How's the Market Today?

Yesterday I was reminded me of a comment made by a financial analyst during the last stock market boom – when your grandmother starts looking at the stock prices in newspapers, it’s time to move out. The cabbie who was driving me home from office had a “bhav copy” (a two-sheeter with closing stock prices, printed every trading day) tucked behind his steering wheel. So, there.

On Creativity and Education

I just heard this outstanding speech by Sir Ken Robinson on creativity and the role of our education system in nurturing it. It’s simple, inspiring, witty and profound – everything the current education system isn’t. He delivered it over a year ago at the TED conference. What a pity it took me this long to stumble across it. Listen to it, if you haven’t already. Actually listen to again even if you have. It’s beautiful.

Update: Got a couple of mails saying the download was somewhat patchy. So I've uploaded the mp3 version here. Hopefully this should be easier.

Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit

Today is my birthday. Not relevant for anybody but me.

But the text messages I’ve been receiving is indicative of the pressure a lot of friends are under. Most of the people don’t seem to be happy just wishing a happy birthday. There is almost a compulsion say something more interesting / smart / witty. So all sorts of contorted witticisms find their way to my inbox.

There was a time when greeting cards took away that pressure by being witty. So one just had to spend twenty bucks and bask in somebody else’s wit. Alas, e-greetings have taken that pleasure away. Most of the e-greetings are too busy serving up gif files of cartoons to have anything smart to say. Ditto for mobiles and their dry emoticons. Hence most people are left in the lurch trying to be smart while messaging their friends. Which leads to me believe that people may be willing to pay money to be able to easily access smart quotes for birthdays, anniversaries etc. It saves them the time and trouble of thinking too much and makes them feel good. So what if they aren’t able to conjure it themselves, at least they’ll be seen as having the right sensibilities to choose and appreciate the smart lines; the way I've headlined this post by borrowing a quote from Oscar Wilde. Am I not smart?!!

The Reluctant Politician

“Politicians instead must revel in the political process. They must adore people, jump into crowds, pump hands, kiss babies, travel by train to remotest corners, walk where there are no roads, speak a language that touches hearts, causes tears to flow and raises a million cheers.” . . . Sagarika Ghose writes in today’s Hindustan Times about Dr. Manmohan Singh as the accidental politician. Worth a read.

Reviewing Ads

Like any true blue advertising person, I had a good time venting spleen at an ad that I think stinks. Got the opportunity when I reviewed the Emami Fair & Handsome television commercial in The Mint and had great fun panning it. Some would say it is poetic justice that my acerbic review was trimmed of most vitriol by the 400 word limit that commerce imposed on it.

Media and Creativity

Adage reports that Domino’s Pizza has handed its media planning duties to – Crispin Porter. This is landmark as it puts “creativity” back in the centre. According to Domino’s Chief Marketing Officer, "Crispin Porter & Bogusky is known for creative, and that passion for doing things differently also extends to media."

This move also indicates that despite talks of creative media planning, media agencies derive their primary strength from scale. In today’s environment, media planning actually involves managing the context in which messages get delivered. By that yardstick, an agency which can provide the most creativity in developing the communication content should also be able to provide similar creativity in identifying the right contexts to place that content. I hope this leads to a Domino effect and will we see more large clients working with similar models.

A Matter of Livelihood

I was talking with Sharmila today about the new found passion of our government for SEZs and the public protests against them by local residents in various parts of our country. And the discussion got me really confused. She claims she’s got research papers (she’s working for a not-for-profit organization now) that show how SEZs in particular and most such large schemes in general often end up harming the local people.

I disagreed and felt that development is not a zero-sum game and in the long run, everybody gets pulled up. The problem is that in the short-term a lot of people actually suffer – take for instance the Nandigram issue where a lot of people have been farming the land for generations but don’t have papers to prove the land is theirs. Most such people will not get adequately compensated. They’ll also need to be re-skilled in new jobs; not the easiest of things for people who’re mostly illiterate and lack any soft skills. So what does one do? Do we let them continue with what is undoubtedly subsistence farming and living or should the government encourage industry and try to manage the collateral hurt caused to a lot of the local population?

