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Marketing and Promotions in Bollywood >> 99

stories did they have to tell about their place in Bollywood? To mark the shift
from selling tickets to selling rights is an important first step. It is crucial,
however, to then note that the notion of “selling rights” also signals a shift in
the imaginations of audiences and territories. This in turn raises the question
of how film industry professionals began responding to modes of conjuring
audiences—television ratings points, market research, brand valuations, and
so on—that underpinned the operations of the television and advertising
industries and that also informed the worldviews of MBA-trained profes-
sionals like Tarun Tripathi at Yash Raj Films.

Knowing the Audience, MBA-Style

In his analysis of the different kinds of narrative that professionals in the
film and television industries in Los Angeles deploy to “make sense of their
specific work worlds and their creative or managerial task at hand,” John
Caldwell draws attention to “genesis myths” as a genre that is typical of
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stories told by above-the-line creative personnel. These stories, he writes,
“function less as celebrations of work (suffering at the production task and
vocational survival) than as celebrations of an originating moment and artis-
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tic pedigree.” The stories I heard from Tarun Tripathi and other market-
ing and public relations professionals in Bombay certainly fit this category.
Consider, for example, this response from Tripathi when I asked him how
his position in the film industry had changed: “When I came to work at Yash
Raj, the industry was not thinking about how to connect with other media. It
was a black hole. The industry was not organized, was not prepared to speak
the same language. But as things changed, people began seeing how valuable
it was to have someone with my background.”
Reeling off a list of films for which he spearheaded the marketing cam-
paign, Tripathi positioned himself as a professional whose work had forced
Yash Raj Films, and indeed the entire film industry, to acknowledge the
importance of overhauling film marketing practices. Tripathi’s answer was
echoed by others who had entered the business of film marketing and pro-
motions during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Consider this explanation
offered by Archana Sadanand, who manages one of the most prominent
film-promotion agencies in Bollywood (Imagesmiths), when I asked her how
she had gained a foothold in the industry:

In the last 5–6 years, no one quite knew what publicity meant. Even now,
a lot of producers have this one-man publicity team who goes to the trade
papers and some prominent magazines and newspapers. And there are