Media - Child's Play

Have you seen and remember the movie named "BIG" of Tom Hanks. A delight to watch like most Tom Hanks movies - the story is how a kid makes a wish of becoming an adult and his wish is fulfilled overnight. Now, other than all the funny situations that the movie takes you through - it shows how the kid becomes successful in a Toy company. The company is managed by adults and our Adult-Kid is the only one who understands kids in the true sense and so is able to make the best toys for the kids.

Do watch the movie if you already haven't :-).

Today, we need a "Kid" in many companies especially from the perspective of "media". Most managers in even very senior positions have grown up in the media-environment of the yester years and just cant fathom the relationship between the new media formats and the new generations.

I am past 40 and was born in the non-TV era of India. Till then Radio was the favoured media and Amin Sayani was a celebrity. At 8.00 am in the morning there used to be pin-drop silence as our father listed to the "News" on Radio. And, at 8.00 pm at night our whole family huddled around the radio to listen to "Hawa-Mahal" the prime-time hit on Vividh Bharti. We used to be scolded by our parents for getting spoilt and whiling away our time and future if we were caught listening to songs on the Radio. The announcements of the farmaishi programs and the farmish from Jumri-Talaya and the Fauji Bhaiyon ke liye..etc are still so etched in our memories.

We saw the mass roll-out of the TV Stations while we were in school. I suppose they were inaugurating a TV-transmitter a day for a year or so. We used to wait for the TV telecast to start so that we could watch the starting Doordarshan Signature Montage.  TV was telecast only on DD-1 to start with and that too only for limited hours in a day. We only had black&white TVs and some enterprising people used to put a coloured screens over their black & while TV to get a feeling of coloured TV. Don't laugh :-). Of course, having a 8 channel TV was considered a waste of investment since there was only one channel. A remote was unknown. Gradually, DD-2 started and gradually channels increased. And, mind you there used to TV Antennas on the buildings and it was such a nuisance when the kite season started. But, size mattered even then.. the rich people had big TVs and big Antennae too. Going to a neighbours house and 20 - 30 people sitting and watching a cricket match or a Sunday movie or the mega-serials is an something many in my age group will identify with. Chitrahaar was the ultimate song show and it gave a beating to the radio songs.

All this while the newspaper was a stable and sure media in most houses. There used to be one newspaper in the city (2 - 3 at max in larger cities) and we used to get the same newspaper for years and years.. so much so that the newspaper vendor was like a family member due to the long relationship. Not getting the newspaper used to cause a lot of physical and emotional trauma to the elders in the house. We used to be told to read the newspaper to improve our English and to prepare for GK in competitive exams as we grew up. Borrowing Newspaper from neighbours though a subject of many jokes was a reality too.

Magazines were few but we used to read them cover to cover. The Illustrated Weekly, the India Today, Readers Digest, Sarika, Greh Shobha, Champak, Mirror, Span and so on.. were some of the favourites I can recall.

It was quite a time before the "cable" happened and Zee TV took the fancy of India with its fancy song-shows and the proliferation of channels was started. The content available exploded and I remember studies that were done and articles that used to be written how the TV was going to be the doom of the next generation. Parents used to lock-up the TV in a box during exams. TV was held responsible for eye-sight problems, education problems and many more social ills.

Cinema was a loved media though it used to take a lot of dare to go for a movie in the first few week of release. Good movies used to go on on theatres for at least a few months and the classics blocked theatres for over an year. English movies used to  release in select theatres and either were the classics or the adult types. Movie going used to be a family affair often with neighbours and relatives included. We used to listen to full audio of the films on radio or on cassettes. I remember my cousin who not only had seen Sholay for over a dozen times but could mouth the while story with dialogues, songs and a fair amount of background music too.

So far, we had heard of computers only in newspapers and magazines and paperback novels. Internet was a word we had never heard. On Star Trek serial which was the most sci-fi thing for us ever - we used to wonder at the "Communicator" never even imagining that we all would be carrying one a decade later.  Telephone had advanced a lot and now we did not have to go to the Telephone Exchange to make a Truck-Call but had STD at home :-).

