 our special five-part series titled news is undervalued in these times of crisis news is not just a source of information but it also leaves us with emotions like hope or sometimes despair it is something we all believe in and fall back upon for its credibility if you don't believe me believe the bug data news genre showed an unprecedented growth of 298 in first few weeks of the lockdown the number continued to be as high as 251 percent in week 13 and 219 percent in week 14 so the question we need to ask today is despite these numbers does the news continue to be undervalued by marketers or other industry people so to answer this and a lot more with me today is Mr. Vikram Sakuja group CEO Madison Media and outdoor Madison world before we start Mr. Sakuja just give me one minute I must mention that our presenting partner is ABP news and I request all of you to keep tweeting using hashtag e4m webinar and hashtag ABP news also tag ABP news welcome to the show uh Vikram hey great to be here amazing time crazy time that we roll in Vikram I want to start with that in these times that we consume news from various platforms every platform is a is has a different level of credibility so would you want to speak about credibility of news in these days and how does it pay to be more credible okay two questions there so let's start start with credibility platforms now you know I just in the last few days I've got one okay I'm just going to give you actual instances that have happened to me I got a few pieces of news delivered to me in different ways I got a whatsapp about a Japanese Nobel laureate claiming that the virus had been manufactured in a lab then I got a CNN uh sort of video of a president saying that you should you can actually inject disinfectants to kill the virus then I read a newspaper article that said I'm right now in Delhi so that non-essential shops will also be opening up and I saw a video of a news anchor saying that a political party had instigated an attack on him now this I got so four different pieces of news from four different sort of sources I also saw Twitter today which said that the one poor person who was actually trying out a vaccine some scientist has died now I have absolutely no reason to believe or I don't know whether any of these pieces of news are true or not true chances are most of them are true now let me switch the same things around in a different context supposing the whatsapp video that I got I got the president saying that that that that you can actually inject disinfectants came to me on a whatsapp supposing the entire CNN news was about the Nobel Japanese Nobel laureate saying that the the virus was created in a lab supposing Facebook had told me that non-essential shops were opening or for that matter a rival channel was actually writing and saying that this particular news anchor has got attacked by a somebody of a political party how does it start working in your head to me it works differently so right now chances are all news items are correct it could be all false also but somewhere along the line why is it that you're tending to believe one more than the other and I think that requires some degree of sort of introspection and understanding to me both credibility and trust needs to be earned you know around the time and I was getting married over 30 30 or 32 years back my wife was a reporter researcher with time magazine so I remember every Thursday they had to close a copy or something like that and they had this obsession with checkpoint Charlie checkpoint Charlie was any kind of fact that has to be reported in the story has to have at least two sources double check triple check to make sure that each and every word in that you put down is correct now contrast that with the recent interview that we've seen where now this is not even wrong it is just I mean it's egregious it's not even malicious there was a IMF chief economist talking about how the entire economy is getting sort of battered as battling exogenous variables now the news transcriber is putting it down as economies get battling exhaustion exogenous exhaustion now sometime back quite a few years back in fact there was a who are now unfaith unfortunately infamous journalist now who in America went and called the Chinese Premier Xi Jinping Xi Jinping she pronounced his name as 11 Jinping now both of these are what this is it's just stupid blunders but I think it's symptomatic of something which is deeper which is an in your rush to get out news there are some sometimes a tendency to take on mediocrity or accept mediocrity and I think that's the beginning of the problem of lack of trust credibility and authenticity and that is where I think the platforms that are doing it better are the ones which actually stand to have be more credible so in my book for me the brand is the most credible so I will so BBC to my mind for example I think it's very credible brand so if they come out with a piece of news on be it TV be a radio be it they're online but stuff I attach a certain credibility to it after that I actually attach most amount of credibility to stuff which comes out in newspapers and I think that's also because a there is a legacy the way the entire way the editors go about it they also sort of have the night or the evening and the night to actually see the the entire copy before it actually goes the response in a story it gets printed the lead time is probably a little bit more than it might be an online and TV place and as a result of it I think a little bit more quality and deliberation goes into it and in general I think the goof up less then I think I would go into TV and then maybe online editions and only the news aggregators comes way after that and I'm sorry but bottom of the pile other social media social media and the news that they sort of perpetrate so yes I do clearly believe that it's a I don't think the intentions are bad of everybody everybody wants to give credible news but the way you've built your entire news organization there are some which demand and therefore it demand more sort of exacting standards and then they will come out with respect so that is about the platform piece it is also about