South Asia Conference

INMA South Asia Conference

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Agenda

>> Update: Click here for South Asia Conference delegate list (as of August 2)

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Below is the programme as of August 3. The programme will be updated daily and is subject to change.

Day 1: Tuesday, August 7

8.30-9.30
Registration and Welcome Coffee
Foyer, Sovereign, Le Meridien

Conference Moderator: Bhaskar Das, President and Principal Secretary to MD, The Times Group INMA South Asia Board of Director

9.30
Welcome and Overview
>> Sanjay Gupta, President, INMA South Asia, and CEO, Jagran Prakashan Ltd.

9.45
Inaugural Address
>> Ravi Dhariwal, President, INMA Worldwide, and CEO, The Times of India

10.00
Keynote: Succeeding In a Volatile Environment
It is well known that business, in general, and newspaper business, in particular, is going though multifaceted challenges led by technological disruptions resulting in inter-category migration of attention and revenue, shifting consumer preferences and attention deficit. This has resulted in every business model becoming suspect with the task of sustaining top-line growth and rationalizing middle-line becoming extremely complex. By addressing this inherent volatility in our operating environment, the keynote will set the tone for the conference.
>> Nandan M. Nilekani, Chairman, Unique Identification Authority of India, Planning Commission, Government of India

10.45
The New Growth Path and How to Get There
The emerging revenue growth path for news publishers has little to do with selling what's been sold in the past. It is about embracing e-commerce transactions, digital advertising networks, clubs and communities, cross-platform consumer memberships, private treaties, and becoming solution providers for advertisers weary of buying space. To pursue this revenue growth path requires a mindset shift and a re-imagination of what your brand represents to the market it serves. In this presentation, learn what publishers should be doing now to prepare for the seismic changes to come through 2015, particularly South Asia publishers seeing less digital disruption than global peers. South Asia's position in the global economy of ideas is both a strength and weakness, and learn about the opportunities that can be had soon by preparing now.
>> Earl J. Wilkinson, Executive Director and CEO, INMA

11.30
Tea Break

12.00
The Future of News
North - East - West - South or NEWS, its acronym, has been a dominant source of human cognition and enlightenment. The source of news, and its distribution, has always been evolving. However, over the last two decades, the ubiquitous-ness of technology and its resultant empowerment of an individual as a pro-sumer have metamorphosed both news-generation and its consumption in a significant way. This has raised issues about the "future of news" and its socio-economic implications. With anytime-anywhere news-generation and consumption, would formats be relevant in future? How will it affect the consumption-style and thereby the business models of news marketing companies who have multiple sources of incessant news generation? How will this impact the credibility of news in an increasingly trust deficit world? If mere up-dation is commodity then would up-gradation be an unfolding source of competitive advantage? Would commerce compromise on the impartiality of news? But, who decides on impartiality when every story is someone's agenda? Will news follow the protocols of the age of algorithms? Would media-snacking trivialise the gravitas of the Fourth Estate? This session would try to explore and answer many such questions through Speakers who have been successfully practicing the management of news for both socio-cultural platforms and for commerce.
>> Moderator: Jacob Mathew, Executive Editor, Malayala Manorama and President, WAN-Ifra
Panelists:
>> The Editor's Take: M.J. Akbar, Editorial Director, India Today and Headlines Today
>> From the Business Prism: Sanjay Gupta, CEO, Jagran Prakashan Ltd.

13.00
Lunch

14.00
Walking Through The Mind Of The Post-90 Born: “Creating A Newspaper That I Would Like To Read”
Media, in general, and news, in particular, serves multiple age cohorts with different experience-bands. But, never before in the history of mankind, has the generational divide been more conspicuous than today between the post-90 born and its previous generation. The catalytic agent for this generational divide is the accelerated pace of technological developments and its consequent impact on consumer behaviour. The spread of globalization - which is an expression of homogeneity of culture, aspiration and mongrelisation of living — amongst the post-90 has only further accentuated this divide. All media are getting cognizant of this but, have not yet been able to unravel the software that can decode the route to achieving the stickiness that they would love to. This will be a pioneering session that will include the post-90 born consumers who are leading this technology-led societal transformation and who are increasingly asserting their voice in society. A young journalist who has been experiencing this journey of adjusting to the soul of the new age consumer, will be interacting with five of these post 90-born (two boys and three girls) to explore their definition of news. And, its future consumption can be an eye-opener for current practitioners of the newspaper industry.
>> Moderator: Ashwamegh Banerjee, Journalist
Panelists:
>> Sourya Donkada, Student: Economics, Khalsa College
>> Aakash Kapoor, Student: B.Com, SRCC
>> Tuhina Kapoor, Student: B.Com, SRCC
>> Rajat Sakhuja, Student: Economics, SGTB Khalsa College
>> Vatsala Shrangi, Journalist

