He is obviously the one for steady relationships. I Venkat joined the Eenadu Group 33 years ago and has seen it grow from a fledgling print company to a media conglomerate straddling print, television, Internet et al. As director, Venkat is responsible today for all the group's strategic forays across media and across state boundaries. In this rare interview to Alokananda Chakraborty of agencyfaqs!, he talks about how the advertising slowdown has affected various media, the fallout of the price wars unleashed by various English and Hindi newspapers, and how language media has fought the bias among media planners to claim its rightful place in the advertisers' priority list.

Q. Eenadu has evolved from a newspaper brand to a full-fledged media conglomerate with presence in television, Internet et al. What has been the process of evolution like? Which among the various product offerings is the key focus area for the Group now?

A. Print will always be our strong point. That is because one does not flirt with print. Print is like a steady marriage; whereas television is like a fling, a one-night stand. That is not to say we are not serious about television. What I am saying is there is nothing permanent on television. Take Zee, which was the No 1 player till just two years back. Now STAR rules the roost. And it is all because of one programme. Imagine this. A single programme on one channel changed the fate of all the top national TV channels and the entire television landscape beyond recognition! Again, if you look at the television landscape in south India, Gemini TV's figures are much better than ours today but one year back, we were No 1.

The point I am making is television is volatile. The whole business can swing overnight. In print, the process of change is much slower. The challenger cannot unseat the No 1 player in print in a particular market overnight. But in TV you can topple anybody overnight with just one or two good programmes. In print your fortune cannot change overnight.

Q. If that is the logic that drives your marketing strategy, how do you justify your enthusiastic launch of six channels at one shot just about a month back? That too at a time when the entire economy is in the grip of a major slowdown?

A. The imperative was different; the issue was consolidation of our business. It was not as if we were launching something from scratch. We already have several channels up and running. We have the infrastructure, we know the markets, we have some understanding of consumer preferences, and we have experience of running the business. So why not take advantage of the situation and try and get ahead?

Q. Does having a bouquet insulate you as a group against the capricious viewer and advertiser? Coming to the current scenario, has the recession in the advertising industry affected your print and television businesses in any way?

A. Overall, the budgets have come down in television as the number of players has increased manifold. Basically, two things have happened in the recent past. One, the overall advertising pie has shrunk. Two, the pie itself is getting distributed as more and more players join the fray. Now buying on TV has become very similar to buying by the weight.

Print, unlike TV, has some basic discipline. That may be because it has a history 70/80 years longer than TV. So there is some semblance of systems and procedures. Having said that, in today's scenario, having a presence across media is not much of a relief either. Even print, which had the sanctity of a rate card till recently, is negotiable depending on volume.

But if you were to compare the two, in TV the scenario is worse because there is only a handful of players who can hold on to their card rates. Believe you me, even the No 1 TV channel's rates are negotiable, though they claim otherwise. The Sun Group and we are much better off - maybe because we have been able to spread the risk. What I can say with certainty is that everybody has been affected by the recessionary trend in the industry. It is only the extent to which each has been affected that is different; and it is the way they were able to foresee the trend and react to it that has determined the individual performances.

Q. Now coming to the Eenadu Group's performance in TV, among your various language channels, which are doing well in terms of sheer viewership?

A. No other television group can claim to have the width of coverage as Eenadu. Take Hindi. We have four Hindi channels in four different dialects of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Bihar. That apart we have one channel each of Telugu, Oriya, Kannada, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati and Urdu. In terms of sheer viewership, Telugu has always been No 1 because in absolute numbers, there are more cable and satellite homes in Andhra Pradesh than any of the other markets we are tapping. Moreover, the Telugu channel was started right at the beginning of the satellite boom, in the year 1995. So with a longer history, penetration is obviously higher.

Q. If you look at the various languages you are present in, which would you say, are your priority markets in terms of revenue generation - both in print and in TV?

A. Let's take print first. About 55 to 60 per cent of our revenues come from Andhra Pradesh; the balance 40-45 per cent comes from markets like Delhi and Mumbai. For television, the key markets for business generation happen to be Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore and Kolkata - though Kolkata, for all practical purposes, is as good as negligible. Now, you would ask: Where does Hyderabad fit in? Hyderabad has very few local clients so the prospect of business generation for television is absolutely insignificant.

Q. Many regional language players, especially in print, complain facing a bias among media planners in favour of English. As a regional media house what has been your experience? How have you faced up to this bias?

A. Yes, the bias is there, but I think regional language players have been able to present their case properly to both the media planner and the client. Players like Ananda Bazaar Patrika, Malayala Manorama, Jagran, Bhaskar, Eenadu and most others have extensively used relevant data from NRS and IRS to prove a point or two.

Side by side, to drive home the message to the reader they have used intelligent advertising to project what their brands are worth. For example, to draw attention to our readership profile we have used premium imagery in our advertising like the Mercedes car or the Skoda and said this is what the Eenadu reader is like. Even Malayala Manorama has created a beautiful campaign to tell people what they stand for. While the bias is still there, most print players in the regional language have worked very hard to get all the three parties - the planners, the advertisers and the readers - to see their point of view.

Q. Talking about changes in the media scenario over the years, how do you assess the trend of consolidation among media companies? In fact you were among the first to get onto the bandwagon when you entered a combination-advertising package deal with The Hindu last year. How have you gained from the exercise? Do you see media consolidation becoming the order of the day? Do you see this extending to cross-media alliances?

