Anant's Blog

Last morning, we announced that Raj Nayak had taken charge as CEO of Colors.

I had known of the impending announcement for a bit, and had quietly celebrated the news – because, as the worthy Rajesh Kamath quit, Viacom18 needed to find a replacement who would energise and reinvigorate the channel.

And, in such a situation, there’s no one better than a salesman.

And there’s no salesman better than Raj Nayak.

Raj and I were colleagues at STAR TV when STAR started operations in India. So I know Raj and I know Peter Mukerjea, for donkey’s years.

Peter’s in Bristol now, but we meet every time he comes to India and to Mumbai, which is every few months. And when I hear he’s coming, a few of us who worked with Peter at STAR call each other up and try and catch up for a drink or seven.

Back from Goa, with the normal baggage from Goa, which is a lot of angst and a lot of cribbing, almost all of it is rooted in the awards tally and the interpretation thereof.

To begin with, a clarification. The table that we (and all the others in the press) received from the Awards Governing Council was in alphabetical order. When we made a table, which we believe is only an extract from the original table, we had mentioned that we had reproduced the table as we had received it. What we did do was to extract the top winners from the table and arrange them in descending order sorted by quality of metals won.

Since the AGC had arranged the columns in the order Grand Prix, Gold, Silver, Bronze, the top row had O&M, which was the only agency to win a Grand Prix, which is how the Olympics treats the winners table.

Was O&M the overall winner, on top of the table as we saw them? Or was Mudra, who had more metals than O&M? Different publications have interpreted the same data received from the AGC differently; Campaign India sees O&M as the winner – in the absence of any clarity from the AGC.

This is not the first year that there is a hue and cry over the tally and the interpretations. Can this be the last, please? What prevents the AGC from arriving at a weightage for each metal? Once this is done, the matter ends, and no energy need be extended by all of adland in the chaotic exercise that all have just gone through.

Worse, the current stony silence leaves the Award with no clear winner. O&M could feel cheated, as could Mudra. I cannot imagine the AGC taking a position for this year’s interpretation, so we will meander in an uncertain gloom till the Abbys is forgotten.

In what has been a far less controversial Abbys than we have seen in the recent past, this ambiguity, and the consequent bad blood, was totally unnecessary….

….as was the mystery surrounding how Creativeland Asia’s name was in the print out that the press received and missing in the PDF received. I do agree with Raj Kurup that he deserves to know how on earth this happened. This, too, was totally unnecessary…

…as was the shifting of the digital part of the creative Abbys to the previous day – with no one being informed of such a change. Many of the winners, were, indeed in Goa, even at the Goafest venue, only to learn that they had missed the presentation. If they’re livid, one can easily empathise with them…

… but time for the Cribfest to end. Shashi Sinha has done a fantastic job in bringing as much of the industry together. I’ve spoken to many of the jurors, and, while things are not perfect, there is consensus that this year’s judging has been significantly better than it has been in the last few years.

Last weekend, I was in Chennai.

The provocation for this post is Paritosh Joshi’s (www.twitter.com/ParitoshZero) tweet on irritating Times of India half covers.

The innocuous tweet flew all over twitterland with all responses agreeing with Paritosh’s original tweet: “Will someone please tell ToI these HALF-covers are FULL irritation? Or don’t paying readers matter?”

You can go to Paritosh’s twitter page and read all the exchanges.

About a decade ago, I was heading the Mumbai and Pune offices of TBWA India. One of the big wins of the office, then, was the CNBC TV18 account.

The team on the client side was very, very small, and the first meetings used to feature just two from the client and five or six from the agency.

Amongst other facets and highlights of the channel that we discussed was the fact that the screen was so ugly:

There were multiple stickers at the bottom, traveling at different speeds. There were multiple stacks left and right of the screen, moving rapidly in market hours. And then you had the picture-in-picture of various guests being interviewed.

