'The show Financial Quotient will help women make the right choices for themselves'

With an aim to empower its women audience financially, CNBC-TV18, an English business news channel, is launching a special series titled ‘Financial Quotient.’ The show aims to equip women in their journey towards financial freedom. Season 1 of the show goes live on Friday, September 3, 2021.

The channel has roped in two leading brands for the show - Zebpay and Aditya Birla Sun Life AMC Ltd. While keeping women audience at the heart of the conversation, the show plans to target all stakeholders. 

The network is going the extra length to promote this property via a comprehensive marketing plan. "Fund Your Dreams. Fund Your Freedom. It’s Your Time!” – the central thought of the show has been seamlessly integrated within all elements created for television, social, digital, trade, etc.

To drive scale and visibility, the channel has brought together the leading faces of CNBC-TV18 to share their ideas of financial freedom and fulfilling their dreams with its audience through a massive on-air and social campaign. 

To build connect on social media and to keep the buzz going, they have partnered with the topmost influencers in the finance, investments and business spaces, namely Rachana Ranade, Pranjal Kamra and Malini Agarwal a.k.a Miss Malini, to talk about what financial independence means to them and also discuss aspects like driving one’s own business etc. The channel will also be deploying social media polls with an interesting set of questions, to gauge popular sentiments amongst the audience with respect to financial planning & investments.

The campaign will be sustained with the launch of a mascot – Ms. FQ – which is a quirky and fun take on the show. The mascot will share key takeaways for our audience after every episode. The network is confident that this holistic plan will further equip the show to win a million hearts when on air.

In a conversation with exchange4media, Shereen Bhan, Managing Editor, CNBC-TV18 talks about the new series ‘Financial Quotient’, content across news channels, BARC data impact on content planning, and much more

What led to the launch of the Financial Quotient (FQ) series? Please tell us more about the content of the show and the idea behind it?

CNBC-TV18 has always stood as a thought leader and a content leader. We have always focused on putting forward innovative programming every quarter, and we have done this for the last 20 years of our existence. This is not a new space for us; many years ago we had done a series called 'What Women Really Want.' The series was about real women, not just women CEOs, focusing mainly on the challenges they face and the struggles they have to deal with while balancing work and home. Our effort at that point in time was to try and give a voice to women who were professionals, trying to get them to share their stories with the hope that it would create real conversation and real dialogue.

What are the key objectives of this programming?

Women's empowerment is linked very closely to financial empowerment and financial independence. Financial Quotient is a programme that will help women access the right kind of information to make the right choices for themselves. This programme will bring together various issues, and not just about stock market or investing. Instead, the show will talk about inheritance law, retirement planning, maternity planning, and a whole gamut of issues. It will be much more than a women's show as it will address issues from the perspective of a family unit. If we want to have more women in the workforce and empower more women to be financially independent, we need to get all stakeholders on board to encourage that. That's the overarching principle for us to be able to launch the show.

Additionally, the way we have branded the look and feel of the show is breaking away from all the stereotypes. Financial Quotient is a show where women take the centre stage.

Can you tell us about the content of the show?

Every week, we will take up different issues; as I said, financial planning, retirement planning, maternity planning, and inheritance law are some of the topics that we will discuss in the show. There will be experts relevant to that conversation. They don't necessarily all have to be women, but they will be experts relevant to the discussion and the subject that we intend to take up in that particular week. We also plan to focus on having real-life champions and real-life case studies.

As I pointed out, it will be a diverse show that will look at all aspects of how women can be financially empowered and financially independent and how they can use that independence to make the right choices for themselves.

Who is the target audience of this show?

We are looking at young women professionals, mid-career professionals; especially women who go through the phases like marriage, maternity, etc. We are also looking at women in the 40-plus category who've already been working for a while and possibly looking at the next phases of their life.

Every week we will address issues that will be relevant to a specific target audience. Though women will be at the heart of the conversation, our effort will be to include all stakeholders as part of this dialogue.

Has there been any research done for this show?

There is no specific research that we commissioned. But we have some feedback. This is an issue close to us as a brand, and we have championed it for many years. Since the time we did ‘What Women Really Want’, women's participation in the workforce has only declined; things have gotten worse, not better. We are continuing to champion that cause, and this is just our most recent effort to take that conversation forward.

It's not based on any specific research, but it is based on insights. For instance, the World Economic Forum's gender gap report shows how bad things are in India and the fact that they've gotten progressively worse over the last few years. So as a responsible media brand, we want to highlight conversations that will hopefully lead to an improvement. The channel has women in leadership roles, but that's not why we have chosen to take this forward. But I believe that the channel looks at content in a much more diverse way today than we did maybe a decade ago. This is our effort to create more diverse and inclusive content.

Why, according to you, Indian news channels do not have much content around financial issues concerning women?

As far as content is concerned, news channels across India follow the herd mentality. Unfortunately, it's the same stuff that we see across TV screens, and very few channels have come up with new programmes on new categories, brands, or new content platforms.

But CNBC-TV18 has always stood for that. We have created content across different platforms for different communities. For instance, India's longest-running show on startups and entrepreneurship is a CNBC-TV18 property called 'Young Turks', launched 19 years ago when nobody on television or otherwise talked about startups! We have always been ahead of the curve and always thought about nurturing different communities with actionable information and this is another attempt to be able to do that.

Our DNA has been clear; we are a purpose-driven organization with purpose-driven content. We want to be relevant to our audience and relevant to the constituency engaged with this brand. And that constituency includes women, so why should we not do something pertinent to women?

How much has the elimination of BARC viewership data impacted content planning? How has the process changed?

Honestly, we have never designed our content for ratings. We have created our content for our audience, who have always been the driver of our decisions in the newsroom. Rating is an outcome of the effort that goes into putting programming together. It is not necessarily the input or the primary input to design programming.

Also, I think there are more avenues of getting feedback from the audience on what they like or dislike. So there's enough information out there coming into us to tell us and help us understand what our viewers want, and more importantly, what's working. We have never been ratings-driven. I think that's just the wrong way of approaching things. We have always addressed our viewers' needs and tried to be as relevant to our viewers by giving them credible content that helps them make better choices.

How does the newsroom at CNBC-TV18 look like after the second lockdown?

The newsroom was not severely impacted because news media came under the special category, so we still had some people coming to the office. Teams are working in silos and intermingling in a restricted way from a safety perspective. But it's good to be back and see one another physically. Even through the pandemic, when we moved 90% of our staff to work from home, we didn't let it become a constraint. We used that as an opportunity. Last year, we launched CNBC-TV18 Clutter Breakers, which was a whole new set of programming. The idea behind launching a brand new programming line-up, which helped people understand the changes during the pandemic, was important as there's already so much gloom and doom in the atmosphere, and even our employees were feeling demoralized. We were one of the few channels that experimented with things in new ways and launched new programmes during the pandemic.