Page 115 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

102 << Marketing and Promotions in Bollywood

Earlier producers had a rather crude way of marketing. Their method
was to have a PRO who would take journalists out to drink, feed them,
give them some photos and material and tell them, yeh chhap dena (pub-
lish this). The story would be a synopsis of the film, and some stills. He
wouldn’t say ki film ka image yeh hai (this is the image of the film), this
is how we’d like you to break up stories. Today when you sit with a pro-
ducer, you get to see the film in preproduction stage, rough cuts. Then
you sit down with the producer and think about the overall message of
the film. Think about the phases of promotion—is it only interviews, what
kinds of audiences you want to reach beyond the film audience, how you
go beyond a film magazine or the Bombay Times, and so on. Think of dif-
ferent ways to create recall. You make deals with TV channels and say ok,
we’ll give you this much exclusive footage. Earlier, producers did have
some ideas that worked, but not anymore. Before, the publicity system was
different. Journalists were close friends—it was a relationship game. Today
it is about who gets you more eyeballs, or better eyeballs. And that means
knowing your numbers.

Public relations agents like Parul Gossain and marketing executives like
Tripathi thus emphasized the need for market research to manage a film’s
promotion across multiple media platforms, and argued that a promo-
tional strategy developed on the basis of gathering information on audi-
ence tastes, desires, and purchasing power was an absolute necessity in
the prevailing media environment. Television corporations and advertising
agencies did, of course, have to play their part in legitimizing this new
mode of conjuring audiences for the film industry. Given the number
of television channels competing for film-related content and consumer
brands seeking product placement opportunities, particularly from estab-
lished producers and directors, marketing professionals also had to dem-
onstrate how promotional tactics would translate into better publicity and
ultimately, audiences in theaters. At the same time, stories detailing inter-
actions between film, television, and advertising sectors also suggest that
the value of market research-based constructions of the audience does not
derive from claims about objectivity and empirical rigor. Rather, it resides
in the very nature of the audience as a construct that is central to the
larger issue of defining value in the media industries. The “audience” is,
much like the calendar images that Kajri Jain analyses, “traversed by vari-
48
ous forms of value.” In her analysis of the production and circulation of
calendar images in India, Kajri Jain argues that the power of the images
resides “in their role as switching points between different frames of value,