The Hindu Business Line : `Find customers, not audiences'

In the first ever Media Review presented by The Advertising Club Bombay, and recently at the Ad Club Chennai, Sam Balsara, Chairman & Managing Director, Madison Communications, made a case for finding customers instead of reaching audiences; for moving from broadcasting to narrowcasting; for using multimedia and non-mass media; for moving the obsession from Rates to Value and Impact; and for greater remuneration for media agencies to enable advertisers to avail themselves of the full potential of what the media discipline can offer. Excerpts:

WAY back in March 1980, when the Ad Club Bombay celebrated its silver jubilee, as part of its celebrations, we persuaded one Mr Bobby Kooka, then already in his frail 80s, to come and talk to us. For those of later generations, Bobby Kooka was a fine, genteel, blue-blooded professional and a celebrated ad man. He did not work for an agency, but was the Marcom manager of Air-India, and his claim to fame was that he was the creator of the Air-India Maharaja and the acknowledged keeper of the airline's image. His speech then, full of wit, reminisced on how the advertising industry had changed and changed beyond recognition. I remember some of his words. He said, "Advertising in my time was different. It was a lot of fun. And all that was required to be in advertising was "a facility with the English language and an ability to down a few pink gins at lunch." He said that now he had heard that it had become complex and almost a science! Remember, that was in 1980!

So what has changed? Nothing. Except, the rate of change. The rate of change has accelerated with every passing year and more so in the past 10 years, and even more so in the past three years.

The changed scenario

On November 15, 1995, when I received a call from Vivek Bali of Procter & Gamble informing me they had chosen Madison to be their AOR, little did I realise that this was the beginning of a new industry that was to take centre-stage in advertising. Ten years later, with dedicated Web sites reporting every media planner's move from one agency to another, leave aside account moves and every event being dissected in detail in mass media within hours of it happening, media agency men featuring on page 3, and even The Economist doing a feature on Indian media, you can bet media has indeed arrived.

There is an accelerating pace of change in the way media sells, advertisers appoint media agencies and media agencies plan and buy.

Underlying this change is the basic reason that for advertisers, markets are becoming more and more fiercely competitive, media choices are growing exponentially, and return on media investment, if made the conventional way, i.e. the way it was made even as recently as three years ago, is coming down sharply.

Would the media discipline have progressed as much as it has in India, if it continued as a department of the full service agency? A very quick overview of the progress made by the discipline in the previous 40 years, compared to the last 10 would give a conclusive answer.

Evolution of media concept

For a better appreciation of evolution of concepts, let us draw from the much older and experienced advertising industry.

Rosser Reeves, in the 1960s first expounded on the concept of unique selling proposition. Rapid development in technology, increased travel and establishment of communication links across the world soon led to neutralising of product benefits. Then came the concept of positioning propounded by Jack Trout and Al Ries, which moved the focus from the product to positioning the product in the consumer's mind with a single image, concept or proposition. In the last decade, the thinking has been that for your advertising to succeed you need to have an insight, which in my book is an uncommon observation about human behaviour or the reason for it, which is not so obvious on the surface. A definition that we could well use in media, too.

Due to growing demand on time and space, thanks to a buoyant economy and partly due to drop in TVRs due to fragmentation, the new concept we need to adopt in media is finding and reaching customers. To maintain our sterling record of the last decade, of adding genuine value to our clients, we will have to find for them users for their brands, using media insight. And we need to find that medium which connects with prospective users better, or what they can relate to. Media costs, clutter and fragmentation are going to increasingly make it difficult for us to broadcast our advertiser's message and we will be forced to narrowcast, which is potentially more dangerous, in the hands of the inexperienced. For if you make an error, you miss your potential audience entirely and not just waste the extra numbers you reach with a broadcast strategy.

The challenge before us is to develop media insight relevant to the brands and categories that we handle. A small car manufacturer can selectively target middle-aged junior officers who can afford to own a car but are too embarrassed to walk into a driving school at that age to learn. A cough-and-cold remedy needs to deliver its message to those who are more likely to be suffering from the ailment at that time. And, of course, we need to find more and more creative ways of using broadcast media, since we know that despite everything being said and done about it, the 30-second commercial is not dead and perhaps, never will be, Joseph Jaffe (a consultant and thought leader of new marketing) notwithstanding. Fortunately for us, a body of knowledge developed over a period of time exists in the area of consumer insight which is used by clever creative people to create advertising that bonds with readers or viewers and converts them to consumers. We need to apply the concept of media insight in the development of our plan, which I believe will help our brands find customers, never mind if cost per contact per viewer or reader is 10 times higher.

Technology and future

Combining the interactivity of the Web with the alluring engagement of television is an idea whose time is upon us. What is at the root of all the changes taking place is, on the one hand, the unlimited capacity of the Web and acceptance and growth of broadband, and on the other, the ability to digitise movie and TV content which earlier was restricted to tape and could be transmitted only through air waves. Against this backdrop, let us see how we can further strengthen the media function. Let us first start with the important ingredient - people. There is no doubt in my mind that the only reason why we may fail in the future is because we have not taken adequate steps to ensure a steady stream of people with relevant talent and reasonable expectations into this discipline. What kind of people do we need to seek?

