News - Important and Interesting

“Brand Managers are . . . congenitally incapable of understanding the nature and purpose of journalism” writes Vinod Mehta, one of my favourite journalists in a heartfelt guest article in Agencyfaqs. He says Brand Managers can never understand that content is more, much more, than what readers want. A similar thought was echoed a couple of years back by a senior BBC journalist who compared journalism that only reflects what a majority of people want to read, to a politician who spouts inflammatory rhetoric in front of an angry mob of rioters under the pretext that’s what people want to hear.

Coincidentally, Michael Hirschorn has an even more nuanced perspective on the subject in this month’s Atlantic Monthly. He recommends newspapers to “stop being important and start being interesting”, saying “news” in the classical sense of the word is a commodity today. What is more relevant to people are “non-commodifiable virtues” like deep reporting, distinctive point of view and sharp analysis. All of which actually often get reflected in the “most popular / e-mailed” boxes on the websites of newspapers. And “the most–e-mailed lists suggest that readers will consume meaningful, interesting (and maybe even “important”) journalism if they feel compelled, beguiled, seduced”.

What is interesting to me is how the solution to Vinod Mehta’s plea to give readers more than what they want, give them the unexpected can lie in the online space. And he’ll surely find it gratifying that online lists suggest that people don’t always want to read about Britney Spears. Friedman and Maureen Dowd routinely turn up on the NYT’s most popular lists. There’s hope still.

PYTs and Rich, Old Fools

Last year a billboard for the newspaper DNA quizzed us on where pretty young girls would find rich, old fools if the dance bars of Mumbai shut down. Steven Levitt answers on his post The Economics of Gold-Digging !!

A Better Mousetrap

The greater the barrage of ads that people are exposed to, the more adept they get at filtering out what they aren’t interested in. Strangely, we in the advertising and marketing business continue to do more of the same. The latest ad may be more creative than last year’s, but viewer’s ennui with our collective output still outstrips the incremental creativity.

Over the last few years it’s become commonplace to take product parity for granted and hence depend on created communication to be the differentiator. This in turn makes the advertising try harder than ever to stretch the metaphors, sometimes leading to the ridiculous; I mean, a soap will not exactly make India a better place. This trend reminds me of the consumer who once said when you sell a shoe, sell a shoe and don’t sing the national anthem while you are at it. Given all this I wonder if sooner rather than later, we will we go back to the times when companies actually attempted to deliver superior products vis-à-vis competition? Will be very long before a marketer actually decides to reduce investments in communication and invest more in simply designing better products – from delivery to packaging to experiences. We see a lot of that already in technology brands, some of whom have become cult. So why not shoes or soap?

Of Civic Campaigns and Talent Searches

Two leading newspapers are currently in the middle of initiatives that seek to encourage public debate and participation in civic issues. The Times of India is doing the Lead India campaign and the Mumbai Project is Hindustan Times’ attempt at raising, debating and engaging stakeholders on civic issues plaguing the city (and god knows we have many).

While both are public campaigns, the differences are very telling. The TOI campaign takes a top-down approach – it invited SMS votes to select a candidate who may actually participate in the country’s electoral politics. The HT initiative is a completely bottom-up approach. Over two weeks, there were a lot of facts and some very good debates that were stirred and the newspaper simply served as a platform raising civic raising issues.

The TOI’s Lead India campaign was a marketing initiative complete with televised debates and celebrity moderators (they even asked a candidate’s wife to sing his favourite song on the TV show). They also roped in Shah Rukh Khan, Abhishek Bachchan and the likes to promote the initiative with a huge television and outdoor campaign. Not that marketing the campaign by itself is wrong (in fact some of the TV ads are very nice). But at some point, it became a campaign highlighting the personalities rather than the issues they represented. And while I am willing to accept drama being a surrogate for singing in shows like the Indian Idol; issues like governance, education, infrastructure etc. are far too important to be decided through SMS campaigns.

The HT’s Mumbai Project on the contrary was primarily a journalist-driven initiative. It had a lot of meaningful content, in-depth analysis and a platform to debate those issues. The content was obviously put together with a lot of assiduous effort and hence there was enough material to have a serious engagement with.

In fact spending 15 minutes on each of the campaign websites highlights the stark differences between the two initiatives. One filled with relevant content and the other, a slickly packaged show. I don’t know about the larger world, but I would any day take the content.

A judge in New York state lost his job because he ordered 46 people in his courtroom to be taken in custody after they refused to admit whose mobile phone had rung while his court was in session. I feel he was doing what many of us fervently desire when the woman sitting behind in a cinema theatre instructs her son to look for the dal in the top row of the refrigerator. Hope somebody starts an online petition to reinstate the honourable judge.