A trip to the post office was customary almost every week and it used to be a chore to sit and write letters to friends and relatives who would maybe write back to us in a reply that would reach us a few weeks later at the earliest. Looking back now it seemed like a conversation in slow motion. We used to know the location of all the post-boxes in the vicinity and knew the pickup times from them too. The postman also was like a family member and I remember how we used to wait for him on the road to our house to intercept the "report-card" from reaching to our parents :-). The yellow post card, the blue inland letter, the international letter, the envelope, the registered post, the money order.. there was so much to manage..

Hoardings were few and we never paid heed to any but still recall the Amul one which we used to see on our way to school. Besides, that it was only movie releases that used to be on hoardings or paper posters plastered across the city.

That was all till I guess I turned about 20. That was one generation and the amount of change that happened in the next 20 years can be termed phenomenal. We now have over 400 TV channels, a dozen radio stations per city, a multitude of newspapers and a score of supplements, hundreds of magazines,  mobile phones and Internet rule our lives, the post-office is a relic while we move ahead with emails, chats, facebook updates and tweets communicating in micro seconds.... I wont describe this much. .just look around you.. the world has totally changed...and the relationship of the young today with media is far more transitory than the manner in which we used to engage with it. .but paradoxically is far more interleaved into their lives than it ever was in our days. Earlier, it was just an add-on but now it is a part of life.

And, this changed media world requires brands and media custodians to use media very differently but most of the managers as I said belong either to my generation or earlier. Howsoever much, we may claim to understand the perspective of the young.. we cant even come close to their realityy. So, if we really want to apply media and design media solutions for the current generation, we need to get them into our teams.. 

Just as in the movie Big, the kid coming into the toy company turned their fortunes so will the fortunes of our  companies change if we induct the kids into our teams. Lets go for the BIG change.

Brands - Wake up to the power of content

For so many years, content has been an area mostly barred to advertisers. The sanctity of the editorial and the historical divide in the media houses between the editorial and the space selling teams has kept the boundaries intact for many years.

As, competition in media became stronger and as media brands survival and prosperity became tougher and tougher to sustain; the adversity eroded the boundaries a bit in the recent (last decade) past. Media opened up to some interventions in editorial for the benfit of brands.. of course! at a cost.

If, we look around there are examples of brand - content integrations in all media.. some good ones that have given back to the brand as well as to the media while some are an appaling abuse of the advertising brand as well as the media brand. A majority though are brand managers delight and a media planners delight and I am not sure how much do these give back to the advertising brand if at all. Smart media sellers have managed to sell innocuous innovations and integrations that give them their revenue without really giving up much in editorial.

Anyways, the idea here is not to criticise the quality of work done but to ask brand managers and media planners why "content" is not their first port of call. We all know the power of content and yes, while content was not available to advertising brands the advertising break and the advertising spaces were the default choice. But, now over the years brand-content integrations are certianly possible. So, then why are we still spending  crores and crores of Rupees on conventional ad-spaces and not having the guts to invest siginificantly into content. Why is the investment pyramid not the other way around?

Is it because communication strategy is still ruled by conventional creative agencies who still are masters of only the TV and Print creatives? Is it because conventional advertising is a safe bet from the point of view of justifying decisions within organizations? Are brand managers giving vent to their own creative energies by taking part in the creation of the 30 second story? Is it that we are slave to data and measurement which is very ambiguous when it comes to branded content development or integration?

Whatever, the reasons that govern our behaviours at present. these have to change..... more and more investments will go towards producing brand funded content taking away from conventional ad-spaces. As digital media becomes more and more significant the line between content and brand will become even finer...  Consumers of media have been threatening to move away from the 30-second ad-spot for very long.... as a start they are avoiding it desparately.. brands too will need to move their focus of communication away from the ad-space and align themselves to the power of content..

Of course, it means a new perspective to communication, new theories, new models, new skill sets, new tools and research.. another ecosystem to be built for brand communications.. 

What should we measure - cause or effect?

Media is possibly the only domain that has so much research and measurement data available. No other product or service can boast of a measurement system that offers a minute-by-minute relay of the consumption patterns (TAM and AMap) or of a sample survey that is over a 2 lakh sample size which has been conducted every year for more than a decade (IRS) or of a database that records the details of almost every transasction in the domain (Adex). And, there is much more.

