MAM
Indiantelevision.com’s Media, Advertising, Marketing Special Report
New emerging technologies are going to change the way we consume media. It is a dynamic and constantly morphing scenario that confronts media researchers and marketers. Indiantelevision.com introduces the first of a series of studies by Group M’s Maxus, which will cover a wide range of issues.
Indiantelevision.com would welcome such similar studies that add to a better understanding of our media landscape.
In this, the first such paper, Maxus dwells on Television and Generation Next.
“Incredibly Young India”! This might well be an appropriate coinage given the current demographics of the Indian population. Over the next decade, marketers are looking at the most lucrative and influential youth market in Indian history.
But crucial to profiting from this increasingly critical section of our society will also be a proper understanding of this fickle and extremely hard to please generation.
The fact that India is getting ‘younger’ is also reflected in our advertising – in 2005, advertising directed at the youth comprised 20 per cent of total ad spends, up from 16 per cent a few years ago. (Maxus estimates)
However, worryingly, youth engagement with TV is on the wane – time spent on TV is progressively declining.
Time Spent on TV viewing per day Index to 2002
(Source: TAM, 15-24 years, SEC A)
A look at similar numbers for housewives confirms that this is a youth only trend – housewife viewing is at best flat with spikes in some years.
Time Spent on TV viewing per day Index to 2002
(TG: Housewives, 25-44, SEC A)
So while more money is chasing the youth on TV year after year, the worry for marketers is the declining returns on their investment. TV channels aimed at the youth need to also contend with this problem. How do they get Gen Next to watch more TV?
Why is this happening?
The growing propensity to multi task also makes inroads into the TV preserve – not only is the youth much more on the move (college, tuition, evening job, partying…), they are also consuming multiple media simultaneously – SMS a friend, while on a chat site with FM blaring. The SMS shorthand has also shortened attention spans making the youth clamor for constant newness.
But of course, the biggest change agent has been the Wiring of Gen Next’ – a phenomenon sweeping urban India – SMS, internet, gaming, iPods…
Apart from the technology, these gadgets fulfill a very basic youth need of providing a network: their virtual, private world offers them the peer group belonging and security, exchange of information and a social cocoon that helps fight loneliness characteristic of nuclear families today.
Most of the entertainment options that appeal to this whole new segment is actually done with others and not alone. Be it going to multiplexes, hanging out in coffee pubs, sweating it out at gaming parlours or chatting online – all are group acts.
Hence the cult rise of IPods, chat rooms, networks, Google, iTunes and PodCasts, on line messengers…
All the gadgets and entertainment options mentioned above are:
Interactive and/or consumer created
Warm and friendly inviting active participation
Platforms where there are very few pre-set norms or content limitations
So, is it doomsday for TV?
Certainly not! TV has some inherent strengths – the challenge for TV is to amplify its strengths and leverage the new digital world to expand its youth catchment.
The starting point of course has to be content. In the convergence era of information, communication and entertainment, the last remains a bastion for a (relatively) large screen, audio-visual medium like TV.
This is the area that TV needs to build on and develop far greater depth in content. The question is how? For one, we really need to stop thinking of the youth as one amorphous mass of wired, accessorised, colloquialised beings.
The content generators have to realize that there are at least four life stages that are spawned in the decade of 15-24 years – leaving school, college years, early work life and in some cases, matrimony – each with their own share of angst and joy. While some content has meaningfully focused on the first two, nothing has been done on the rest
The possibilities are many:
A soap completely scripted by the audience through emails and the winning contestant being sent on a creative writing course to a US university
A news hour exclusively showcasing reports from “Citizen Journalists” (anyone with camera-mobile), who can SMS/email in their content
A muti-contestant Gaming platform on TV completely enabled at the back-end to require just a mobile phone to participate
A few ideas, like the ones above, have in fact been experimented with by various channels. However, these have been a smattering on the larger landscape of music countdown shows! One way to increase impact for these shows would be to package them in a ‘youth’ time slot. We have an afternoon band for the ladies at home, one early evening for kids, but no time band exists which invites youngsters into ‘their’ world.
The second big focus area for TV needs to be on becoming a part of the digital youth network. In this regard, content providers need to augment their content through the digital world as well as sample it through the digital world.
Snippets of programming converted into mobile/mail friendly formats like 3GP or MPEG and mailed/SMS’d out
Creation of specific chatrooms on popular portals that help the prospective audience understand (and augment) the programming intent
Previous episodes easily accessible online, but for the fresh episodes they have to tune in
In the end, TV will be an integral part of the digital world – the challenge for TV will be to retain its glory as the defining point of entertainment – just like its content be it cricket or serials dominates the drawing room and kitchen conversations, will it also dominate the canteen, the SMS, the blogs and other ways in which the youth communicate?
AD Agencies
Abhay Duggal joins JioStar as director of Hindi GEC ad sales
The streaming giant brings in a seasoned revenue hand as the battle for Hindi television advertising heats up
MUMBAI: Abhay Duggal has a new desk, and JioStar has a new weapon. The media and entertainment veteran has joined JioStar as director of entertainment ad sales for Hindi general entertainment channels, adding 17 years of hard-won revenue experience to one of India’s most powerful broadcasting operations.
Duggal is no stranger to big portfolios or bruising markets. Before joining JioStar, he spent a brief stint at Republic World as deputy general manager and north regional head for ad sales. Before that, he put in three years at Enterr10 Television, where he ran the north region for Dangal TV and Dangal 2, two of India’s leading free-to-air Hindi channels. The north alone accounted for more than 50 per cent of total channel revenue on his watch, a number that tends to get attention in any sales meeting.
His longest stint was at Zee Entertainment Enterprises, where he spent over six years rising to associate director of sales. There he commanded the Hindi movies cluster across seven channels, owned more than half of north India’s revenue across flagship properties including Zee TV and &TV, and closed marquee sponsorships across the Indian Premier League, Zee Rishtey Awards and Dance India Dance. He also handled monetisation for the English movies and entertainment cluster and the global news channel WION, a portfolio that would stretch most sales teams twice his size.
Earlier in his career Duggal closed what was then a Rs 3 crore single deal at Reliance Broadcast Network, one of the largest in Indian radio at the time, before that he helped launch and monetise JAINHITS, India’s first HITS-based cable and satellite platform.
His edge, by his own account, lies in marrying data and instinct: translating audience trends, inventory signals and client demands into long-term partnerships built on cost-per-rating-point discipline rather than short-term deal chasing. In a media landscape being reshaped by streaming, fragmented attention and AI-driven advertising, that kind of rigour is increasingly rare and increasingly valuable.
JioStar, which blends the scale of Reliance’s Jio platform with the content firepower of Star, is doubling down on its advertising business at precisely the moment the Hindi GEC market is getting more competitive. Bringing in someone who has spent nearly two decades doing exactly this, across some of India’s most watched channels, is a pointed statement of intent. Duggal has spent his career turning audiences into revenue. JioStar is clearly betting he can do it again, and bigger.