like big news channels also have resources to confirm from multiple sources so they can actually bring you credible news which perhaps a social media platform may not be equipped with so then I'm sorry to say but then then you shouldn't be in the business of news then if you can't if that's not your business then don't be in it so coming back to sorry sorry to interrupt you and I'll tell you why that's important the reason when you started this entire session that we are having by talking about the astronomical way in which news is being consumed these days the kind of crisis which has forced the entire world into a standstill basically has brought about a need there's a huge huge requirement for just finding out more information in order to be able to cope with the kind of crisis that this has has a task so at this point in time people obviously turn to news channels to get that so the responsibility is enormous and I completely believe just like I think the entire world does that the platform which is publishing news is fully responsible and accountable for the quality of news that they are supposed to put out so yes platforms that do it they don't have any option but to make sure the fact check so I have just got this message from my technical team that we are already live on Facebook and Twitter so you can now watch us there as well so Vikram moving on to my next question I wanted I mean we all know that TV worship is at an all-time high because we are all sitting at home so news has contributed significantly to this it is it is the leading genre it's almost like shown unprecedented to 98 percent growth in few weeks so despite all of this is news getting its true value commercially do you think as a media planner okay so let's just review the numbers that you started off the session with so yes overall TV has grown TV has grown about 40 percent and it's been driven by 12 percent more viewers and about 25 percent more viewing so average time spent is now upwards of four hours and 38 minutes and TV news as you viewership as you said has traveled so at this point in time the entire growth in TV viewership about 52 percent of that increased TV viewership is contributed by the news increase in news and share of news used to be about six seven percent now it's gone to about 17 percent it went to a high of about 20 percent but in the last post COVID week it's got a market share which is almost now similar to movies and GEC whereas it used to be considerably down at number four or five whatever it might be not only is the TV news gone up while online consumption hasn't gone up as much as TV so online consumption is only gone up by 10 percent but news online has gone up by about 76 percent and there across apps websites and video news the growth is pretty pretty solid and if I have to look at even at times of India survey that happened sometime back it seems that even the newspaper reading has gone up from I think 33 minutes to about 44 minutes with the number of people reading it for an hour or more having gone up dramatically to about 38 percent of the people are reading the paper that much so this is all sort of addressing this hunger of news and need for news that people have to sort of satisfying by going to these places now this should have actually been a bonanza time for a large number of the sort of news publishers and news media owners unfortunately these eyeballs are not translating to business the way they'd like it primarily because there is no demand so April and like the media we've always known as the demand supply game at this point in time the April has had a demand of advertising has come really due to a crashing crashing hold so it's down 60 70 percent from what the normal levels would have been if and even that is probably on the aggressive side so at this point in time news would have idly like to have said so many more people are coming and watching me so take my rates up or stuff like that but even they are being forced to discount because they just as you know there isn't enough demand now regarding value the best way we look at value is on media we look at cost per rating point or cost per thousand which is the same thing basically and in this we actually what we've seen up till now before the covid environment is that you look at this with various tv journals the gc's and the new movie channels definitely the gc's were the news channels is to have a higher cprp than the gc's and much higher than the movie channels now with the kind of growth in ratings actually you're finding that versus the pre-environment pre-covid environment the cprp's of news channels are now actually very competitive but that said obviously there's a competitive environment so the discounting that's happening on news and general entertainment is even more in news papers of course because people are it's compounded by a lot of people believing that papers are not reaching people and all the rest of it has become even worse and even if people are reading the newspaper more it's not translated in fact advertising is completely gone from there and that's again impacting the pricing so to answer your question about value i'd say that market forces actually determine value so at this point in time i the fact i don't think it's being undervalued to the extent that i think a news today there were about 11 to 1200 brands that were active in a given week during on tv during these post-covid weeks all then i think last couple of weeks all of them had news on the media plans that shows that news is being valued uh also about 40 percent of all the inventory that was bought was bought the news channels okay so i think the value the getting their dues shared by finding a very very prominent place in media plans i'm sure they would want a higher price but that price is not coming because the demand is not there but but if 40 percent is going which is which is compared to what in previous days now that 40 percent i don't think new journal would have commanded across the board a 40 percent share of all inventory at any point in time it would be lucky to get half of that so it's almost doubled yeah yeah so news definitely is doing much better relatively