Lintas Media Group unveils Media Futures

The number of television brands has increased from 137 to 300 between in 2000 and 2005. Similarly, the number of print publications during this period has also shot up from 38,398 to 46,332.

This clearly indicates that although media choices have rapidly expanded, the consumption of this media or the average time spent hasn’t increased.

This is probably where, Media Futures, the consultancy service for media brands, launched by Lintas Media Group hopes to play a big role in the growth of media brands. This B2B venture hopes to help media brands tap into India’s largest segment: the youth.

Media Futures has partnered with Garcia Media, the international publication design specialist, Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS), the market information company, and Bruce Dunlop Associates (BDA) which is an international broadcast design specialist.

This new Lintas company will cater to media brands from the fields of broadcast television, newspaper publishing, magazine publishing, radio, and the Internet.

Raj Gupta, who heads Lintas’ media agency, Insight will head the new venture, Media Futures.

Gupta elaborates on what brought about the concept of Media Futures, “As the media industry is rapidly expanding, two very disruptive trends are becoming visible,” he says. “The first is the paradigm shift in Indian demographics. Today, the youth comprises over 60 per cent of India’s population, making them the most sought out group by advertisers and marketers.”

“But,” Gupta points out, “the irony of the situation is that there is a great propensity of this group to avoid advertising, especially mass media.”

He validates his point with a study done by Initiative, which discloses that 70 per cent of the youth today avoid advertising.

“The second important change is the growth of digitisation,” says Gupta. While digitisation has caught on elsewhere in the world, it will take a while to impact India fully. “But it will happen sooner or later,” he asserts.

Media Futures has been conceptualised to address these two factors. The consultancy will offer three dimensions to media brands, through which they can improve their offering and widen their TG. The first is ‘Dimension Breath’, which helps in serving content across media channels and formats to the dynamics of each medium.

The second one is ‘Dimension Length’ which will help in increasing content lifespan. And lastly, ‘Dimension Depth’ hopes to repackage content as products and services, thereby creating new sales and revenue streams.

“With these three dimensions, we will help media brands see tomorrow, today,” claims Gupta.

Some of the solutions that Media Futures hopes to offer include strategic opportunity identification and market mapping, identification of consumer need states, investigation and development of consumer, brand and market insight, creation, development and validation of brand and consumer strategies, content consultancy and extension to new media and formats, research on audience and advertisers, product and service definition and design and sales process redesign and training, among others.

For the record, The Lintas Media Group has the following offerings, apart from Media Futures: Insight, Interactions, Initiative and Intellect.

© 2006 agencyfaqs!