We discussed the level of irritation to the viewer – and decided that the viewer would suffer the irritation, even ignore the irritation, because he profits from watching the channel.

A decade later, a lot of what CNBC TV18 introduced to Indian TV – such as the inset screen with an L shaped ‘ad’ framing the screen – have moved from business television to sport. We see a lot of it during the ICC WC broadcast by ESPN STAR.

The same intrusion or innovation grates and irritates on live cricket, far more than it does during market hours on any business news channel – because the viewer is not willing to suffer the offending piece of communication – because he doesn’t really profit from it.

Try the same ‘innovation’ on a GEC and the channel will have hell to pay; because while there might be some ‘profit’ from watching live sport, there is none, whatsoever, in watching a saas-bahu serial.

Getting back to Paritosh’s tweet, this is not so much about the intrusion by the advertisement as the physical pain of being able to handle the newspaper (and I must add, in fairness to ToI, that every major newspaper sells this ‘innovation’, not just the ToI).

Here, too, the argument of the profit motive works; the same innovation in Bombay Times or a supplement would not irritate as much as in the main paper.

There are a number of innovations which, arguably, are as impactful, without the irritation factor. Take yesterday’s front page of The Economic Times, for example.

What ad sales teams (and marketers) should be doing is to test on the irritation levels of proposed communication – and to check what can be done to lower such levels.

The half page innovation irritates, for example, not because of the intrusion (then the ET ad would, as well), but because of the difficult readers go through handling a newspaper with such an innovation.

The same half cover does not irritate in Campaign India – because the page is part of a centre-pinned magazine.

Can newspapers figure out a way for the handling to be as easy despite the half cover? It’s looking for an answer to questions such as this that will stop reader irritation – and deliver big for the advertiser.

The first step, however, must be taken: accepting that the reader is irritated.

Haymarket operations in Mumbai, till about six months ago, were housed in three premises. In a move that was a relief to all, especially to those who had to visit two or more offices regularly, we shifted to a large, spacious new office, and all employees of the two companies that we run in India were under one roof.

We shifted; new office, new furniture, the smell of paint, new air conditioners, etc. All was well till we discovered that none of the mobile services worked inside the office.

I spoke to Arif Ali of Loop Mobile, a dear friend, and yelled for help. A couple of hours later, two engineers from Loop were at my office, and, hey presto, I could make and receive calls from my desk.

My call to Arif helped a minority of my colleagues. I think there are only three out of 100 odd colleagues who subscribe to Loop.

As I write this, many months after the problem was first reported, Loop is the only service which works efficiently in the office. Vodafone, Idea and Airtel, for example, work in some parts of the office and not in others…

And I look at all the communication on number portability and I stop and think.

If I were to go across to a colleague on Vodafone and expressed my wish to port out of Loop Mobile to Vodafone, he, the Vodafone customer, will dissuade me from doing so. Because he is unhappy with the service himself.

Ditto someone on Airtel, someone on Idea, someone on Docomo, someone on BSNL, etc.

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Mobile phone companies have a mountain of data on their subscribers – and do precious little with the data.

Mobile service providers have – literally – millions of consumers – and do precious little with them.

Their data can tell them who has been a consumer for how long, who is a national roaming customer, who is an international roaming customer, who uses data services, who has a BlackBerry, and so on.

They know the name of the consumer, his or her address, certainly his or her phone number, in many cases his or her bank, credit or debit card number, and so on.

What would it have taken for the service providers to engage with their existing subscribers and improve satisfaction levels with them before making a noise on number portability?

If they had, when I asked a ‘Vodafone colleague’ about whether I should shift to Vodafone, if he felt special, if he felt cared for, he would recommend  the shift with enthusiasm and pride.

I’ve not received a single call from Loop Mobile in the past year asking me whether I was satisfied with the service, whether I had had any problems, whether I had complaints, etc.

Not a single call.

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What a waste.

