Jottings of an Ex Circulation, sorry RMD, guy

I was in the first batch of the Times School of Management in 1990. When I joined it post doing 3 years of Hotel Management from PUSA it was a typical move of a confused young Bengali who was not smart enough to join Engineering or Medical so from my parents side it was do whatever so that you can earn a living.

On joining I realized that, there is this group called BCCL and in its helm is this three siblings – SJ, VJ and NJ - who are trying to rewrite the rules of the print media in the country. My interactions (mostly in a group) were more with the elder brother than with their late sister or the then young VJ. In that one year, I heard and saw the little steps that were being taken to shake the company out of its lethargy.

I was told about why the Sesquicentennial (I am deliberately not doing spell check here as to emphasise the point that even now I don’t know how it is spelled) events were critical in giving a larger than life image to a newspaper group and move it into a happening brand category.

I was told how and why NIE was started, to ensure that the kids of the Punjabi families started reading TOI from School so that 10 years down when they decided to demand their own newspaper they asked for TOI and HT which was ' Punjabi written in English'. It was also explained to us by Buro Lahiri (sadly no more) the reason behind the setting up of TSM. As per him SJ realised that the media planners plan their media 1/4 by data (can be manipulated so no one really trusts) and 3/4 by guts and what he reads. His reasoning was, as over the years the students from this Institute proliferate and join agencies and take marketing decision-making positions in Orgs they would have a natural bias towards the group thereby making the sales job easier.

If these are not examples of being far sighted I don’t know what are. Ask any Delhi guy who is more than 35 years old and he will talk about the night 'The Boss' sang in JLN stadium. Success of NIE forced the competition to start PACE (and they have done a great job) but BCCL is pushing NIE to the next level in making it a medium to reach School kids across the world and not limit it to Delhi. Thanks to face book I know lots of TSMites who are decision makers and decide on Advt spends across orgs.

When I passed out of TSM I decided to join RMD, circulation to non-BCCl folks, and not the more glamorous Response (Advertising Sales to the aforementioned) as it was spoken as the place where men get distinguished from boys. This was thanks to a speech from SK Mehta (MKD) where he exhorted us to take the tough route rather than the easy. I realized once I was in that I was conned but that is a different story. RMD in the city of Delhi used to be all about getting up at odd hours to go to street crossings where 200-300 hawkers used to come and buy all newspapers. In the afternoon it was going with the magazines on Feeder routes.

Now coming to the main point of this edition of my blog as a rejoinder to Robin and Sen about distribution in the print industry and some myth busting.

Myth 1: Hawker decides which copy a reader reads. I say Bull Shit; this myth was manufactured by the hawkers and given by air by moth balled circulation managers who thought this would increase their worth. Tell me when was the last time a hawker came and sold a newspaper to anyone of us. Most of us don’t even know the bugger as he comes when we are asleep.


Myth 2: We circulation guys know where each and every copy of ours goes and who is our reader. Bull bloody shit, PCC (again started by Times group through Bimal Chadha) showed very clearly that most of the old fogies in circulation had no clue about their readers and even with the name and address in hand could not ensure that the newspapers were delivered at the right address by the right hawker.


Myth 3: Schemes help in selling copies. Yes it does but only because the hawker rotates the copies. Just by giving Tupperware or Bed sheets one cant increase circulation on a permanent basis. That needs to be backed by product improvement, consumer interaction and communication and old-fashioned distribution.


The third myth is where I feel the FMCG types who came in to print have really added value and that is where again the Times group was way ahead of the competition. In spite of the jabs of the old times that these Joote aur biri bechne wale kya jaante hain newspaper sales ke baare mein, they were the ones who broke the mould and brought in new management styles which are the norm today.


Regards,

SN

(Blogkeeper's Note: SN now is the Country Manager of a leading International Wire-Agency in India. He keeps a blog : 'Random Musings' at www.saurjyesh.blogspot.com and can be reached at saurjyesh@gmail.com )--

Is it only about Eye-balls ?

Taking off from where Sen and Robin started….


I think it was R Sundar who once told me, chatting over tea at the BCCL office in Government Place East in Calcutta, “circulation has to be built copy by copy - there are no short cuts”. Then there was AD who would never tire of recounting how it took The Telegraph a good 10 years to touch the circulation of the original 'Englishman' of Chowringhee Square, despite the self-destructive tendency of the latter. And, till date the ToI hasn't been able to win the 'catch up' game with TT, as indeed it hasn’t been able to dislodge the Deccan Chronicle in Hyderabad.

