 |
| DEEPAK LAMBHA |
Deepak Lamba, the business head of Bloomberg UTV, has been leading the company’s remarkable surge on the frontiers of India’s news-scape. Indians — buoyed by their growing wealth — are craving insightful and relevant business story /finance information like never before. In an exclusive interview with Adgully, Lamba elucidates the prospects for India’s business-news market, and outlines Bloomberg UTV’s plans for the country.
“Bloomberg was looking for a partner in India because it is a very important country in terms of Bloomberg’s overall ambitions to grow its business,” said Lamba, setting up the background. “The alliance happened in October 2009. Bloomberg is the world’s biggest financial brand. It has been immensely successful in the terminal business, the TV business happened later.”
Lamba then explained how Bloomberg UTV had calibrated the brand campaign for the alliance. “We had to assess how we could start working together seamlessly, imbibing the best of Bloomberg and determining what works locally and ensuring that [a settled paradigm] doesn’t get disturbed once you align yourself to core international values,” Lamba said. “You don’t build a successful brand by eating somebody else’s. We can be in the same genre and yet have a very different offerings.” To learn what sort of offering India wanted, Bloomberg UTV carried out an extensive survey. “We evolved the brand strategy based on the survey,” Lamba said. “Once we articulated internally what we stood for, what we wanted to be, what is going to be our company philosophy, only the tough job of execution remained.”
Bloomberg was careful to ensure that content shaped up in a manner that reflected the company’s promises, Lamba said. “The promises get announced by a brand campaign,” he said. “Intensive work is done to ensure that the product is actually tweaked to deliver the promises. We are there only 70%, not 100% yet. A lot of work has started on the editorial aspects. We wanted to be the trusted anchor that helps a consumer navigate through the financial decision-making processes.”
The research yielded a statement suggesting that there were four kinds of consumers, Lamba said. “First, there are the opinion leaders and industry leaders,” he said. “Then, there are the heavy users – the traders; the third category contains growth aspirers; and the fourth is made up of tradionalists.” Lamba said the four channels in the space Bloomberg UTV was eyeing were looking only at the first two segments. “And for us, the opportunity clearly was to position ourselves towards, and focus ourselves at, the ‘growth aspirer’ community,” he said. “Business news is considered to be ‘an expert speaking to an expert’ medium. When the growth aspirers’ community — which is much larger than others, and will continue to grow as India continues on its path of economic progress — looks at business news in the hope that someday it will ‘get it’ by simply watching.” He said the segment in question was clearly not being targeted by other players. “The channels only target the other two segments, like the trading community, which relies on the stock market as a means of livelihood; and the expert industry-leader segment, which is corporate India,” he said. “In any case, experts were talking to experts. And we believe we could be the voices of consumers. That entailed looking at the whole genre differently.”
Lamba said the approach led to the Bloomberg UTV tag line, ‘Blunt. And sharp’. He went on: “That means we will give an unbiased view, in a lucid & understandable form, without sugar-coating it, as we are not the voice of the industry.”
Thereafter, the work on tweaking the content began. “We wanted to change the look and feel of the channel,” Lamba said. “After deciding on a date, we started working backwards on the marketing campaign. We signed off on an extensive and aggressive distribution plan. We were at 0.8 million in relation to our TG before this exercise was started. But now, the number has gone up to 1.4 million, which has put us is sight of the No.2 position in terms of reach.” The standard TG used by the English business news channels is C&S, Males, 25 +, Sec AB.
The conversation turned to the inevitable question of recession. Lamba said the slowdown had hit a lot of businesses, and Bloomberg UTV was no exception. “But I think we had a sharp management foresight,” he said. “UTV is a diversified conglomerate. We had a premonition of the things to come and took measures to safeguard our interests by tightening our belts well in advance. We went into the maintenance mode fairly quickly. So we were actually a little better prepared than some of the others to get through this rough passage.”
Lamba then returned to the question of the content strategy. “Markets leaders [in the TV biz-news space] are perceived to be doing a good job and being the voice of the stock markets,” he said. “We believe that today, business is not just about the stock market. We want to be a holistic business channel. We have divided our content into three distinct buckets: market, news, and features.”
“Features could be programmes divided into two sub-buckets: programmes that can educate you about the ways to make money, and programmes that will help you find ways to spend the money smartly,” he said. “And quite a few of the feature-show formats will be fairly disruptive and provide a scale that this genre hasn’t witnessed before. We are working towards harnessing the strengths of the Bloomberg terminal which is a powerhouse storage system from across the world.” Lamba said his channel works very hard to ensure that one big story from India is covered across the world, daily. “This is not somebody sitting in Hong Kong and reporting about India,” Lamba said. “We have someone from Bloomberg UTV office in India to do that. This provides a lot of Indian entities with a fabulous platform to reach out to domestic audiences as well as international markets. This is a very big plus point for us.”