to all the other journals although at a much lower price yes well lower price than what they were earlier at but at a corresponding point also now which is comparable to some places where they were earlier at a premium so the i'm already getting a lot of questions uh from our viewers and uh before i take up the first question from the where i must remind you that the session is in uh collaboration with abp news uh so this is this gentleman called mr manish gupta he wants to ask you a question that there are some newspapers regional local who do their best to give credible trust worthy news will they and how will they survive impact of cobit 19 post lockdown it's more of a print question okay so um let me let me take it at a broader level does credibility is credibility valued and i think it's a slightly profound question so the i think the best way to answer this is in two ways one is that is does credibility of a news channel also lead to greater popularity so that's a consumer question subscriber question whether you're subscribing to newspapers or tv channels and the other question is that does a credible news channel get paid more by advertisers just because the platform itself is credible now i think it's a very murky area to say that is one news channel more credible than another news channel that's because when people are chasing a news channel or news for that matter there are a number of factors that go into play there is the ideology so you know the proverbial fox news versus cnn that you see in america it's better to distance it because then you're not making it personal if you look at india and there's a danger of antagonizing some of my friends so uh there is an ideological thing there's no right or wrong but there is fox news and cnn are absolutely different sides of the spectrum and people following the tool are just subscribing to that ideology some people follow personalities some people follow the investigative capability they are some people follow just the empire entire ability to break new news some of them are just going after sensationalism and salacious stuff and of course some people are going after credibility but credibility and authenticity is one factor probably not the most important thing now does this translate at this point in time to two more viewers and there again i think not because i don't see if i have to look across all the channels which we get firstly most of the on tv most of the news channels are free most of them the ones and the premium ones which are there the ones that do which do charge money they charge typically less than one rupee per month from the subscribers and if you have to look at news channels or brought sorry the business channels they might go a little bit more so at this point in time i don't think consumer monetizability is becoming a factor to look at to actually say does that determine popularity now from a from a credibility and would somebody as an advertiser pay more to be on a more credible platform now this is an age old quantity versus quality debate so i remember when i was in proctor and gamble several decades back so that time it used to be this question of would you be willing to pay a premium to be on a premium environment and most marketers actually say that if my target audience is watching a particular say program on tv and if i'm getting helping and that program is helping me get rich then i don't want to put a premium on the quality i don't want to put a handicap on adverse quality because i respect my consumer and if the consumer is watching a particular program and if my ad comes on that then that ad is completely acceptable and i don't think i should pay a premium to be on a more credible platform so the i think the brutal reality is even though we may want in our hearts the credible and the authentic guide to win unfortunately even the advertiser is not paying a premium for that particular person so long-winded answer to friend munisha's question much as i'd love even assuming that there are some whether it's regional or whether it's national if there is somebody who's really really holding the the authentic authenticity credibility and integrity of the fourth estate alive i'm afraid the consumers and the advertisers currently are not quite in the same camp to keep them afloat they will be going going more by the eyeballs go i now want to take up sandeep shivastav's question what and i'll add a little more to this so he's asking you that the newspapers delivery significantly impacted since the start of the lockdown this might have also contributed to the search in news genre on tv but you said that even readership has gone up but this is you you recently said right yeah so uh yes in a word overall news consumption has gone up it's not that maybe digitally i think all tv has gone up the entire you're not getting that print the new newspaper power frankly right now will remain something that we won't really get to know during the post-covid period uh anecdotally we are hearing that publishers are probably publishing 80 percent of their print trans but these are this is anecdotal data from whatever i understand abc may not track some of this stuff this time in this quarter because of the disruptions so at which point in time we will really never need to know what is the circulation which happened just in the post-covid period so that's it i'll complete his questions so he's saying that while appetite for news might seem momentary could part of the search remain even post-covid i also want to add one part to it will this uh preference of marketers you know towards the news will also continue post-covid marketers will chase where the eyeballs go so if if consumers want to be obsessed with news afterwards also that will also happen but my i mean i've never been a very good crystal ball geyser but i think once hopefully this is behind us quickly i think people are going to go back there will be some residual consumer behavior impact of this entire virus but as far as i think the tv genre viewership is concerned news may get some residual gains but they won't be as dramatic as what you're seeing right now i think what is going to see the