Sirish Chandran, Executive Editor, Overdrive magazine
On the Net you get only short stories, for example, about a car launch or so on, but you don’t get feature write-ups or stories around it. That is what a magazine is about. I agree that an Internet presence is very important today, but a magazine is acceptable and will always be acceptable in the long run. Magazine is the only solution – one can take it everywhere and anywhere, and read at leisure. The print medium is very strong and it won’t be replaced any soon. However, one can never predict about the next generation.
A mechanical engineer, Sirish Chandran joined ‘Overdrive’ magazine in 2000 and in seven years progressed to his current position of Executive Editor. Besides road testing cars and bikes, Chandran was also responsible for the motor sport section of the magazine and launched India’s first motor sport magazine, ‘Grand Prix’, in 2006. He has also competed in several races and rallies, taking class victories on debut in the gruelling Raid-de-Himalaya and Desert Storm rallies.
Chandran’s motoring views have appeared in mainstream newspapers, websites and the electronic media in India. Apart from contributing to international publications, including the Sunday Times, UK, he has been on the jury panel of the Overdrive Awards panel for the past seven years and is a founding member of the Indian Car of the Year and founding chairman of the Indian Motorcycle of the Year jury panels.
Chandran’s automotive views are also regularly aired on the Network18 channels and he is also a presenter on the ‘Overdrive Show’ on CNBC-TV18, CNN-IBN and CNBC-Awaaz, in addition to giving expert advice on the Auto Selector segment of the ‘Overdrive Show’.
In a candid chat with exchange4media’s Swapna Rahul Shah and Devika Bharadwaj, Chandran shares ‘Overdrive’s journey, the evolving content, his views on the competition in the market, future plans and more. Q. How do you plan your content strategy to meet the competition? We are India’s only car, bike and motor sport based magazine. We have an equal mix of content and stories on cars, bikes and motor sports. Along with that, we cover a lot of inside news like scoops, spy images, etc., for both cars and bikes.
Q. What is ‘Overdrive’s circulation? We print 120,000 copies each month, and the readership is four times that.
Q. How do you maintain a balance between content and advertising? What is the ad-edit ratio for ‘Overdrive’? Our ad-edit ratio is 35-65. But sometimes, we get lot of feedback from our readers asking for more of content. However, ads are a necessity to generate content.
Q. Who are your target readers? Ninety-five per cent of urban, affluent men in the 25-45 age-group are our TG. But we are growing in terms of female audience too. We are the only automobile magazine to have a female writer, who also does a lot of tests for us.
Q. What are your views on the growing automobile industry? It’s a growing market and will definitely continue to grow.
Q. You began your career in journalism in 2000. How has the journey been so far?
It has been a fast-paced journey. Automobiles are all about action. To write about cars and bikes, a writer needs to have the passion for them. One can easily write about business, facts, figures, and numbers, but ‘Overdrive’ is more than that, it is about our passion for cars and bikes. Everybody has a child inside, which is turned on by cars, bikes, and the speed – and that’s what ‘Overdrive’ targets.
I, too, started with the travel section. The travelogues have taken me all over the country. We have brought a lot of destinations into the mainstream perspective, like Ladakh and so on. Earlier, nobody used to go to places like these, so we pioneered in cutting edge road trips.
Q. Do you have any plans for redesigning your magazine or content? We believe in redesigning gradually and we have been doing that. But if you constantly muddle with your magazine’s identity, you lose connect with your readers. So, we have been making mild changes constantly in terms of adding new tests, figures, numbers and data for readers, especially to help them with their purchase decisions. The ‘Overdrive’ identity has remained constant over the years. You will be able to relate the very first issue with the recent one. In a way, our magazine is like genes, it changes, but the basic DNA remains the same. In the same way, we have continued with the ideas that the founder editors had started out with. The emotional aspect for automobiles has always been our guiding light.
Q. Who are your strongest competitors? ‘Autocar India’ is our closest and strongest competitor. It is a very good magazine and worth commending. Competition keeps you on your toes and enthuses you to do more. Most of the new magazines are international and thus, their content comes from abroad. So, if you compete with them, you have to generate content that is as good as the best magazines in the world. Our Indian writers rise up to that level, but we have our hands, feet, eyes and ears on the Indian ground, listening to what our Indian readers want. That’s what that differentiates us.
