Insights into last year’s reinvention of the Hindustan Times – the first in the 95-year-old Indian broadsheet’s history – were a highlight of this week’s INMA Congress Brainsnacks sessions.

Marketing vice president Aparna Bhawal told of the publisher’s aspirations to build its millennials audience – a cohort of 400 million accounting for almost 47 per cent of the workforce in a country of 1.4 billion people, driving an estimated $330 billion annually and “just moving into their prime spending years”.

Clever integration of print and digital content was key to a “refresh” driven by international newsmedia designer Mario Garcia, and using social cards, QR codes and image pointers to connect the platforms.

After testing, HT also chose its new slogan – ‘first voice, last word’ – with the thought-leading demographic in mind.

Plans for the revamp went ahead despite the COVID-19 pandemic: “We wanted to infuse optimism, as a counterpoint to what was happening,” she said. “We knew we were on the right path, and redesigned the brand accordingly.”

Promotion included videos featuring a millennial influencer.

The “big opportunity” for HT was to move from a primarily print brand to a digitally-enabled newsbrand identified as “relevant, motivating and sustainably different” in the current environment.

Bhawal said the exercise was “very heartening” with positive feedback from readers, advertisers and agency partners. “The response was overwhelming and positive,” she said.

The print redesign included a new masthead, revamped front page and “all new ‘Page One Plus’, an all-new Sunday product, HT Wknd, a new travel-and-food focussed magazine dubbed Brunch, and one-stop HT City lifestyle and entertainment section. A revamp of digital product took HT from fourth to second place countrywide with 70 million unique visitors, “crossing all targets”.

Other speakers included Australia’s Aimie Rigas on the award-nominated topic editor dashboard at the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, and Dainik Bhaskar’s ‘climbing doosra’ (from number two) campaign from chief marketing officer Kaacon Sethi.

Today’s fifth World Congress module (of seven) focuses on subscriptions with three premium case studies, an executive summary from INMA and an update on the Facebook Journalism Project’s subscriptions efforts.