The Media Buying and Planning workshop, a competence building program, was conducted by the Advertising Club Bombay on Friday, June 13. Held at the Mayfair Rooms in Worli, Mumbai, the event was a close-knit one with the gregarious Bipin Pandit kicking off activities.
The Madison Media team comprising Punitha Arumugam, Praveen Sharma and C Mallikarjundas who had graciously agreed to conduct the workshop, proved they were some of the best in the business by delivering a robust yet simplified look into the power of media while simultaneously helping a willing audience understand how media actually works—and they did this with a theme underlying the quote “Suji wa dokhushin ni kagiru”, a Japanese phrase for “Sudoku”. The multiple sessions conducted by the able Madison team was filled with theory, fun, games, and an exciting role playing game closely simulated the professional skills and challenges of working in a media agency, no matter the role.
Puzzles were handed out all the participants but only one lucky participant managed to win all five prizes; in fact, prizes were given out to every member who contributed correct or factual answers and this shaped the fun factor of the entire day. The workshop looked at the work a media agency would do, a gigantic puzzle in itself, and broke it down to the simplistic, easily understandable “Sudoku” approach.
The program for the day was split into four parts and started sharp at 9.30am with Punitha’s fact driven presentation. Punitha, who heads Madison Media which is one of the largest media planning and buying agencies as the Group CEO, has helped her agency grow to about Rs.1800 crores! The winner of the GR8 Women achievers award in 2005 for her contribution to advertising began her presentation with an attention-grabbing quote by American author Joel Rosenberg, ‘I’m a simple man. All I want is enough sleep for two normal men, enough whiskey for three and enough women for four.’ She was able to gather everyone’s attention immediately and then launched into a closer look at the media industry. An estimate that the size of the media industry is about 20-25,000 crores was agreed upon and here, it became clear that ‘engagement’ was going to be key to the entire session.
With open discussions abounding in the lounge area of the hotel, the room quickly buzzes with activity every time a question was thrown around. Punitha spoke about the industry comprising of T.V, Press, Radio, Cinema, Outdoor and the Internet. She made it clear that cinema was the powerful medium as of now and was growing the fastest. With the Internet and radio following closely behind, she estimated that in about six years, radio, internet and outdoor advertising would grow tremendously. Of particular interest were the facts that no one in the audience seemed to know—cellular phones, soap, shampoos and two-wheelers bagged the highest number of advertisements and this suddenly became so obvious!
Punitha then explained the perspectives of the business from the point of the advertiser, the media agency and the media owner. This was the most interesting part of her session because the details involved were stimulating for thought and eventually, research. It should be mentioned that each member of the Madison team knew their statistics and with over 10 years of experience each in the industry, their youthful charm combined with the theory communicated flawlessly with the audience.
Regarding perspectives, Punitha said that the trend for advertisers is they think short-term, they want to increase shareholder value and quarterly profits, they have flexible advertising budgets and finally, they are clear that advertisements today are not about information—they’re about the art of persuasion.
Consumer taboos have broken down today as compared to the past; Punitha’s example was that the conservative ads of yesterday have been replaced with all out, freakish, bold and sexual ones and this spoke volumes about the change in target audience. Added to this, Punitha’s comment, ‘The only constant is change’, seemed to resonate well with everyone.
Next Punitha spoke about the agency’s perspective. The main facts here were that agencies have become consolidated. It’s a mini-monopoly out there and the competition is not just fierce, it’s all based on specialization. With products flooding the market that have similar features and benefits, agencies have a new animal to tame and that boil down to the central fact—the choices are limited and there’s an overdependence on numbers because statistics do point businesses in the right direction for planning, production and execution. The old 15% commission exists no more. T.V works and how—it’s an 8700 crores industry.
However, the not so positive side was that talent is hard to find today meaning agencies have to work with freshers who have to get up to speed faster than you can say ‘advertising’! It’s an industry where computers and data are higher than the mind.
Punitha ended her session with the stress on media owners and how their involvement had changed. With rising costs of operations and advertisers, the media owner has quite a few roadblocks. Consumers are also changing quickly. And now, it’s all about multi-media-mega empires who dictate terms!
The second session was presented by Praveen Sharma, the COO of Madison Media Infinity-Delhi. Praveen’s experience has taken him across agencies and today, leading the media business on Airtel in the most challenging telecom category in addition to other Bharti group companies helped the audience encapsulate the knowledge he shared on strategic tactics in media buying and planning.
Praveen’s session was straightforward and he helped everyone understand the various terminologies that are used in the media business. Participants walked away with the knowledge of terms such as TRP, Peoplemeter, GRP, CPRP, OTS and Plan Development. Most of the participants had doubts about the accuracy of the data collected that these terms belie but Praveen assured everybody about its legitimacy.
The focus of his presentation ultimately hinged on four central topics which were understanding media currency, measuring media, planning development and finally, databases a practitioner should know of. Planning the development of effective advertisement is different for different mediums. For instance, planning a print advertisement works on a period of six months whereas for TV, it would be much more often, say every week. Instead of focusing too much on the slides projected, Praveen interacted voraciously with the participants and ensured everyone knew their terms and how they were used in media buying and planning.
