Agtalk | We practice Brutal Intellectual Honesty: WOI's Atul Phadnis

In earlier days whenever you watched TV you just switched it on and then what…. flipped through channels and programmes not knowing what each programme has to offer in terms of interesting viewing or what is popular on TV. Compare that with the scene today. You know what you are watching, know the details of the program you are viewing or can even plan what you will watch on TV in the next seven days. Much of the credit of making that possible to the vision of one-man who aims to change the way TV is watched..

 

Meet Atul Phadnis, Chief Executive, WHAT’S-ON-INDIA (WOI) who has launched India’s largest TV Search and EPG (Electronic Program Guide) system with an aim to help viewers in making sense of programmes in over 550 channels. WOI is not just into advising viewers with information and recommendations of what TV programmes to watch but into many other areas as well. For those who know little about Atul Phadnis, he is an authority on TV viewership and ratings having had stints with companies like Rediffusion-DYR, MindShare, Starcom Worldwide and TAM Media earlier. In a career spanning over 15 years, he was also ranked among CNBC’s ‘Top Ten Young Turks 2010’ entrepreneurs.

 

Adgully spoke with the CEO on WOI’s various initiatives and the industry as well. Following are the excerpts of the interview. 

 

 

Atul Phadnis (AP): As professionals, we all need indicators and data points of different sorts to take critical decisions in our respective businesses. Advertisers/ brands need to know where their advertising messages can be posted at the most economical but in a far reaching manner. A TV channel has to to figure out how they are going to build viewership and aggregate viewers and how they will get paid for either advertising or subscriptions. From a Production House perspective, to find what stories or programmes work.

 

All these questions need to be answered using data-points and indicators. In that respect, TV ratings are a critical input. But I would say they are not the only thing because we have had some terrible experiences of gross over-dependence on ratings – both on the broadcaster side as well as on agency end. Ratings are at best an estimate and should not be mistaken to be the actual reality especially at ridiculously low levels going down to single or double decimal points TVRs! This industry over-emphasis on ratings is a dangerous path of “losing the trees for the forest.”

 

 

AP: It is a good thing that BARC has come up. It has the opportunity of doing something really critical in an area that is languishing in our industry for long. There are grave structural fault lines in the way we are measuring viewers in today’s context. However, there is very little debate on what the major issues are relating to TV ratings. In fact, if you ask what is wrong with ratings, nine out of 10 people will say sample size is wrong or that it is not representative. In reality these are just the tip of the iceberg. BARC should widen the debate to include those structural, methodology issues as well.

 

There are a lot of other issues that BARC can address. It can build consensus on where to expand the TV ratings. The answer to that question today is different for different stakeholders say for Doordarshan, Star TV, HUL and so on. Another issue to address is reporting ratings at ridiculously low samples and ludicrously high error rates for certain genres. A more meaningful way is to only report summaries for these channels/ genres rather than by market, by target group, minute-by-minute ratings or break ratings!

 

Another broader set of methodology issues relate to how sample homes are selected in todays market universe reality and if that has undergone modifications and requisite debates to reflect the new DTH universe as well as a lot of consumption on other screens.

 

Take for instance the DTH reality. If 8-10 years ago, an area within a city was receiving channels only from one cable operator, today that same neighborhood can choose to get TV from nine different sources – seven DTH players plus the cable guy who delivers through the analogue method and through set-top boxes.  The ratings methodology has to include DTH versus Cable market-shares in their panel construction and in their Primary Control Variables. There has been zero debate on that in the last couple of years about this and I find that very disturbing.

 

One other critical area of concern is for BARC to channelize the private disagreements between TV ratings company and their clients with an escalation route so that these issues are debated and answers found via consensus. BARC should look at facilitating this dialogue.

 

 

AP: The industry has an opportunity here too. Today content owners would like to be compensated for other viewership that happens but does not gets measured. Today only in-home viewing is captured but not TV on the go, at public places, pubs, multiplexes where viewing for large events happen. These are now important. Viewing outside with your social network is getting more frequent say sports events. We also have a new reality in 3G which typically allows for TV consumption on the fly/ on the go. These are currently untapped and untracked. If we do not measure this then some content owner or broadcaster is not getting compensated. I am trying to emphasise that we have an increasing incidence of TV viewing happening on newer and newer devices; and in newer and newer places. If we are not measuring those eyeballs then we are missing a trick or two as an industry.

