Page 105 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

92 << Marketing and Promotions in Bollywood

conjuring Bollywood. In addition to the annual FICCI-FRAMES convention,
different groups in Bombay have organized “marketing seminars” to address
how film, television, and the advertising and consumer goods sectors could
work together and develop successful promotional strategies across media
platforms. The most prominent among these have been the “Value Creation”
seminars organized by the Advertising Club of Bombay, and the “Enter-
tainment, Media, and Marketing Forum” organized by the Film Producers’
Guild of India. While a range of topics were addressed at these seminars and
forums, the overarching goal, as explained by Rajesh Pant, CEO of Percept
Advertising, was to make the film industry aware that “well-packaged enter-
25
tainment sells despite all odds.” Exhorting the film industry to observe and
learn from Hollywood marketing practices, several speakers at these events
argued that there was a “clear need for Indian films to take their marketing
business more seriously if they want to increase their foot-print and kitty.” 26
As we will see in the next chapter, it is precisely this aspect of marketing
and promotions that dot-com professionals leveraged to great effect as they
forged relationships with various people and groups in Bollywood.
In arguing that the audience was reimagined by industry professionals as
a measurable, knowable, and controllable category that could be imagined
outside the context of the box office, I am not suggesting that an audience
commodity for film-based television programming never existed. In fact, the
Hindi film industry’s relationship with television, and thereby the advertising
industry, can be traced back to the early 1980s. However, it was only in the
early 2000s that the “empirical,” professional, and globally accepted language
of market research became a part of the discursive conventions for think-
ing about audiences where the Bombay film industry was concerned. This
shift did not, of course, happen overnight. Beginning in the mid-1990s, the
phenomenal growth of the television and advertising industries was already
forcing filmmakers to rethink their assumptions about audiences. Further-
more, the film industry’s links with new circuits of capital and modes of
speculation—set in place by transnational television companies during the
1990s—were shaped by the ways in which state-controlled television forged
links with the Bombay film industry during the 1980s.

The Doordarshan Years

When the state-regulated television network Doordarshan opened its doors
to sponsored programming in 1983, signaling a departure from an earlier
model of public service broadcasting with the express goal of utilizing televi-
sion for “development,” some of the earliest and most popular shows were