We want to be a platform-agnostic content provider: Worldwide Media CEO

The first challenge is convincing people and the second is scale, says Deepak Lamba

What was the trigger for changing WWM or Worldwide Media?

Two years ago when I joined, my mandate was growth. Filmfare, Femina, Lonely Planet, we have some great brands. But they are all magazines and it is a tough industry. (About 25 per cent of Worldwide Media’s revenues come from its magazine business. The rest of it, largely, comes from 60-odd events it does a year. The biggest of these is the Filmfare Awards) There are other platforms, like audio-visual, which are more efficient. The vision was to become a platform-agnostic lifestyle and entertainment content provider given that our brands are domain experts. You may be interested in reading about films, but perhaps not in a magazine.

So what did WWM do to that end?

My brief to the editorial was to think of the magazine as an executive summary and of online as a full book. There is no limit on what you can put online. There was a seven-eight month online workshop the entire edit team went through. They understood which stories work, which don’t. Facebook did a workshop with us on how to use the medium. And there was a new rule — you have to file at least one story a day. It is alright if you miss magazine articles. Earlier social media was used just for the heck of it and we did five-seven updates a day. That is up to 15 a day now.

And…

We started with Femina and Filmfare so that we could focus. The next one will be Grazia. Femina had 300,000 uniques and three million page views a month. Now we are three million uniques and 30 million page views a month (going by SimilarWeb). We will be happy if we hit 100 million page views, that is when we will dominate the space. The next is to have home-grown video shows. Our shoots are already on video. So there will be 15-minute videos on cooking or make-up. In Filmfare there is a bigger space to capture. Besides Hindi and the south we took the Filmfare Awards to Marathi and Bangla cinema. Both Femina and Filmfare have archival stuff which is a goldmine. Largely everybody talks of movies releasing now, that is the commodity content. But who can put together, say a list of the seven most badass villains of all time. That is what separates Filmfare from a hundred other sources offering film content.

This year Facebook wanted to be associated with Filmfare awards but the rights, inside the hall, belong to Sony. So we got Facebook on the red carpet or to show the stars practising. As a result Twitter came on board. Before the awards were aired we had already reached 284 million people. And this is only by WWM directly. There is the secondary reach we have through Jio, and other platforms. We power all film and travel content (through Filmfare and Lonely Planet) on Jio. We did 15 style videos for Flipkart using our Filmfare connections. Now Myntra wants to do that.

The impact on revenues and profits.

There is double-digit growth in topline and this is not from the traditional business. Two years ago digital was next to nothing as a proportion of my topline, it is now growing at 100 per cent. By the end of next year digital should be five per cent of our revenues.

But aren’t the rates on digital minuscule?

A lot of the advertising sold is bundled, that safeguards our budgets and increases them nominally. If you put together our website, Facebook and Twitter, the reach for a campaign could be four times. The size of the deal has increased from Rs 6 crore to Rs 23-24 crore (with events). So the jumps are bigger.

Why TV?

Digital, TV, they are all ways to reach more people. TV gives more revenues. Earlier in May we launched Famously Filmfare with Jitesh Pillai (editor Filmfare). It first comes on Jio and then 48 hours later on Colors Infinity. The show’s format will be replicated in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Bangla and Marathi. Nexa Journeys on AH1, a travel show, started airing on three Discovery channels. It is about five celebrities who took a road journey from Delhi to Bangkok via Myanmar and their process of self-discovery. Another show based on Good Homes (a WWM magazine brand) is in pre-production. We could be doing fiction with Femina and pushing it on any platform. The choice of platform will be decided with our partners. For example Maruti (which owns Nexa) and WWM decided on Discovery. We want to be a leading platform-agnostic content company. Filmfare Awards doesn’t sit on Zoom or Times Now but on Sony (WWM is part of the Times Group, and Zoom and Times Now among others are group brands). By April 2018 we will have launched seven shows.

The big challenges in shifting from pure print to being a neutral content company.

The first is convincing people, they still think you are rooted in magazines. The thinking is, if you like digital, why join a magazine company. The second challenge is scale. Events are the glue that keeps our magazine business together. We could push them from 60 to 120 but it will break the team’s back. The one Filmfare event is equal to 10 because it sits on television. There is no scale in activation events. We are thinking of a reality series with a fashion brand that is scale plus five times revenue.