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.