Page 95 - From Bombay to Bollywoord The Making of a Global Media Industri

82 << Marketing and Promotions in Bollywood

professionals had come to occupy a prominent role in shaping the produc-
tion and circulation of paratexts.
These changes in creative and industrial practice were all the more strik-
ing given the marginal position that marketing has historically occupied in
the Hindi film industry. In her account of conceptions of the “audience” in
the Bombay film industry, Tejaswini Ganti notes that a discourse of “hits”
and flops,” that is, evaluating and speculating about the box-office outcome
of films, is the “primary way that Hindi filmmakers relate[d] to their audi-
ences . . . and commercial success or failure is interpreted by filmmakers
as an accurate barometer of social attitudes, norms, and sensibilities, thus
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providing the basis for knowledge about audiences.” Ganti also notes that
the “scientific” language of market research that drives business decisions
and production practices in the television, advertising, print, and consumer
goods sectors in India was rarely invoked by those in the film industry.
However, from the perspective of the marketing and public relations pro-
fessionals I spoke with, “class/mass,” “city/interior,” “family,” “ladies,” and so
on—classifications of the audience derived from the carving of distribution
territories, evaluations of these territories’ revenue-earning potential, and
filmmakers’ assumptions about viewers’ cultural capital—no longer seemed
sufficient. As this new group of marketing and public relations profession-
als brokered deals with newspapers, purchased spots on various television
channels, negotiated sponsorships with brands, entered into merchandising
agreements, and sought the attention of audiences through ringtones and
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MMS clips, the “audience” was reimagined as a construct that had purchase
in a number of different sites of mediation and could no longer be defined
and understood solely in relation to a film’s performance at the box office.
This chapter examines how this shift came about by mapping the develop-
ment of marketing and promotions as a new site of knowledge and decision-
making power in Bollywood. Outlining the emergence of a distinct zone of
creative and business practice—in-house marketing teams, freelance public
relations agents, small-scale public relations firms, and film marketing divi-
sions within prominent advertising agencies such as Lintas, Leo Burnett,
and Ogilvy & Mather—I argue that ongoing changes in the domain of mar-
keting and promotions are emblematic of broader reconfigurations of rela-
tions between capital, circuits of information, and forms of knowledge (in
this instance, regarding the audience) in Bombay’s media world. Further, I
examine this transition by locating film marketing and promotions within
a broader history of links between film and television. Tracing this relation-
ship—from the early 1980s, when the state-controlled television network,
Doordarshan, opened its doors to sponsored programming, to the entry and