Hindustan-e4m webinar: ‘Hindi heartland's media consumption evolving’

Jai Lala, Rajeev Jain and Mitesh Desai shared their perspective on the growth and opportunities in the small towns and rural areas at e4m and Hindustan Times’s webinar series - Naya Hindustan - Discovering the Hindi Heartland

exchange4media in collaboration with Hindustan Times organized a webinar series called ‘Naya Hindustan - Discovering the Hindi Heartland’ to understand from marketers and media experts the opportunities in the Hindi-speaking market and what it would take to win in such markets.

Chaired by Neeta Nair, Associate Editor, IMPACT, the panellists for the session were Jai Lala, CEO, Zenith, Rajeev Jain, VP, Marketing, DS Group, Mitesh Desai, Head Sales Excellence and Agency Partnerships, HT Media Group.

Commencing the session, Lala said a lot of marketing space is focused towards Bharat and in the areas between India and Bharat. “I wouldn't just attribute it to the pandemic, but it's been a trend which has been going on for the last probably five-seven years, where the focus is definitely shifting to the Hindi heartland. And India is basically divided into two parts, one is urban India and the second is what we call as Bharat. The essence of a lot of marketing space is now being focused towards Bharat and in between India and Bharat, we call it the ‘Rurban’. So, that's an area which has been of immense focus. And it's growing because that's where the real next phase of India's growth is going to come.

It's not that urban is all sort of maxed out. Urban continues to be a growth provider and there is a huge potential in the urban markets. Earlier, it used to be completely media dark, but now with the accessibility things have changed. With the advent of free TV, free dishes, TV channels, which reach out to them, you obviously had print, which was reaching out. And now with the advent of digital, we've seen the maximum growth which has happened in digital penetration is within this area. So, it becomes quite a lucrative market now to reach out to the consumers.”

“It’s very true that India's story is moving towards Tier 2-3 and rural areas. I will divide it into three categories basically - the towns with a 10 lakh-plus population, the towns with 1 to 10 lakh and the towns below 10 lakh. The penetration in the 10 lakh-plus population of any product is already quite high. It doesn't mean that there won’t be any further growth, there will be growth. But definitely the penetration of any product, the more we go down in the population strata is relatively lesser. So, definitely it gives more avenues for any marketer to push down the production in those areas for higher growth,” Jain said, while sharing a marketing perspective on the growth of tier 2-3 and rural markets.

Elaborating further on the factors that are driving the growth in Bharat, he explained, “The growth drivers for this may be various. One is that disposable income of rural and tier 3 towns population is also increasing. Second is that digital is also playing a very important role that more and more rural audiences are adopting digital now. Now OTTs are heavily penetrated and before OTT, satellite channels were there as such in rural areas. All those things have raised the aspirations of the consumers in tier 2 towns and when they have aspirations and the income level is also. And in fact, companies are reaching out to them. And I too agree that it’s not a phenomenon that started during the pandemic, it started before that. But it was accelerated further during the pandemic as the effect of pandemic was a bit lesser in the rural areas.”

Speaking about the media consumption habit of consumers in the Hindi-speaking markets, Desai shared, “Previously, what India does today, Bharat used to do it tomorrow. But not anymore. What we are seeing is the trends are moving on faster and sometimes in parallel. So it's no longer that we are looking at watching what the Metro towns or India is doing, and then replicating it somewhere else, but the trends are moving faster. In terms of media consumption, we're seeing that the Hindi Heartland is evolving significantly. So, on the surface, the trends are largely in line with any major metro. So, we are seeing increased adoption of digital platforms, which include digital news, entertainment platforms such as social media. Now, all this is essentially aided by low bandwidth costs and cheaper and more powerful mobile devices. Today, smartphones cost around 5000 roughly, which is the cheapest smartphone and we know that the bandwidth costs have come down.”

Sharing the brand perspective, Desai said: “We know that brands today are looking to partner with platforms which give them a full funnel source, like from creating awareness to building association and driving sales, and not just one media like just Print, which can’t contribute to all, it has to be a mix. When we talk about reach and impact, the critical elements to drive awareness, reaching the relevant cohorts is important. Brands are looking for platforms to source them to reach more accurately and are also seeking more accountability by measuring the reach and impact of campaigns. So that is something which is an additional layer on top of our ability to connect.”

He further claimed that the maximum number of IAS aspirants and engineers comes from the Hindi speaking belt. “And what has changed is that the COVID situation has only accelerated the adoption of digital platforms, not only the way people consume media, but also they bring digital platforms into various walks of life, such as education, shopping, content and entertainment consumption. However, what we saw was the fundamental need space for news and information of these markets essentially remained the same. And make no mistake that this belt churns out the most number of IAS aspirants, engineers in the country, besides being home to 50% of the population. So what we saw was markets like UP, Bihar, Jharkhand, which were relatively media dark, and therefore print media always played a significant role in the way Hindi Heartland has consumed news and information. The belt was always hungry for high quality news because of their aspiration to be in touch with politics, global news and in general knowledge. So taking cues from that, at HT media, we've kept pace with evolving consumer behaviors and evolve both print and digital platforms with features which are very intuitive, actually we've been inspired by the way the digital media is consumed, whether social media or anything else.”