It is important to be optimistic, smart & cautious while planning businesses: Sunil Lulla

At a time when most of us are struggling to keep our minds from getting locked up during the lockdown, there are some leaders who have a bigger task at hand of keeping their things together.

We have one such leader with us in our segment called ‘Beating All Odds’ -Sunil Lulla, Chief Executive Officer, BARC (Broadcast Audience Research Council) India.

What kind of changes have you noticed in viewership and consumption pattern during these four to five-weeks since lockdown?

What's important to understand is that television was always the screen of the household. It has now become even more vital in its role. We have seen 40%-45% growth.

We looked at a period in January, that we call the pre-COVID period. It was only in late January that India started seeing cases, and media started reporting a lot more actively around it, and it became possible that India may also have cases.

We, then look at periods between February and March, from the time the lockdown was announced and a lot of companies went to work from home, until all the way to the last week's data points.

When we look at the overall growth of television viewership in India during this phase of lockdown, it jumped by 43%. Until last week it was 40%. That is huge. The growth is across states, whether we take Punjab and Haryana which is at 53%, or a low lying market like Rajasthan which is at 72%. Maharashtra is at 39% and Tamil Nadu at 39%, which is already a high TV viewing market. Uttar Pradesh is at 49% and West Bengal at 30%. Anywhere you cut it, we're talking about very high viewing.

When we look at the overall growth of television viewership in India during this phase of lockdown, it jumped by 43%. Till last week it was 40%. That is huge. The growth is across states, whether we take Punjab and Haryana which is at 53%, or a low lying market like Rajasthan which is at 72%. Maharashtra is at 39% and Tamil Nadu at 39%, which is already a high TV viewing market. Uttar Pradesh is at 49% and West Bengal at 30%. Anywhere you cut it, we're talking about very high viewing.

What is happening is that- everybody's under lockdown inside their homes. Therefore, what is called in our industry as non-prime-time, has grown. Overall, across India, it has increased by 79%. Within Hindi speaking markets, it has increased by 95%. In southern markets, there was already a habit of non-prime-time viewing, which was significantly higher, and it too grew by almost 60%.

So, across the day, we saw an increase in time spent on TV. It was already high for prime-time, and now it's grown very high for non-prime-time too. People have started watching TV almost as soon as they wake up. In some markets, we have witnessed the viewing starting at four in the morning. In some markets, we have seen TV viewing until 2 AM at night. So, it's almost continuous.

As a screen of the household, we have to see that, for example- news is being watched by kids and kids shows are being watched by parents. The household is viewing television together. Even when we look at mega cities, a lot of recent viewing is coming from there. We witnessed a high growth from Mumbai, Delhi and other big megacities. Urban has grown more than rural. Men and women's viewership has grown equally.

NCCS-A has seen a large growth in their television viewing habits. Even the young audience has seen a growth of 15% to 24%. The growth is across sectors. TV has become a place where people turn to escape boredom. News used to be 7% of total television. It peaked to 21% and is now at about 16%. GEC used to be at 53%. It's a little bit lower now at about 43%. But, movies have gone up, kid’s genre has stayed almost consistent and news has gone up significantly. Those numbers are big things, as people are spending more time in their home, they are looking at television more often. They are seeing much more channels too. The earlier average was down to 16, now it has grown to 22 to 23 channels.

People watching TV all seven days a week used to be in its late 30s (percentage-wise), is now in its higher 40s at almost 50%. It means, 50% of the homes watch TV seven days of the week. We can say, television has become the centre of attention in homes. In big cities, viewing has gone from 4.5 hours; or from 4 hours and 14 minutes to 6 hours, and even higher in some markets.

It's not everybody who may be working from home. Some people, who are at home, may not have the physical arrangements to work at home, and they cannot go to work. So, they're spending their time watching television.

What kind of operational challenges did you face during this crisis? How did you tackle this?

We took a slightly earlier call before the lockdown and went into a work from home mode. We realized that many of our industry peers are doing similar things in India. We also realized the risk, so we first bought in safety measures into the office. We reduced the number of people in the office and at our various workplaces. And then, we just moved out completely.

The first thing you understood was, not everybody's house has great internet. Therefore, we got to try and get them to have that. We use remote VPN connections to get people connected. We make sure that people have the money to pay for the recharges of all their phones and computers. There was a 24X7 help desk set up for any crisis that might happen with any individual. We set it up on four parts. One is for the IT services, to keep the services up and running because we are also connected with so many homes across India which measure television, Therefore, we needed to make sure that those homes are running and they are working. Our call centre and people in-charge of the job, would constantly call and ping them to make sure they are okay, and things are working well for them.

