Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: The Bhojpuri plug

MEDIA SCOPE

It is called the 'people like us' trap. At some point the men and women running creative businesses start believing that their target audience is 'people like us.'

This is happening to Hindi cinema. It seems to to be blinded by the Rs 150 an Indian multiplex viewer pays and $7-12 the overseas one does for a ticket. As a result, it is losing out on swathes of the domestic market for films in B- & C-class towns. Not too many of the big hits in 2007, except perhaps for Chak De India! have worked across Hindi-speaking markets. Bheja Fry or Partner, some of the other big Hindi hits, just don't register with small town audiences. Sreedhar Pillai, an expert on the south Indian film business, confirms that this is true for Tamil films as well. If a film works in Chennai, Malaysia, Singapore and (these days) Japan, production companies are not interested in the rest of the state.

At the recent FICCI-Frames conference, I asked a bunch of Hindi film scriptwriters why they were losing the B- & C-class audiences. One of them responded that since the multiplex audience was upmarket, they did not want to pull down the quality of what they did by writing films for B- &C-class audiences. You could argue that the quality of cinema you watch has nothing to do with the town you live in. If someone paid Rs 150 to watch it in a multiplex in south Mumbai, it doesn't make Tashan a good film or the consumer an upmarket one.

The point is: are film companies missing long-term gain for low-hanging fruit? Some part of what they are doing is in reaction to the past. India sells a world-beating 3.3 billion tickets a year according to PricewaterhouseCooper's Global Media & Entertainment Outlook. However, since our ticket prices are amongst the lowest in the world, the market remains small and unprofitable. Multiplexes take the average ticket price up from Rs 20 to Rs 150 or $3.5, as film companies like to tell investors. This has prompted production companies to focus only on the Rs 150 audience. So, an entire generation of scriptwriters is churning out, some very good films, albeit for 'people like us.'

The fact is a large audience exists outside of metro-India; one that the digital screens being rolled out in thousands are reaching out to. It is an audience that buys Chinese DVD players, rents VCDs for Rs 5 a day and is driving the double-digit growth of cable and DTH. This audience, which earlier consumed a lot of Hindi films, is now increasingly finding its succour in Bhojpuri, Marathi or Bangla cinema. This came across strongly in research that my class of 79 students at the Mudra Institute of Communication Ahmedabad (MICA) did in March this year. Their rough estimates put the box-office gross of Bhojpuri cinema at Rs 500 crore.

That Bhojpuri is filling a gap left wide open and yawning by Hindi films is just being noticed. Reliance Adlabs and PVR now play Bhojpuri films at some of their metro screens. But these are exceptions, not the rule. Across production, distribution and retail, the film industry has done a fantastic job of cleaning up its act. However, it seems to have forgotten a lesson that every MNC coming into India learnt the hard way "" this is a high-volume, low-value market. Do cater to the Rs 150 a ticket chappie, but remember the gold really lies at the bottom of the pyramid, when you can get 200 million Bhojpuri-speaking people to watch a film again and again at Rs 50 a ticket.

Indian advertising had fallen into the same trap some years back when copywriters sitting in Mumbai and Delhi were completely out of touch with consumers in the faster-growing Tier-II and III markets. That is when people like Piyush Pandey and Prasoon Joshi came in to bring the small-town 'tadka' to mass media communication and helped connect consumers to advertising. That is probably what will happen with films. As revenues from B- & C-class towns start showing up on the balance sheets of companies such as UFO Moviez and Pyramid Saimira, the production firms will start looking for scriptwriters plugged into small-town sensibilities. Till then the mention of Bhojpuri cinema will only have sneer value.

The author is a media consultant and author of The Indian Media Business. She can be reached at vanitakohli@hotmail.com