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100 << Marketing and Promotions in Bollywood

independent PR people—I don’t think they’ve ever sat down, watched a
film and thought about what kind of an audience the movie will appeal to,
the kind of promotions we need to develop and all that. They would just
talk to the producers, ask for some pictures, and that’s it. Our first prob-
lem was in dealing with producers who were used to individual PROs. My
team is entirely female, and some of the older producers were hesitant and
still had some stereotypes—what can these women do, kind of attitude.
There was a lot of bad mouthing that happened—oh these girls, just out
of college, what do they know. But once we did our first film—Taal, with
Subhash Ghai—then people started talking about us well and now we are
well-known in the industry.

While these “narratives of self-affirmation” are interesting in and of them-
selves, embedded in them are also stories of a media environment in transi-
tion, a new ethos even, wherein established modes of imagining audiences
are no longer deemed viable. In other words, they point to the revaluation
of film marketing and promotions as a distinct zone of creative and busi-
ness practice, one that was no longer on the margins of the film industry,
and moreover as a practice that demanded specialized knowledge (an MBA
degree, for instance). Tripathi and Sadanand’s narratives suggest that this
ongoing transition also demanded changes in the ways in which producers,
directors, and stars talked about their films. Tripathi’s response, when I asked
him about filmmakers’ interactions with marketing and account executives
in television companies and advertising agencies, speaks to this shift:

When you’re a content provider, you need to ask yourself why will MTV
promote your film? You have to convince MTV, or a brand like Coke or
Pepsi, that your content will draw audiences or consumers as the case may
be. That people will watch MTV for your content. When you have to talk
about promotions to a television channel, or to a corporate sponsor, you
have to be able to talk about the attributes of your film—your target audi-
ences, key features of the film, what your positioning is, what kinds of
audiences you expect to attract, and so on. You have to address your pitch
to others. Like I said, it’s not enough to just tell them you feel that your film
will work. You need to be able to speak the language of market research.
And you need people who have the right training and background.

Not only did this new group of professionals establish themselves as key
players in the world of film marketing and promotions, but they also played
an important role in translating between two very different conceptions