Page 123 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

110 << Marketing and Promotions in Bollywood

far more useful to approach it as “a circulating or animated object, which, as
the common element between different constellations of value, draws them
into a relationship where it becomes possible for value to switch tracks, to
jump from one economy to another, drawing their subjects into each other’s
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networks.” Focusing attention on moments of exchange such as the one that
Bhatt orchestrated, or the PowerPoint driven meetings that Malhotra spoke
about, foregrounds how multiple and often competing notions of value have
come to define Bombay’s media world over the past decade. I would argue,
then, that approaching the audience in terms of its circulation across the film,
television, and advertising industries allows us to comprehend film market-
ing and promotions as practices that enabled the film industry to respond
to the demands of a different kind of speculative capital and negotiate new
regimes of value. And it is precisely by foregrounding their ability to navigate
and forge links across seemingly incongruent terrains that marketing and
public relations professionals positioned themselves as central to the process
of authoring hype in Bollywood.

Conclusion
Focusing on links between the film and television industries, I have shown
how an emerging group of marketing and public relations professionals
introduced producers, directors, and stars in the film industry to new ways
of imagining the audience. This shift was not only a matter of rethinking
budgets and allocating a greater percentage of the production budget for
promotions and marketing. I have shown that marketing and promotions
came to function as a site of knowledge regarding audiences that was strik-
ingly different compared to the practice of relying on distributors and exhibi-
tors to assess audience tastes and gauge the fortunes of a film. At a structural
level, increasingly expensive marketing and the language of market research
does act as an organizational safeguard—as a technique of risk management
for both family-run companies reinventing themselves as professional and
corporatized entities, and companies such as UTV and Pritish Nandy Com-
munications that have entered the film business over the past decade. But
in practice, the “audiences” that marketing executives and public relations
professionals spoke about were as much abstractions as categories such as
“ladies” and “family” deployed in the Hindi film industry. At one level, there
is no difference between a producer saying “it’s a terrific film, the songs are
really good, there are foreign locations, it’ll definitely be a hit, take my word
for it,” and a marketing case study—such as the one that Madison Mates
produced for the film Krrish—that predicts success on the basis of a survey