Indian Media and Entertainment Industry: An Analysis of Cases

By

Megha Iyer (Asst. Prof. SCS)

Ruchi Tewari (Assoc. Prof. SCS)

Hardi Oza (Academic Associate SCS)

Introduction

India shining is becoming an accepted and taken for granted term and availability and access to the global resources a reality. In this background, it is interesting to note the impressions casted by various sectors and the patterns within the industry. One major sector which is at the base and impacting business across sectors and industries is the entertainment and media (E&M) industry. Business is more and more understood by what it communicates to its stakeholders and therefore organizations are arising to this reality. The E&M industry is growing at an accelerated pace and there is addition in its kitty in the form of newer mediums of communications, rising revenues and growing number of target audiences.

Evolution of the Media Industry

From the days when British-occupied India got its first newspaper in the form of the Bengal Gazette in 1780, to the 99 million newspaper copies circulated in 2009, the media and communication industry in India has come a long way. As per the Pricewater Coopers report (2011) about the media industry, the print industry of the country grew to a size of INR 193 billion, while the television industry stood at INR 297 billion, and radio was at INR 10 billion. Allied industries such as Out of Home Advertising, Public Relations, Cinema, Animation and VFX also grew substantially, leading the media and communications industry to stand at 652 billion INR at the end of 2010. The cumulative annual growth rate (CAGR) of the industry was pegged at a substantial 8% for the period from 2007 to 2010, and the industry is expected to grow into a 738 billion INR sector by the end of 2011, according to FICCI estimates.

Media Industry in India: landscape and challenges

In an extremely heterogeneous, melting pot of a country with a teeming 1.21 billion as its population, the advertising, branding and marketing strategies adopted by Indian brands (or even foreign brands in India) assume special significance. Whether it is by means of a print advertisement, a television commercial, a pop-up or banner ad on a social networking website or even a BTL promotion, every marketing move in a market like India requires much careful thought, planning and execution. Besides the obvious challenges of living up to the brand’s existing image, adding further meat to it and catering to a very wide variety of people, advertising in India also faces the major challenge of managing to convey the message without ruffling feathers or rubbing people the wrong way – something that has grown increasingly frequent over the years, due to varying political agendas and the need for (just about any kind of) publicity, among other factors.

All these make India an especially interesting case where advertising and marketing are concerned. Compare the functioning of an Ogilvy & Mather in India, with the same for O&M abroad. How difficult is it to create an advertisement that caters to people who all speak the same language, are influenced by the same cultural factors, and have similar hobbies and interests? This would perhaps be an oversimplification, but compare the case of a TV commercial for, a brand of cornflakes/cereal in the US, with the task of creating a TVC for a gold jewellery brand in India, and one would realize to what extent the latter is delicate. It is said of India that the language, culture and customs change at every few kilometers. Naturally then, so do the perceptions, likes and dislikes. A working woman in Mumbai will need smaller, elegant pieces to complement her attire, while the bride-to-be in South India will be expected to wear chunky ornaments. The two will have a different approach to buying jewellery, and different reasons as well. The metals, patterns, designs and even budgets are likely to be poles apart. Similarly, a brand of instant noodles in India is likely to create different ads for different areas, depending on the alimentary preferences of people in each region and their socio-cultural-economic environments. Jains will not consume Chicken noodles while Bengalis will likely love them. A satire involving Rajnikanth is likely to evoke tremendous applause in Tamil Nadu, while a TVC of Hindi film actors dancing on a train is likely to become more popular in the North. All these disparities ensure that the advertising/marketing process in India is a complex, challenging and multi-pronged one, with high and varied expectations at every juncture (Can we take this in the first paragraph and start our discussion about Indian through this). What is amazing is that despite the obvious challenges faced while trying to create a brand in such a competitive environment, India has had its fair share of phenomenally successful and effective advertising campaigns. Many of these became a rage among the masses, they were discussed and repeated during gatherings and get-togethers, immensely enhanced the sales and recall value of their products and companies, and in some cases, even inspired the youth of the country. These campaigns and other advertising media are of immense relevance to a body like AMIC, where research is considered a top priority. This is mainly due to the fact that the amount of research and analysis conducted in the area of advertising, branding and marketing is still way less in India than it should have been. And the bottom line, at the end of the day, is that India is gearing up for a lot more and therefore, it makes sense to understand the direction towards which the advertising industry in India is moving.

Cases

The Times of India’s Lead India campaign

The Lead India Campaign was a brainchild of Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd, the publishers of The Times of India, India’s most widely read newspaper. This campaign initiated by them aimed to bring in a new breed of political leaders and administrators into the national limelight, from among the general masses. Several professionals, prominent names in their respective professions, participated in the exercise. While the outcome/output of the campaign is debatable, the fact that the campaign got people talking and participating in large numbers is undisputed.