A. We did gain a lot from the package both in terms of value and volume. In fact, both of us did. We have gained by roping in new clients, which were oriented more towards the English press. The Hindu, in its turn, has gained in terms of a sizeable regional clientele. But it was not as if we were the first people to do this. There was this Bartaman-Statesman alliance in Kolkata before that; then there was the Media 5 alliance between Deccan Chronicle (English, general), Business Standard (English, business), Andhra Bhoomi (Telugu), Siyasat (Urdu) and Milaap (Hindi). An odd combination, by any stretch of imagination, and I don't know what came of it. May be they were not trying hard enough to leverage the alliances; or may be they couldn't do much with it.

But the fact remains alliances can only become stronger in times to come. It is happening at the clients' level, it is happening at the agency level. So media has no choice but to come together to protect its turf. And it will extend across media - it makes sense to. How and who will survive only time can tell. But the trend can only gain ground. It's like what happened during the dotcom boom. Everybody got into the bandwagon only to find out the reality the hard way. But then the stronger ones did survive; so did the ones that had a strong reason to exist. The same thing will happen here.

Q. Talking about the emerging scenario, the Indian press represents a strange paradox. It is very vocal about liberalisation and about increasing foreign participation in the industry. On the other hand, when it comes to FDI in print, it recoils in horror. What is your Group's stand on this issue?

A. As a Group we oppose foreign direct investment. So do most established newspapers in the country barring the Indian Express, Asian Age, Jagran, the Ananda Bazaar Patrika Group and some others. I feel very strongly about this issue. The moment these foreign players come in, they will start impinging on the collective consciousness of the Indian people...

Q. Let me interrupt, what makes you think Indian people are so susceptible to foreign influences?

A. Let me explain how they will foster inequality. They will not only colour our thinking, they will also unleash a situation where the whole salary structure in media will change. Salaries will go through the roof. Imagine for a moment that New York Times comes here and decides to hire a junior journalist at $1,000. It's like paying Rs 50,000. A thousand dollars is peanuts for them, but it's a hell lot of money here. They don't stand to lose anything. They are getting quality labour at one-third the price they would have had to pay in their own country. So you tell me, who stands to gain out of this whole thing? This is a fear, a very real fear…

In most countries, print is always in the hands of the local people. Take the US. Rupert Murdoch had to convert himself to a US citizen to be able to own media in that country. Now why they have put this condition in the US, I don't know. But the crux of the matter is that the same people who criticise our rules and regulations employ a similar set of rules in their own country to protect their domestic media! I don't see what is the argument here...

Q. You seem to have very strong views on this issue. Tell me how do you react to the price wars that the top print players have indulged in from time to time...

A. We don't indulge in things like invitation pricing. In Andhra Pradesh, we were just three players Eenadu, Vaartha and Andhra Jyothi - the last one is closed now - and we have always discussed it among ourselves and have stayed out of a price war. After all, what is there to be gained out of the whole thing? As the leader in the market we continuously talk to our various competitors and, to tell you the truth, we have never felt the need to get into the invitation price game.

But as a trend, I seem to think this is more of an English press phenomenon. When Times entered Andhra Pradesh in August-September 2000, they reduced the price and all the English papers followed suit. But none of the Telugu players joined the war. Besides English papers, I have seen this happening among Hindi players too. But I have never heard of Bangla, Malayalam or Kannada papers getting into a price war.

In fact, at times the same English paper sells at different prices in different states. Take The Hindu. In Bangalore, it sells at Rs 2.50 on four days and Rs 1.50 on Wednesdays and Saturdays. In Madras, it sells at Rs 3.25 (all days) and in Kerala at Rs 3.20 (all days). Again, in Andhra Pradesh, it sells at Rs 1.50 on four days, Re 1.00 on two days and at Rs 4.50 on Sundays. So does Indian Express. We don't.

Q. You were talking about the power and growth of regional media earlier. Now how do you sustain growth if you don't give readers sops like lower prices, gifts etc?

A. If you look at ABC or NRS or IRS, you would see that the growth of the language press has been more than that of the English press. And yes, whatever growth has happened in the English press is largely driven by those price wars etc. But what is important is that the language press has grown without doing any of the things that the English press has done. The growth has happened because in our country the affinity to the regional language is much stronger than the English language. And this is a much bigger achievement - the fact that we have overtaken the English press without undercutting the value that we have attached to our product.

Q. One last question. As a marketer, how do you perceive the differences between the consumer of regional media and that of English media?

A. Basically, the whole strategy of packaging the product and marketing it has to be different keeping in mind one simple thing. The two consumers approach media with two different perspectives.

First of all, English readers are more evolved consumers. They are exposed to many other influences, including foreign and local media. Therefore subconsciously, the English reader has some understanding of what he needs and clearly looks out for that in the paper.

To give an example, the regional language reader may read his paper from the front ear panel to the last credit line on the last page. On the other hand, the English reader may be content with reading just the headlines of particular news pieces or specific sections he is interested in. He might even open the paper only from the page he is interested in. This might be happening because of two reasons. One, he knows what he is looking for, and two, he really has very little time. So as marketers we have to constantly understand the audience we are addressing and change/upgrade it to catch up with his changing needs.

May 06, 2002
Hyderabad
You can write to I Venkat at
ivenkat@eenadu.net