So many questions. Such limited knowledge. Maybe we should just have a television debate with Mahesh Bhat and Ashok Singhal.

In Rainbows

Radiohead have experimented with business path which few marketers dare tread. Their new album In Rainbows has just been released in digital MP3 format online on their own site inrainbows.com. And here’s the thing - for a single download, it’s priced at whatever you wish to pay for it. You may even choose to download it for free, if you wish to.

The website also sells a discbox which contains the album on a CD, on two LP records plus the lyrics booklet and a specially designed artwork by Stanley Donwood. That’s priced at ₤40.

Radiohead is obviously betting on people paying something for the download – and given the digital format and the direct to consumer approach their costs are likely to be more modest allowing them to get better returns even on smaller amounts that people may pay. There may also be a fair number of people willing to pay ₤40 to hear the music in superior CD format with specially designed artworks etc.

There will also be other benefits – like more people hearing the album because it’s not expensive and thus better turnouts at concerts which are substantial money spinners.

Whether the whole thing turns out to be viable remains to be seen (it’s been reported that on the day of the release, 1.2 million copies on In Rainbows were sold as digital downloads). But trust the artists to try new business models even as established record labels watch transfixed like a deer in headlights.

Update: Social Networking news site Mashable reports that the Radiohead got an average of $8 per album. Just under $10 million within the first week is not bad revenues at all. Concerts and other paraphernalia not included

Craftsmen at Work

What can modern businesses learn from the art of the craftsmen? That was the subject of an excellent episode of In Business on BBC Radio 4 that I heard yesterday.

It again brought to the fore an ongoing discussion on several discussion boards recently – the central role of business in society and what drives successful businesses. Sociologist Richard Sennett put forward his thesis that people who practice a craft know better than “business people” how organizations ought to be run.

Businesses are set up to meet genuine customer needs and they are typically driven by the passion of entrepreneurs who love making and delivering a product or service to their customers. Then the businesses grow. And they get “professionalized”. "Performance optimization” becomes the holy grail and very insidiously, the focus starts shifting – from the product or service to the company’s revenues and stock price.

Soon almost everybody forgets that goal is not making more money but celebrating the craft which gave birth to the business in the first place. Of course lip service is paid every now and then to the core of what the organization is about, but key strategic calls are made with an eye on the Street.

Also a dubious theory gets propounded that craftsmen are so involved with their craft that they don’t know how to run a business. Dubious because there is nothing to suggest that a person adept at a craft will not be able to collaborate with teams, will not be able to develop meaningful relationships with customers and employees and will be unable to command a fair price for his / her product or service. Most of the iconic brands and businesses we talk about reverentially today were created by such craftsmen, people who cared about the businesses rather than care about the money - whether it was a McDonald’s or Starbucks or Apple or Google or whatever. The bigger challenge for businesses in fact is to continue keeping their core craft at the centre of their business – note the classic memo written by Howard Schultz to his employees earlier this year. Even if it is not real, the memo became famous because it so truly seemed to reflect the passion of a founder-entrepreneur for a craft undermined at the altar of efficiency.

Finally going back to the BBC radio programme, the proposition of craftsmen as better businessmen was best articulated by Richard Taylor of the WETA workshop which produced the stunning special effects for movies such as Lord of the Rings and King Kong. Asked how they run such a stupendously successful creative business without any formal business training whatsoever, he said they did it by turning the accepted business model on its head and driving it from the heart of creativity. Instead of pursuing the last dollar, the bottom line, they looked at producing the most beautiful work creatively and in turn, good business will follow. Now how many businesses can say that hand on heart?

