The Man And The Medium

WANTED: a media planner. Only persons with the statistical abilities of Mahalanobis, the computer programming aptitude of Steve Wozniak, psychological and sociological insights comparable to Jung and Weber, the astrological precision of Cheiro, the marketing prescience of Lee Iacocca, the negotiating skills of Bill Gates, the innovative ability of Buckminster Fuller, and the data-processing capacity of a Pentium chip, need apply.

Five years ago, he was the ubiquitous backroom boy. The quintessential number-cruncher whose statistical mind and familiarity with computers had found him a job as media planner at the country's advertising agencies, working in the shadow of his account servicing and creative peers. As far as clients were concerned, he was never seen and seldom heard.

Then the '90s happened. Bringing with it the media revolution: satellite and cable, print proliferation, a radio revival, and an explosion of unconventional media, from jingles on the Rajdhani Express to print advertisements on video-cassette covers, from stepney covers of two-wheelers to rural fairs. A deluge of brand launches has ensured that the Indian advertising industry—and advertising spend—has grown at an average rate of 35 per cent per year since 1991.

With the abrupt growth, it's no longer enough to just create the right message (in many cases it came riding piggy-back on international advertisement campaigns). The consumer—equally unfaithful to both  brand and media choices—is now a moving target. The all-important advertising question has changed from "What do we say to the consumer?" to "Where do we catch him so he'll notice what we're saying?" As Sandeep Goyal, vice-president, Rediffussion, puts it: "If the early '80s belonged to the account servicing personnel, and the latter half to the creative guys, the '90s promise to be the decade of media planners." Agencies now talk of superior media planning abilities when making pitches for accounts.

"The media planner is not only the most sought-after but the scarcest commodity in the advertising market today," says P.V. Narayan-moorthy, vice-president, Media Services, McCann-Erickson. But if the winds of change have thrust the media planner centre stage, all that glory isn't coming easy. Demands on the media planner have increased and the reasons are several:

MEGA ADVERTISING SPENDS. "Till two years ago, a client with an advertisement budget of Rs 1 crore in Delhi was considered a big spender. Today he would be apologetic about hiring a big advertising agency," says Goyal. Consider the media budgets of some of the leading companies—Unilever: Rs 150 crore, BPL: Rs 60 crore, Procter & Gamble: Rs 55 crore, ITC: Rs 40 crore, Videocon: Rs 30 crore and so on. Transnational corporations (TNCs) already operating in India have yanked advertising budgets up, and post-liberalisation TNCs are rushing in with megabudgets to make up for lost time.

Given the magnitude of the budgets, clients today expect much more from the media planning exercise. "They are suddenly asking far more questions on effective use of spend than the servicing guys can be equipped to handle," says Neeraj Verma, media controller at Rediffusion.

THE RISE AND RISE OF MEDIA COSTS. Over the last year in Delhi, the costs per column cm for a black and white advertisement in the two premier dailies, The Times of India and The Hindustan Times, have gone up by 47 per cent and 58 per cent, respectively. A half-page colour advertisement in The Economic Times could put the advertiser back by Rs 5.5 lakh. The costs are increasing at an average rate of 30 per cent a year, requiring constant update and review of media plans. Any viable media plan must, therefore, pre-empt and build future price and product-mix options into its ambit.

PROGRAMMING METAMORPHOSIS. Channels have proliferated, and the programming has become more vibrant. Till 1991, an advertisement spot on the weekend Hindi feature film and Chitrahaar assured 80 per cent reach. Today there are scores of Hindi, regional and foreign feature films per week on various channels, as well as film music-based programmes, chat shows, soaps, game shows, the works. Increasingly, audiences are becoming narrowly segmented according to their interests, age, socio-economic and cultural milieu. "A media planner now has to take into account the user's psychographics to evolve a comprehensive plan," points out Narayanmoorthy.

To compound the problem, most soaps sport the same stars and basic storylines. The media planner thus must figure out why Serial A starring Kanwaljeet, Shekhar Suman and Neena Gupta about two warring business clans will do better than Serial B starring, Kanwaljeet, Shekhar Suman and Neena Gupta about two warring business clans. And within narrow audience segments, the remote-toting viewer is armed and dangerous, short of attention span and merciless on anything that doesn't give him a thrill a minute. Regionwise too, research shows disparities. Audiences in Bombay are highly fragmented. In Delhi, DD reigns supreme, while Zee TV has a larger following in small towns. Says Goyal: "It's no longer enough to buy cheapest; a media planner must also buy smartest."

THE RESEARCH SHORTFALL. Market information and analysis have not kept pace with the increase in diversities. The National Readership Surveys (NRS) have till date been appearing once in five years or so, an aeon in today's frenetic context. It is only now that a concerted effort is on to get an NRS done every year. The launch of peoplemeters—gadgets to get a fix on the time different members of a family spend on any programme—has created even more confusion, since peoplemeter findings often flatly contradict the findings of the traditional television rating point (TRP) surveys. The media planner frequently falls back on pure gut feel to arrive at an optimum media plan, says Verma.

TOUGHER CLIENTS. Advertisers today are better educated and more demanding. Vibha Desai, head of Ogilvy & Mather, Delhi, recalls that in the '80s, there was little marketing information from the client's side. Nor was there any kind of spend on tracking of competitors' advertisement spends. Planning was more a quantity function with a 30 to 40 per cent margin of error and wastage taken by the clients in their stride. Today, clients cringe if the spillover exceeds 5 to 8 per cent. TNCs now demand media presentations and continuous updates on the media industry. Complex statistical computer models are the order of the day. And the media planner has to be as articulate and convincing as the account servicing personnel.

Demand creates supply. Many entry-level professionals now opt for media planning as the first option. A far cry from yesteryear, when recruits came by default. Salary scales have jumped by an easy 100 per cent in the last two years, with media planners earning Rs 50,000 a month even in smaller agencies. In the bigger agencies, the sky is the limit. But every penny, clearly, has to be hard-earned.