. Yet, there was a moral-police type of call to prevent Honey Singh from performing his routine playlist on New Year’s Eve.

Who are we kidding here? Pornographic songs, often created by parodying popular Bollywood songs, are an age-old phenomenon. It’s content, that’s up for rejection or acceptance, within a legal framework that would prevent its public display anyway. Two nights ago, a film critic on a TV debate moved from discussing Honey Singh to lamenting about how our music has moved from calling a woman “Chaudhvin Ka Chand” to calling her “Fevicol”.

Fevicol is not what Kareena Kapoor is called in the song. But if a girl were indeed called “Fevicol”, I’d argue strongly that it’s at least more empowering than stereotyping women based on their beauty, by calling them “Chaudhvin Ka Chand”.

“Item numbers have a negative impact on our society” is the second example of misplaced agendas over the last week. Someone in another television debate spoke about how ChikniChameli portrays Katrina Kaif’s character as a “woman who gets drunk and flirts with men.” And guess how that could possibly help propagate sexual crime!

Unbelievably so, a section has also attacked television serials for being responsible for our society’s attitude towards women. The beaten-to-death “regressive” argument was back in the mainstream again, where daily soaps were blamed for promoting that “women should not step out of their homes”. At least seven out of the top 10 daily serials today are basedon strong, free-thinking and progressive female protagonists, of the kind we would want our women at large to become!

About a decade ago, I wrote a short presentation on the relationship between reality and television. The well-researched document ended with: “Television mirrors reality once in a while, but more often, it excludes reality, i.e., it gives us what we aspire to have but can’t get in the real world.”

The genesis of this thought is the matter of another piece altogether. But in times that call for serious action, I wish we stopped getting distracted and targeting everyone’s favorite punching bags – television and films.

Time to shift attention back to root causes.

Shailesh Kapoor is founder and CEO of media & entertainment research and consulting firm Ormax Media. He spent nine years in the television industry before turning entrepreneur. He can be reached at his Twitter handle @shaileshkapoor

By Shailesh Kapoor

After a hiatus that was received by the television industry with excitement and skepticism in equal measure, TV ratings are scheduled to make a comeback on December 19. Expect a chaotic fortnight of data crunchers working overtime at broadcasting companies and media agencies. Also expect trade promotions based on claims and counter-claims, including those that proudly declare how some channel is no. 1 in its genre among males in the 25-34 year old age segment in SEC B in the UP-MP market. All par for the course!

TV ratings, in their different avatars, are the media buying currency worldwide. However, smart marketers have figured out over time that ratings tell only one part of the television audience’s story. A very important part all right, but still not the complete story.

Here is my list of four critical things TV ratings don’t tell us:

1. Active v/s Passive Viewing

Most television shows show a gender split between 50:50 and 60:40, in favour of either gender. That would imply, for example, that a primetime daily soap is as much a media vehicle for a bike brand as it is for a detergent brand. Now, common sense would tell us this is not the case. That’s where the biggest limitation in any passive audience measurement system lies. It does not account for the audience’s involvement in the content. If the housewife turns on her favourite programme and the husband and the kids merely watch along, often multi-tasking during that time (for example, reading the newspaper, browsing on their mobiles, etc.), they are all counted at par, as equally valid audiences.

So, a programme like Balika Vadhu may show a fairly balanced gender profile on ratings, but its day-after recall is skewed 75:25 in favour of women. The day-after recall of Hindi movie channels is skewed so sharply towards the 10-34 year male audiences that targeting any other audience type through these channels is worth questioning. ‘Active viewership’, which is what a broadcaster should be basing its marketing plans on and an advertiser paying for, needs a filter beyond the ratings.

2. Satisfaction Levels

Is the consumer satisfied with my content? For any broadcaster, that is a key question, especially given the volatility in content and the ever-decreasing loyalty levels. In our work over the last year, it has been conclusively proven that drop in satisfaction levels of daily programmes (across genres) lead to a drop in ratings, but with a lag of about 3-4 weeks. Hence, measuring satisfaction levels of channel and programme brands can lead to far more purposeful actionables for both the channels and the advertisers backing them.

3. ‘Aural’ Viewing

It’s an oxymoron, but it’s happening. Increasingly, a lot of television is being heard, not watched. Kitchen work, homework, office work, mobile, Internet and many other such activities are being ‘managed’ while watching TV. The proportion of ‘aural’ viewing increases significantly during ad breaks. Ask an advertiser if he wants his ad to be only heard, not watched! Ratings clearly don’t tell this part of the story.

4. The Surround

In a convergence-driven world, looking at television in isolation will be foolhardy. The surround or the ambient noise a TV channel or program manages to create is important to quantify. This may happen through social media and the Internet, or through traditional media like print articles, not to mention the extremely powerful word-of-mouth effect. As BARC gets set to redesign the norms of audience measurement in India, this should be an evident area of focus for them.

TV viewing is a jigsaw, and the ratings certainly don’t complete the puzzle. Full marks to advertisers and broadcasters who have recognized this reality and have built additional metrics to address it. For others, it’s the age-old adage that comes to mind: Better late than never!