The session broke for a great Chinese lunch and when everyone returned to their seats, they were ready for a logical and analytical Mallikarjun Das, the head of Madison Media Research Centre (MMRC) at Madison Media whose career in the media industry encompassed media planning, media buying and mathematical modeling. Das’s very knowledgeable and genial approach towards explaining some of the more advanced aspects of the media business was appreciated by everyone present including the other Punitha and Praveen.
Media planning today according to Das consists of many elements such as the target audience, the media mix to use, the budget constraints, the effectiveness of the media, the competition, the market prioritization, the scheduling strategies and many such indicators that need to be analyzed before implementing a media solution. After an interesting discussion with participants on each of these elements, Das proceeded to talk about market prioritization where the methods consist of sales saliency, projection basis and CDI-BDI while the data sources would be retail audit for consumer products, internal client sources and product linkages. The number one priority question he felt everyone should ask was, “How much to back growth versus current shares?”
Defining a target audience, Das claimed could be understood via a diverse V.S. a narrowcast plan; both would affect the frequency of the media as per the audience. Determining a media mix is also an important question. Which media to use? How much of each media? Effective reach and frequency had to be considered for any media solution.
Das was an innovator in the sense that he came up with an engaging game to teach everyone about frequency and goal setting. It was playfully titled ‘Game of the Infected and Uninfected’. The rules were simple. One person in the room was ‘infected’ and was unknown to everyone except the workshop conductors. Each person tossed a coin and privately viewed their results. Then Das informed everybody that tails would mean infecting someone with the scratch of hands while heads would mean the shake of hands. The frequency was measured over a 10 day period. The first coin was tossed by Das and everyone started walking around stopping only on Das’s instruction of the result of his coin toss and subsequently, handshakes with the person next to each other. There would be one infected person in the room at the beginning and by the 5th day, there were already 6 infected people! After joking, jesting and completing the game, Das plotted the results on a graph to explain the frequency changes.
At the end of this session, everyone was clear about how logical and analytical thinking about media could help derive some of the best results. He also mentioned that a launch planning is different where goals are set to maximize in the initial weeks to create a ‘buzz’.
The next session was about media buying strategies and examples were shared about Procter & Gamble’s advertisements being driven by the CPRP, Asian Paints’ ads driven by the target audience, Coca Cola’s ads driven by events and Cadbury’s ads driven by brand value. Another interesting aspect of this session was ‘Negotiation Tenets’ which was explained as trying to win the trust of people because trust betrayed takes a long time to rebuild so being thorough with the concept and execution combined with slick marketing techniques can help save the day! Skilled negotiations ask twice as many questions and so Praveen stressed that everyone should ask questions and try to gather as much information as possible because in the end, it’s the business trust that matters today; people do business NOT companies as people commonly misinterpret.
The final session was on Innovation. An important topic, it was improvised as a free-for-all discussion moderated by the Madison team who asked everyone to pitch in their responses for what they thought were some of the most innovative advertisements. Punitha mentioned that most responses were blurry because creative media and innovative media must be differentiated. The innovation syndrome according to Punitha is, “…not necessarily gimmicky’ and instead the brand message can get communicated in an innovative manner by observing some examples such as Cadbury’s Dairy Milk with their slogan, ‘Kuch Meetha ho Jaye’ which even Amitabh’s appearance in the ad does not mask the importance of Cadbury’s brand message—celebrate with Dairy Milk no matter the occasion. This was an important realization that Punitha wanted everyone to accept. Today’s India is more receptive to thinking of a Dairy Milk as a sweet craving for even a ‘traditional’ audience. Knowing this helped Cadbury expand their innovativeness into consumer satisfaction as well as communicating an intense yet loving brand message. The Kinetic GF scooter launch for instance helped rejuvenate an ailing Kinetic by simply introducing a layout change in a print advertisement. Punitha explained that by changing the layout in the newspaper i.e. influencing the print agency’s to show the ad by changing the very layout shows the primacy of the advertisement—a bold, innovative move that has reaped rich results for Kinetic.
A revenue model like this is absolutely necessary and all three speakers adjudged this. So the question is, “How can we make innovations happen?” According to Punitha, innovation is a mixture of elements such as work discipline, long term planning, executing the media plan with the right timing, having adequate money and engaging in win-win partnerships. It also consists of breaking the rules after learning them, keeping an open mind, doing the research and knowing the statistics. So, innovation is not something that comes into a piece of art or work without a lot of thought and effort.
After a fifteen minute tea break, it was clear the room was abuzz with discussions, questions and comments. The speakers had definitely done the job of getting people to think of media in an innovative manner and not blindly follow past glories. To wrap up the workshop, Punitha said media was simple, logical and followed from common sense and a world class media person had passion—P for patience, A for analytical skills, S for speed with accuracy, S for single minded focus, I for innovation and initiation, O for open mindedness and N for no hang-ups!
An exciting workshop indeed with every participant thanking the speakers profusely for spending their valuable time sharing the best in media buying and planning; the networking ended at 4.30 pm and it was time to get back to the media woodshed and ultimately, the real world, which the Madison team had prepared us well for!