15.00
Winning the Ad Growth Challenge: It It a Plausible Model?
That, growing top-line in today's volatile business environment is an extremely arduous challenge is stating the obvious. For print, which is a derived business, it's all the more complex. So, when advertisers do well, in their respective sectors / industries, the media house reaps the benefit. But with the advertiser's business model also under constant pressure due to technological disruptions & growing intensity of competition, the volatility of the media house multiplies. So, with our fortunes linked to each other, most media houses are finding it difficult to grow their top-line. Plus, inter-category migration of attention & cash, and intra-category intensity of competition are only compounding the challenges. In this session, 2 media buyers & 2 clients, who are dependent on high decibel communication, along with the moderator, who is a strategy consultant with expertise in media, will delve on the issue & discuss a plausible model worth pursuing.
>> Moderator: Ashish Pherwani, Partner- Advisory Services, E &Y, Pvt. Ltd., India
Panelists:
>> Bharat Bambawale, Director, Global Brand Bharti Airtel Ltd.
>> Mayank Pareek, COO ( Marketing & Sales), Maruti Suzuki India Ltd.
>> Shashi Sinha, CEO, LodestarMedia
>> Jasmin Sohrabji, CEO, OMD India

15.45
Tea Break

16.15
Battle of the Bulge: Is Cost Deflation a Utopian Expectation?
While growing the top-line continues to be a challenge, the days of squandering resources are certainly over. For any organization, stagnating the cost structure would be a critical priority so that any lukewarm-ness in top-line growth can be neutralized through a disciplined cost management. After all, if austerity is painful, oblivion is certainly not a "pain-reliever". This session would purport to recommend path-breaking solutions even if they might seem unreasonable from the current circumstances. After all, the best way to invent future is to create it.
>> Moderator: Mohit Jain, Executive President, Supply Chain, BCCL
Panelists:
>> Pawan Agarwal, Non Executive Director, Bhaskar group
>> Piyush Gupta, Group CFO HT-Media
>> Ashish Pherwani, Partner-Advisory Services, E&Y, Pvt. Ltd

17.00
Managing Cultural Assymetry in a Multi-Media Organisation
Managing the internal culture of an organization, which has always been a challenge for organizations, only got further compounded for those companies who have been trying to work on a growth pipeline of 70-20-10 i.e. 70% core business, 20% emerging & 10% embryonic. Consequently, the organization has to create three types of operating environments and three types of financial architectures for transitioning from present to future. It's only expected that the demand of these three different outcomes and three different types of effort will create an unprecedented pressure on the existing organization structure and culture. How does an incumbent organization manage this transition and balance inter-departmental tensions creatively? This session led by a CEO and a Human Resource expert from a transnational corporation will guide the audience to wade through the labyrinth of human and market psychology.
>> Santrupt Misra, CEO, Carbon Black Business & Group HR Director, Aditya Birla Mngment Corp.

17.45
Conclusions For the Day

18.00
Programme Ends

18.00-22.00
Cocktails and Dinner
Desire, Le Meridien

Day 2: Wednesday, August 8

9.15
Overview

9.30
Media 2020: A Future Backward Kaleidoscope
INMA — in its inimitable style — has always worked on fore-arming its members ready through a “future backwards” conceptualization of the world in we will be living in the future. Media 2020 takes the audience through a journey of the world as it would be in 2020. How can we deduce the surprise component of 2020? Would it not be prudent to get ready from now? But, what is so special about 2020? With 2020 being the year that the millennium child will be on the threshold of becoming an adult, they are certain to make their presence felt in various decision-making processes by then, if not earlier. As such, 2020 promises to be an indicative watershed of behavioural shift of media consumers and as business practitioners it would be too late to get ready in 2020. Hence, our strategy consultant — KPMG — will take us through a kaleidoscopic journey so that we can start with our dress-rehearsal.
>> Lead Speaker and Moderator: Jehil Thakkar, Partner, Head- Media & Entertainment, KPMG India
Panelists:
>> Santosh Desai, MD & CEO, Future Brands India Ltd.
>> Ravi Dhariwal, CEO, The Times of India
>> D.D. Purkayastha, CEO, ABP. Pvt. Ltd.

