The Hindu Business Line : The two-in-one nation!

MASS media as we know it has changed dramatically in the last five years. Not only in terms of its shape and form but also in terms of its interaction with consumers and advertising messages.

TV had to change as the influx of newer channels as well as advertising kept increasing steadily. From six channels in 1991 to just under 300 TV stations by end of 2004, TV has come a long way. Print has had to change because of the way the consumers are changing their habits constantly. Whether it's the Page 3 focus or more happy and sexy pictures or more localised news, print has evolved considerably. Radio, cinema and Internet are attracting increasing numbers though the issue there is the current small base. In this piece we will attempt to look at the changes in media, from the perspective of marketing and communication.

The urban-rural divide in India has always existed and is quite extreme in the case of media consumption and availability. The last NRS (2003) puts TV ownership at only 86 million of the 202 million Indian homes, a meagre 42 per cent! In fact, TV ownership for urban India and rural India is 75 per cent and 30 per cent respectively. Can you imagine the awesome diversity? TV penetration in urban India is 2.5 times that of rural! Here is where the two behave almost like two different nations within one. This, for us in the media and communications industry, is the Two-in-One Nation!

The first table shows the disparities between India Urban and India Rural. If one looks at `TV sets per 1000 people' as a statistic, we get to see China twice of urban India and nearly four times that of India (U+R). And there isn't any doubt on which part pulls the average down.

Table 1 indicates that the two-in-one nation theory holds true for nearly all the traditional mass media. As the second table indicates, the ratio for all media with the exception of radio is far greater for urban India than rural.

Hence, whenever we talk of the future of mass media audiences we have to take into account how the weaker link (in this case, rural) will shape up in the near future. It's one thing to talk of all the new concepts and gadgets making an entry into the country (CAS, DTH, Private FM, Net shopping, multiplexes, and so on) but will the basic macro-media numbers start going up? Will rural suddenly move from a 30 per cent TV set penetration to 60-70 per cent? Will higher literacy rates and the spate of regional publication editions cause a spurt in rural press readership from the current 16 per cent to, say, the urban number of 50 per cent? These are all million-dollar questions but will shape the way we know our media environment as well as the way mass media advertising is understood. Else we, the mass media professionals, will see more and more money slip into the feared B-T-L (Below The Line)!

In this context, television is like a magnet in a tray of iron filings ... it keeps attracting more and more brands onto itself. From less than 4,000 brands a decade ago, TV attracts close to 12,000 brands to advertise on it in recent years. They are there obviously to chase the audience that comes onto television.

For television in the urban nation, exciting times could be at the corner as a host of new technologies make an entry. DTH and IP-TV perhaps are the two exciting ones scheduled to make an entry into urban Indian homes for the purposes of TV viewing. The CAS experience in this case unfortunately does not provide too many clues because of the confusion on its implementation for a long time. One of the clues that it does provide, however, is that the most affected by CAS would be pay channels whose viewership got completely wiped out initially.

The other clue comes from our market as well as some international experiences which suggest that consumers in most cases are a little slow to adapt to new technologies. This is an experience that also comes in from, say, the US market where on one hand an enthused industry gave great optimistic estimates for new TV technologies such as PVRs (Personal Video Recorders) and I-TVs (Interactive TV). However, on the other hand, the consumer played safe and refused to bite! So much so that while the estimates for PVRs were pegged at 3.6 million for 2001 in the US market, the reality in 2002 was only 0.6 million! Same is the case with the I-TVs market, which was forecast to be worth $7.9 billion by 2002 (as per a forecast-study published in Year 2000) but ended in reality only at 0.5 billion!

The issues with rural television are quite different. One key issue is the penetration of TV itself! At 30 per cent of homes, it leaves a lot to be desired. The issue here is the pricing of new TV sets. Can TV sets ever breach the Rs 1,000 or Rs 2,000 mark to spur growth?

Then again, is it a pricing issue or a connectivity and content issue? There are currently two DTH proposals - one from a private company and the other from the public broadcaster that will essentially target rural India. This could inspire, perhaps, a spate of new conversions into television.

The more immediate concerns are the kind of TV sets available in rural India. Of the 30 per cent that own TV sets in rural India, three-fourth has black & white sets, meaning that they probably receive less than 20 channels. Not only that, the four bottles of a popular shampoo for this section are not pink, yellow, orange and green but grey, grey, grey and grey! Ditto for paint ads, lipsticks and nail polishes! Did I hear some creative directors groan?

If we now move on to press, the numbers look very stark! Consider this ... of the 750 million adult Indians, 200 million do not claim to read any publication! That's almost three out of four adult Indians who do not read any newspaper or magazine! In fact, the two-in-one nation concept that we talked of earlier is fairly easy to understand in the context of press and urban. Press readership in urban India is three times that of rural. If one looks at the English press, the numbers are even more skewed. The changes so far in overall readership had been gradual. The way we read our news, the places where we read, the sections that we read, the time that we devote to reading are expected to change far more rapidly in the immediate future.

On the other hand, press and rural is a glass half full or half empty depending on which side you are on. With press readership less than a fifth of the rural nation, print can only come up as the fruits of development and economic progress reach these masses. Also, what can press offer them that television can't? With TV getting into the race for regionalisation and localisation, what new rabbit will print produce from its hat? Local language, local dialects, local issues - what will finally propel new readers into print? In any case, the new sets of readers that press accumulates will be fairly different in the way they interact with the print media from the early converts. That's because the new converts will most likely be exposed to TV before they start reading!

Moving beyond TV and print, the Internet is where the urban-rural divide is the highest. More than 90 per cent of all Internet users come from urban centres. For a national mass media campaign, the role of media like the Net and multiplexes is limited to urban centres of affluence only. If one considers traditional cinema theatres, the biggest constraint is still lack of information. Are the masses still coming in? Which pockets are doing well and which aren't?

In all these urban-rural comparisons, radio is curiously different. Here is where the two blocks converge, at least in terms of radio listenership penetration. Both those numbers are in the 20-odd per cent range. However, these two are headed in opposite directions. Listenership has been on the upswing for urban centres specifically where private FM has been allowed. Rural listenership, however, has been steadily declining. The verdict is clear. It's not education that will propel radio listenership but pure entertainment!

Someone recently called India an `entertainment-starved nation.' To my mind the definition is fitting yet scary. Depending on which modes of `entertainment' get to the uninitiated first could shape the destiny of how communication professionals would have to keep changing the chasing of consumer eyeballs and consumer attention!

(The author is Vice-President, TAM Media Research.)

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