Tag: The Anchor

By Suranjana Ghosh, Marketing Head, CNBC-TV18

 

The Indian broadcasting industry is poised at the brink of the next big game-changer. With digitization, we are at the threshold of the new wave, which will reset the existing rules and patterns.

 

Digitization and the mandatory rollout of digital signal for cable operators in the four metros is a long overdue, and a welcome move for the Indian broadcasting industry and for all stakeholders involved: Broadcasters, distributors and viewers. It is a step towards bringing the industry on par with the global broadcasting standards.

 

Digitization will presumably allow and make way for greater addressability for both broadcasters as well as distributors.

 

Viewers will get a superior, enhanced viewing experience now. Digitization will make the medium more democratic, empowering the viewer with greater access to the channel of his or her choice. This makes it incumbent on broadcasters to focus more sharply on their content offering, to make it attractive and compelling to its viewers. This enhanced value will ensure audience retention and loyalty.

 

The revenue model for broadcasters may also see a shift from being governed largely by advertising. Subscription revenues are now likely to start contributing more to the revenue line.

 

Lastly, digitization will enable advertisers to make more targeted television spends, given that the audience will now be more clearly segmented by the choice of content that they subscribe to.

 

By Rajan Narayan, President, Quadrant Communications

 

In this hurried world, brands have lost their authority and aura. They are reduced to transactions, service providers, labels and vendors.

 

Much like Po, the Kung Fu Panda who realizes that there was no secret ingredient in his dad’s soup, today we are waking up to the harsh reality that the elusive holy grail of advertising – the Big Idea – may be dead.

 

Or rather it has become irrelevant. Why is this so? Because the very definition of the Big Idea – that it held the brand idea together for years if not decades – has now changed permanently.

 

Ah the luxury of time! Today brands don’t live for a decade, so what chance do the brand idea and the Big Idea have? And what does this do to the concept of the Big Idea? It is reduced to the need for many small ‘Big Ideas’ (excuse the oxymoron!).

 

Today brands need continuous engagement with their consumers to stay relevant. This puts tremendous pressure on the brand to refresh itself continuously and present itself in new and different ways to stay on top of the consumers mind. This calls for more continuous ideas that steadily flow to the consumer rather than the one Big Idea that is followed by silence.

 

Tearing away at the Big Idea is also the proliferation of media that a consumer today engages with. The availability of the plethora reduces his involvement with each to a bare minimum.

 

Gone are the days when a consumer read a newspaper end-to-end. Or subscribed to a magazine. The television comes to life at fixed hours called ‘family time’ or does the odd job of being a ‘filler’ at gyms, pubs, restaurants and hair salons!

 

The internet is everything in a snippet – emails that reduce communication to a line, social networking reduces it further to a ‘like’, YouTube reduces every video to under a minute and Twitter says it all in 140 characters.

 

And you can cram it all into your lunch break or coffee break or travel time, thanks to phones, pads and pings.

 

In this hurried world brands have lost their authority and aura. They are reduced to transactions, service providers, labels and vendors. Call it the great ‘Dumbing Down’ of brands, if you may.

 

Few if any have maintained their vision and led a collective belief. And it is impossible now to do it under constant media glare. One slip and everything is recorded and dissected to the brand’s end.

 

Iconic brands like Cadbury’s, Coca Cola, McDonalds, Nike and Apple have all faced this heat of consistent scrutiny.

 

The crumbling of icons and the need for constant relevance steals the depth in every interaction. Today relationships are shallow and weak. Companies sell off brands in a matter of a few years. Entire marketing teams change in less than two years and in that time half a dozen agencies work in and out of the brand.

 

So who’s thinking long-term? The tremendous pressure to perform leads to marketing and advertising folks dubbing ‘little engines’ as Big Ideas. Because the target is often the next awards show or the next performance appraisal. Often the target of the idea is not the consumer – it is an awards jury or the CEO of the company.

 

Lastly, the judgement of what constitutes a big idea has moved away from the consumer to the amount of newsprint grabbed by the idea.

 

How well can a minor idea get written about? How many people in my network can I get to write and talk about my idea. Can I convince the marketing head that this can become a star point in his CV, making him more marketable?

 

So here we are at the end of it all, content to create many tiny little ideas and spend time trying to convince the world that they are big. While the concept of the Big Idea passes us by – along with our consumers.