Q. What are the various ways of revenue generation?
First, it has to be advertising, and second, through various events organised by us. For our September issue, we had contests with prize money totalling Rs 7 lakh, and the prizes include a Hyundai i10 car, Kinetic Blaze scooter, five JVC stereos, 10 sets of Neo alloys, merchandise from Oakley and Nurburgring merchandise. We also have a contest with Renault F1, where we will be giving out passenger rides with a Formula1 driver at the Renault F1 road show in India towards the end of the year. We will also be giving out Renault F1 merchandise. We also gave away a DVD of the World’s Fastest Indian free with the September issue.
We have done tons of contests over the years. Some of the big ones include: The Overdrive-Delphi Design Challenge, where we send winners to the Geneva Motor Show; The Helmet Styling Challenge, where the winner gets a full paid race seat in the JK National Racing Championship. Some of the major events that we have been involved with include: The DB Drag Event; the Pune round of the Indian National Rally Championship; partner in the Motorcycle Road Racing Championship; partner in the National Dirt Track Championship; partner in the Desert Storm Rally; partner in the Delhi Car Rally; partner in the Bangalore and Hyderabad rounds of the INRC; and partner in the BAJA SAE India Inter-Collegiate Contest, etc.
We have set the national time and speed records on both two-wheelers (on Hero Honda Karizma) and four wheelers (Maruti Suzuki Alto). These records have been certified by the Limca Book of Records. We have also set the national fuel efficiency record with the Mahindra Renault Logan, where we had run the car non-stop for over 35 hours at the VRDE, getting a mileage in excess of 36 kmpl. We have also set the speed record for the fastest journey from Kanyakumari to Leh on two-wheels (again certified by the Limca Book of Records).
And then, of course, we have done tons of mega drive events like connecting all four metros in five days, driving from the West Coast to the East Coast of India, etc.
Q. Who, according to you, is the king – content or the advertiser? I would say content. But it would be 50-50, because to produce content, you need ads. Without ads, would the reader be able to afford a magazine for say Rs 100-plus, instead of Rs 60? In India, you have to have advertisements.
Q. What are the future plans for ‘Overdrive’? We are a part of the Network18 Group now. So, an association with them has opened up a lot more avenues for us and is helping us build our brand further. The magazine is obviously there, but now we have moved on to television with the ‘Overdrive Show’ on CNBC, CNN-IBN and CNBC Awaaz, which is boosting our image considerably. We are also going to revamp our website, wherein we plan to interact with our readers a lot more than before regularly. Through our magazine, we used to interact with them monthly, but now it would be a daily interaction. There is a lot of other reader oriented stuff that we are doing, which helps us keep the excitement alive among the community.
Q. Congratulations on reaching the 10-year milestone in India. As Editor, how does it feel? It has been a very emotional experience for me. I started right at the bottom, growing into the job, and now heading the magazine as it completes its 10th year. So, I feel extremely proud and equally humbled because of the opportunity that I got. ‘Overdrive’ is India’s best and largest selling car and bike magazine. When ‘Overdrive’ came into existence, it brought about a radical change as it was a world class magazine, available at an incredibly low price. At that time, ‘Overdrive’ brought about a landmark shift in the Indian automotive journalism scene, not only in terms of the price, but content too. Various magazines have come up since then, but ‘Overdrive’ has been at the helm.
Q. At a time when the market is flooded with magazines like ‘Autocar India’, ‘Auto India’, ‘Car India’, ‘Bike India’, and so on, which also cover what ‘Overdrive’ covers, how has your magazine differentiated itself? Our USP is our passion that drives us. Automobiles are not boring, they are fun and aspirational, and any automobile writer has to feed that aspiration. So, we give readers all the data that they want, but in a way that they enjoy it. That’s how we cover everything and put life around it.
Q. With the growing popularity and usage of the Internet and television media, will your target audience devote the time to read the magazine?
On the Net you get only short stories, for example, about a car launch or so on, but you don’t get feature write-ups or stories around it. That is what a magazine is about. I agree that an Internet presence is very important today, but a magazine is acceptable and will always be acceptable in the long run.
We also carry news and features on our website from the magazine, but one cannot take one’s laptop everywhere and anywhere. One cannot spare time on the Net to read a whole feature story. Magazine is the only solution – one can take it everywhere and anywhere, and read at leisure. The print medium is very strong and it won’t be replaced any soon. However, one can never predict about the next generation.