biggest spike if you when that when normalcy returns is going to be sport people there's been a dearth of life sport so the minute it comes back people are just going to jump to it and see it and of course when the gc comes back with new programming that is also going to get us huge surge so this may not continue for very long if you ask yeah my my guess is that once normalcy news will go back to its normal level so it's always a very prominent genre but you don't think you'll get 20% share propansi surya has a has a question which is little to do with news so this is the time when pharma and fmcg can rise above fct and explore brand solutions to highlight and enhance brand value but there is still hesitation when it comes to integrated solutions and there is never a definite answer as to why not could you please enlighten as to what goes on in the brand's mind regarding this okay no this look there is clearly at this point in time the consumer is looking for certain assurances from uh marketers so they are looking for reassurance they are looking for a lot of safety and uh and yeah basically safety concerns they're looking at even some value concerns so if you are able to address hygiene concerns all of these they are looking so if a brand has a story to tell at this point in time there will be a high degree of responsiveness i also believe the trusted this as we've seen through some of the media and to like the ramayans and ma Bharat's there is when there is insecurity all around people like to go back to the nostalgic old kind of stuff where they've derived a lot of cocoon comfort so they will go back to those kind of behaviors so from that standpoint old trusted brands if you advertise i think are going to do they'll actually get received very well by consumers and they'll actually bounce back stronger but i think the the problem that advertisers are facing is a more short term and a very more sort of survival one there are three reasons why advertisers are not advertising at this point in time one is demand led one is supply led and third is cash led so there are some cases where even if you have all the stock in the world the autos and all of this world for example a people right now want to defer purchases and of course the stores are shut the showrooms are shut so where will the person go so at this point in time they don't want to even create forget they don't want to create short term forget long-term demands they don't want to do that then there are others like the fmcgs of this world where demand is perfect they're under essentials that actually are supposed to be available but they actually have some very acute supply side problem because factories are shut their entire distribution networks of trucks moving from one place to another that is all hampered so they really again don't have stock and this is a supply chain issue and then there are third kind of set of guys who might still have the business you know the classical so to speak the startup economy which may have a lot of I mean which at this point in time which are relying on investor funds and some of them have them but a number of them might say we have to conserve this cash and they may actually may not have cash and everybody is doing the proverbial let's pay our people before we actually go and pay for advertising and stuff like that so I think the at this point in time to suddenly come in and say why don't you do an integrated kind of solution which actually builds your brand values it may actually do good things for your brand but for very real reasons which are really linked to demand supply and or cash I think people have to sort of postpone these we have five more minutes before we have to close this session I can take I think one more question Gautam Datta wants to he's been sending this question repeatedly he wants to ask you we are getting shares but not price planners never value credibility and perception is this correct we are getting shares we are not getting price yeah so no but shares are presumed they shares as in social media shares footfall on social media kind of thing sorry this is this question is coming from what a media owner no no no no he's he's not a media owner he's but he wants to understand that we're getting shares but not price earlier he has his credibility I'm afraid I'm afraid I haven't quite followed the question news you're getting shares but not price so by that he means that news is getting shared but it's not getting paid for and advertising I think I try to answer that people are hungry for news but right now there is no demand for advertising so that's why I thought to try to explain that in the value piece so right now at least 40% of the inventory is going to the news if you talk to your brethren in GC movies music even kids which actually kids genre is actually seeing a lot of growth but even they are not getting as much traction as maybe news channels so if I was a person in the news thing I'd be actually reasonably satisfied with what I'm getting because the others are getting even less three minutes I'll take one last question current with so much clutter in the news genre both in English and Hindi what's the future of longer run of channels and their survival also why news channels are not able to get their fair share of revenue as compared to other genres wherein it is a critical genre now we're not talking about only covid days you know we're talking in general because a lot of news channels keep complaining that you know also we have eyeballs we don't get that kind of price or share which we should so this is also our topic so let's close it on it and understand from you where is it lacking okay so you know this goes I think the fundamental reason why this is happening is because of fragmentation now the crazy part is that when I started my career in advertising in media whatever 32 years back my cost for 10 seconds that I was paying was probably as high as most of the regular inventory in fact maybe even higher the Mahabharata used to pay 150,000 per 10 seconds for super prime time 10 a.m. on Sunday mornings I'm sure there's no program I mean there's no way Mahabharata would have got that for that any