So, while there is a lot of reseach measurement available, here, I want to examine if these measures are relevant and appropriate or not. In the marketing-media ecosystem, there are two kinds of measures which can be identified. Lets understand the possibilities that exist and then discuss the pros and cons of each method.

The first type of measures are the "cause" measures. This includes measurement of phenomena that are an input to the marketing ecosystem; that are the stimuli in the marketing system. In a way, this is like measuring the "effort" that is exerted. The Reach, OTS and GRP measures are primarily measures of the media inputs that are being invested by the brand and hence are all "cause" or "stimulus" or "effort" measure.

The other type of measures are the "effect" measures such as sales, awareness, brand image, footfalls, etc. These represent the actions or the mindset of the consumers and hence are an indicator of what is the "result" of the various media and marketing efforts. 

In the days of, scarce media and when the brand choices of customers too were limited; there was a high correlation between the "input" and the "result". Hence, measuring either of them would give the brand manager an idea about the success of the brand. In such a scenario, since measurement of the "effort" was far easier, all the media measurement systems then set up are merely measures of the "input effort". Till recently, these measures served us well. But, the media landscape has changed a lot now.

The compexity in the media landscape and the huge clutter of advertising communication has eroded the effectiveness of conventional advertising. The gap between the "effort" and the "effect" has widened. More and more clients are asking agencies to show the "effect" rather than the "effort". It is quite another matter that due to low sample sizes etc of the research even the actual value of the "effort" is often debated upon. It is an accepted practice that the agency has to provide the measurement of "effort" while the measurement of "effect" is the responsibility of the client.

The Clients are at varying degrees of readiness when it somes to having the "effect" data. These range from those who are not even able to provide regular, systematic data on sales to those who have extensive data on customer interactions with their call-centres, awareness track information, walk-in data, website traffic data, etc. Most of these are data are not captured with the objective of understanding the impact of media and hence are often either not suitable to understand the media impact or need a lot of "massaging" before any inference can be derived. There is no standardization of the indicators of communication "effect" and the efficacy of advertising and communication is diagnosed basis "whatever available" sets of data.

More and more communication design is being linked to such "effect" data but there is a lot of ground to be covered. There has to be a joint effort from the the clients and agencies both to agree upon and setup "effect" data capture systems that are targeted to capture the effect of media.

A lot of discussion happens on "ROI" and if really we want to walk the talk then the frst step is to define "ROI" measures and start measuring them. Lets measure what we want to deliver instead of just delivering what is available to be measured.

The Last Gasps of Media Technology

I am probably among the early adopters of the view that many media formats are destined to buried soon and forgotten. I joined media industry in 2002 and it did not take me long to build this view looking at the way digital was progressing then. However, I am surprised and at times inspired by the optimism that some have about the 'indestructuveness' of the traditional media formats.

Maybe, the optimism is what may eventually give a new lease of life to these traditional formats but for how long?

I was reading this article in Ad Adge titled "Consumers aren't so keen on cutting the cord after all" which shows the situation in the US where despite many technological advances in alternative TV distribution channels 'Cable TV' is still very popular. Yes, subscribers are adding on additional formats but very few are giving up the cable as yet. My observation in India too is similar - households have taken on DTH and IPTV subscriptions but continue to have the traditional cable TV connection too. 

There would be many reasons for this - commercial, emotional, political, etc. The behaviour is similar with newspapers too. While, we would still be doing a lot of our news gathering on TV and/ or Internet but no one is giving up newspaper subscriptions at home. As a matter of fact the newspaper subscriptions are only increasing due to more and more number of newspapers now available.

I guess, it would be interesting to learn from the transition of the market from the landline phones to cell phones. Initially, there too a cell phone was only as an addition to the landline phones. Only, after the cell phone reached a certain level of  acceptability, then consumers started adopting cell phones as a replacement of landlines. The landlines penetration first saturated and then started moving downwards. Will the same happen in these media technologies too - only after a certain tipping point of adoption of the new formats has been reached then the downward slide will start? What, is the level for that tipping point - are we there yet or not?

