MUMBAI: The Diamond Jubilee Seminar of the Advertising Agencies Association of India (AAAI) "Beyond the Horizon" held here on Friday, brought together leading luminaries from the advertising and media industry who spoke on subjects as diverse as newspapers and the FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) sector.

Peter Mukherjea, CEO, Star India, said a new look at television and television advertising was needed. Being an emerging medium, it needed a "digitalised mindset" to meet a whole new set of challenges.

A "revolution" was taking place in how young people accessed the media just as in TV programmes; there was a change in the way television advertising was being produced, distributed and consumed. He felt that too many in the industry were out of touch with viewers and consumers. "The future beckons and there is likely to be complete convergence of the media in the days to come," he added.

Speaking on the media and entertainment sector, N. Ram, Editor-in-Chief, The Hindu, highlighted issues facing the newspaper industry. Quoting figures on the net paid circulation (NPC) put out by the World Association of Newspapers (WAN), Mr. Ram said that Asian newspapers completely dominated the top 100 best-selling dailies, accounting for three-fourths of them. The WAN figures released in May 2005 indicated that while China's NPC was 93.5 million copies, India's was 78.8 million, Japan's 70.4 million, the US' 55.6 million and Germany's 22.1 million.

Drivers of change

The drivers of change in India, Mr. Ram said, were literacy, good transport and communication, aggressive entrepreneurship and, above all, the excitement brought in by political events.

Warning against the trend of "dumbing down" and "tabloidisation," Mr. Ram said that newspapers would decline unless they made radical changes in how they connect to readers. The latest National Readership Survey (NRS) figures are, however, heartening for the Indian newspaper industry and journalism with readership in small towns and non-metros increasing.

For the FMCG sector, the future lay in penetrating the market by offering bite-sized products, said C.K. Ranganathan, CMD, CavinKare Ltd. The factors that would drive both value and volume growth in India were chiefly, per capita consumption, innovations and development of new products. "In fact, those offering bite-sized products are growing significantly faster than others, e.g., in the shampoo category, where sachets have been successful," he said. CavinKare entered the foods segment last year with pickles and had already become the largest player in Tamil Nadu in both value and volumes.

John Cahill, Regional Director, Asia-Pacific, McCann (Healthcare), said the healthcare communications spend in India was a mere $200 million, in a $-21billion pharmaceutical sector which had doubled in the last decade and was likely to double in the next. Healthcare communication as a discipline, he said, was here to stay with issues like "wellness" gaining popularity.

Optimism on retail sector

The organised retail sector, a $-7 trillion industry globally, was the sector that drove the national economy, said Sudipta Sen Gupta, Senior General Manager, (Marketing), Café Coffee Day. She said it smartened the entire value chain behind it. "It has, in fact, made shopping a leisure activity and the outlook for retail in India is positively exuberant," said Ms. Sen adding that from its current size of Rs. 12,000 billion, the retail sector was likely to double in the next five years and touch Rs. 20,000 billion by 2010 with organised retailing constituting 35-40 per cent.

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