The Hindu Business Line : Media mayhem

When Carat Media Services decided to reposition itself as a communications planning organisation recently, it was to adapt itself to the changing media and consumer environment to build a lasting relationship with its clients. As part of a global initiative, it rolled out a 3C (curiosity, creativity and collaboration) process to give a more responsible and accountable approach to the brands it handles.

Charles B. Jenarius, Group CEO, Carat India, is emphatic about the need to move to a new process. He says: "Carat will evolve to a more consumer planning process compared to channel-centric planning which we have been doing so far. The only objective will be to create greater consumer engagement through experience-based activities and to increase ROI for clients while being accountable.'' With its differentiated offering, the independent media outfit is hoping its 3C process will find new and better ways to connect its clients with their consumers through communication.

As the media scenario gets more complex with increasing media choices and consumers, media agencies have been unveiling a series of tools and concepts to cope with the process of fragmentation. From selecting the right media to targeting a segment which stays away from using mass media, the quality of the measuring systems have been enhanced with a view to optimising the media spends made by the client.

While Carat has repositioned itself so as to maximise ROI, Group M, the largest media company in the country, has gone to the extent of forming a joint venture with IT major Covansys (India) Pvt Ltd for scaling up its expertise in data analytics. The new company has been christened Meritus Analytics India Pvt Ltd. It will offer data analytics services to potential clients in marketing, financial, healthcare and retail verticals worldwide. Covansys is a global technology services vendor with a broad interest in knowledge process outsourcing and more specifically in data analytics. According to Group M officials, the new company will be a one-stop shop for potential clients in the selected verticals, as it will have end-to-end solution capability — from raw/summary data to actionable insights. In effect, it would provide the new generation CEOs a `sure-fire' way to yield the maximum return on investment.

New tools and techniques

In the process of maximising the ROI, a series of new tools and techniques are also making their way into the market. While Lodestar Universal has its new tool of TV graphics in place, Madison Media has introduced the Madison Engagement Factor or M:ECF which when multipled with the TVRs would help in giving a metric that better serves the advertiser's objective especially in terms of brand recall. Then there is the Starcom Mediavest Group, which recently launched two proprietary tools for television planning in India - M Orchestra and Tardiis. The common points of both the tools are that they both work on TAM raw data as the base source, both are user-friendly, intuitive and customised for India. While M Orchestra is a GRP (Gross Rating Point) Optimiser, Tardiis, which stands for Target Audience Reach Delivery Inventory Investment System, is a Reach Optimiser.

As advertisers look at reach to be a better measurement than ratings today, Tardiis claims to be a stronger tool since it can be used for planning, buying, research and analysis. Some of the salient features of Tardiis are that it can work with unlimited inventory, it can handle multiple brands at the same time and can be used for corporate inventory allocation. It is a multi-market reach optimiser and can optimise any combination of reach, frequency and GRP objectives.

According to Ravi Kiran, MD Starcom, "As media markets mature, the focus is shifting from pure brute force-based negotiations to introduction of tools and approaches that better recognise market realities and deliver enhanced value to clients. The recognition that consumers are more media neutral than ever has got Starcom MediaVest Group to launch a series of specialist services over the last three years. Also, recognising that there is a lot of untapped productivity potential within TV, we launched two powerful tools — MOrchestra and Tardiis — in August this year. We have launched these two new tools since they will have the potential of saving clients' TV budgets by 15-20 per cent.''

Another TV planning tool (TV Graphics) to figure out the levels of fragmentation in TV viewing tool was unveiled recently by Lodestar Universal. Positioned as the first TV segmentation tool in the country, TV Graphics is a tool whose "time has come," according to the media agency. Says Mahuya Chaturvedi, GM, Lodestar, "It has been a myth that mass channels rule for everyone. TV planning for long has been stuck in a time warp. Planning on demographics seemed to suggest that a housewife in MP, an executive in Mumbai and a teenager in Kolkata all watched the same channel. Planners were forced to ignore their intuition and simply blame the TV numbers right from sample sizes to selection of panel homes. But now fragmentation of the audiences has come to light through TV Graphics through the clustering of audiences.''

TV Graphics isolated segments within the broad demographic group having distinct TV consumption behaviour and preferences. The research used industry standard data but with a different perspective to uncover fresh insights. The segments isolated were quantifiable and findings actionable to add tangible value to clients' TV plans on an ongoing basis. In effect the new tools are also creating a new equation between the media agencies and their clients. Trying to overcome the hurdles of trying to negotiate with clients, today media agencies believe in marketing their specialist tools to optimise the client's budget. As Hiren Pandit, National Director, Broadmind, a division of Group M, says, "So far media agencies have been saving monies through negotiations. But now they have realised that by enhancing the quality of the tools there will be optimisation in media monies being spent and better targeting leading to savings in the client's budget."

Right choice of media

Deciphering the right choice of media for a particular target group is also becoming an area of concern for media agencies. Recently, the Lintas Media Group brought in four media tools from its global portfolio to include brands such as Path2Purchase, GrowthGrid, MasterMind and Encounter.

Raj Gupta, Chief Strategy Officer of the Lintas Media Group, who has been entrusted with the task of implementing the entire toolkit within all Lintas units in India, including advertising and below-the-line, says, "The toolkit enables one to closely identify with the business problem at hand, and open one's mind to strategic and not just tactical communication solutions."

Adds Lynn de Souza, Director of Media Services, Lintas India, "The tools are basically a guide to the selection of media choices and are linked to providing a solution to the problem of communication. As the media environment is getting more dynamic, its role in people's life is greater and today many more people are being exposed to many new media."

Summing up the current media scenario in the context of the new concepts and tools being launched, Sam Balsara, CMD, Madison Communications, says, "Media is no longer planned and bought in the conventional way and the ways of the past has stopped working. On the one hand today there is too much of media today while on the other hand there is a bit less of consumer's time to consume it." Madison Media's attempt to plug the need gaps in the media market have led it to launch two new concepts of Media Insight and Media Engagement Correction (M:ECF). While the former is all about trying to understand the consumer in terms of figuring out what is obvious on the surface, the latter is a tool for correcting TVRs to factor in brand recall. `Moving from exposure to engagement' is what the title of Madison Media's latest newsletter suggests. New tools, methods, concepts and processes are simply a way of media agencies getting more bang for the clients' buck.