Page 34 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

Introduction >> 21

speculation and practices of risk management that Hollywood has rendered
globally recognizable.
Chapter 3, “‘It’s All about Knowing Your Audience’: Marketing and Pro-
motions in Bollywood,” further develops the analysis of changing industry
structures by focusing on the emergence of marketing and promotions as
a key domain in Bollywood. Drawing on in-depth interviews with market-
ing executives and public relations agents in Bombay, I show how the phe-
nomenal growth of the television and advertising industries during the 1990s
and the related loss of a readily imagined “national audience” led to the
emergence of marketing as a site of knowledge and decision-making power
in Bollywood and, moreover, altered how the audience was imagined and
constructed. Historicizing the relationship between the film and television
industries, I argue that ongoing changes in the domain of film marketing
are emblematic of broader reconfigurations of relations between capital, cir-
cuits of information, and forms of knowledge (in this instance, regarding the
audience) in Bombay’s media world. In a period defined by extraordinary
technological, financial, and organizational flux, marketing and promotions
emerged as practices that allowed the film industry to negotiate the tran-
sition to new circuits of capital that had redefined Bombay’s media world
throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.
However, television and marketing professionals working in Bombay
were not in a position to shape Bollywood’s relationship with overseas mar-
kets. Shifting attention to the emergence of dot-com companies during the
late 1990s and early 2000s, chapter 4, “‘Multiplex with Unlimited Seats’:
Dot-Coms and the Making of an Overseas Territory,” analyzes how dot-
com companies mediated Bollywood’s imagination of an overseas audience.
Building on the analysis of film-television relations in the previous chapter
and tracing changes in the structure of film distribution and exhibition, I
demonstrate how dot-com companies positioned themselves as “knowledge
brokers” who could reconfigure a geographically vast yet vaguely understood
overseas territory into a well-defined Non-Resident Indian (NRI) audience.
Asserting their value in both aspirational (the Web as an index of global-
ity) and strategic terms (the need to know NRIs), dot-com companies played
a crucial role in the broader project of reshaping Bollywood’s geography of
operations by positioning the media industry as capable of imagining and
institutionalizing an overseas audience.
While chapter 3 draws attention to issues of hype and speculation in an
environment in which a proliferation of screens and platforms as well as
new sources of capital have forced media producers to look beyond the box
office as the primary site for imagining the audience and hence profitability,