A soccer ball lands at the feet of a young Bengali woman, hanging washing within a walled garden. Will she ignore it or challenge her culture – and a disapproving matriarch – by seizing the opportunity to show her spirit?
As she jumps and twirls, breaking into a colourful yet sensual dance, it’s the cue for a television commercial that “redefines women”… and sets the style for a new tabloid.
With that – and a host of launch day events including a city-wide kite carnival – it’s clear Ebela is also helping to redefine newspapers.
Ten weeks later, the youth-orientated Calcutta newcomer is printing more than 300,000 copies a day and has 185,000 ‘likes’ on its Facebook site. Remarkable… even in an Indian newspaper market which grew 40 per cent in a decade while that in North America was shrinking by a similar amount.
The idea of challenging accepted cultural ideas in the commercial – produced by the local Ogilvy & Mather office – went hand-in-hand with challenging ideas about newspapers. ABP commissioned market research across a sample of 1000 people and 200 reader interviews, benchmarking ten different brands. Feedback was that newspapers were “inconvenient to carry and read”, that they were boring and too full of political coverage… and that they were expensive in a world where young people got their news ‘free’ via the internet.
Ebela addressed these issues with a smart tabloid format – the first in Calcutta – with colourful, visually-focussed layout including large pictures and infographics. Content was varied, with some news presented in short takes, with 50 or 60 news ‘capsules’ every day. A 12-page pull out covers entertainment, while the main section includes eight to ten pages of international news and eight of sport. But Purkayastha warns, “Don’t underestimate this market – they don’t just want entertainment,” he says.
A ‘value-for-money’ (INR2) pricepoint delivered more pages per rupee than other newspapers in the city, value which doubled if you became a subscriber.
The dance commercial was one of three used for the launch, together with a ‘flash mob’ event in the city, 2000 billboards and advertising on buses and underground trains. Some 50,000 branded sweets were given away with the first issue.
Core branding based on differentiation, with an ‘Ami amar moto’ (I am just like myself) slogan and unusual marketing creatives: One shows a man painting a horse to look like a zebra, while another has a woman wearing sneakers with a sari.
“This TV commercial showed a young married woman breaking into spontaneous dance moves in front of her mother-in-law, and action which would be a complete ‘no-no’ in any part of India,” says Purkayastha. “This lady listened to her heart and did what she felt like doing, making her frowning mother-in-law smile in the end – this signified the spirit of the newspaper of being bold and eventually winning hearts.”
With two others, it reached more than nine million viewers across three TV channels, while two radio spots reached six million listeners. Big-name celebrities at the ‘flash mob’ event, and the presence of a leading cricketer and some of the country’s most popular singers at the kite festival ensured attention.
“Ebela became the second-largest Bengali daily in Calcutta in no time.”
At 303,000 circulation in the city it was second only to Anandabazar Patrika, and ahead of competitors Bartaman, Sangbad Pratidin and Aajkal.
Purkayastha says 30 per cent of Ebela readers are under 30 years old, compared to 20 per cent for other Bengali newspapers.
Advertisers love the new publication he says, and “are all coming back from TV, realising what they are missing.
“Things are looking brighter.”
There’s a message here: Purkayastha says publishers who continue to do the same things they did 20 years ago are finding conditions difficult, but “every time we do something new we get results.”
And he points to an advertising market able to support the innovation. Newspaper advertising rose 59 per cent in India and 127 per cent in Indonesia in the past five years. Paid daily circulations rose in India, Malaysia, China and Indonesia in the same period, the latter by 45 and 81 per cent.
Print, he says, is the medium, and he makes no secret of his commitment to traditional publishing: “I am more fond of print each day,” he says
“Print newspapers can be customised and targetted, offering certain elements which cannot be delivered by other media. While it has seen a severe decline in the West, print has a sound future in Asia driven by opportunities for further penetration.”
While ABP has 13 editions across its 5.8 million national circulation – with editions varying from200,000-700,000 copies according to locality – Purkayastha envisages much smaller runs, “providing press manufacturers will move.
“Very likely we will want very small presses and perhaps digital printing.”
WAN-Ifra’s Publish Asia/Ifra India Expo event in Bangalore was full of the positivity you would expect of such a vibrant market.
A volatile rupee – down almost 30 per cent against the US dollar in the last couple of years – has brought challenges, increasing the cost of imported equipment and consumables such as newsprint. To these, press makers are responding with increased local content – reducing the impact of protective taxation – and tension systems tuned to cope better with locally-made paper grades. manroland has announced its intention to start building a single-width press for the region, probably in India. Tighter production control is delivering savings “straight to the bottomline” by addressing paper waste.
And the growing-pain problems of how to keep up with demands for new titles and rising circulations are of the kind the rest of the world’s industry would love to have. One Indian publisher spoke of commissioning a new printing plant every four-and-a-half months. DB Corp has grown from five print locations in 1996 to 49 currently, production and IT chief general manager Dinesh Sharma told the conference.
Its flagship newspapers, Dainik Bhaskar, (in Hindi), Divya Bhaskar and Saurashtra Samachar (in Gujarati) and Dainik Divya Marathi (in Marathi) have a claimed average daily readership of 19.8 million readers.
The passion for papers is supported by a consumer survey this month which identified India – and to a lesser extent, Malaysia – as home to the most enthusiastic readers of newspapers in the Asia Pacific.
Some 84 per cent of respondents in India said they read newspaper at least weekly – with Malaysia rating 82 per cent – ahead of activities such as listening to music and shopping for groceries. The figures – including 75 per cent for Singapore and 62 per cent for China and Japan – compare to an Asia Pacific average of 62 per cent and global 59 per cent. Research company GFK polled more than 40,000 consumers aged 15 and above across 28 countries. About 1500 respondents per market were surveyed on their attitudes, behaviours and values.
India has almost 3000 paid-sale newspapers (of a total estimated at about 74,000) and with China, claims almost half the world’s biggest newspapers. Some 25 titles have claimed readership of more than a million, a list topped by Dainik Jagran (Jagran Prakashan), DB’s Dainik Bhaskar and The Hindustan (HT Media, which also publishes the English-language Hindustan Times). At 7.6 million, the Times of India (Bennett, Coleman and Co) is the world’s largest English-language newspaper, while Malayala Manorama (9.7 million) is the most-read Malayalam daily.
Advertising revenues have also surged with increasing literacy and middle-class prosperity, a demographic in which print newspapers have what has been called “an aura of respect” (Rasmus Nielsen). Adult literacy at 74 per cent, is also up nine per cent on a decade before, and Indian newspapers are typically cheap, allowing many households to buy more than one.’
In what Paulo Hooke of Sydney’s UTS says is “effectively a new market”, it is the vernacular – rather than the relatively more saturated English-language – press which is growing, delivering public affairs alongside a mix of scandal, gossip and sport, Nielsen likens to the European tabloids.
And while publishers recognise the inevitability of the march of digital publishing, regional and local conditions have held growth back, the suggestion being that mobile and tablet editions may overtake those read on desktops and laptops. “Some think India will be one of the last countries for digital penetration,” Hooke says.
Online is growing – advertising by 30 per cent last year to INR 22.6 billion ($390 million) according to IAMAI figures, and readership by 32 per cent to 74 million (ComScore) – but the figures are tiny compared to western markets
Not all would agree with Purkayastha’s assessment that there is 20 years of life in print, but it’s hard to argue other than that conditions for the medium in India are better than almost anywhere else in the world.
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