The next step was to make sure our staffs' systems are running because we crunch a lot of data every day and we have to make sure that data can be crunched. We made sure that the places where we have our services, which are in Baroda and Bangalore, our back-end servers had the ability to run. The government was kind to give them permission, as they saw us as an essential service working for the media industry. They gave permission for a few people to be at work and to do this.

We also made sure that medical safety is there for all staff members. We put-out certain guidelines, because some people wanted to go back home, some wanted to stay back, exactly where they are. We undershoot some people may travel. So, we made sure that people are safe and healthy, that is really important. And then there is the emotional component. We have kept the people busy, engaged with online games, online coaching, playing the guitar, doing yoga classes, art and drawing, etc.

We changed our office timings, which initially were from 9:30 AM to 6:30 PM, to 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM. We feel, because people are at home, they have little more responsibilities now. Especially women felt that if they are at home, they should contribute to any workload that they may have at home. Then we also made sure that we stayed connected. We've given people time off during the week when we felt that there was a high amount of stress. I just declared a holiday last Friday and asked employees to take the workload off of them.

BARC will complete five years on April 29. We'll have an online celebration then.

With the re-launch of Ramayana and Mahabharata on Doordarshan, we have witnessed huge popularity of Mythological show genre. How much has Doordarshan contributed to overall viewership growth in GEC, and how has the re-launch helped Doordarshan grow in the last four to five weeks?

Doordarshan has become the number one channel in terms of Hindi speaking markets, higher than any other competitors. It became the number one channel. It went to the apex position on the back of Rayamayana first. Then Mahabharat added to it, and eventually the other shows which they brought back from the library. If you remove the effect of Doordarshan in Hindi GEC, the rest of the GEC grew only by 5%.

The overall growth of Hindi GEC is by 25%, Doordarshan alone contributed to 20% of the growth. It has been the driver of that growth, especially Ramayana.

I'm willing to bet at if you weren't born before 1986 when Ramayana came in, and you have heard about it from your parents and family members or read about it, you'd be interested to watch it. Also, let us not forget that we are living in a time that is very taxing, emotionally. So, the show became not just mythology or a great story, it became a bit like a de-stressor. You can use the story to uplift your spiritual mood and your confidence. That's why it worked.

When it started, it had three or four advertisers. It’s gone 14 fold to 42 advertisers. Mahabharata started with two advertisers and went to 24 advertisers. People really lapped it up and shows have been big drivers.

Overall, Hindi GECs have done well. A few of these GECs, which used to be on Free Dish, like Sony Pal, Colors Rishtey and a few others, they transited at the end of March or beginning of April. During COVID-19, they decided not to charge and they went free. And they saw a big growth in that period. And GECs are continuing to see growth. People are checking different programs, especially non-prime-time.

The prime-time viewing habit could be what it was, or it may have been dampened down because if you've seen all the shows, you cannot repeat them. People started watching a lot of the shows that they were able to catch up at non-prime-time. Some of the GECs also played earlier mythological that they had, by catching on onto the trend and seeing people's mood and building around that.

In the south, the GECs remain strong, they haven't got as impacted as in Hindi. All the four-five languages in the five states, GECs have remained around the line of movies. In the Hindi belt, some movie channel started doing better, and they have done better over time. That's principally coming on the way they plan their movies. Some of them brought some new movies in. Overall, movie viewing has also gone up.

If you go to the period when people started working from home and then moved into lockdown, news saw a big rise. Then came movies. Ramayana came around that period too, and we saw that as a third curve coming out there. Now, I could say that there's a bit of stability in this week and perhaps also in the coming week, in terms of genres holding the position where they are right now. These numbers may not be growing week on week, but they are much higher from before. And that contribution is coming because of what we do in our free time at home. We may have had a prime time habit, but what do we do during non-PrimeTime? TV is filling that gap.

How has all of this impacted the advertising volume?

It's not a great time for advertising. We have got so much viewing, but much less clutter. Until March 31, the closure of the Indian fiscal year, there was an advertising growth happening largely because there were contracts in place. In April, as the new fiscal year began, we saw a nosedive. After that, we've now seen it flatten out.

There were about 1400 advertisers in January and about 1000 advertisers now. It's down by 400 advertisers. The ones who are advertising are what we call as the 'essentials basket'. It's food services, personal care and hygiene. Also, banking and financial services, and some of it is government, who is promoting either the app or it's giving cautionary and educational messages around COVID-19, like how to take care of yourselves from the virus.