other program is getting those kind of rates today and if I have to take it to news all the more so because as you get more and more news channels coming in the same supply I mean same demand for news is now getting fragmented over more and more channels so it has a you know it has a double whammy to it so it's in fact it's a lose lose in a sense to it from a broadcaster standpoint because it's now getting more and more commoditized it's easy for us to act as us buyers I'm a media buyer so I can actually just buy it anywhere because it's not getting fragmented over so many channels so I can just keep on drying down the price because there are so many people out there to sort of compete with flip side as a as a advertiser it's not that that great it for me because my cost for rating point or the more number of grps I need to buy to get the same kind of reach increases so cost of my plan also goes up so it's inflationary from that standpoint so your effective rates are also going down at one level your cost for rating point is going up at another level so it's a lose lose on both now the final the proof of the solution lies in consolidation so if you actually land up now look at the places where things have consolidated so you only have one place from where you can buy IPL so prices keep on going up CPR it also go up but probably the CPRP inflation is probably on par with the CPRP inflation that you might have on crowded genres so the I think the answer to this question lies within the within the broadcaster set and they have to decide how much they want to proliferate so if I understood it right if you'll have less than a number of news channels perhaps they'll have better rates yes so I machine can we take more questions or because my they said we have to close it by 330 I still have one or more questions one question one more question should be good one or two questions should be one more question this is again from wants to ask currently big FMCG brands or big advertisers are looking at integration and also trying to gain brand equity by associating with media however the SMEs and retailers in spite of intent are not able to advertise due to cash issues or maybe they are jittery what will be your suggestion to them at this moment actually I find SMEs they probably are the most savvy and they understand the pulse of their consumer and their market in a number of ways better than national advertisers primarily because they operate in a very small market and they understand that well what I've seen the way them that they actually behave is they typically try to put all their eggs into one basket so against conventional theory what they will do is for example they will go tie up with one newspaper or they'll tie up with one channel and say I'm giving you all my money it's not much but this is what it is now you make this worth my while so at that point in time the media owner actually goes out of the way because they've actually been able to get a hundred percent of the guy's budget which in and of itself is also significant and becomes that much more valuable because he has given it all to that one person and then it becomes sort of almost incumbent on that guy on the media owner to be a co-partner in making this money work for them so this we've seen not I mean during COVID days we've seen less I think here I'm talking about a general strategy because that is this is the way I've seen the SMEs work and in the process I think they actually will land up being quite effective in market in the very short term of COVID frankly I think they are the ones who have a cash crunch so they will they will use very existentialistic factors to determine whether or not to advertise but for that matter even national advertisers I don't think I mean he said they may have the money to do fancy things like integration but most of them are also right now being very cautious when it comes to spending I hope this has answered your question Mr. Ghosh and we are already running out of time we have exceeded a few minutes. Vikram before I ask you for your closing remarks and summing it up I just want to tell all the viewers that will be back on May 6th with us part two of the series with Mr. Ashish Basim CEO APAC of Dan and Vikram thank you very much for this insightful session would you want to have some closing remarks I mean something a suggestion or anything that would you would like to speak on the topic before we close? You can lend me a philosophical note the broad issue that we were discussing was authenticity of news and its importance in these days I don't think anybody in their right mind would doubt that news is critical at this point in time and it's even more critical for that news to be accurate and trustworthy but I also believe that if we have to demand this of our newscasters the solution of that will lie with consumers and it won't lie with advertisers because unfortunately unfortunately in a democracy pretty much like the government the people deserve the press they get so at this point in time if there are consumers who want to go after the sensational the salacious the stuff which is probably not at all true but it just makes for great forwarding and shares those are the guys that's the kind of people that we have and that's the kind of society that we're perpetrating if on the other hand we are actually feels on the bottom of the heart that this is a serious issue and we should actually not allow even once something like this we should where anytime you hear this you should actually call it out and maybe name and shame the perpetrator of this kind of stuff I think once the consumers do that only then will there be any hope in a utopian world that authentic incredible news is also going to be valued more thank you so much Vikram it was really inspiring and insightful and we hope we'll have you back on some other panel sometime very soon thank you my pleasure you know where to find me I'm not going anywhere from my house I hope let's hope this lockdown gets over soon yes I hope so too thank then we'll have you live at our events look forward to it everybody please stay safe thank you same to you thanks a lot thank you very much