“The first step toward change is awareness. The second step is acceptance.” – Nathaniel Branden
We in India live in an ever changing media landscape. I wonder how interesting it would be to observe the hullabaloo of continuous developments among media planners, buyers and the media community as a whole. I was at the Discovery Upfront show in New York last week. This is an annual event where media players put out their strategies, content and programming for the next one year to marketers, CMOs, brand managers, media planners, media buyers and analysts, and evangelise what their line-up will be during the year. The media companies try and sell their advertising space and inventories on that basis beforehand. It’s a congregation of the entire fraternity at one single place where nothing else but business is talked, breathed and analysed.
This is the market of Media. There are prices. Prices for efforts, quality and returns... right there on the table. Discovery is a great company with fantastic content and programming, and has lot of its “O.W.N.” to share. It had David Zaslav, its Global CEO, Mark Hollinger, CEO, Discovery International and Oprah Winfrey, Morgan Freeman, Billy Ray Cyrus and many more showcasing the bread and depth of Discovery’s portfolio of brands and how they will net audiences. It was the most entertaining two hour sales pitch I’ve seen in the media industry – informative, and somewhat like watching a movie or a play though what you were essentially doing is seeing the programming line up for the year from a TV network.
I was there for a short time and while I was returning, I was informed that Discovery has sold most of its inventory for this year and there is only minor scattered inventory available now. It made me wonder why we don’t have an Upfront in India.
India today has a huge market for entertainment, sports and luxury that attracts people like bees to honey. Properties like IPL, T20, beauty pageants, awards, lifestyle shows – and even politics has its own share of events that are usually planned in advance. In a situation like that, I feel it becomes extremely important for various networks to promote their content and their rights to these properties ahead of time. Apart from this, even if the regular content is presented and sold in a logical way, empty inventories at the last minute can be avoided. Upfront is a chance for the marketer to bet on something that will be big in the future. Can he or she get it right and make the first move at the right price and ROI?
There is a huge advantage if the marketers get the marketing and media investments right when they spend some of the amount from their marketing budgets upfront. Media players can also reap better returns on their inventories by pre-selling them and de-risking extremely low cost spending of inventory.
But the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about creating an Upfront in India is the way we function. Most things in India happen at the last minute, and the scheduling and organising that is required to be present at a platform like this can’t be ignored. Second, our content and programming which is highly volatile and depends hugely on the mood and trends of the people is difficult to plan so much in advance. Difficult, but not impossible.
If Upfront happens, this industry would benefit immensely. Creating a platform like Upfront in India would lead to better media relationships, reduce the yawning gap between agency, advertiser and media, and also build the economics of the whole system. It would also help in accountability – if someone defaults after buying the inventory, it would be open in the market.
Thus, if we truly aspire to compete with international media, we need an Upfront in India. It requires a lot of thought work from industry leaders; and the question is, who will take the Step?
Upfront in India will enable marketers and media planners/buyers to become futurists and let me quote:
“The role of a futurist (and anyone can be one) – is to honour the past, inhabit the present (notice what’s going on now) and engage the future – to be involved in a process of stimulating our friends and our loved ones and even strangers to getting the grips with the fact that the future itself is a race between self discovery and self-destruction…” – Richard Neville
