How brands are leveraging changing content landscape on TV

The inaugural e4m Pride Of India South conference witnessed a panel of industry experts and observers engage in an interesting conversation on ‘Building Brands and Growing Business with Television.’

While the panel was chaired by Baagyalakshmi Nagarajan - Executive Director - Advertising Sales, Star Vijay, the others on the panel were Uttam Malani- Executive Director, Centuary Mattresses; Nandagopal Nair- Vice President & Head – Brand & Communications, V-Guard; Megha Jain- Vice President, Carat; Dr Sanjoy Das- COO, Fipola, and Laya Menon- EVP & Business Head, Bengaluru, Lodestar UM.

Megha Jain spoke about the trends emerging in television advertising in today’s world. She said, “What I see in TV that is emerging now is the change in the content landscape. From what we used to view and what we are viewing now are very different…And the other one that I'd like to talk about is television content consumption. It's not just on television. It is moved to multiple devices. It's moved to multiple formats. It is device agnostic completely; large format, small format, snippets on social media, OTT, YouTube, it's all available to the audiences.”

Uttam Malani established the importance of television as a powerful medium: “From brands perspective, television has always been the go-to medium. It's kind of one of the failsafe risk-averse media, so to speak, historically.” He spoke about how Covid disrupted viewership and trends seem to have changed around that for television advertising.

Meanwhile, Nandagopal Nair spoke about how television helped in expanding the business in the South. “Initially when we looked at the South, the medium of choice that came to us was television. The fundamental reason being, it gave us the operating leverage because, you know, you could actually use television because it reached out to almost 90% of your audience across these markets. And you had the flexibility of doing your campaigns in each of these either independently or cohesively.”

Baagyalakshmi Nagarajan, the Session Chair, concluded the discussion by saying, “Television is in the subconscious spending. When a brand wants to talk to the Indian masses, one of the things that will give them scale, which is a benchmark for success stories, is television. Television is ubiquitous to scale. And another thing which I am going to repeat here, television by its very nature of how we curate content, how we are able to say compelling story, lends itself to family viewing. This is the arc we continue and the trial of brands, television, and, of course, storytelling is here to stay for years to come.”