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In any conversation with CEOs of advertising and media agencies, one hears of the importance of data and analytics.

And where data is available, nothing seems to be done, as in the case with mobile service providers.

What I wonder about now is, who should have belled the cat? Should the creative agencies focus just on entertaining advertising (I like the Virgin MNP ads the most, followed by the Vodafone ads, followed by the Docomo ads, followed by the Idea ads; the rest I don’t care for too much) or suggest that a logical and lucrative first step would be to engage with existing subscribers and raise their satisfaction levels – or at least the perception of service?

The loss due to the lack of thinking is monumental, as many talk of wanting to port out and very few actually do, because when disgruntled consumers talk to other disgruntled consumers, one ends up choosing the devil one knows.

Which means the creative agencies will keep churning out expensive communication that doesn’t work.

Chew on that.

Last morning, I annihilated The Economic Times crossword with my first cup of tea and got pulped into submission by The Hindustan Times one and left for office for a scheduled 9.00 appointment. Reached the office only to discover that my appointment was delayed.

Since I now had some time to while away, I decided to read some football blogs (which I shunned for some time, thanks to Liverpool’s horrible displays till Kenny D brought back sunshine into my life).

Read the blogs on bbc.com, on The Telegraph  and then moved onto The Guardian.

And I read this on a fantastic piece of writing by Martin Kelner:

“Watching highlights of the 1981 FA Cup final replay between Manchester City and Tottenham Hotspur on ESPN Classic, two things struck me. First, the greatness of Glenn Hoddle, often obscured by later wackiness, and second, how the commentary of the late Brian Moore let the game breathe, allowing you to decide for yourself how it was going, to create your own narrative, as you might do if you were in the ground.”

You can read Kelner’s whole post here.

I read the post once, twice and the third time, looking at the parallels you see on TV in India when we watch sport. Enough, already, Sidhu!. Ravi Shastri, get out of there!

You get the drift.

And I went back to the first paragraph and re-read it. “…how the commentary of the late Brian Moore let the game breathe, allowing you to decide for yourself how it was going, to create your own narrative, as you might do if you were in the ground.”

And I forgot about sport and thought about news television in India. For some years, I’ve been raving and ranting about how news anchors keep shouting and keep interrupting. And I wondered why anchors on the BBC never do and wondered why Indian channels couldn’t understand that the softness, the calmness makes the viewer feel more calm as well.

Perhaps I got it all wrong. It wasn’t about the shouting and the interruption.

It was about their not allowing the news and the import of the news to ‘breathe’. The channels weren’t allowing me, the viewer, to ‘decide for myself how it was going’ based on the inputs that I received from the channel.

Continuous interruptions do not allow a point of view to soak in; by the time I’m trying to understand what someone is saying or what he or she stands for or what agenda he or she has, I’m interrupted again, with a counter-argument to an argument that still hasn’t seeped in; as I try and understand the counter-argument, I’m interrupted again with a new one or another point of view.

What Sidhu and his ilk do, and what our wonderful news anchors are doing, is preventing us from using our intelligence to make an educated assessment of what we see on television. Anchors and commentators certainly have a role to play in helping us see the developing story with some added expert advice, but to prevent us from applying our minds is akin to treating us as if we were brain-dead.

Advertising understood this early. “The consumer is not a moron, she is your wife,” said David Ogilvy.

News TV needs to understand this as well. The viewer is not a moron, either.

Last week, while I was on holiday, Kartik Iyer from Happy sent me a link to a new commercial they had created for their client, Myntra (Kartik had called it a viral; I said it could be called so if consumers made it one; till then, it remained, for me, a TVC).

Today’s been interesting.

I open the newspapers, go to the Economic Times first; it’s the budget.

Quickly glance at the headlines, stop and stare at the unusual visual on the front page – it’s a ‘postcard’ designed by Ogilvy.