BCCL appointed J Walter Thompson (JWT) India to design their television commercial, which will go down in history as one of the most mobilizing of all TVCs created in India in recent times. JWT came up with a promotional video for the campaign which shows a tree that had crashed in the middle of a busy thoroughfare. Several commuters, in vehicles ranging from state transport buses to cushy sedans, watch in exasperation but few bother to do anything to move the tree aside. There is tremendous cussing and abusing all over, when, to top it, it begins to rain. The men continue complaining, when in the meanwhile, a young school child travelling by the bus takes a look at the tree and the rain outside. Realising the folly of the ‘elders’ around him, the child steps out of the bus and begins pushing the tree. He is battling the heavy downpour and knows that he can accomplish nothing single-handedly, but his effort serves to enlighten the others. Within minutes, a lot of the spectators join in, including some street kids, and together, they manage to push the tree out of the way, and the road becomes functional again. The video ends on an inspiring note, promoting the idea that if ones wishes to, one can truly bring about change. In other words, ‘leadership’ is an inherent trait which all of us possess, all we need is a channel to bring out the leader with us (and hence the Lead India campaign).

The response received by the campaign for this promotional video was tremendous. In a country where patriotism is the middle name, and where Independence has been hard-earned, after a struggle of more than two centuries by millions of its people, this video gave almost every viewer goose bumps. What made it very easy for people to relate with the video was the fact that the attitude of the masses, as shown in the video, was pretty much exactly what one sees on the streets everyday. The indifference depicted therein made most viewers sit up and take note. And while it would be premature to say that the video was responsible for the campaign’s success, it would be indisputably true to say that it played a vital role in the way people paid attention to and followed the campaign.

JWT India, the agency that designed the video, won several accolades for their work. They won the first Spikes Asia '09 ad festival's ‘Advertiser of the Year’ award for the campaign. They also won the Grand Prix in the Direct Awards category at the Cannes Promo and Direct Lions awards 2008, a very prestigious ceremony where only the best of the best advertising giants are honoured. This event was a proud moment for India, where advertising is now slowly but steadily coming of age.

Vodafone Essar’s Zoozoos

Vodafone Essar, which had previously earned several thousand fans for its ‘Wherever you go, our network follows’ campaign with a cute pug, decided to move on to a non-animal subject for its next campaign, the one that would promote the VAS (Value-Added Services) being provided by the company. For this, they finalized what have come to be known as ‘Zoozoos’, animated characters that are completely white in colour and have ballooned bodies and egg heads. While they look like products of animation, these are actually humans posing in Zoozoo costumes.

The agency in charge of the campaign, Ogilvy & Mather (O&M), had the entire campaign (30 ads) shot by Bangalore-based Nirvana Films, in Cape Town in South Africa, in a record time of 10 days. The production was cost-effective and terribly uncomplicated, with thin young women being draped in the Zoozoo costumes, made of several layers of a particular material. The facial expressions were made of rubber and pasted on the actors to cut down on time and costs. The shooting was done at low frame rates, the background was a simple and uniform grey, and the Zoozoos had little to do except be very expressive and look their cutest best.

And yet, despite the commercials being very simple, devoid of any smart one-liners or wisecracks (a la Amul), they were a huge hit among the masses. What O&M did was, instead of focusing on the text/script/dialogue, they concentrated on the visual appeal, creating in the process, some very eminently likeable characters which would draw the audience’s attention anyway, with or without smart lines. They were tremendously successful in their attempt, if the audience reaction is anything to go by.

The Zoozoo ads were viewed by thousands of people, on television, in print and on YouTube. On the latter, there are, at present, at least nine different videos of Zoozoo ads, with each having received more than 1,00,000 hits (views), the highest number being 11,14,170 so far! There are more than 250 pages dedicated to Zoozoos on the cyber space, on websites such as Facebook and Twitter, and there are at least 3,00,000 fans (collectively) on these websites. O&M received their fair share of recognition for the awards, including PETA’s 2009 Glitterbox Award. Vodafone also won three awards at the Asia Marketing Effectiveness Festival held in Shanghai in 2010, for the Zoozoos.

While it is difficult to say how much exactly the company has financially benefitted from the Zoozoo campaign, one thing is for sure – the cute little animated figures have successfully managed to create unprecedented brand recall for the company, and have added tremendously to its popularity.

AMUL – The Big Fat Indian Brand

If one were to dissect and analyse the most successful advertising campaigns that India has seen so far, a distinct winner is Amul. A ‘brand’ in the real sense of the world, Amul, meaning ‘priceless’ in Sanskrit, was born in 1946 in Gujarat in India, in the form of a milk co-operative. It is managed by the Gujarat Co-Operative Milk Marketing Federation (GCMMF), and is jointly owned by some 2.8 million milk producers in Gujarat today.