10.30
Increased Circulation, Dwindling Readership: Is It Time to Measure “Access”?
With multiplication of media options facilitating anytime-anywhere consumption, media audience is increasingly becoming platform-agnostic. In view of this empirical reality, INMA would like to invoke a hitherto un-discussed subject of “media access”, i.e. substituting / complimenting the conventional audience measurement matrices, be it print, TV, internet, etc. Is it too ahead of its time as the grammar of audience behaviour, irrespective of formats, has not yet been measured? For a multi-media company, this seamless experience coupled with the credibility of the organization can be a motivating source for consumer of one format to use the other formats. Does that offer an indication of robustness of brand loyalty which can also give us an insight into emerging consumer behaviour? This and other related subjects would be dealt with, by this panel, who have been leaders in the area of audience measurement and can provoke the audience to engage in interesting discourses and thereby ideate on new matrices of audience measurement.
>> Moderator: Lynn de Souza, Chairman & CEO Lintas Media Group
Panelists:
>> Paritosh Joshi, Independent Media Professional & Board Member of MRUC
>> L V Krishnan, CEO, TAM Media Research Pvt. Ltd.
>> Basant Rathore,Vice President-Strategy, Brand and BD, Jagran Prakashan Ltd.

11.30
Tea Break

12.00
Newspaper Distribution Channel: How Best To Nurture It For The Future:
The newspaper industry is used to uni-dimensional mode of distribution and this might still continue for quite some time to come. But, with consumer becoming increasingly format neutral, is there a case for re-inventing the conventional distribution model to catch present and potential audience anytime, anywhere? Is distribution only about the delivery of hard copies or connecting with audiences through soft copies too? Moreover, with rising ambitions of the next generation of the hawkers' families, will there be a supply squeeze on hawkers or will the growing militancy of the hawker community queer the pitch of smooth distribution in the coming days? Is there a case for re-inventing the commission structure of the intermediary? This panel discussion will explore answers to many such vexing questions.
>> Moderator: Sanjeev Vohra, Executive President, Audiences, BCCL
Panelists:
>> Mateen Khan, Product Head, Lokmat Samachar
>> O.P. Rajgarhia, Chairman & MD, Overnite Express Ltd
>> Rakesh Sharma, Aaj Samaj & ITV Group
>> P.S. Venkat, Vice President, Circulation, The Hindu

13.00
Lunch

14.00
Managing Complexity In South Asian Markets: A Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh Experience
This session is an opportunity for the INMA delegates - who would primarily be from India's print medium - to gain visibility and exposure to the volatility of the operating environment and business complexities in our neighbouring countries (viz. Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) and the manner in which they are coping with them. Their way of confronting these challenges may be vastly different from those in India may be practising and, as such, these insights — especially in light of the growing inter-dependence beyond boundaries — can prove to be a source of learning for Indian delegates. And, nothing like getting it straight from the practitioners. So this session would get dominant players and a strategy consultant (from one of these markets) to deliberate on various facets of print management, especially the aspects of revenue, distribution, content from a prism of changing consumer preferences.
>> Moderator: Bhaskar Das, President & Principal Secretary to MD, The Times of India Group
Panelists:
>> Javed Jabbar, Chairman & Chief Executive, JJ Media (Pvt.) Ltd and former Federal Minister, Pakistan
>> Matiur Rahman, Editor & Publisher, The Daily Prothom Alo, Bangladesh

14.45
Media Learning From Other Industries
In the new world order, to define the competitive land-scape is a sure recipe for failure. Industries across the globe are increasingly learning from other industries to improve their operating efficiencies and innovation capabilities across various spectrum of businesses. Can media - especially print - gain such learnings form other industries that can be helpful in re-inventing and re-vitalizing the news media business. KPMG, an ardent observer of various sectors, will cull out macro-learnings from micro situations and share the same with us with a view to expand the perspective of media practitioners.
>> Lead Speaker and Moderator: Jaideep Ghosh, Partner, Management Consulting, KPMG India
Panelists:
>> Rajiv Prakash, ex-CEO, FutureBazaar.com
>> Jairam Sridharan, Head, Retail Banking, Axis Bank

15.30
Tea Break

16.00
Closing Session: Evolving a Sustainable and Thriving Media Business Model
The closing session is an effort to truly complete the two days of deliberations by the speakers and the delegates on the various facets of newspaper / print / media business. A strategy professor from IIM Bangalore will present a sustainable and thriving media business model that can successfully withstand the vicissitudes of business environment. The session promises to be extremely thought-provoking and disruptive, given the current thought-process of print media.
>> Professor Rishikesha T. Krishnan, Chairperson, Corporate Strategy & Policy Area, IIM- Bangalore

16.45
Conference Conclusionsy
>> Conference Moderator: Bhaskar Das, President & Principal Secretary to MD, The Times of India Group

17.00
Programme Ends