It wasn't hard to keep tabs on all of this. As a consumer, one notices these changes since they affect one's life in some way or the other. What came as a most pleasant surprise however was something you don't notice as an ad person-who-is-not-quite-a-media-person. Amid all the sound and fury that the TV channels create with their hoardings and e-mailers, and the constant barrage of pre-digested information that TAM sends out, a low key invitation to address a language publication's annual sales conference two months turned out to be a huge revelation.

While preparing for my talk I learned that
a) in the last five years, just two Hindi publications have added 14 million more readers to their fold. Over half of these were added in rural areas. They did it through a combination of deep down to earth marketing and new localised editions in smaller towns. The simple but time tested method of taking your product right to the consumer's doorstep,…and heart, worked wonders for them.
b) all the satellite channels during the same period added only 12 million more viewers to their fold in the same areas covered by these papers.

The written word is still in fashion after all. That's very good news. Better still, more people are learning to read, and more people are reading the news.

Quizzing some young media planners on their perceptions about these two newspapers however, I was appalled to find that they could tell me lots about serials on niche TV channels with ratings of less than 1 per cent, but could not even enumerate the edition centres of these papers. Which is not to say they don't know their job. They are sharp, bright and well educated - but perhaps these times have tuned them towards a tunnel vision - one which suggests that the world of media planning in June and July, 2003 AD must start and end with discussions on CAS. A phenomenon that will affect a princely 6 million homes, if that, out of the 160 million in which our consumers live.

Multiple use of media, multi-media planning, integrated marketing, how can any or all of these happen if we don't open our eyes? Not just to all the 360 degree possibilities (because new media ideas can be quite alluring and make great pitch material) but to the remarkable changes taking place in all the old familiar media as well.
Initiative Media has a simple but stupendously effective tool that does just this. It forces a planner to look beyond the blinkers of TAM ratings into the wider world of print, radio, cinema, internet, direct response, out of home, and so on.

The tool is imaginatively and aptly called RADAR. What I like most about it is that it does not start with a multi-media reach and numbers argument using the standard NRS or IRS data. It starts with the consumer instead, that too the consumer of a specific product or service category, any category you need to promote and for which you are willing to conduct special research. RADAR further subdivides the communication task based on whether the situation is one of launch, switch, or maintenance.

RADAR requires you to go out and meet a sizeable number of your current or prospective customers, and administer a battery of about 30 simple statements. These lay out the framework for what they seek from the communication on that category, followed by how they rate various media forms in their ability to deliver what they seek. Let me explain with an example.

Take cars. Among the various attributes that consumers seek from the advertising for a car, they rate 'detail', 'attention', and 'trust' the highest. What they mean is that the communication should grab their attention, should provide enough detail for them to make an informed choice, and should invoke trust in the manufacturer (it is after all an expensive purchase). They rate these attributes as more important than what we would have obviously thought- such as 'stature', 'image', 'self identification' etc. But remember, these questions are asked in the context of the media to be deployed not the creative that will be used.
They follow this up with a rating of the various media in being able to deliver these attributes - sadly while television does deliver on attention-getting, according to them (we interviewed consumers in Delhi and Bombay), it falls far short on the ability to provide detail, or indeed invoke trust. This is where the internet and print come in. Incidentally, while the internet is cited as capable of delivering detail, it loses out on the trust aspect. Cinema is a good place to run an ad for 'the car for me' - scoring well on self-identification.

Print is not perceived by car owner as an attention getting medium for advertising cars - outdoor is. However, I believe the new full page colour campaign for Tata Indica - showing packets of peas and lifeboats and armchairs, but no cars - may have managed to overcome that.

Here is a simple chart on how RADAR works
What consumers seek in the advertising for the same category can and does change depending on whether the task is launch or maintenance as this example from Initiative Media, UK, for a skin care product shows
Here is how various media fare among soap users in Mumbai on the communication attributes they consider most important, which are likeability and reliability. The product was for a particular type of soap for which we innovatively decided that poster ads in visiting areas in a hospitals might be a good idea - and consumers seemed to think rather well of that - scoring them high on reliability and ofcourse on ideas.
IM in India has done RADAR research on several categories of consumers - watches, cars, soaps, baby products, insurance and so on. We find it invaluable in helping us look beyond the numbers that the audience measurement studies throw up. Since the tool is flexible, in that we can define media any way we choose (though the attribute statements must be maintained fairly standard across the world), we broke up television by genre in one study to find this:

That general entertainment TV does well for categories where consumers are looking for likeability of, and new information in, the ad - but news channels fare much better where the consumers expect to find the message involving, reliable and capable of assigning some image to the product. Typically, FMCG products fit into the former, while high priced durables fit into the latter descriptions.

RADAR can also be used to provide cues to the creative on what aspects of a medium need to be overcome in order to meet with a consumer's expectations from the communication of the category. For example, releasing full page colour ads in print for cars is obviously a good move when the consumer is asking for attention getting communication, and believes that print does not work well in that area. On the other hand, not giving them the detail they seek from the same medium may well be a bad move.

Our next attempt will be to put innovations in the old familiar media onto the RADAR screen. Interactivity on FM radio, cataloguing in magazines, Doordarshan's attributes in terrestrial-only homes, these are some of the aspects we will cover. Watch this space.

Feeback on this article may be emailed to:
smeditor@indiatimes.com