The so-called dot-com revolution is also an example to study. In the late 90s the way the dot-coms took off it seemed that the whole world would be made into a big website and our lives would soon be mouse-clicks. But, soon there was the dot-com bust and companies returned to the brick & brick model. However, with time gradually but surely today we are far ahead of the curve on Internet acceptance than we were at the time of the dot-com bust and companies are again working on their brick & click models.

I am reminded of an article that I had read in the Harward Business Review about a year ago titled "The last gasps of technology". As new technologies are introduced in the market and threaten the traditional technologies - the article showed how the old technologies move into niches favourable to them and how they work on their output such that they become highly efficient though in a reduced area of application. What this causes is a sudden rise in the efficiency curve of the technology and thus is referred to as the "last gasp" after which either the technology eventually gets obsolete or remains but only in that niche area of application where the new technology cant beat it.

I can almost see that happening in media technologies. Look at how newspapers are finding their niches v/s the threat from television and Internet. Look at how the attractiveness of newspapers is increasing in some segments given what they offer and at what cost. of course! one never really knows if that is the "last gasp" or is it a "rejuvenation" which will bring the media back into our midst as ever.

Can we look around at the various media formats that surround us and ponder if any of them is actually taking the "last gasps" or is soon likely to.

Obsolescence!!

So many objects in our life have become obsolete and been replaced by better alternatives. Here, I just want to remember all those obsolete objects and reflect upon the future.

We grew up listening to the ruckus of the sewing machine as our mother stitched our clothes at home. The big radios at home are nowhere to be seen now.

And, do you remember the record player and the big black records that were a luxury to listen to. And, more recently we saw the cassettes and cassettes getting wasted.

The top-view camera, the big box camera with the stand and the fast vanishing film rolls.

As kids in nursery we used to have a slate and chalks, rarely seen now.

The priyadarshini phone is unknown now while the phones with separate ear piece and mouth piece had already vanished before our time.

Dozens of types of computers have come and gone, I still remember seeing the computer that used those cards as input instead of a keyboard.

The Black & White TV sets are almost gone. The clumsy looking switches are replaced by swanky ones now.

Car models have vanished.

The VCR had a short life.

The kerosene oil stoves in the kitchen are gone.

Rarely see a fountain pen around and the ink bottles and ink droppers are seen no more.

Horse carts outside the railway stations have been replaced by Taxis.

So, may things that were so a part of our lives have vanished - either they have outlived their utility or have evolved into more efficient and contemporary forms. In Future Shock, Alvin Toflersays that the speed of change and obsolescence is only going to get faster and so more and more of our life is going to get transformed faster and faster.

In the media industry, many of us are but in a state of denial - we refuse to see the writing on the wall or even if we do; we never really believe that any mahor shift will happen during our lifetime. The choice is ours to either ignore the change and bury our heads in the sand like the ostrich or anticipate the change and be ready for it.  We need to ask ourselves some questions:

• Do we really think that print media does not need to worry about its future?
• Is TV advertising going to continue on its growth trend for long?
• What all areas of media is digital going to invade?
• How long is the traditional TV spot or the Press ad going to exist?
• How many TVs or screens are out there that no measurement system is measuring?

Obsolescence of many media and media formats is inevitable. Lets stop denying it and prepare for it.

Redo the organization - Social Media is here!

"Social Media" is probably the latest buzz word in use in media and communication planning groups. It has been awarded the status of the "messiah" of the advertising world that has the answer to most advertising and communication problems. The most popular reason for the rise to fame of this media is supposed to be that it is 'almost free' :-).

I was recently reading an article in Ad-Age Digital by Judy Shapiro, a brand strategist who very clearly  describes what all comprises of Social Media and how it is different from the other approaches. Reading this triggered a chain of thoughts on what exactly does it need for an organization to be adept at Social Media.

Traditionally, organizations are tuned to the one-to-many model of brand communication. Traditionally, these organizations have a set of people who are supposed to be experts at deciphering what the organization needs to say about its brand; to a set of people who are again decided by this elite group to be the "target group" and they are also the experts at designing (or at least of leading the process of design) and disseminating this message in a planned manner. I may be blamed for being over-skeptical but largely organizations just have a marketing and a marketing and communication department and many have failed to transform themselves into marketing - oriented organizations.

In the realm of Social Media, we are talking of many-to-many messaging - a phenomenon that is new to every organization at the scale that it is happening now facilitated by technology.

