Mid Day zeal

How the small and resilient newspaper honed its strengths to compete against rivals with deep pockets.

On June 26, Mid Day, the Mumbai-born tabloid which has spread out to Pune, Bangalore and New Delhi in the last three years, turned 30. Like most thirty-year-olds, India’s only major English daily distributed in the afternoon has come to believe that it has found its calling. The paper decided to celebrate the epiphany with the zeal of a new convert.

Copies of the 200-page anniversary issue priced at Rs 10 hit newsstands and entered workplaces in Mumbai on that day. It carried vignettes of young Indians going about their work — from a bookseller selling old hardbacks in Kolkata to a Meghalaya girl waving traffic in Bangalore.

 

Titled “India 9-to-5”, the project was the brainchild of Mid Day Multimedia Managing Director Tariq Ansari. “Since Mid Day serves the information and entertainment needs of young urban professionals in the middle of the day, a visual history of cities during work hours would make a lot of sense,” Mid Day reported Ansari as saying. Mid Day followed up the anniversary issue with a contest launched in the first week of July, titled “India 9-5”, which urged young professionals from the four cities where the paper is present to click photos that capture urban India’s working ethos and post it on www.mid-day.com with a caption.

Amid all the fanfare, not many readers and media observers noticed the pain behind the war-paint. In the same month (June), Mid Day Multimedia’s news media subsidiary, Midday Infomedia, reported its first loss (before interest and tax) of Rs 14.2 crore. It houses the newspaper and the loss reflected that all was not well with the flagship. Revenues had declined as advertising sales were down. But Mid Day was not alone. All newspaper companies are known to have taken a hit in 2008-09.

Mid Day’s financial distress, symptomatic of a larger challenge facing the newspaper industry, is only one side of the story. Unbeknownst to many, there is another side of how a small yet resilient newspaper has honed its strengths, eking out a bold go-to-market strategy on the way.

Punitha Arumugam, the group CEO of Madison Media, articulates what many sector experts feel: “I think Mid Day is a fantastic survival and success story. It has held on its own against the might of The Times of India, Hindustan Times and DNA. You must realise that it is not a company with deep pockets when compared to the big publishing companies. The strategy it has adopted to stand up to the competition is commendable.”

Mid Day, to be sure, has slipped to the third spot from the second in its home turf of Mumbai. According to Indian Readership Survey 2009, Round 1 figures, Mid Day trails The Times of India and Mumbai Mirror.

In search of oneself
“We don’t care what you are reading in the morning. But in the middle of the day, you come to us,” says Ansari, seated in his glass cabin, with editions of Mumbai’s morning newspapers strewn on his table. It is only in the last one year that Mid Day has become vocal about its positioning.

From 2006 till early this year, the paper was busy populating the morning as well as the afternoon time slots to keep up with the fierce completion from DNA, HT and Mumbai Mirror, launched within a span of months in Mumbai four years ago.

Recalls a senior marketing executive who worked with Mid Day at the time: “The paper suffered during those tough years. The new entrants took away a number of our clients with aggressive and, at times, reactive pricing.” Reeling under added print and distribution costs owing to two separate circulations since 2006, Mid Day has been forced to think of a niche that could stop the revenue erosion. This birthed the idea of targeting the YUMPI (young urban mobile professionals of India) segment.

Even though the exact market size in terms of ad revenue of the YUMPI segment in metros is not known, going by demographic estimates, it influences more than 60 per cent of the combined Rs 3,500-crore Mumbai and Delhi markets.

Manajit Ghoshal, CEO of Mid Day Infomedia, explains, “For young working professionals, morning is newspaper time, evening is TV time. The most productive time during the day that professionals spend in offices is a virgin territory and that’s where our tagline, ‘make work fun’ comes in.” He adds that morning newspapers offer no differentiation. This is where being the only afternoon tabloid makes good sense. But it has to reflect through distribution, marketing and content strategies.

In January this year, Mid Day closed its morning edition and redirected 50,000 copies distributed in the morning to its afternoon edition. As for distribution reach, Mumbai has only 40 per cent of circulation reaching offices, since it is much in demand across city points. In the new cities, however, “Ninety-five per cent of distribution goes directly to offices,” says Ghoshal.

While the company has built Mumbai’s afternoon distribution network from scratch, Ansari says Mid Day was the first paper to think of hawking at traffic signals — it had to come up with new ways to reach working professionals in other cities.

Bangalore, which figures high on the YUMPI scale, has Mid Day’s target segment concentrated in select software IT parks. Mid Day distributes 55,000 copies in Bangalore. “We did research and found that thousands of buses leave different destinations and take IT professionals to offices. The average commuting time is 50 minutes to an hour. Most listen to radio. Morning newspapers are so bulky, so they don’t usually carry them. So we distributed our paper in buses. We got around 20,000 copies into Infosys,” beams Ghoshal. Other than buses, Mid Day installed vending machines inside offices.

At the same time, the absence of an organised afternoon distribution network in Delhi made the terrain difficult for Mid Day. Ghoshal admits that the going has been tough in Delhi: “Afternoon reading habits of Delhi are different from those of Mumbai. We are not banking on Delhi Metro for distribution as we are focused on offices in line with our strategy.” He informs that the Delhi edition will take one or two years from now to break even.

While Mid Day’s content is much loved in Mumbai, the tabloid strategists had to leverage on strengths other than content to compete in markets like New Delhi and Bangalore, which have yet to develop a taste for Mid Day’s style of content delivery. More so, rivals like Mail Today and Metro Now, with their strong legacies, are hard to beat on content quality. Sniffing a battle on hands, Mid Day’s marketers have stepped up to deliver.

Marketing mettle
“We didn’t have the resources to compete with the big daddies, so we had to think out-of-the-box,” says Ghosal. Alarmed by a sudden spike in marketing spend in 2005-06, when the competition hit closer home, Mid Day marketers felt a deep urge to come up with a solution that could prove effective and yet save precious bucks.

That is how marketing concepts such as “Bollywood Lunch” and “Corporate Cricket League” were born. Spurred by the popularity of its Hit List section, that carries spicy causeries on Bollywood celebrities, the tabloid marketers figured that, on an average, more than ten small and big Bollywood films are released every month. Since producers spend good money on marketing of these movies, Mid Day could partake in some of the marketing spend by taking celebrities from these movies to the latter’s target audience. Needless to say, the paper would be marketing itself for free in the process.

“Our marketing executives often get puzzled. They wonder how a marketing activity can earn money when one is supposed to be spending on it,” Ghoshal chuckles. “Our entire marketing activities will either break even or end up as gross revenue earner for us this year.”

When it comes to innovative ideas for advertisers, media planners believe that Mid Day marketers go the extra mile. Madison’s Arumugam says, “In my experience, among all the publications, these are the guys who are willing to take risks in terms of creativity, in terms of making things possible for clients.” She recounts that when UTI Bank’s name was changed to Axis Bank, Mid Day had changed the tabloid to broadsheet keeping in line with the brand proposition.

When asked about the main focus areas for the publishing business, Ansari points out that the company is revving its web and mobile initiatives this year. While the web initiative is primarily for marketing for the near term, Ghoshal says that the paper aims to earn ad revenue from mobile subscriptions in the long term. Ansari informs that Mid Day has netted 150,000 SMS subscribers for news alerts already.

At the same time, it will be a while before Mid Day’s afternoon positioning pays off big dividends. As Arumugam points out, the differentiation of the afternoon segment has not happened as it is yet to see much activity. However, the market will explode if big players enter this space. Till that happens, Mid Day has enough time and room to establish its presence in this space.