Page 143 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

130 << Dot-Coms and the Making of an Overseas Territory

Madagascar invited audience participation through innovative online con-
tests and other branding exercises. Following this is a two-page spread that
details indiafm.com’s efforts at bringing the same “global” level of innovation
to Bollywood. Framed by case studies of movie websites created by indiafm.
com, the text in the center of this page reads:

With the Indian Internet Usage projected to go up to 100 million by 2007
even as the Indian Film Industry is estimated to boom, the Internet just
cannot be ignored in the movie marketing mix. Internet surveys con-
ducted abroad are clearly indicative of the trend towards users logging on
purely to seek entertainment. With a whole slew of Bollywood movies due
for release, along with some big launches, we at hungama-indiafm have
been busy doing our bit to put Indian entertainment on the world (digital)
map (my emphasis).

70MM also includes interviews with a diverse array of film industry pro-
fessionals who comment on the growing importance of marketing and
promotions, the value of working with companies like hungama.com and
indiafm.com, and the importance of the Internet in the long run. Care-
fully produced, 70MM is very much a part of indiafm’s PR efforts. How-
ever, I would argue that it needs to be seen in the first instance as a
trade artifact that addresses a range of professionals in the film, television,
advertising, and marketing sectors in Bombay and only then as publicity
material that seeks to promote indiafm.com to Internet users in India and
abroad. 70MM invites producers, directors, marketing executives, and stars
in Bollywood to imagine and understand the Web as an index of global-
ity vital to the larger process of reimagining the Hindi film industry as
“Bollywood Inc.” Thus, 70MM serves as an important cultural-industrial
artifact—in John Caldwell’s terms, a “semi-embedded deep text”—in at
least two ways. First, it reveals how indiafm.com and other new media
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companies went about negotiating and forging relationships with other,
more established media institutions in Bombay. Second, it alerts us to the
changing business practices and identities of film companies that were
grappling with the challenges of reimagining themselves as global, corpo-
ratized companies.
The circulation of trade artifacts like 70MM were not isolated efforts
and must be seen in relation to the normalization of the overseas territory,
particularly the “dollar and pound” markets of the United States and the
U.K. as Bollywood’s route to the global. Consider, for instance, a two-day
marketing summit organized by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII)