Page 114 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

Marketing and Promotions in Bollywood >> 101

of the “audience.” Recounting the marketing campaign for Subhash Ghai’s
Taal (Rhythm, 1999), Sadanand explained her company’s role in very similar
terms:

When we came in, we started to look at films as products. We said look,
you need to have some plan in place depending on your target audience.
Go to Channel [V] for the youth segment; go to Dainik Jagran for the
Hindi belt. So that’s how we got started on building a campaign around
a film. With Taal, we were new so we were taking directions from Sub-
hash Ghai on what he wanted. But we also went beyond simply sending
out regular updates. We also helped him with his company’s IPO. We went
to mainstream papers and said, you don’t cover these aspects of the film
industry. Taal was one of the first films to be insured. Ghai wanted his
company to go public. We went to all the major websites and newspapers,
not just the film magazines, and provided them with information.

In conversations with producers, directors, and stars, public relations agents
like Archana Sadanand and marketing executives like Tarun Tripathi intro-
duced market research and the language of psychographics as indispensable
tools for operating in a media environment in which transnational televi-
sion corporations and advertising agencies had reconfigured the “national
family” into a number of enumerable audience segments. This fixation on
mapping the many parts of the “national family” had grown more intense
during the late 1990s with television channels and the consumer goods sec-
tor competing for the attention of the middle class. As Mazzarella has shown,
“study after study of the habits and dispositions” of the burgeoning middle
class charted an “ever-expanding series of manifestations of ‘the Indian con-
sumer,’ each with their own subcategories: ‘the Indian teenager,’ ‘the new
Indian woman,’ and so on.” 47
I would argue that in addition to bringing stars and filmmakers into
more direct contact with producers and executives in the television and
advertising industries, the development of television as a major new pro-
motional medium also drew film industry professionals into the ratings dis-
course that underpinned the television and advertising industries. Further,
as Parul Gossain, a public relations agent who has worked for film stars and
managed film promotions since 2001, explained, producers and others in
the industry also realized that working with television corporations, adver-
tising agencies, and corporate sponsors called for a reconceptualization of
the “relationship game” that had characterized the world of film marketing
and/or promotions.