To paraphrase Bobby Kooka's words, obviously to start with, people with a facility of numbers. You've got to layer that with an ability to understand business, read the balance sheet, understand top line, bottom line and implications of ad spends on both these and cash flow. Otherwise you are not going to find favour with the IBF-AAAI committee, or the newly emerging INS-AAAI committee. And you have to layer on top of that, people who are bold, imaginative, who can generate ideas, who can persuade both the client and the media owners.

Can you expect to receive a steady and ready supply of people with such capabilities from the market? Without our doing anything about it? Obviously not. In this connection, I must compliment MICA for taking the bold step several years ago and more recently, Lintas, for starting a one-year media programme for freshers. You need many more of these to be run by industry people, perhaps as an adjunct to our agencies rather than getting businessmen to enter this area. I would urge large advertisers to rethink their media agency remuneration plans and tie additional remuneration to additional innovative staffing because I believe media calls for time-intensive work. Even if the additional remuneration results in one good `connect' idea and the pay-off would be many times more.

You cannot discuss media without the subject of rates creeping in. But I suggest, and mind you I suggest this in the interest of advertisers and not in the interest of media owners - let us shift the emphasis from rates to value. As media choices multiply, chasing lower rates without focusing on receiving value, impact and result for the brand is only going to make media richer. As the media ownership industry becomes more and more attractive, thanks to the decreasing cost of technology, and more and more industrialists want to become media moghuls and existing media moghuls wanting to expand their fiefdoms, these choices are only going to increase.

To find how attractive the media is or it appears to be, you only need to see the PE ratios of media company stocks, compared to the rest of the industry. This is going to get many existing players into the stock market and what are they going to do with the money they raise? Offer us more media choice! Whilst increasing media choice may be good news for the reader or viewer, or the distributor or the journalist and production fraternity, the impact of multiplying media choices on the advertiser is disastrous. Whilst proliferation may lead to lowering of rates, which may seem attractive at first, the resultant fragmentation of readership or viewership nearly always means an increase in unit cost and more importantly a phenomenal reduction in impact.

There were 277 TV channels at last count. The total advertising time beamed out to us as consumers has moved up over five years from 51 million seconds to 214 million seconds per year and as a double whammy, the average duration of commercials has come down from 22 seconds to 16. Imagine the clutter in the viewer's mind that you have to cut through. And yet, India is only the 14th most cluttered market.

What is not a good development is the increasing tendency amongst both media planners and advertisers to shun those options, which cannot be measured, using hard data. I think this is a grave error that we are making and letting a wonderful opportunity pass by, merely because it cannot be measured. After all, everything in life cannot be in black and white. If it were, then you would not need highly paid advisors and decision makers at agency and advertiser ends. Large advertisers are more guilty of this than smaller advertisers. There's a life beyond numbers and whilst we need to grow our cubs on the rigid discipline and rigour of numbers, we need to also teach them when to go beyond numbers.

Lack of industry-accepted measurement data in the outdoor area is leading to a serious under-utilisation of this medium.

Let us learn to actively collaborate without fear of somebody trampling over our shoes and worrying about whose turf it is, in the interest of doing a better job. And we need to collaborate with each other too, within the industry, to develop healthy business practices. Perhaps the time has come for us to act on the suggestion that there be a media agencies' association to strengthen, nurture, regulate, and address our concerns. Let us continuously find new ways to do things faster, better, cheaper, more accurately with fewer mistakes and more responsibly. Otherwise, the time is not far when, like creative agencies, a bunch of media boutiques will come up that will provide intellectual capital and inventive solutions to demanding clients, whilst media agencies are still chasing CPRPs on television. Rich pay-offs come when you go down the untrodden path and buy anticipated performance. Buying proven performance is safe, but expensive, and not going to bring you or the profession any glory.

This is a nascent industry and early settlers have to play their part. If I take a leaf out of Madison's vision statement, "We need to show advertisers the importance of media in achieving their corporate goals and simultaneously we need to sensitise media owners to advertisers' concerns and goals."

I would urge those advertisers who have abandoned print, radio and outdoor to review at least one of these media and augment their TV plans with these inputs. At the same time I would tell those advertisers who have not yet discovered the magical powers of TV advertising to waste no time in using this medium. If media planning and buying has developed as a media industry, the media-selling function too has rapidly developed. Media organisations today religiously track which advertiser's ad is appearing in which publication and channel and are quick to make a case to both the planner and advertiser as to why a wrong decision has been made, but having got a campaign how many analyse, track, get feedback on what has been the result of the campaign that was carried in their medium. This is the next stage of evolution that media sellers need to get into.

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