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NEW DELHI SESSION TWO

"Post CAS-- viewership of housewives will be affected the most": Opine Media Experts

In the second session of exchange4media's symposium on CAS-The Road Ahead in Delhi, the panelists explored the ways of "Stretching the media buck in Post CAS scenario." The panelists included Ashutosh Srivastava, Managing Director, MindShare, Anita Nayyar, Executive Director-North, Starcom, Chintamani Rao, President, Universal McCann, LV Krishnan, CEO, TAM and SV Quraishi, Director General, Doordarshan. Amit Agnihotri of exchange4media moderated the session.

The session started with speakers accepting pervasive ambiguity on the issue of CAS and its impact-- in the short run, and therefore deliberated upon the plans they have put in place for their clients. "The immediate 2-3 months post CAS will be a period of transition," said S.Y. Quraishi, Doordarshan. "After looking at the four metros and analyzing the impact of CAS, I feel in the short run the impact of CAS is manageable," said Ashutosh Srivastava, MindShare. Chintamani Rao of McCann added, " In the short term, obviously, there will be no generalized solutions, it will depend from client to client and we have the contingency plans in place."

Taking the discussion further, Srivastava of MindShare said, "I believe in the short run, in the Post CAS scenario the reach of the channels is likely to go down by a minimum of 10-20%. But proportionally the cost of advertising on these channels would also go down, thus, there is not much of an issue for the advertiser," he added. Citing another reason to support his argument, he said, "Since July-September is a period when comparatively lesser amount of advertising happens than the other months, the worry on the advertiser front is less."

The discussion brought out an area of deeper concern. "The more important area of concern will be the drop in the involvement and therefore the decline in the time spent by the viewers," said Rao of McCann.

However, almost all the panelists were optimistic about the benefits accruing to the advertisers, to cable operators, media planners and consumers in the long run. While, Anita Nayyar of Starcom opined, "Looking at the past experiences, CAS implementation may take longer than expected." Ashutosh of MindShare said, "In the long run, the effect of CAS depends on the speed of role out of Set Top Boxes (STBs)." On this Rao added, "The pricing of set top boxes as well as the pricing of channels will be a major deciding factor on the speed of role-out of STBs."

Also, the discussion brought out that the major segment of audience going to be affected will be housewives. "Maximum viewership contribution is by housewives and so that's the segment which will be affected the most," said Srivastava.
As per a presentation by LV Krishnan of TAM, study of success of CAS across countries revealed factors contributing to it. First being content and second being affordability, together they contributed to success of CAS. Looking at the split of Free- to- Air channels as compared to Pay channels, the data reflected that CAS implementation will not affect Chennai and Kolkata as much as Delhi and Mumbai. Giving the example of Chennai market, Krishnan said, "Just 29% of the channels are pay channels in Chennai, as compared to 75% in Delhi and 59% in Mumbai."
TAM data exhibited that "Stickiness to channels is restricted to content categories --soaps, actions and cricket (live), followed by movies." Giving deeper insights into Post CAS, Krishnan said, "A point which has not been factored while analyzing the effect of CAS is that over 20-25% of the viewers do not have a remote control. However in the Post CAS scenario all these viewers will have a remote control, this would lead to a minor drop in the rating of channels."

On the issue, whether there will be a decline in the advertising spends, Krishnan said, "In case of FMCG categories there would not be any effect as over 90% of the sales of these companies come from markets other than Mumbai and Delhi"
On the questions on the TAM data post July 15th, he said, "There will be a representation of CAS viewership in TAM data after July 15th. The software will continue to be MediaXPress, however, TAM will be doing frequent baselines, starting July across four metros."

On the question whether in the short term the advertising budgets will divert its budgets towards print media, Srivastava opined, "I don't think so. Till now, there were clients from consumer durable category, which used to advertise heavily on print media, but that trend has also changed in favor of television channels."