To stay relevant, Print needs to reinvent: Ashish Pherwani

The reach and circulation of regional print media is back to almost 85% of the pre-Covid levels of circulation, except in larger cities for English newspapers, said Ashish Pherwani, Media and Entertainment Leader, EY LLP, in a live chat with Kailashnath Adhikari , MD, Governance Now.

Pherwani, however, said that monetizing digital subscriber from the subscription point of view and convincing an advertiser to pay the same rate for physical or digital subscribers is a challenge and emphasized on clubbing of data bases of physical and digital subscribers.

“There is need for fundamental change in how advertising is sold in print and how we can club data bases of physical and digital subscribers to grow revenue. To me its opportunity lost in a big way. Something needs to be done fundamentally for print to grow in future in terms of ad revenue otherwise circulation will be a challenge,” Pherwani added.

He also said that print is going to get its circulation going and spend the next year or two in building it up. “We saw many people trying digital newspapers for the first time, even those having smart phones. Some will continue with that mechanism and some will come back to reading physical newspapers, some will move to digital medium for the quality offered,” he said.

While responding to a question on if television will get back its AdEx to pre-Covid levels, now that original content is back, he said TV will recover 100 per cent and not get dethroned for several years. It has a reach of 800 million people in our country.

Pherwani said it is not as much Covid impact on genres but the double whammy that it has faced due to NTO and Covid where certain sectors have been impacted. “I am hoping it will recover by end 2021. In India, we have seen that it’s very tough to bring back rates once they have gone down. For broadcasters who have done discounting in a big way it will take them longer than the usual 6 months or so.”