 

By Ashwin Padmanabhan, Business Head, North and South, 92.7 BIG FM

 

India is a diverse country, much like the varying lengths of the fingers on your palm. There is unity in diversity – of culture, habitats, food and more importantly language families. Officially, the Indian Constitution states 22 languages – these further have grown with dialects changing every 100 kms or so, like its bio-diversity. With a 1.2 billion population, the uniting aspect for all these characteristics is language, though myriad, it is that one big idea that ties the country, and to go regional in terms of language content is the factor that will converge and amalgamate especially in the media and entertainment industry

 

Regional markets have developed to an extent that everything that is available in the metropolitan cities is sold here. The education and information spread makes it relevant for marketers and advertisers to be present in this populace. Advertisers, local and national, have seen the benefits in ROI. Product marketers have seen their products reach new peaks in sales output. When luxury cars arrived in the country, it was thought that the metro cities would show high sales, but unprecedented sales in regional areas led them to pump in more promotion in regional markets and thereby opened these markets for higher and more luxury brands.

 

Hence going regional is the one value-add in every product segment. In media and entertainment, radio covers almost 95% of the country; cinemas in every town ensured weekend entertainment; malls are the latest trend for evening shopping; but the one big promoter has to be television. TV infiltrates the audiences like never before. In-home entertainment is here to stay. And advertisers acknowledge this immense buying power.

 

For us, we believed in the regional story all along and hence our first business with 92.7 BIG FM and 45 stations across the country, each distinctly different from the other, each regional in its true sense. We have recently also made our television foray in the regional space, with television brands – BIG MAGIC and BIG RTL THRILL, both of which have been developed keeping in mind the regional audiences.

 

There are many India’s within one India, and it is for brands and marketers to cater specifically for their audiences. Meeting the diversity of its audience, and providing them what they want, and not just merely what they need, is the big idea. With the consumer spoilt for choice and far more aware, the one shoe fits all theory clearly doesn’t work anymore. Regionalization is most definitely here to stay!

 

By Colin Lawrence, Director of Distribution, BBC Global News Ltd

 

“Persistent questioning and healthy inquisitiveness are the first requisite for acquiring learning of any kind.”
– Mahatma Gandhi

 

Certainly a big idea but not a new one! I’m afraid Mahatma Gandhi got there first. As India cements its position as a dynamic emergent economy, global competition for capital, consumers and knowledge has never been greater. As a global news provider, the BBC’s values and ambitions in delivering trusted and impartial international news and insight have never been greater. Enabling our viewers to live the story through original authored journalism, and providing them with the narrative to the rapidly evolving and changing geo-political environment around them.

 

We are now focusing on making that information available to our Indian audiences, on television, radio and online, and not surprisingly, those audiences are growing.
According to the latest Ipsos PAX survey (Q2 2012), BBC World News is the top English news channel in India among affluent viewers, and when compared against both international and domestic news channels in India, it is the #1 news channel among India’s top executives, BDMs, investors, travellers and tech-savvy young Indians.
Viewers in India will have much to look forward to when BBC World News moves to its new base in Central London in the upcoming months. New HD studios, dynamic presentation and state of the art graphics will showcase the BBC’s established journalistic credentials in an engaging and compelling way.

 

Our business is cutting through the hubris and hyperbole of headline news, to provide the depth, rigour and insight we all need.

 

By Supriyo Sinha, Vice President, Bengali Dailies, ABP

 

Over the next few years, advertisers will see discontinuous value in print advertising through micromarketing in locations beyond the metros. There are three main reasons that will drive this discontinuity:

 

(a) Advertisers are increasingly looking at tier 2/3 and semi-urban locations for the next wave of growth in India, (b) while metro locations have a large penetration of alternate advertising media, e.g., TV, FM radio, print, etc, tier 2/3 and semi-urban locations have a predominance of print, (c) this predominance will continue for a reasonably long time in these locations – some of the factors that have driven the drop in print advertising in the Western markets, e.g. internet penetration, web-literacy etc., are reasonably behind in the tier 2/3 locations (in relative terms with respect to metros). In addition, vernacular print medium will enjoy a special advantage, since in the semi-urban and tier 2/3 locations vernacular has a stronger bond than English.

 

In order to capture this opportunity, print players have to develop some important enablers: (a) develop customised location-specific content to engage readers of that location and (b) build advertising sales teams that are equipped to penetrate the real micromarkets.

