Partha Sinha: the idea worth carrying forward

How will success be coming out of the pandemic? When we talk about success, it will be the story of coming out of the pandemic. That would possibly make a very important story. So when I joined Times of India on 24th of March 2020, and it was the second day of the lockdown, and because of the lockdown, we thought our biggest challenge would be to be able to get the paper to the reader and make sure that if they don't get the physical paper, then through our digital outreach, we at least give them the news. So that we thought would be our biggest challenge. But soon we figured out that it's not just us. The society's biggest challenge was the whole phenomenon called fake news.

Massive fake news was getting spread around that newspaper is a carrier of the virus. When it comes to virus and public health, we can't go to the rooftop and shout, saying that no, no, don't worry about anything. Because that's not us. That's not Times of India the brand. We are a very holistic kind of brand, and we care for India, and we care for how India behaves and believes. We figured out that's only a small part of the fake news problem. The biggest fake news problem was that people were getting paranoid thanks to fake news and taking wrong decisions because of fake news. So one of our primary objective was to try and restore the whole veracity and trustworthiness of news. We did many programs which finally led to fact checker.

You know, right now, Times of India runs the biggest fact checker. So, because we believe that people in society deserve to get news which is authentic and which has got veracity. Without veracity, news is a dangerous thing because news cannot be driven by commercial agenda or political agenda or even at times, you know, malicious and evil agenda. Pandemic kind of underlined it and people realized that what kind of price they were paying because of fake news. I mean, they say consumer generated content is good, not for news. Consumer generated content in news could be absolutely dangerous if it's not proven. If somebody doesn't do the fact check, if it's not authentic, somebody hasn't checked the veracity, that becomes absolutely dangerous.

So we use this time actually to pivot to make sure that we become source of trust. We have always been trying to achieve that. But that's why you will see that possibly the final Reuters report which came out, Times of India is number one in trust ahead of anything else ahead of BBC. One of the key learning that we had and we understood that not only the consumer or not only the reader, but also the customer, which is the advertiser, they miss out this environment of trust and veracity. And news, a good newspaper can always offer that. So we figured around that and changed our offering completely to make sure that anytime people come to Times of India, whether it's through the digital offering, whether it's through the physical offering,

we offer an environment of trust, both for the reader as well as for the advertiser. And that has been, that is the reason we could bounce back because our focus was singularly on that. Number one was that typically newspapers were slightly oblivious for the dominant narrative in social media and especially personal social media like group chats. We made sure we started culling those data and finding out that there are some wrong narratives going on. And we created articles to disprove those wrong narratives with facts and figures and, you know, authenticity. We not only started printing it on mainstream medium, we also started distributing across all those channels, which started generating that fake news to start with.

So then all of a sudden people started doubting anything which doesn't have the stamp of approval or the stamp of authority. So that was a big success. Digital with all said and done is a medium. It has to appeal to something which is fundamental to the reader's thinking or the consumer's thinking. The consumer started getting worried about the truthfulness of the news, the trust of the news. And they started looking for something they can, they can latch on. And we started giving it to them in all biteable sizes where they could at least get to something which has authenticated, which is truthful, which is structured. We actually could overcome that whole problem. And now today the newspaper circulation is back.

And the second wave, we never, we never faced a massive problem with that. I mean, unless and until there was a society which was locked down and there was a red zone because physically you can't get inside a red zone. But all the other places we didn't have the problem because we worked systemically towards killing rumors. And many brands have always asked me that, you know, how do we improve the trust score and all? So the point is trust is an earned score. You can be truthful to facts and figures. After that, whether the consumer trusts you or not will depend on the consumer's interpretation of whether he or she finds those facts and figures palatable, facts and figures acceptable in societal norms.

So all those things matter because, see, facts are inhuman and truth is emotional. I always say this. Our job is to help the consumer travel from facts to truth. And that happens if you are consistent. And that's what we did again during this period. And it proved very useful for us. This is a study which has been done by Nielsen. And I think it was first published by one of the large publishers, I think Google. So they did it together. It's a very interesting thing because how a combination of media works. There has not been very good studies. This study actually proved that the best combination as media entity is print plus digital. So if digital is preceded by print, then the impact of that goes up by four times.

So if digital is X and print is Y, the impact is X plus Y into four. It all boils down to how much you trust what you see many times in an environment which is trustworthy, which is print. The moment you get introduced to a concept, you see it many more times, you start believing it in more and more and more. Because you got introduced to it through a credible context. Now the moment the context is credible and today the possibly the smartest medium of distribution would be digital. And so the more and more you get to say it on digital, your original trust gets reinforced. So therefore the effectiveness of any campaign goes up four times if print and digital are combined. I think when you explain like this, it sounds obvious, but guess what?

People didn't think about it. I mean, somebody had to do a study, you know, to find this out. I've got tons of examples like Pine Labs by by you, of course, is a great example. You is very strong in digital medium, but they're very strong in print medium because their product is such that they need unconditional trust of people. Education is something for which you need unconditional trust of, you know, parents as well as the students. So I'm talking about all these new edge companies. We have seen it with many of phone launches, you know, the new edge phone launches because not for nothing they come on to print because eventually people end up buying on the digital channel or even if it's on the physical channel, they will do a search on digital.

So, but they're not, they're not fools to put the money upfront in print because the moment you put it on print, the desirability of the product goes to the roof. So at the end of the day, you need to establish something, whether it's desirability, whether it's trust, whether it's believability, whether it's passion or whatever it is. And then it gets very well built up through a digital distribution. So therefore print and digital together has worked for many, many, many brands. All our real estate brands, it works beautifully with print because the real estate industry, you know, what has been the contribution of Times of India. So, and again, not for nothing. In fact, increasingly a lot of FMCGs are coming back to print.

The FMCGs were the first to kind of desert print and increasingly they are all coming back because again, nobody gives them that, that kind of impact. You have to start with an impact. Your campaign has to start with an impact. It's not how many people are seeing it. It's what is happening to your objective. Here, I want to say something very clearly, which is again, this pandemic has showed us a very important difference. The difference between efficiency and effectiveness. How many people, how many times are all stories of efficiency? Effectiveness is what is finally happening to your objective. And we all work in marketing for effectiveness. We don't work for efficiency.

Efficiency is just one of the tools and it need not necessarily always lead to effectiveness. But effectiveness is something which is a combination of the kind of impact you are having on people's mind. After that, in with what frequency and how many times and what. But before that, if it doesn't create an impact in people's head, it will never be effective. One of the key thing which the pandemic showed us was that we need effectiveness in our communication and not just efficiency.