Social Media Marketing is not just about using the 'vanguards of social media' such as facebook and twitter and listening to conversations, hijacking opinions, interjecting brand ideas or about getting people to talk about their brands - I believe it is far more profound.

The thought starts at realizing who really owns the Brand. Traditionally, it is the organization and some department within who are the brand owners or custodians. However, the way in which social media has exploded - the control of a brand is moving from the company to the consumers. The company is tending towards a role of a 'facilitator' who provides means to the 'consumers' to 'manage the brand'.

The Brand is a 'Social' being. The brand lives among the consumers; they interact with the brand regularly and talk about it and it is their 'talk' that creates the brand personality. The consumers have relationships with the brand and no company can come and start tinkering with their brand. An organization that instills this into its management and organizes its structure and process to thus facilitate the cultivation of this Social Brand is truly a social media oriented organization.

The most fundamental change required in communication is for the brand to stop looking at itself in the mirror singing praises of itself but instead to start looking out of the window into the world of the consumers to discuss and participate in issues that are central to their lives. Mind you, I am not talking merely about a CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) campaign here but a total re-do of the organization.

Power is flowing into the hands of the consumers more and more everyday and brands that realize and appreciate the change will continue their journey into the next era and the rest one day will be sucked into their mirrors to fade away from the world of the future.

IRS - Covering all Quarters?

The IRS has come a long way since its first report in 1995 when it challenged the existing sporadic research studies with an every year continuous research with a reporting every 6 months. The superior sample structure, comprehensive information design and collaborative ownership enabled the IRS to become the industry standard soon.

In 2010, the IRS started releasing the data on a quarterly basis. Let us try to understand the significance of this change and the impact that it has on the media research users. But, before we explore this specific improvement we need to get a perspective on the status of IRS as a research input in the media industry today.

The strategic challenge a decade ago was of reaching audiences relevant for the brand. The availability of robust data on key demographics and product - media linked data in the IRS was a boon to the media planners and so IRS became integral to every media strategy for most media agencies.

During the last decade there have been significant changes in the media consumption behaviour of consumers in India and hence also in the pattern of advertising spends by advertisers. While, the overall advertising spends have been growing at a healthy rate the media choice is shifted from Print to TV and is now tending towards OOH & Digital. This changing media landscape does have implications on the information coverage in the IRS for it to be still relevant and useful as a research database for media strategy planning as it was envisaged when launched.

Not only the number of media that make part of every plan have increased but the number of ways in which each media is used for advertising has increased significantly. Each media option delivers something different for the brand. Hence, the media choice decision now is far more complex than it was a few years ago and it needs a lot more dimensions of understanding of the media vehicles than just the "estimated readership numbers". There is a need to understand the nature and intensity of the interaction that a consumer has with each type of media exposure. There is a need to capture such interactions into objective variables that can then be used by planners to compare media options in an objective way to decide the best combination for delivering the campaign objectives for brands.

In the absence of such evolved measures, like most other syndicated databases, the IRS too has got relegated to a database of measuring only readership which can be best used only as a buying currency. A quick analysis will further reveal that the market price of a media option and its readership do not have a strong relationship and that there are many more variables beyond readership that ultimately decide the market price.

In such a context, I want us to now look at the issue of "quarterly reports" of the IRS and I must say that it does not address any of the strategic issues discussed above. If at all, it is able to bring the changes happening in the market to the media research users at a higher frequency than before.

The competition between publications also causes variations in the readership numbers and a quarterly report has the chance to bring these numbers to the market much faster than a six-monthly report. New publications are launching so often as new brand come in or existing brands expand to new geographies or target new segments. There is a need for the "readership numbers" for business transactions to progress smoothly and a quarterly report brings these numbers early for these new publications. This is also useful when new products and service brands are launched in the market. Advertisers now need to wait lesser for their new brands to feature in the IRS data. Of course! the IRS maintains its quality control of not reporting brands and publications that are too recent or have low sample size or are depict unstable numbers.