(Caption from the Economic Times: The battery ran out of the socialist clock in 1991. Two decades on, it surely is an exciting time for India and its hard-driving and globally expanding entrepreneurs. Gone are the hammer and sickle and even the last vestiges of a system of governance that dulled the Indian spirit and dimmed the hopes of millions. Now, in 2011, the Rupee rules, a strong symbol of a new and muscular India)

I forget the rest of the headlines; I turn page after page to look for more postcards. There are, indeed, more of them.

That’s an interesting change from the budget day’s ET’s in the recent past; Bollywood, Hollywood  and cricket have dominated the ‘themes’ in the big day editions of ET in the past few years. Not just on budget day; the agency reckoner has seen this, too. Railway budgets and the economic survey as well.

And  I go through the paper once again, spending much more time than I would on the paper (I’ve never bought or sold a share in my life). It’s been a few days now; the newspaper is looking more and more serious than it has done in the last few years. New fonts, new design templates.

And new treatment of the content. The headlines, too, have become more business-like. Gone is the overuse of Hinglish.

What’s with ET?

Even on the dotcom, www.economictimes.indiatimes.com, we see changes. While the newspaper is decidedly pink, the dotcom version is shaded a light blue-grey; again, more businesslike.

More international?

And what is the need for it, I wonder…

Perhaps because they no longer compete with just other Indian pink papers…

Perhaps their competition, in this age of digital and at a point when 3G is imminent and tablets will proliferate, tomorrow, could be any financial daily from anywhere in the world, accessible by all Indians first thing in the morning, with India focus and an India home page.

I’m going to watch this space; if ET is preparing for the war in the skies, there will be one – and I’ll get myself a ringside view.

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And on another front, days like the budget are great days for media products to prove that they’re better than their peers. All have the same news and similar access to experts. Yesterday, our busy Finance Minister had time for interviews with Arnab Goswami on Times Now, Dr. Prannoy Roy + TN Ninan on NDTV and Raghav Bahl on CNBC and CNNIBN (I didn’t watch ET Now as my Tata Sky doesn’t carry it).

Bahl won hands down. If you get a chance to see it (I”m sure there’ll be a repeat), do so. It’s worth the trouble.

DNA, the newspaper, has been in the news recently for two unrelated, but both significantly debatable, reasons.

The first was their decision to do away with the edit page.

In a signed communication to readers, Aditya Sinha, Editor-in-Chief of DNA, said, “The newspaper edit page has long outlived its usefulness. It’s boring, very few read it, and it’s a chore to fill. It’s more punditry than expert comment. It’s become a single-page editorial ghetto; and that makes little sense in this TV/mobile/web age where you’re looking for more news validation and analysis,

“This does not mean DNA will shun analysis: after all, it’s part of our title. Instead, DNA will give more comment, spread across the paper. For instance, yesterday we have articles by experts on Mumbai, on corruption and on the China-US presidential meeting. Each will appear on a different news page. Otherwise, they’d appear on three consecutive edit pages. DNA will give more comment in the days to come; readers have already seen it in the Money section, and readers will even see it on the Sport pages. And it will all be interesting,” he added.

The decision foxed me; the greater the competition, the greater the role of the edit page, I thought.

When ‘news’ in a newspaper is already dated by the time a newspaper reaches consumers, it is the analysis of the news and the opinions of thought-leaders that keeps the newspaper alive, I thought.

And editors of newspapers are thought leaders trusted by the readers, I thought.

And the edit page is the one page that the reader gets the view of those he trusts, I thought.

The edit in his paper is the edit most trusted – it is the opinion that he adopts as his own, I thought.

DNA obviously thinks differently.

Not quite, though. Since this momentous decision – taken without consulting the most important stakeholder – the reader – DNA has chosen to carry edits on the front page – defeating their own argument.

Admittedly, the attention that an edit gets is maximum during times of trouble or tumultuous change – but that does not mean that the edit has no role to play otherwise.