 

 

AP: In some cases there are ways to monitor, in some cases international markets have shown how to measure viewership.  However industry will have to invest in R&D to devise new methodologies. Once you have a body like BARC, it can happen. Let’s say there can be an R&D experiment to measure all viewing that happens on 3G. Once it is successfully tested and agreed upon it can be integrated with the main panel.

 

 

AP: I guess that’s for the BARC authorities to answer. However, some of the elements that I have mentioned earlier are entering the collective consciousness of the industry in general.

 

 

AP: WOI is a TV Content search and EPG company. Today we are increasing our coverage from just set-top boxes programming guides to a lot of new devices. We are powering EPGs for digital video recorders (DVRs) and high definition (HD) set-top boxes. The EPGs are themselves becoming very clever and intuitive.

 

WOI is working with some of the industry players to make EPG more relevant for different kinds of users.As one of the initiatives we translate all the EPGs into Hindi, Telugu and Tamil on a daily basis. These are being powered into set-top-boxes having features to flip languages. That is a big leap to make EPGs relevant and available in local languages. Some of the bigger DTH players use this on their set-top boxes. We have currently built capacity for 10 Indian languages and we are in conversation with all leading operators and are looking at their plans to introduce these to their local constitutiencies.

 

So we have made significant progress to being an EPG partner to the industry. In a lot of these cases we have invested in technology, the architecture and software to better the quality of EPGs.

 

Another big initiative we have taken in the last one year is we have looked at giving episode level information for major TV shows of GEC channels. We are thankful to leading networks like Star, Viacom and MSM who have partnered with us to better the experience digital TV viewers have in terms of EPG.

 

In the last one year and especially post partnering with Intel, What’s-On-India has made a lot of alteration to our original vision and thereby restructured the company. One of the result of this is we have launched a series of interesting and intuitive consumer applications on mobile, tablets and smart-TVs which typically help viewers search and discover TV shows and content.

 

Other major aspect we have launched recently is social EPGs which help viewers discover what their social networks & friends are watching in a way that dramatically influences their viewing patterns. For this we have integrated with Facebook.

 

The third area we are focusing on is to integrate our platforms with ground information. Earlier this year, we have launched a new vertical called “TV Street Maps” to capture on-ground distribution and availability of  TV channels. TSM currently covers approximately 500 towns and by September we will increase coverage to 2000 towns. At this crucial juncture, when the whole industry is moving towards digitilisation, we want to be able to figure out channel distribution patterns on-ground in smaller cities

 

The fourth major focus for us is our international roll-out. We are also looking  at couple of acquisitions both in Far-East and Middle-East to expand our presence in the Asia Pacific region. Recently we won a tender in the Middle-East to create  the entire EPG and TV Search backend to be deliver to a Middle-East Telco and Cable company.

 

 

AP: Today we are doing a ton of activities, connecting the various dots of TV Content, Distribution and Search platforms. In a way we have emerged as an integrated player and have been able a build a model across verticals. So currently I don’t see competition from that perspective. It will be difficult for someone to create a model as widespread or as integrated as ours.

 

 

AP: There have been loads of influences. I have learnt from all my ex-bosses and have been dramatically influenced by people I have read about. I read a lot - but only biographies and take a lot of inspiration from real life success stories. Interestingly I’d read a book in 2004 called “The Long Tail” by Chris Anderson that altered my view on  media content search models – a lot of what we have built inside the company is actually how a long tail model would be applied to the TV . Reading up about the late Steve Jobs has had a large influence on me and I often wonder how he would have designed an iTV.

 

 

AP: There are some principles we use at WOI that typically influence day to day decision making. We practice Brutal Intellectual Honesty (BIH) at WOI. If something is going wrong internally we do not make excuses and instead brutally tell the concerned team what is wrong. The team takes it in an intellectual fashion constructively and debates with other teams what is to be done to fix it and then we set it right. Second I would say is a ‘never say never’ attitude. For the last four years of our existence I kept hearing you can’t do this or that and in each instance, we went ahead and did it.