Twenty20

On a talk show on NDTV about Twenty20 vs. Test cricket, Imran Khan made an interesting point. Cricketers, he said need talent, technique and temperament to do well in Test cricket. Twenty20 takes technique and temperament out of that equation. It brings out the sheer force of raw talent which is in abundance in both India and Pakistan. But by that yardstick I wonder how New Zealand reached the semis. They are one team who have plenty of character and spirit but can’t be accused of being too talented.

Where are the Cricket Magazines?

Just before the excitement around the Manic Monday win (I admit, it does sound better Sizzling Sunday), I was talking to some friends about why cricket magazines in India have never taken off in a big way in India. By all reckoning, it should have been a through and through winning format. There are a huge number of people passionate about cricket, there’s a high level of understanding of the nuances of the game and a national cricketing calendar that is so packed there will never be slag issues.
A lot of people and media companies tried to have a go at a cricketing magazine. Some serious money has been invested and some big names have been signed on to write for those magazines - but all of them have come a cropper. It’s so puzzling we spent a round of drinks debating why it should have been so. Here are some hypotheses that came up:
1. Given that most people have a general aversion to reading, would they pay 20 or 30 bucks every week to read – even if it is about something they are as mad about as cricket. Despite it being free, I doubt a large number (read – commercially viable) of resident Indians visit the sites like Cricinfo or Rediff on non-match days; I suspect a substantial number of visitors to these sites are NRIs who pine for cricket in baseball country.
2. With the surfeit of news and analysis on everything related to cricket on television and newspapers, there is nothing left to be said in magazines.
3. We love to discuss match statistics and minutiae which tend to lose their impact if the immediacy is lost and a lag of a week could render them completely irrelevant.
4. Our affair with cricket is very temperamental – notice the plummeting ratings after the West Indies World Cup and now the T20 ratings. Maybe magazine economics don’t allow for such wild swings in circulation and the resultant unpredictability of ad revenues. (A related point - this unpredictability is a headache for cricket broadcasters too; but the upside on television when India does well is so high that it possibly makes up for the downsides when we sink.)
5. A big source of excitement for sports magazines in the pre-satellite TV days were glossy action pictures. But other than photography connoisseurs, I don’t think many will be interested in those in today’s age of stump cameras and slow motion replays.

Whatever the reason, just for the sake of some good writing I hope a cricket magazine makes good in India.

Does Manic Monday sound better than Sizzling Sunday. Was that the
reason for scheduling the finals of the first Twenty20 championship at
a glorious time of 2 PM local time on a monday afternoon. I am sure
there is a reason. Would love to know what that is.

Free Free Free

Two news items caught my attention yesterday. One, the New York Times made its online content completely free (parts of it were accessible only to paid subscribers till now) and separately, I read that Rupert Murdoch may consider making WSJ online free.

I found this interesting because both these sites (especially WSJ) were generally regarded good examples of generating revenues through subscriptions. Hence this puts into question the business model that was held by many as a beacon of hope for mainline media in the new space – a model that ensured they lived in this online world after their imminent collapse in the offline one. There are I think three main reasons why this model doesn’t work – and irrespective of how well it is couched, the fact is these newspapers are going free because not enough people are paying up.

1. People consume online media by verticals. Unlike offline newspapers or magazines, people don’t read all or even most sections of online newspapers or magazines. They tend to skim and read only those verticals or sections which are of interest to them. It’s difficult to get a consumer to pay for the entire newspaper portal if he / she is going to read only the sports section or the technology section – and they’d rather read that stuff on sites dedicated to those subjects.

2. Most of the traffic to such sites is actually generated by links provided through search engines. And somebody who is directed to a site through such links is unlikely to subscribe just to read a single article of interest at that point in time.

3. A lot of bloggers refrain from linking ‘subscriber access only’ sites. This further reduces the number of possible visits to the sites.

As difficult as it may be for old media owners to reconcile to giving content for free, that’s probably the only way for them to remain relevant in today’s information-rich era. Meanwhile, they’ll just have to keep trying to discover more ways to monetize their content, other than advertising.