It’s like two friends, one better informed than the other. The better informed is the advisor that the less informed turns to, to understand everything from why onion prices went up when they did, to understand whether or not Manmohan Singh should appear before a JPC, on whether Lalit Modi is a crook, or whether Adarsh should be demolished.

Imagine if the better informed, one fine morning, decided that he will no longer be available to the less informed. Or, bizarrely, decided that he will proffer his advice as and when he felt like.

Fundamentally, this is what DNA has decided to do. The paper has decided that it will be available to the reader as and when it feels like – and that’s bizarre.

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And on another front. DNA says, on the front page, next to the masthead, that the paper is free of any paid news. That’s fantastic. Can any other paper do the same?

Or, as a provocation, should one ever, ever have to say something like this….

There are two areas of high interest and focus for me, personally, and they are advertising and media. If one had to narrow the latter down, it would be news media.
This post’s about news media, especially television news media.

I’ve been a glutton for news ever since I could read. Our house was full of newspapers; we got all the papers from Calcutta, where we lived, obviously, but we also got a whole host of newspapers from outside Calcutta. I’ve read papers like the Searchlight, the Hitavada, and so on. Some of these outstation papers I read for the cartoons (almost all had editorial cartoons those days), some I read for the features. For example, I read Hindu for Art Buchwald and William Safire, The Times of India for the crossword, and so on.

There was no need to read other papers for the news. There was no differentiated news in those days (except for the local pages). The front pages of all the papers were more or less the same.

The other source of news, in the early days, was the radio. One listened to All India Radio’s news programmes to get the establishment view on what mattered (again, it was just news; very little analysis) and to BBC Radio for the ‘international’ and ‘balanced’ view.

In the 80s came TV, and with it, news television. You also had the news-on-video, stuff that India Today launched.

Finally, with the 90s came news television with Prannoy Roy and STAR News.

That was a milestone in Indian news media. Here we had a private channel which was implicitly trusted.

STAR News and Dr. Roy seemed to be able to feel the pulse of the nation, understand the hopes, aspirations and concerns of the nation.

The happy trend continued with Aaj Tak, and in another (but similar) genre, with CNBC TV18. It was good for the country; trusted news sources are always good for the country. These channels all seemed to understand what the concerns of the citizens were.

Then we had the proliferation of news channels as the cost of transponders fell sharply and as the cost of other infrastructure came down as sharply as well. Viewership fragmented – and revenues fragmented, too.

And the channels started staring at each other…

… rather than what mattered to those who were watching the channels.

On the news front, they’ve become, in a way, almost indistinguishable clones. They report on the same issues, they deliver the news in the same manner.

The bigger issue is in the analysis and the opinion.

They seem to have lost their touch and feel for what the consumers care about and are worried about.

They are experts at post-mortems rather than in anticipation. The post-mortems, because the news in such cases is already in the public domain, are clones of each other as well.

Added to this is their short-term focus – and their inability to commit themselves to a hard position.

Because of their prevarication and tentativeness, they are no longer able to influence or pressurize the government of the day – and, in so doing, lose the confidence of their viewers.

There are myriad issues that the environment has raked up over the last year or two. News TV (and other news media) jumps in to take credit for various exposes and governmental decisions, but, if one takes a long, hard look, it becomes increasingly important that it was not the pressure from the media, but the imperatives of politics, which forced the government hand.

The next few months will be crucial to the credibility of news television as it is today. What happens to those involved in the various telecom scams? To the real estate scams? To politicians who commit crimes? To the high and mighty in the private sector who aid and abet various crimes? To the black money in Swiss (and other) international bank accounts?

News TV has never had it so good as far as opportunities go.

Will they take advantage – or play safe?

If they do the latter, they will be reduced to entertainment channels – without the influence that their viewership gives them.

And it’s good to remember, it’s only the influence that gives them the disproportionately high yields that they command….