Speaker / Gateway

Mr. Alex Kuruvilla, a veteran of the Indian media and entertainment industry, made an interesting audio-visual presentation on “Media in the digital age” at the last meeting, describing how technology has “disrupted” not just media but the way in which people live, work and play. Mr. Kuruvilla, as Vrinda Rajgarhia said in her introduction, was MD of MTV India and was responsible for launching publications like Vogue, GQ, Conde Nast Traveller and AD Architectural Digest. In 2006, Mr. Kuruvilla began, NASA had launched a spaceship on a 7.5-billion-km. journey to Pluto, but the first images of the planet were received only in July, 2015.

When Conde Nast India was started in the same year, their mission was equally daunting: to build India’s most admired publishing company. The media world was ruled by the likes of the legendary Rupert Murdoch, one of the most respected media tycoons, who started News Corp at the age of 48; Sumner Redstone, who took over Viacom at the age of 64; and Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., who Figure this out: The ways in which the world has been ‘disrupted’ since 2006 was gifted The New York Times at the age of 41. The world’s top companies were dominated by those in the oil and gas, and banking sectors, with a single software company, Microsoft, at No. 3 and valued at a little under $ 300 billion. “And then, all of a sudden, the rug was pulled from under everyone’s feet and the world as we knew it changed forever,” Mr. Kuruvilla said.

Now, three of the top five companies by value are in software and technology. The combined market value of Apple, Microsoft and Google ($ 1.4 trillion) is almost twothirds of India’s GDP. What is even more remarkable and gratifying from an Indian point of view is that two of these are led by unassuming geniuses from Hyderabad and Chennai, Satya Nadella (Microsoft) and Sundar Pichai (Google). Their companies have a combined market capitalisation of $ 700 billion. And these days, the world is run by young geeks like Mark Zuckerberg who started Facebook when he was 20; Larry Page and Sergey Brin who started Google at 25; and Jack Dorsey who launched Twitter at 30. David Karp, another young lad, created Tumblr and later sold it to Yahoo, pocketing $ 200 million.

“In a little over a decade, these mavericks have created companies valued at almost ten times those created by the media companies of the three ageing media moguls I mentioned. No surprise then that more and more companies are wondering how to start thinking like a start-up! Technology disruption has changed the paradigm in media,” Mr. Kuruvilla pointed out. Even more revealing is the fact that Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate. And Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles! All of this has been made possible by the evolution of the cellphone from being an instrument to make and receive calls to one that performs multiple functions. Today, a smartphone acts as a television receiver, a bank, a shopping cart, a camera, a newspaper and a personal assistant, all rolled into one.

And there are over two billion smartphones in use with all these capabilities. Turning to Conde Nast, Mr. Kuruvilla says life there and at other media companies has become more complex but remains exciting. Editors create content not just for magazines but also for stories on websites, posts on Facebook, tweets on Twitter, images on Instagram and pictures on Pinterest. “However, all this hasn’t dented our magazine business, the lean-back, immersive, highly tactile experience of reading glossy magazines, which has withstood the digital onslaught… which newspapers, I believe, will be unable to do.” In the analog world, editors had the luxury of shooting, processing, printing and distributing fashion images in product life cycles that extended to months. But that has now been radically altered. Today, fashion images off the runway are posted on fashion platforms and even streamed live so that people can “shop the look” straight off a video. For instant gratification. In the good old days when he ran MTV, Mr. Kuruvilla said, the only way to watch videos was on television. If someone missed a show, bad luck. Today, it is easy to watch TV shows (or any other videos), “when you want it, where you want it and how you want it.” You Tube now has one billion users worldwide. And Making a point.

Mr. Alex Kuruvilla in the course of his presentation at the last meeting I have a question. Dr. Shailesh Raina lobs a query on the India- Pakistan talks every day, people watch hundreds and millions of hours on You Tube and generate millions of views. Netflix subscribers, on average, stream 77,000 hours of video every minute. Having left his audience in a daze with all these mindboggling statistics, Mr. Kuruvilla decided to slow things down by screening a series of films. One of the films showed how Conde Nast converts a magazine print fashion shoot into video content. While shooting magazine stories, they are also shooting for other formats, such as Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook and so on. Conde Nast has also entered the video medium through a platform called thescene.com, which has a channel equivalent for each of its magazine brands. Thus, it is possible to watch a GQ series, a Vogue story or a Traveller episode on the web or on mobile as easily as one can read these in the magazines. What about shopping? Once upon a time it used to entail a visit to a luxury store.

But today, every store and product is available at one’s finger-tips in the comfort of one’s home. Amazon receives 4,310 unique visitors every minute – a figure that a traditional brick-and-mortar store would clock in ten days. Conde Nast has therefore decided to enter the ecommerce space with its own platform, style.com. Readers can read about products and also shop from their magazines and websites. “Our vision has changed and today it is to make Conde Nast India’s most admired new-age media company,” Mr. Kuruvilla said, pointing out that “taking a risk has become the rule and not the exception… because change is always around the corner.” Moving away from digital disruption, he then spoke about two Conde Nast projects that are close to his heart. The first is “Vogue Empower” which brought on board over 150 personalities to contribute their time, money, talent and resources to further the cause of women’s empowerment. Among those who signed on were Sudha Murthy of Infosys, Barkha Dutt, A.R. Rehman, Aamir Khan, Deepika Padukone and Tanya Godrej.

The result was three films that garnered a reach of over 26 million; 180 pledges; over $ 5 million worth of earned media; and a women’s empowerment journalism award. Mr. Kuruvilla then screened the film on domestic violence described as his personal “pledge”. The second film, yet to be released, is part of Conde Nast Traveller’s fifth anniversary celebrations and from the series “Journeys of a Lifetime”. Answering questions on Indian media and television, Mr. Kuruvilla concluded, “Television is also going to see a major challenge. People are watching TV on their phones, laptops and other devices. The Star Group is spending a lot of money promoting their ‘Hotstar’ app on the mobile platform. They realise that that there is where the future is. The shift is inevitable and the consumption of digital media is set to change.”