 

Such a proposition will be a winning formula for advertisers – both national/MNC and local. While large national/MNC advertisers will get the next wave of growth from such a play, small/ medium local advertisers will have a much ‘closer’ view of the returns they get from their advertising buck. Beyond just the brand building and sales value, advertisers will increasingly be able to get a real pulse of the consumers in these markets through the print medium (which remains the most widespread communication medium in these locations).

 

Go beyond the metros. Go micro. That’s the winning formula for print advertising!

 

By Nikhil Gandhi, Executive Director, Youth Channels, Medianetworks Disney UTV

 

The discerning Indian youth audience is confident and informed. They are articulate about their preferences and choose to engage with preferred brands, with a choice of content across multiple platforms and touch points. If you see the media engagement of a young Indian’s life today, he is exposed to 24 hours of communication and brand engagement which occupies his mindspace for attention.

 

In such a scenario, any player in the youth segment needs to move beyond just the television numbers game. In fact, we as a youth brand need to seek out what they want, when and where they want it and be able to provide it exactly there. Working on this insight has been the ‘big idea’ which has the potential to catapult youth brands into the target audience’s consideration set faster than ever before.

 

Be it compelling content on TV, engagement on the web and mobile, rendezvous at live experiences correlated to their points of interest like music, celebrities, youth icons – everything needs an extensive, exciting and engaging with a 360-degree presence.

 

At Bindass, our constant research over the years has enabled us to delve deep into the fabric of young India and understand their fundamental tastes and preferences and changing trends. We have been able to create a youth brand which engages with them with a purpose. This means extending the bindass experience across platforms through innovative concepts like Chikipedia on the web, cutting edge show formats like Big Switch, Superdude, Emotional Atyachaar etc on TV, hi-octane live music events/concerts with exposure to international and popular local artists like Enrique Iglesias, Lady Gaga, David Guetta and much more. Also taking the experience across to the campus with properties like Bindass Buddies & Campus Attack.

 

The same philosophy also extends to our Bollywood brand UTV Stars. The brand was launched with a view to create exceptional Bollywood content and get the viewer closer to their icons. Within less than a year of launch, UTV Stars has made inroads into the web and ‘on-ground’ space in a big way via prestigious associations with People Magazine, Cosmopolitan Fun Fearless Awards, Lap Buddh Circuit After Parties and launching its first on-ground IP, the iconic Walk of the Stars! The brand is poised to become the ultimate Bollywood destination online with 45 mn+ video views on YouTube and 6 hundred thousand fans on facebook in less than a year.
The youth of today are influencers of change and the ‘mantra’ is to create impact and influence them across mediums they prefer to engage in.

 

By Aditya Swamy, EVP & Business Head, MTV

 

In 2020, for an 18-year-old, the smartphone was in his home before he was born. Just as the internet was for a person born in the 90s. With the rate of adoption of technology increasing rapidly, the emergence of the smartphone as a platform and not just a device is the next big leap in our industry and this will change the way content is produced, distributed and consumed forever.

 

While people primarily use their televisions and computers to view content, trends clearly indicate that they will start using multiple devices to access this digitized content and in India, smartphones will have the lion’s share of this new device adoption.

 

Singapore leads the world at 7.2%, which is the traffic that comes from non-computer devices. India is still only at half that at 3.7%, but what’s interesting is that a whopping 90% of this comes from mobile phones. In 2011, 150 MM smartphones were sold in India. The 3G user base is projected to hit 200 MM by 2016. And increased Wi-Fi availability is making mobile connectivity a very real experience.

 

The interface is moving from the large screen to small, attention spans are getting crunched, and with each passing day content options are increasing exponentially. This will mean looking at our business through a very different lens from what we do today.

 

At MTV, we see ourselves as content producers first, being in the business of young people, and not as broadcasters. The more platform-agnostic our content is, the more advantage we can take of this increasingly fragmented device diet among young people. And the more time we spend being our audience, the more naturally we will evolve with them. Stay Hungry, Stay Raw !

 

By Gautam Kiyawat, CEO, Madison Media

 

The future of News, as we know it, is not in broadcast. It is in individuals accessing news on their time, on their screen of choice, about areas they are interested in.
It is not about who breaks it first or who shouts loudest. It is about well-presented points of view backed by analysis, even if it is after the event.

 

Shouting heads, sometimes six at a time on split screens, do not make for compelling viewing. A news anchor is a guest in your living room and will do a lot better to behave that way on screen.

