MAM
TV personalities – good option for advertisers
MUMBAI: While speaking at the Advertising Club Bombay’s Value Creation seminar on marketing entertainment and their growing inter-dependence, creative consultant Rekha Nigam urged that advertising agencies must leverage TV personalities in a better way to sell products and services. She also added that the late 1990s marked a revolution in TV programming where Indian-ness came out of the closet. TV serials depicted the “Garv se kaho ham Bharatvasi hain” theme and India found its own voice on TV.
The following are the excerpts of Nigam’s presentation:
Where TV personalities score over film personalities:
TV personalities score because their characters are more identifiable, trustworthy and viewers share an intimate bond with them on a weekly basis. Viewers connect to TV personalities easily because they see them more frequently. TV personalities get a consistent exposure and their characters become household names. However, viewers don’t know the real person (Amarr Upadhyay or Aman Varma) behind the character (Mihir) and often don’t even wish to know. TV personalities can sustain the interest of women viewers who identify strongly with them. TV characters don’t reinvent themselves as much as film personalities do. TV characters are aspirational in terms of the values they project on screen.
TV personalities are readily available and accessible to advertising agencies at cheaper and cost-effective rates. Viewers don’t have to pay much in order to view TV personalities as compared to film personalities.
Some of the TV personalities who were not leveraged were Lala Lahori Nath (Alok Nath in Hum Log); Karamchand (Pankaj Kapoor) and Shri Krishna (Nitish Bharadwaj in Mahabharata).
Advertisers need to use TV personalities intelligently and match the synergies between a brand’s personalities and the TV characters. The advertisers need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the TV characters – for instance Parvathi Babhi or Tulsi. Unlike film stars, it would not make sense to use the real person who portrays the character as viewers identify more with the on-screen characters. Advertisers could create little soap commercials. Advertisers must leveraging a TV character the moment the character is no longer part of the serial’s storyline and regular track the progress of the twists and turns of the story. Advertisers must look at short-term bursts rather than long-term usage.
India finds its voice in TV programming:
The success of wedding video film called Hum Aapke Hain Kaun in August 1994 propelled a wave of Indian-ness in both TV, advertising and cinema. It was hip to say “We are like this only” tom-tommed by a music channel. Zee TV also gave a place of pride to the game of Antakshari, that was never publicly played.
The biggest revolution for TV programming came in 2000 when both KBC (Kaun Banega Crorepati) and KSBKBT (Kyuunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi) were launched. Although KBC created a major hype and hoopla, KSBKBT’s silent advent ushered in a era that could determine the future course of TV programming. The serial put family to the centre-stage and capitalised on the fact that family bonding is the core of Indian-ness. The world of Indians revolves around the family irrespective of the part of the world in which Indians live.
As soon as the trend of family sit-coms started, movies and events started losing their sheen on the TRP charts. Asha Bhosale’s debut show on TV got the same TRPs as the afternoon repeat show of a popular family sitcom. The recent episodes of KSBKBT that showed a ‘bahu’ getting married to another son was more revolutionary than Yash Chopra’s film Lamhe that showed a girl getting attracted to a en elderly man.
TV is not a step-child for filmstars who have become spent forces but an opportunity for them to reinvent themselves. TV took on Amitabh Bachchan and returned him back to the film industry in a different avatar.
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MAM
AI could unlock billions for India’s $30 billion media industry, says JioStar vice-chairman Uday Shankar
JioStar vice-chairman urges industry to seize once-in-a-generation AI moment to turn India into the world’s creative capital
DELHI: India’s media industry stands at a historic inflection point. Artificial intelligence, long discussed as a technological disruptor, could now become the lever that propels the country from a domestic content giant to a global creative powerhouse.
Delivering the keynote at the IndiaAI Impact Summit, Uday Shankar argued that AI offers India a once-in-a-generation opportunity to lead, not follow, in global media and entertainment.
Shankar credited the prime minister’s vision for centring India’s growth agenda around AI and described the summit as overdue . Drawing on three decades in media, he traced the industry’s transformation from the arrival of the first newsroom computers to the launch of India’s earliest digital platforms, each wave of technology reshaping speed, scale and audience engagement.
The numbers tell a story of staggering growth. In just 25 years, India’s media and entertainment sector has expanded from a few billion dollars to become the world’s fifth-largest market, contributing more than $30bn to the economy. Television households have jumped from about 70m to over 210m, with more than 800m video consumers today.
Yet global influence remains elusive. While South Korea exported Squid Game and Parasite to worldwide acclaim, and Puerto Rico produced the most-streamed artist on the planet, India has struggled to consistently break through beyond its domestic and diaspora audiences .
The constraints are structural. Hollywood studio productions command budgets of $65m to $100m, with tentpoles running as high as $300m. The average Indian film operates on $3m to $5m . A marquee US television episode can cost $20m to $30m; an Indian serial is typically produced for Rs 7 lakh to Rs 10 lakh per episode, roughly $10,000. The capital gap, Shankar argued, has narrowed ambition and limited global competitiveness.
AI, he said, changes the equation by rewiring the three pillars of the industry: content, consumer and commerce.
On content, AI-powered production is collapsing infrastructure costs and accelerating timelines. At JioStar, the company recently produced Mahabharat: Ek Dharmayudh, a 100-episode live-action series delivered three to five times faster than a traditional production pipeline. The implication is stark. The remaining constraint is no longer capital, but imagination.
On consumers, AI enables conversational discovery, interactive storytelling and regionalisation that goes beyond simple dubbing to reflect India’s linguistic texture. On commerce, it unlocks granular segmentation and dynamic pricing, moving beyond the blunt instruments of subscription and advertising that have defined the industry for a century.
The prize is vast. The global media market, currently worth nearly $3trn, is projected to reach $3.5trn by 2029. India’s share remains under 2 per cent. Even a shift to 5 per cent would generate tens of billions of dollars in additional value.
But Shankar cautioned that opportunity does not guarantee outcome. He called for three commitments: self-disruption before external disruption, aggressive skilling to create AI-native creative hybrids, and policy frameworks that accelerate rather than constrain innovation.
Hollywood’s defensive posture towards AI, he suggested, offers India a rare window to design the business models and regulatory frameworks that could set global precedents. The shift in advantage, he argued, favours nations with deep cultural reservoirs and massive audiences.
The question is no longer whether India can lead in the AI age of media, he concluded, but whether it will move fast enough to claim that position.
The stories were always here. Now the technology has caught up.
