Wooing the Young

BY ninan| IN Opinion | 24/06/2004

Reprinted from the Hindu, June 20, 2004

MEDIA MATTERS

Sevanti Ninan

Less than  four years ago media marketers and channel executives imagined fondly that their fortunes lay in women. A surge of frantic experimentation with genres followed which saw the launch of  both Ekta Kapoor and her creation Tulsi Virani in Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi.  The originals were followed by clones. Now there’s been a change of fashion.  When those who want to sell think mainstream, they think youth.  Everybody tosses around figures to prove that 55 per cent of India is young.  Mass media dominance is achieved by herd-like devotion to the latest trend.

Look around the media scene and you can see the strategising at work . Take  newspapers.  If the Times of  India has transformed itself in the last five or six years it has been with a shrewd eye on demographics and what it means for the market.  Its mast-head and that of its sister publication the Economic Times are as full of colour and action as a cartoon strip. The TOI’s city supplements around the country are a smorgasbord of infotainment. News has been redefined. And what has all this done for the newspaper?  

Last December when it began to chortle that it had overtaken the Hindustan Times in Delhi, it produced figures to show where its audience had grown. "TOI put in a strong showing among younger readers -- a highly coveted segment for advertisers -- with a 42% rise in the 20-24 age group and a 55% surge in the 25-34 segment. HT , on the other hand, suffered a decline of 2% in the 20-24 category and grew by just 9% in the 25-34 group." So to amend matters the Hindustan Times decided not to dumb down its main paper but launch a separate edition for youth which would treat the news very differently. It is called Hindustan Times NEXT.

Television channels have been performing cartwheels to win young audiences. Zee started Trends, its fashion channel, and has now launched Jagran, a religious channel designed to appeal to youth. It offers alternate lifestyle programming live coverage of religious events, films, serials and talk shows.

National Geographic spent Rs 11 crores on its reality show, "Everest Se Takkar"  aimed at the young Indian, hoping for  a 40 per cent increase in viewership and a 50 per cent increase in advertising revenues.  A joint venture with the Indian Army, it said it was trying to spread the spirit of adventure and exploration amongst Indian youth. Sony’s launches of Jassi Jaise Koi Nahin, set in a fashion house, and now Yeh Meri Life Hai,  essentially a campus saga, are cleverly aimed at a  wider segment of the youth market, than the SEC (socio-economic category) AB  that is the mainstay of satellite TV channels.  The new heroine on Indian television is not the over-made up  denizen of domestic politics but a young middle class woman seeking to storm upper class citadels. 

MTV’s veejay Shehnaz and her vacuous prattle are only one part of a programme mix that is based on constant surveys. Its tie up with Air Tel to offer ring tones from music hits is an effort to do ground strategy to snag youth. On CNBC  Simone Singh’s new show, The Lounge, is pointedly youthful and trendy but will soon falter, I suspect, on substance. Young achievers are very much in demand. One weekend Shekhar Gupta interviews Sachin Pilot and Milind Deora on NDTV 24x7, and a few hours later Deora surfaces again on The Lounge. The next weekend Faroukh Shaikh has Farhan Akhtar, fresh from his second film Lakshya, on Jeena Isi Ka Naam Hai. Twenty four hours later he surfaces on CNBC as Simone Singh’s guest.

And then of course, everybody takes their cue from the movies where with Lakshya, Hum Tum, Koi Mil Gaya, Kal Ho Na Ho and so on, well-heeled youthful protagonists are the trend. The notion of  "feel good", remember, originated with Dil Chahata Hai. 

Companies which advertise on television have done a similar reassessment of where their market lies. Reebok introduces sneakers aimed at the generation that listens to rap music, Coca cola and Samsung take over the Olympic torch run in Delhi in a way that makes you wonder whom the country belongs to anyway. Little wonder then that Bipasha Basu replaces P T Usha in the run. The LG CDMA mobile phone advertisement which has two young people sms-ing in a darkened theatre, along with the Air Tel-MTV tie up, should leave you in no doubt as to which demographic group mobile phone companies are targeting. Philips India says it is targeting the youth and the opinion makers.

But you might ask, which kind of  youth are the  target group? The kind who respond to Zee TV’s Bollywood hunt, or the Gladrags mega model contest,  or the young people on DD News’s GeNext, a show that actually gets a less known MP from Bihar as a guest, and gets  young people low on grooming but high on awareness to ask her sharp questions?  The former. The main virtue of Prasar Bharati these days is that on its channels you have a better chance of seeing Indians in their totality. But that is also why it attracts less premium advertising.

 Lodestar Media, a division of the FCB Group,  used mediagraphics, or segmentation studies to decipher the contours of the youth market. Using NRS data it created youth prototypes with names like Manager in the Making, CoolDude@Metro.com,  Simply South Srilakshmi, Cine Meena, and Hum Log. It described the last category as comprising "the low income teenager from the families of petty traders and shop owners in UP, Bihar, Rajasthan and Maharashtra."  Then it looked at a product category like deodorants as a test case and tried to extrapolate which of the above prototypes should  be the target group for the advertising. Simply South Srilakshmi, Cine Meena, described as a star struck young middle class female from Northern and Western India, and Hum Log, promptly disappeared from the reckoning. It would be ditto for other hair and body care products.

The above is a clue to why the youth you see in TV ads and prime time serials on mass entertainment and music channels are a relatively rarified, waxed, deodorised and organically shampooed breed.  The TG, as the ad man would put it, is those for whom thirst (Yeh Pyaas Hai Badi) means Pepsi.

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