Amul was responsible for ushering in what is now known as the ‘Milk Revolution’ in India, and it has made India the largest producer of milk and milk products in the world. However, while theirs is a brand that has remained undented for several decades, it is most surprising to note that Amul advertisements, famed for their smart one-liners and high recall value, make up not more than 1% of the company’s total revenues!

Amul produces a wide range of milk products, among them mill, ghee, butter, cheese, ice-cream, paneer and others. It mainly follows an umbrella system of advertising, and in the last one decade, the ‘Amul doodh peeta hai India’ and ‘Amul – The taste of India’ campaigns have proved immensely successful. However, the undisputed winner within the Amul umbrella is the ‘Utterly Butterly Delicious’ tagline used by Amul Butter, whose mascot is a cute young girl with a polka-dotted dress and a high ponytail. This ‘Amul girl’, as she is referred to, made her first appearance in the year 1967, when the first hoarding for Amul butter went up in Mumbai, and went on to become an instant favourite among housewives.

The Amul account is managed by DaCunha Associates and Draft FCB Ulka, who have been with the brand ever since its ad campaign took roots in the 60’s. And when the ad campaign for Amul was still taking shape, the promoters realized they had to take a call on whether they wanted the product to play safe and come up with tame ads, or whether to actually take a stand and make Amul a product with a social conscience. The agency decided to go with the latter, and Amul Butter took birth as a product whose hoardings/weekly updated taglines were looked forward to with national enthusiasm.

Amul’s taglines usually deal with the ongoing, the current. Social, political, cultural and all other issues that are the toast of the moment manage to find their way into Amul hoardings. From time to time, Amul has commented on actors, politicians, industrialists, scams, controversies, all sorts of good and bad events, and even the biggest of brands. However, over the last three decades or so, Amul’s has come to be known as an advertising campaign that doesn’t mean malice anywhere in its attempt to elicit laughs. There have been instances when the ‘victims’ of Amul’s one-liners have gleefully agreed to pose along with the corresponding hoarding, all in good humour! And that’s also part of the reason the campaign has succeeded – not only have the Indian masses sat up and taken notice of the sheer originality and wit in the Amul butter repertoire, they also look forward to these ads and see them as an instrument of social commentary.

Over the last few years, gems have included ‘Pow Bhajji’ when Indian cricketer Harbhajan Singh slapped team member S Sreesanth in a fit of rage, ‘Yum Karo Bun – Mit Jaaye Gham’ to coincide with the release of Bollywood flick Dum Maaro Dum, ‘Bas aur nahin! Kasab aur nahin!’ as a comment on terrorist Ajmal Kasab, ‘Kochi toh log kahenge!’ in the wake of the Shashi Tharoor-Sunanda Pushkar controversy vis-à-vis the Kochi IPL team, etc. So long and uninterrupted has the Amul campaign been that it has found pride of place in the Guinness Book of Records as the longest-running advertising campaign in the world. There are hundreds of Indians who’ve been impressed and amused by these ads that they’ve gone to the extent of collecting these ads (they also figure on packets of Amul butter) and making personal collections for themselves.

A Few More

While the above have been some of India’s most influential advertising campaigns till date, there have been several others which have played an equally important role in influencing India’s media-savvy ranks. Pidilite’s Fevicol brand has enjoyed undisputed popularity since the last several years, due their innovative advertisements. From a truck-top laden with more people than it can accommodate (but the people are bound together by Fevicol) to a young couple being followed by a man on a bicycle (who can’t separate himself from the young couple’s vehicle due to the latter being laden by Fevicol tins), the brand has managed to sustain itself thanks to the humourous, tongue-in-cheek situations they manage to think up. Similar is the case of Mentos, a popular consumer item that manages to grab attention due to its innovative concepts.

Conclusion

These and several other campaigns have managed to astronomically lift the fortunes of the companies and products they represent. The reason why advertising makes for a very interesting study in India is that this is a country where one takes into account several forms of disparities and differences, before creating a tool of mass communication. In several cases, one has to create different versions of the same tool before one can display it to different sections of the society (Kurkure ads in different languages being an example). In most cases, ads depict the socio-cultural-economic environment of the society and people they’re reaching out to. And where the latter goes, hardly any country in the world has the kind of variety and diversity that India possesses. Hundreds of thousands of advertising/publicity tools are created and implemented in India every day, and together, these make up the widest possible spectrum of advertising matter anywhere in the world. However, in spite of the sheer size and magnitude of this industry, advertising research in India is still not at a position where it may be considered enviable. There remains tremendous scope for media aspirants in India to research in the areas of advertising, publicity and PR.