It has been the ‘it’ topic of discussion over the last few days. The Civil Service Aptitude Test (CSAT) has been generating a lot of debate ever since the Government said that marks for English language comprehension skills would not be included for gradation or merit. The statement invited criticism from several quarters.
For instance, English is the main medium of official communication in North-Eastern states such as Nagaland, Meghalaya and Mizoram. So can a civil servant with little knowledge of English get posted in that region?
In another unrelated case, Hindi baiters took a bashing. Last week, a former Air-India flight purser, who was mocked by his colleagues for writing post-flight reports in Hindi, wrote a letter that went viral on social networks. In that letter, Tejendra Sharma, the former Air-India employee, announced that he would be awarded the Moturi Satyanarayan Award to promote the Hindi language later this month by the President of India.
The popularity of Hindi and other Indian languages (often dubbed vernacular) may be on the upswing elsewhere. But they have not often been on the winning side, particularly in advertising. The vice-chairman of a large media house recently brought up the topic of “regional bias in the pricing of advertising rates”. His example: the country’s leading Hindi television news channel has a viewership that’s ten times more than the leading English news channel. However, in revenue terms, he claims that the gap narrows down significantly. The Hindi news channel makes only 2.5 times more revenue than the leading English news channel.
According to Brandintell Services that offers the TV commercial rates for the top 100 Indian television channels, in June 2014, Hindi news channel Aaj Tak commanded a peak rate of ₹17,000 for 10 seconds of commercial time while the comparable 10 second rate on English news channel Times Now was ₹21,500. These rates are further negotiated by media buyers.
But the pricing power that English commands in news falls flat in the television entertainment channels (GEC). Among the GECs, the highest 10-second commercial rates are for Hindi GEC channels such as Star Plus and Colors, while niche English channels would fall way behind. Even regional channels such as Sun TV in Tamil perform far better than English channels.
Even in print it’s a no-brainer that the combined reach of all Indian language newspapers far outstrips that of English newspapers. If English newspapers in India have a combined reach of 20 million, the Indian language newspapers have a combined reach of 150 million. But when it comes to advertising rates, the gap narrows down. However, media planners admit privately that it’s easier to drive down prices with Indian language media.
Who is more relevant?The above factors, at least in the news genre, give rise to the question — is advertising guilty of not following its own oft stated principle that advertising follows eyeballs. Or is it victim to the system where both ad agency executives and the marketers are used to living in big cities and thinking in English and hence are blissfully unaware of the intricacies of the national language media? “Be it the clients or the media agency side, all of us are guilty of it,” admits Ashish Bhasin, chairman and CEO, South Asia, of media services company Dentsu Aegis Networks. However, he’s quick to add that, going forward, pricing will fall in line with audience and content and that the gap has considerably decreased over the years. Mallikarjunadas CR, CEO of the Starcom MediaVest Group, says that the pricing phenomenon of TV channels is easier to explain. According to him, it’s only the Hindi and regional language GEC channels and the Hindi and regional Film channels along with some Hindi news channels that have some sort of ratings to support the decision making. However, ‘Malli’ as the industry knows him, says, “There is a quasi-rational equation between rating and pricing in the leading channels. But niche channels are completely driven by perception. Better measurement of niche channels will bring in more accountability in pricing.”
Bhasin adds that the pricing power for media is also because of the quality of the audience it delivers. “It’s not the absolute numbers that matter but the relevant numbers,” he says. The golden question is, who is more relevant?