The response led Adgully to ask Lamba about the channel’s success mantra. “We look at ourselves as domain experts,” he said. “While television continues to be the biggest manifestation of our brand, we are very clear that we want to be present across platforms; we are going to be platform-agnostic. We want to disseminate our expertise across any platform that our consumers might want. We’ve just launched an absolutely revolutionary web product: www.utvmoney.com. That has been in the pipeline for the past 6 months.”
The channel’s digital team had been working frenetically to power financial portals with most of the top ten companies like Vodafone, Airtel, MTNL and BSNL, Lamba said. “We in talks with a lot of people to execute our plan to create finance-based ads that will get hot-bundled to mobile devices,” he said. “These will be the media that consumers will turn to for a lot of information. We are not bound by the television platform. We will continue to explore every platform available to us.”
As for the “blunt and sharp” campaign of June 2010, Lamba said: “The need to change the look and feel of the channel emerged from our market-gain study.” He said once the channel had identified the nature of the audience, it addressed the needs of the growth-aspirant community. “If you look at SEC AB, male 25 plus, all India, only 7-odd percent actually invests in equity directly,” he said. “This is a staggeringly small number. This figure doubles to about 19% the moment you look at investment by this TG in mutual funds. This means this audience is not able to comprehend the markets. The entry barrier is the lack of knowledge. Unless you are from the finance world or the world of stock markets, you are not getting it.”
That is why Bloomberg UTV wanted to de-mystify finance, Lamba said. “It is not complicated for any person of average intellect,” he said. “Once we decided what we wanted to do, we obviously aimed at a slightly younger TG. We don’t want to cater to people who have [a media] habit formed over the past 20 years because it is difficult to make them look at another product. The entire look and feel of channel has a lot to do with the way Bloomberg looks internationally. The way the logo is placed and how the tickers are run etc. But we haven’t just blindly copied Bloomberg international. For example Bloomberg, internationally, runs only one ticker; here in India, we believe there are two markets, so we run two tickers.”
As far as distribution is concerned, Lamba said the channel had extensive presence. “We are present on all DTH platforms,” he said. “Earlier, we were present only in eight metros; now we are across the country. The results of such a presence are already very visible. We are very serious about ensuring that our product reaches out to as many people as possible. Our efforts are on increasing the reach and then stabilising it, and continuously striving to increase the stickiness of the channel through innovative and disruptive programming.”
So what are the programming plans? “A lot of things are currently in the pipeline,” he said. “One is the web initiative, which I have already mentioned. And the other thing relates to mobile applications. There some initiatives which we are planning to launch in 45 days and I can’t talk about them right now. And we’ve just announced a very exciting & large scale business reality show – ‘The Pitch”. Something like this has never been done before in the business-news genre.”
Elaborating on the thought behind the show, Lamba said “The show comes from the fact that everyone believes they have this one million dollar idea,” he said. “But if it is only the million dollar idea that helps start a successful business, then everyone would have become extremely rich. There is a lot of hard work needed, and also awareness about many business aspects. So the basic idea is that we will get people on board and educate them with the help of masters in the field.” A VC will bring an investment of about Rs 5 crore, Lamba said. “The people who will talk and guide the 10 contestants on the show, though each episode, will be the biggest business icons of India.” Already, the business icons who’ve agreed to feature on the show are Rahul Bajaj, Naina Lal Kidwai, Karan Johar, Mr. Damodaran, and Kishore Biyani. For example, lets look at Karan Johar – eminent film personality, and widely credited with playing a huge part in taking Indian cinema to global audiences. Lamba said. “He may focus on the “power of promotions in the success of a product,” he said. “A prominent finance expert will determine how good a contestant’s financial skills are; and someone who has made millions in modern retail will share his experiences.”
The serious reality show will be hosted by Boman Irani, Lamba said. “Boman enjoys mass appeal across the country, and he’s equally comfortable interacting with the contestants as well as with the Business Icons. Most importantly, when told about the show, Boman immediately connected with the show & it’s objectives.” “And ‘The Assignment’ is another big show that we are doing which will feature MNCs that have set up large shops here. We are going to take business executives & managers from some of the best MNCs and put them into locally run business houses that are doing extremely well. We will tell them that you don’t need to have Ivy League education or come from a fancy business school to run an efficient business, and both parties can learn from each other.”
Lamba said the channel would, for example, pick up executive chefs from top hotel chains, and figure out how they serve the crowd at ‘Jumbo Wada Pav’ outlets. “I am going to take the distribution manager from a large FMCG company, whose job is to service thousands of multi-brand outlets, and get them to manage Mumbai’s dabbawalla service. So you are going to be out of your comfort zone and the language is going to be a problem. Use your management skills! Though they are the so-called desi people, the dabbawallas run their business very smoothly.”
To conclude, Adgully asked Lamba how the current fiscal looked to him in terms of advertising revenue.
“We asked for a rate hike three-and-a-half months ago,” he said. “There is some resistance from advertisers, as expected, but we have been able to show our innovations are actually driving a lot more value to our clients. At least 50% of our clients have already accepted the ad rates. I am talking about 30% plus here.”
