AgVoice | With media business mushrooming in India today, is Mr Mcluhan's message applicable?

Almost twenty years ago, my friends in the Times of India Group told us about Mr Samir Jain’s plans of converting the newspaper in to a packaged “brand.” Many of us who firmly believed that a newspaper was a holy cow thought this idea was a disaster. After all, news media was supposed to be the Fourth Estate, the conscious keeper of the nation, how could it be equated with a toothpaste or a packet of chips!!

Samir Jain had the fore sight. And looking back he was damn right. After all, a news media survives on the power of reaching the desired audience at an effective advertising cost. You cant get the penetration with a badly packaged product. It must be the customer’s preferred choice, as much as the person’s choice of toothpaste or deodorant.

Today with hundreds of TV channels, magazines and even social media sites occupying our lives the concept of media as a brand has become even more relevant. And everything is on sale. Mastheads, news items, formats, in fact everything that you can think of. Most TV channels are giving soap operas a hard time in attracting eye balls, specially Arnab Goswami at 9 PM panel discussions. Once stuck at Binsar where a very few channels were on offer, I had to spend time watching a day long programme on how Lalu Prasad Yadav’s daughter’s friend had died while on some kind of an outing. And as of today, a major part of print and electronic media in West Bengal is reeling under the crisis perpetuated by a Chit Fund company. Ironically, most of such Chit funded publications were the Government’s choice to be subscribed by the libraries and government offices. The case of many largely circulated publications was overlooked. 

Ethics in media has presumably taken a back seat. The Press Council of India makes all kind of noises but their Chairman ends up seeking mercy for Sanjay Dutt or advocating the cause of awarding a Bharat Ratna to Ghalib. The power of political patronage and the power of money definitely runs the media game. Years ago I was asked to release an ad by a ministry and even though we had worked out a well thought of media plan, we were handed a list and told to release it in a number of publications of their choice. When we tried to argue, we were impolitely told “Shut Up or else…..”  The story did not end here. One of the “selected” newspapers had reproduced the ad very badly and our media guy naturally wrote a stinker and asked for a Free Make Good insertion. Result: I was summoned by the babus and given a stern warning. The owner of the publication was a friend of the minister.

Does credibility, ethics, neutrality rather the lack of it affect the advertiser? Not really. The higher the TRP, higher the noise factor, higher the tamasha, higher the drama (ref Arnab at 9 PM), better the media buy. The age old concept of brand profile matching the media profile is passé. It is reach at all levels, under the garb of media buy. It does not matter how. The creative ideas of the ads are equally ridiculous. Groom feels horny seeing the new bride and shuts off the light and presumably lands his balls on the bed (instead of the woman) and the couple soon visit an adoption centre. He should have invested in V Guard invertors before taking the near fatal jump. I fully agree with my friend John Sahab, himself one of the finest creative minds in the business that this must have been the client’s idea. What is the message? That we should have sex with lights on with invertor back up and even filmed for public viewing? Another creative buddy who had a high profile job in one of the largest agencies in India quit after he was taken to task for arguing his point with a MNC client who was a white skin. “What if he reports us to their Global corporate Office in the US? We may lose the business in many parts of the world,” he was told.

The political system in India as also the corporate world is the staple diet for media channels, print and electronics, to thrive. Every three hour there is a scam, every two hour there is a high political drama and while we are promised that the channel is not going to give up, it soon goes back to a Rahul Gandhi, a Digvijay Singh (what is wrong with him?), a Modi, a Karan Thapar or a Arnab Goswami doing all they can to force you to admit what they want you to admit. And everything is well encashed. Only yesterday, Sarbajit Singh’s sister and family reached Lahore and by the evening she was being interviewed by three English channels simultaneously direct from a studio on Lahore!! Whatever it takes, really!!

How long this flux will continue we do not know. With pressures on bottom line, market dynamics being what they are I suppose Mr Mcluhan will not have an answer to his oft quoted “Medium is the Message”. | By Sujit Sanyal, Ad veteran

About the writer:

The guest article writer this week is ad veteran Sujit Sanyal. In his early days  in Calcutta he was with the theatre group which was the flavour of the day in the early seventies. But by late seventies he had stepped into the world of advertising and moved to Delhi. Calcutta has nurtured and shaped some of the finest minds in advertising, Sujit Sanyal is one of them. He has worked with Clarion Advertising and recently launched his book ‘Life In a Rectangle’ which takes us down memory lane and depicts the highs and lows of his days with the agency. His need to download memories is fulfilled by sitting in front of his laptop when words come naturally to him. A multifaceted person Sujit Sanyal is an adman, journalist, poet, artist, novelist and actor all rolled into one which has made him emerge an enriched human being.
 

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and do not reflect in any way of Adgully.