Vivek Sharma
Until now I thought that advertising is about the excellent grasp of the superficial. Now it’s The Times of India. Every morning the Times serves is readers a dose of fairyland fables laced in fizz and now splashed in colour. For a newspaper that started off defining advertising as "news you can use" it has evolved into advertising is news - cover to cover. The fallout is a progressive separation from reality for its readers. Now that the paper has travelled the distance and built a system to meet its objectives - to be in perpetual joy, the Times and its readers can proceed to live in splendid isolation in their branded citadel. If this leads you to think that this is yet another whine thrown in the general direction of the Times - that is the lesser cause for my concern with the Indian media today.
Pop goes the Times and the weasels will follow. You need only speculate about how soon. Ten years is a decent time frame to begin to assess the effects of a milestone. In 1992, when the TOI dropped its price, it was much ado about everything. Media independence, bottom-line, foreign cultural invasion, stagnating readership, a more demanding audience fed with news formats from satellite channels, a pronounced shift in peoples habits for their primary source of news, desire to achieve city leadership etc. The TOI sat up, assessed and responded to the changing landscape by dropping its price - and with it, all its inhibitions. Picture this:
A person living at
§ Three scant plates of cooked rice or 8-10 chapattis
§ A half cup of cooked pulses
§ A spoon of edible oil
§ A spoon of dried chilli
§ One medium sized potato or onion
§ One cup of tea
§ A handful of brinjal
§ One half cup of milk
§ One banana three ties each month
§ An egg every five days
After buying food, two additional rupees would be left over for items like medicines, school books, fuel for cooking, clothing, soap, durable goods etc. Notably, one third of
In ten years since invitation pricing (read: partying) the barrier between real issues and fluff is satisfactorily constructed and a typical Times reader would be forgiven to believe that all is fine with the world.
One would have thought that the market leader strong, resourceful and fighting fit would hold forth the flame. Ironically it went the other way. Rather than ensure that "no one is left outside" a global phenomenon thanks to communications, and one of the core reasons why the media is the fourth estate, the TOI went on systemically to abandon the citizenry and to integrate with the markets.
Why is that bad? Because with unparalleled success comes responsibility. The Times of India is the largest selling English newspaper in the world. It has a job - whether it likes it or not to reflect and respond to the big issues of our times. Instead it is "the super brand on which other brands ride" proclaims its marketing director.
Says Harry Flood, in an essay titled Manufacturing Desire, (the brackets are mine)
"Time was, decadence on this scale was something to fear. If one group of people was gobbling up resources out of all proportion to its needs, consuming at thirty times the rate of other groups of people, at everyone`s expense, well . . . that was bad karma, to say the least. Their society was surely soft, cancerous and doomed.
But somehow, the
23% of
You therefore have a readership that is, thanks to the demands of the marketplace, engineered to be comfortably numb. With invitation pricing, circulation did soar and advertising revenue did leap but the paper lost its raison d’etre. Or rather it discovered a new one. Why is it part of the fourth estate? History? Status quo? Clout? The Times is an FMCG (fast moving consumer good) and it must belong there among the beverages and the mosquito repellent coils.
Harry says
"maybe decadence goes deeper than a behaviour, as deep as the emotion that hatched it. The Motion Picture Association of
Not every American (and Times reader) lives a decadent life, of course. But decadence, as the marketers say, has great penetration. Those who aren`t themselves trashing hotel rooms or being photographed in their swimming pools for InStyle magazine, end up thinking a lot about those who are -- because the culture of celebrity (or the culture of "ornament," as Susan Faludi calls it) is the water we`re all swimming in. Refracted through the glass of the tank, the contours of the world outside tend to distort.
To borrow journalist Robert Kaplan`s metaphor, the
We have more than our share of divisiveness. The regional, the language, the caste, the gender, the class, the religious and many others each potent enough to implode and take us one step closer to the crater’s edge. Nothing compares to the isolationism in the mental realm - the celebration of the rich ghetto neo-liberal type that is the Times’ new ideology. When the English press clones it in varying degrees, which is pretty soon and the vernacular press (think Daink Bhaskar, the second largest selling paper in the world in any language) models itself on this "admirably successful" template, the picture is complete.
Decadence is self-delusion on a massive scale. Like the motto of the new gadget-packed magalog Sony Style -- "things that are not essential, yet hard to live without" -- it`s about convincing ourselves of the value of this lifestyle, (every morning because it is the advertiser induced management mantra) because to question it would force choices we`re not prepared to make.
Decadence is what happens when the energy of a whole society gets channeled into the trivial or the mercenary. In the age of the supercharged Dow, everything reduces to an "opportunity," (or photo op) at an incalculable (though unacknowledged) cost.
What about the other papers? While the Times dropped its price the rest dropped their confidence. Simply because it knew what it wanted, the Times defined the new playing field. The rest? They followed too, but more in defence than with any clarity. What they lost in market share was less costly to what they lost by giving the Times the perceived legitimacy for its actions.
Before the others follow the Times yet again, it will be worthy to consider the contrarian’s view. In a Murdoch-ed marketplace there is no reason to be a price warrior. An Indian Express raising its cover price to a reasonable level - maybe thru an "Independence Pricing" is likely to take it further than the Hindustan Times approach to be a -Times-clone strategy. Show me the alternative. I’m not too sure but it’s worth mapping the decadal story of The Economic Times and Business Standard to see if such a proposition is plausible.
It is time to get the advertiser to be a less of a determinant in the making and selling of news. A well conceptualized and brilliantly communicated Independence Pricing policy by the other papers will not only add value to a paper’s current readership but, it will snap a section of the numb readership of the Times out of its stupor. Such a scenario in the marketplace is more likely to catch the attention of the Times, not a wail mail like this one.
Ah! The mysterious ways of the market.
Vivek Sharma works with Development Alternatives. Contact: sharmavivek@email.com