But in today's age of SMSs and with PE Investors breathing down one’s neck very few have the luxury of waiting for a decade to build a critical-mass circulation to be regarded as a serious “challenger”. So we have to pump hormones and steroids into a new born to make an Obelix out of it in no time.

The ToI, as always, were the original innovators with their 'invitation price'. The apocryphal story of how the idea struck SJ while passing the Alipore Zoo in a car with PG will go down in the annals of the history of newspapers in India. Then came the 'Jodi' offer which knocked the day-
lights of the competition, who were left with little option but to follow suit in great haste. In the process, as everyone knows, the vendors and the raddi-wallahs made hay while the publishers ( at least one of them) bled to near comatose.

This was also the time when the school newspapers ( the NIE and PACE ) came into play as, by some strange logic, they counted for ABC numbers. A school principal in Delhi once told me about the trouble they had in disposing the old papers – which the students inevitably never carried back home, tho’ it made handsome gratuity for the lower level staff.

Next was the era of deep discounted annual subscriptions and consumer promotions. Taking a leaf out of the magazines, which had long perfected the art of selling subscriptions on the back of gifts, newspapers – by then already infiltrated by the FMCG wiz-kids – began to entice their customers with offers of bed-sheets and tupper-ware. There was one major difference between the magazines and the newspapers – which everyone forgot or rather chose to ignore. In the case of magazines, it was far easier to chose your target audience by using DM (Direct Marketing) techniques. And, since the delivery was through courier or post – and not through the trade – it largely eliminated ‘loss-in-transit’.

The joke doing rounds in the newspaper circles then was – “we also sell newspapers”. I still remember walking into the Calcutta Book Fair in the winter of 2003 and saw a huge pavilion from which people were walking out with watches. Initially, I thought it was a Titan stall only to discover later it was actually of a newly launched national paper and the watches were being given as a free-bee for anyone who signed on for a year’s subscription.

Companies went freely in and out of the ABC as per their convenience. Finally ABC was forced to re-write its rules to come up with a new formula for calculating NPS (Net Paid Sales) to accommodate the big boys of the industry. Bhaskar Das was quoted in an interview saying, India would have moved to free news-papers long ago had it not been for the "raddi economics". Infact, today - if you take the "raddi-value" into account thereader is actually being paid to buy a paper.

I received a telling testimony from my newspaper vendor only the other day. He hadn't come to collect his bill for over 6 months. On asking him why - he frankly admitted, the amount he receives from the company by way of commission and trade schemes ( he didn't mention "raddi") is far more than what he gets from the "grahak" (customer). So it was small change and it no longer mattered to him, if he didn't collect his bills for a few months.


Apparently the model was telecom, where company valuations are based on the number of connections. But, no one seemed to be unduly bothered about the quality of their circulation – like a friend who had joined a telecom major, that was in a tearing hurry to ramp up its number of connections soon after launch, had joked - “we have a clear ABCD classification of our customers – Ayahas, Bai-s, Chauffeurs and Drivers”. No prizes for guessing which company we are talking about here.


In all this – people seemed to totally forget, what now seems like almost a defunct concept, Readership. Initially – people fought over NRS and IRS, choosing what was advantageous for them on that round of the survey. There were front page anchor pieces and lead articles on the edit page written to praise or debunk one over the other . Once, if you recall, NRS was taken to court and its results had to be withheld for months before a settlement was reached. Finally, NRS was put to sleep last year – no one’s certain if it will be resurrected ever again - and IRS, by default, became the limited currency of the industry, which you greet with enthusiasm if the numbers look good for or you trash if they look sick.

Old timers compared ABC & Readership to “clinical (physical) examination” and “blood-test”. A Doctor needed both to tell the health of patient.

Wonder how Media Planners, Buyers and Advertisers decide between publications these days ? Is it only on intuition or gut-feel ? It can’t be simply on how much commission or discount the publication is willing to part with as some cynics would have me believe. I am sure they have developed their own metrics for it.

Perhaps, a friend from the Media Buying Agencies will enlighten us.

But, finally I am left wondering – if Media is supposed to be a “mind-product” (as Goldie defined it) – then can it be only ‘eye-balls’ that matter ? One would assume – that to stimulate the mind you have to read it too. Did I hear someone say – “Reader Connect” ?