 

Broadcast news needs to take a bold, deep breath and get back to the basics. Analysis and presentation, wrapped in a unique positioning – that forms the bedrock of programming.

 

My holy grail is Fox News. Ignore their political stance; it is up there right on top of the news broadcast mountain. A single-minded, bold positioning leading to an incredibly strong programming lineup. Less focus on news, much more on analysis and opinion. Packaged and presented with professionalism, enthusiasm. And pride.

 

By Maheshwar Peri, Chairman, Pathfinder Publishing

 

In light of the recent happenings, I wonder whether ethical journalism is any longer viable. Can we make great journalism a paid-for product?

 

Look at all the news media brands launched in the last 20+ years. Those that do not have the advantage of a 100-year history, that thrive on conditions suited for them. Those that got into the business of news media to carve out a space for themselves on unique propositions based on geographies, targeting etc. that were supposed to be largely their own.

 

Drill down further and see how many of them have been successful and profitable — NDTV, TV 18 group, Times Now, Eenadu TV, ABP News etc… How many have been profitable? DNA, Mint, Business Standard – are they profitable? And can they ever be profitable? In fact, on the television side of the business, the two biggest news channels have consistently lost money. What has changed from where we were say 50 years AGO?

 

Once upon a time, Journalism was a noble profession. People with a deep passion for the society and a commitment to telling the truth sought to work in the field of journalism. It was the profession of the ‘jholawala’. However, the manpower costs of news media organizations are at their peak now. Market forces have invaded. For all those who have freedom to write the truth, very few are willing to compromise their salaries. Most job movements even in journalism are for ‘better career’ prospects, and ‘possibly’ compromised work places. Much of the media corruption starts because ‘your’ salary comes from ad revenues.

 

When some editors draw salaries in eight figures, how can it ever be viable?

 

So, in the light of high costs, is ethical journalism any longer viable? In my view, the solution is with us. Do we have it in us, as those who believe in ‘ethical journalism’, to work for less pay?

 

By NP Sathyamurthy, President & Head – Media, Mudra Max

 

If we look at the viewership pattern of the top one or two regional language channels, their viewership is fairly consistent. They have the opportunity to guarantee some GRPs, and then charge cost per rating point. That would find a lot of takers.

 

It is viable in regional language channels because they offer far more consistency in GRPs, than Hindi GEC at a broad level.

 

And in the process they are likely to get higher returns from investors. They can definitely demand more for an ad spot than they are doing now – if they offer a guarantee. If they adopt this approach, they can also sell their second-level programmes, which are not very high rated, but which are reasonably good. It would definitely work from the revenue perspective, and advertisers would be far more confident, if it is guaranteed. To put it simply, they would benefit in two ways – by getting higher revenues, and a higher share of the advertising pie.

 

The other option that networks have is to bundle in various language channels, and sell them as combination. Currently, they are all selling them as individual channels. For a number of advertisers a couple of markets in the South, Maharashtra and West Bengal are priority one markets. If they offer them as a bundle, they can get a higher share of the advertising pie at the cost of so-called national channels catering to Hindi-speaking markets.

 

By Joydip Kapadia, Executive Vice President, What’s-On-India

 

“I hate television. I hate it as much as I hate peanuts. But I can’t stop eating peanuts.”

– Orson Welles

 

Orson Welles said it right; you just cannot stop watching television, be it analogue or digital. Even TV’s inventor, Philo T Farnsworth, would never have imagined what his invention would have to go through in this age.

 

Television in India is at a threshold of change in the way content will be delivered, searched, consumed and measured. This will make all the stakeholders to look and understand television consumption differently that itself is going to be a game-changer.

 

A simple media research design will have to be now looked at very differently for a simple reason that a lot of data will be available readily at the click of a button which in earlier days was collected by foot soldiers going house to house.

 

Digital makes automation a lot easier. There is nothing to stop operators from providing STBs that can track which household is watching what on television, and the same box can also allow consumers to surf the web.

 

Soon there will be smart devices that will enable viewers to search and select content they want to watch, and use the same device to go to that content on their TV sets without bothering what channel it is aired on.

 

And what will stop the consumer from watching content on that same smart device? And can the device enable viewers to post a comment about the content on social media using the same device? The options are never-ending.

 

All these connected devices will be strong sources of information to understand consumption habits. At a conservative estimate, the data and information in the TV business is set to increase by almost 75-100 times over the next three years.