So, recency of numbers that we are seeing is certainly an advantage that the IRS quarterly reports provide. However, we must not forget that the IRS data is still a moving annual total (MAT) so even though we are getting the numbers every quarter these are still an average of the past 12 months. This is consciously done by the IRS to even out any "seasonal" or "tactical" fluctuations in the market. However, now when we are providing the data quarterly responding to the need of the dynamic market - we need to question if by suppressing these fluctuations are we doing justice to those who want to read the fluctuations in the markets.

IRS has a real opportunity to become an indicator of the success of promotion campaigns for publications, if it is able to report the data without averaging it over the year. I am sure prudent planners can always compute the annual average if they so require. Not only media, even product and services brands can use the IRS similarly. The opportunity is huge though I agree not easy to be implemented given the complexity involved in the sampling process and the stringent sample adequacy norms adhered to by the IRS.

In conclusion, I would like to say that the IRS has been one of the most successful products in the country. But, like all products and brands there is a point when one requires a re-thinking for the future and for the IRS that point has come. Incremental improvements such as the quarterly report will not aid this re-construction of the brand unless these are part of a larger strategic change that has been set into motion for the future. 

[Published in exchange4media in April 2011]

Stop Media Pollution - Go Green!!

This thought has been building in my mind for quite some time now and I am convinced enough of its significance to share with all of you and to seek your view on the subject.

We are all aware of 'pollution' which the dictionary defines as "the presence or introduction into the environment of a substance or a thing that has harmful or poisonous effects". We encounter pollution everyday in our lives and supposedly more so in the urban areas. We hear of water pollution, air pollution, noise pollution and so many more. Here, I place before you the thought of 'media pollution' ie the pollution caused in the media that we consume everyday. Media pollution can be  'in-content' or 'around-content'. the in-content pollution causes a degradation of content while the around-content pollution largely refers to the pollution due to increasing advertising. Here, I will discuss the around-media pollution that relates to advertising.

Advertising serves a purpose and has a social and a commercial reason for existence. However, all will agree that there is too much of it in the recent years. As the markets have become more fragmented, the need to make a "sale" to the limited low-hanging affluent consumers has brought about this ever increasing use of competitive advertising. The driving force is the popular concept of  increasing "Share of Voice" which is actually very contrary to an otherwise conservative Indian culture. In an attempt to out-shout competing brands more and more advertising noise is polluting our media environment.

Go to any busy shopping area in any city large or small and just look around and you will see how shabby and deplorable our landscape looks due to all types of hoardings, kiosks, dealer boards, banners, etc. At some places there is actually no landscape visible. Television which is the advertisers darling media forces an average user to see advertising for over 2 hours a week which may be as much as 25% of the viewers total TV viewing for the week. In some newspapers especially supplements, it takes an effort even to locate content as the pages are full of advertising messages. Innovations in publications seem more like irritations. Spam emails and messages in our computers and mobiles are already issues that require intervention from the governement to curb the meance. Brand call centres have people dedicated to calling consumers for un-solicited sales offers. As consumers move out of home, they are easy prey for ooh events and activation teams of brands who assault their privacy and peace of mind at malls and other venues.

On an average an urban indian is bombarded by hundreds of advertising messages everyday and these advertising messages are creating a lot of pollution in media all around us. The Indian consumer is very tolerant and neither does he get irritated nor is culturally tuned to being rude to anyone easily and hence is silent about this overdose of advertising. But, the consumer is becoming more discerning and assertive and will penalize brands that are not "within limits" of prudent advertising. Already, there is talk of ad-free paid content in different media. It is but a matter of time when the affluent consumers will choose to align with such ad-free distribution systems.

Brands need to re-look at the manner in which they approach brand comunications. Brands have a purpose beyond their sales and that purpose is to improve the life of their consumers. The least that a brand can do is to avoid participating in actions that cause pain to consumers or disrupt their peace of mind. Can the brands turn to advertising philosophies that add value to the brand-consumer ecosystem and do not vitiate the media environment?

Yes, it is not easy. Yes, it may not result in a tactical or a short term benefit. But, the consumers understand and value brands that care for them and a more considerate approach to brand communications will strengthen the bond with the consumer much better than the "me-too" SOV increasing tirade of brands.

Advertise responsibly!! Make a difference not just to the brand sales but to the lives of the consumers. Go Green!

Soon, I will write about the tenets for Green Advertising.