To TOI or not to TOI. Review on Bennett Coleman & Co. Ltd (Times)

This article consists of the conclusions I have come to after my personal observation of the Times Of India group. I have made these based on my direct and indirect experiences with the TOI group. Some of my conclusions may be wrong as I don’t have access to numbers and official data. If anyone feels that I have made an error you are welcome to correct me. I started writing this article with the with the aim to see whether tying up with the TOI for any kind of promotion would be good or not but I have also written a little about a about the TOI as a whole. I realize I don’t a have access to the numbers, results etc. Also the TOI has a large… very large circulation. You may feel that I don’t like the TOI… well its true. Go through the TOI today and you will find lots of advertisements for Planet M, Indiatimes.com, Times music and everything else it is tied up to promote. If the TOI is your press sponsor you can be sure to find Indiatimes.com as part of the ads. It will be the official web site. It will have a contest related to the entity it is promoting. Later there will be articles in the newspaper related to the entity it is promoting. The annoying thing is that these articles are actually advertisements for the anything it may promote. Aks and now the Channel V Popstars.

Now that Radio Mirchi is up we we'll see lots of promotions. So the Times group is just a vehicle for promoting itself, its sister concerns and the entities it ties up with. Femina has its ads. The Miss Indias.. ooops Femina Miss Indias are always written about. So why am I writing this article? Well at first I did not like my experiences with the TOI whenever I had to call up the their Office. The boardline operators are often cold and rude. I once called up to ask to be connected to a department and the operator said, ''do you think they will be there at this time sir?'' Before that I asked if it was possible to pass a message for a particular dept, and I was rudely told ''How can we leave a message for that dept?'' (just letting off a little steam here) Now I am interested in film and Tarsem Singh came to India to give a talk. I scanned the paper everyday to see for updates …. Nothing. Later I came across an article in The Briefwhich covered the event. Foolish me. Tarsem was being promoted by the Mid Day group and was therefore blacked out from its pages. 'The Brief' criticized the TOI for this in a later issue with an article bringing out the various unfair practices being perpetrated by the TOI What else now? The TOI has the ability to over hype anything it is promoting. Does over hyping something help? Does publishing an ad everyday, an article everyday really help. Well to be honest I don’t have access to the figures but I can take just two examples. Aks and now the Popstars. We all know what happened to Aks. (I haven't seen it yet) As for the Popstars I sincerely hope the girls do well. The girls are, in my opinion , are very talented. They have worked hard etc. But has all noise produced a really ''different'' song. Extremely talented people like Shankar, Ehsaan, Loy, Javed Akhtar have churned out as song that sounds just like any other Indi pop song. So did tying up with TOI have an effect? Well everyone is talking about Viva, which is a good thing. . . How many of these individuals would buy the albums? So I guess the promotion worked well in making people aware about Viva. The rest depends on the product. Therefore tying up with the TOI has results. But what about this thought. They may have raised people's expectations. So what they may see may let them down. This would generate a lot of bad word-of-mouth publicity. And no amount of post product release publicity could reverse this. I switch channels on Channel V and turn the pages on the TOI.(Yes I do get the TOI at home). So it seems the TOI is all brawn and no brain. This is one of the reasons I don’t like the TOI. They behave like the high school bully. I'd like to end hear for the simple reason that I don’t have much more to say. I'd really like to hear from anyone who might disagree with me with good reason. If noone disagrees with me I will begin to think that I'm cool and I hope I will never be in a position to have to tie with the TOI for any promotion. Enjoy!