We've also seen an interesting trend. About 14% of the ad messages carry something about COVID-19. Here I’m not talking about government advertising, but the private sector advertising. Brands are trying to build on the goodwill. I believe as the supply chain opens up, FMCG and essentials basket will grow. The essential basket has already grown almost by 15% in the last two to three weeks. It's not a high volume, but it's grown. Now we have to see how the next two to three weeks go after the supply chain opens up. Many of these brands will advertise again.

Another interesting trend that we've seen in recent times is that, brands like Unilever, Reckitt Benckiser or Amul’s ads on kids programs and has grown. It is because the parents are watching these shows with the kids. Kids are at home; they don't always want to see the news, therefore the parents who are together with the kids, will sit and watch their programs with them. I think that's smart marketing being done.

One more recent trend is, some of the OTT players have come back with advertising because it's a great opportunity for them. We do a report which we release every Thursday, and the last edition we released with Nielsen, studies Smartphone usage. From the report, it’s very clear that there's a growth in entertainment and news, both genres. The news grew really fast and hard on Smartphones, then comes entertainment. Now a lot of that has moved towards movies, especially movies people haven't seen or series which they haven't seen. The growth is both in international as well as in regional. Obviously languages are doing better.

In February this year, BARC announced that it is planning to increase the panel size to 55,000 homes. Is the plan still on track?

We now need to redo the plan, because, for one, our boxes are not made in India. We've got to wait until the shipping lines open for these boxes to come in. We don't know what transitions we are allowed to make in India because we have to travel around the country. There is a process in which we do that. We do broadcast India first, which is an estimation of television viewing, and then we place the last tranche of these boxes.

We are working on how we will do the estimation of television, in terms of size. We do that every year, and we need to do it this year too. We were scheduled to it last year, but we are trying to do a joint industry initiative. At this point in time, we will do a TV estimate and we are hoping to get that out somewhere between August and September.

So, we have pushed back the progression of the boxes. Frankly, that does not put at risk anything in our business. We are sample-based. A sample is aligned to the seven core variables that account for television viewing, which is the spoken language, state group, town class, household size, NCCS, pop strata etc., mode of the signal received- cable, DTH or Free Dish. Based on that, we continue to represent the sample of India. Our reporting is accurate within the range that we prescribed. It's certified and continues to be certified.

Obviously, when the lockdown is lifted, we don't imagine that we can just go out there and place boxes. There's going to be a process, a gradual transition, and we'll go about it. The first thing we'll do is- boxes are mechanical and electrical functional appliances, they have some failure. Therefore, few boxes will go off and they have to be replaced. Normally in our business, we never report all the boxes, because we have to make provision for some things to go right or to go wrong. We only report a sample size, which is reasonable and accurate and reflects the industry.

So, now we will first re-estimate the TV audience size and then we will go on to place new boxes, as and when they are available. We don’t have a horizon now, for when this will happen. We communicated to the government that we've got to time-shift the plan and they understand that there is nothing anybody can do at this point of time.

What are the other things BARC is expected to do once this lockdown is over?

We now started co-reporting TV and Smartphone viewing. The one project that we will certainly do is multi-screen. We are working with some members in the industry, to be able to report content that's on TV and the content which may be seen on other devices, to the extent that the industry participates and the extent to which we can make this work with technology. We used to have a panel called premium homes, which used to report on the household level. We recently released the individual-level data.

We remain committed to some of the points that we made in February when we shared our plan. There has to be a time shift because this is something that nobody anticipated. We do not know when the when we bounced back to normal. Importantly, we are an industry-funded body. If advertising in the industry doesn't do well, BARC cannot do all its activities. We've already started undertaking many significant cost cuts. We will make sure that we remain financially healthy and viable, and our rating system remains accurate, dependable, and completely valid.

How much do you think the COVID-19 will derail our growth this year?

You should visualize that we will have zero growth, as far as advertising goes. It's a paradox. We never had a year of higher content. It's one of the biggest years of content. And, it's probably going to be parallel, the lowest year of monetization. That the unfortunate aspect. Many categories will de-grow. But, I am personally an optimist, and I believe that the Indian entrepreneur and companies based in India will push really hard for a rebound, as long as they are allowed to keep the supply chain going, without risking the society. I think that's really important. It's a balance of managing health and managing the economy. It's not an easy situation. It's a hard act to walk on. We release the currency because we know this helps our customers and our constituents, to be able to monetize their efforts, out there on a daily basis.

Therefore, believe that advertising will come back. Some category will come back first, like the essentials basket. Some categories may take a really long time. A big sporting event, like IPL that got postponed, and we hope that some of the sporting events will pick up in the second part of the year. It's very hard to predict. It's a tough year. I believe keeping optimism going, being smart and being cautious while planning the business is important. The industry must survive and stay collected together at this point in time. That is simply the most important thing.