Going Going Gone

Just read that frustrated by the political mess in the country, some frustrated soul had put Belgium up for auction on eBay and the bid topped at $17 million before it was stopped by authorities. Guess Shilpa Shetty was ahead of times when she proclaimed "main aai hoon UP Bihar lootne."

On Blogs

I've come across a lot of articles recently on blogging and mainstream media. Mukul Kesavan has written about this in the Telegraph and Amit Varma, whose blog and writings in the Mint I greatly admire has added some very good perspective on the subject.

In addition to those, I believe blogging is about expressing points of views, discussing and having conversations. It’s never meant to replace mainstream media as we know it. Any media will have its own commercial constraints and thus not be able to do justice to the information needs of millions of individuals. Blogging steps in and offers information and perspectives which are by nature niche, appealing to a smaller number of interested people. To that extent communities tend to form around blogs and though each individual community may be too small to be serviced by a dedicated mainstream news magazine, it could be substantial enough to nurture a lot of blogs which feed off each other while dipping into the mainstream media. Exactly, the way this blog references two mainline newspapers and a blog, which in turn references many others.

I read this morning that the Economist once described Naomi Klein (of "No Logo" fame) as having all the “incoherence and self-righteous disgust of the alienated adolescent”. Though I don’t quite agree with the sentiment, can’t help but admire the phrase.

Henry Bliss, RIP

Today marks the 108th anniversary of the first American pedestrian
killed in a car accident. Henry Bliss was knocked by a cab in
Manhattan on Sept. 13, 1899. The cabbie wasn't named Alistair.

Where's That Needle

Ram forwarded me this post by Seth Godin who outlines yet one more huge opportunity for organising all the information in the world.

What Will We Search For?

Google is synonymous with search marketing, with almost all of its $10 billion plus revenues coming from that domain. And it has fine tuned the art of searching for anything from the arcane to the most mundane in a fraction of a second. But with stock market expectations not abating, how would Google leverage its search expertise to keep ahead?
With its AdWords algorithms, Google plays a central role in serving up relevant ads for any queries users throw at it. This has been further enhanced with other services like mail and image search which is an additional opportunity for Google to place ads relevant to the key words our in our Gmail inbox. All of which is not new. What could take this way further is the gPhone – rumours of which are flying fast and thick.
According to a recent Piper Jaffray study on the rise of the Internet as a mass medium, search is the second most commonly used application on the Internet (after mail). More importantly, it is expected to grow almost three times the current size, to about $45 billion by 2011. And two of the key trends are going to be an explosion of new technologies in the search area and increasing “local search” opportunities. Imagine how potent Google’s search technology will be on a mobile platform and how it can exponentially increase the pool of local advertisers.
One of the key reasons for Google’s success as an advertising platform actually comes from thousands of scattered, small businesses peddling everything from timeshare to VHS cassettes of Citizen Kane played backwards (don’t ask me – somebody seems to want it). Most of these businesses find it far more efficient to advertise specific offers to a tightly defined base online (people who like watching movies backwards?!), rather than spend millions of bucks advertising on newspapers and television. In that sense, Google has actually opened up a new, hitherto fragmented market. Now imagine how much more widespread that that can be if the service can be migrated to a mobile platform. How many more local businesses will make use of advertising that is targeted at a tightly defined user base – either geographically (Lamington Road, Mumbai) or by mobile usage. And if that gPhone is priced at around $100 (as the rumour mills suggest), the Piper Jaffray numbers will suddenly start looking very small indeed.

10.30 PM Headline News

It’s 10.45 PM now and mindless channel surfing across four Hindi TV news channels tells me that:

Mangetar ki chaahat . . . saheli ka balaatkaar

Shouhar ki khaaish . . . biwi ki blue film

Ek missed call . . badal gayi jindagi uski

Videsh se lauta . . . flyover kaa lutera

Thankfully, a fourth channel had sports news so I learnt that Sachin ne sanyaas lene se inkaar kiya.

That is how India kept abreast with news, today.
Don’t worry. Be happy. Aur bhi gam hain jamaane mein.