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Bol - Love Your Bhasha: Where’s the Money for Local Languages?

What does the future of regional language looks like? We discuss at“Bol: Love Your Bhasha”.

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Bol India
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How can we make digital content creation in Indian languages commercially viable and at the same time, user-friendly for audiences spread across the country?

We unravelled the dilemma looming large on the minds of advertisers, publishers and marketers in a panel discussion, “But where is the money?” at the “Bol: Love Your Bhasha” event on 18 September.

Do advertisements in Tamil, Malayalam, Gujarati, Bengali and other regional languages in India have takers in a market dominated by English advertisements? Is Hindi, along with regional languages not considered viable by brands/ agencies/ marketers? How often do users find ads that are targeting them in their mother tongue?

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The panel discussion saw Virendra Gupta, Founder and CEO of Daily Hunt, Anant Goenka, Executive Director of The Indian Express, Ritu Kapur, CEO and Co-founder of Quintillion Media, Jaivir Nagi, Director of Online Partnerships at Google and Aditi Mishra, Chief Strategy Officer at IPG Mediabrands in attendance.

The panel was moderated by Sanjay Pugalia, President and Editorial Director at the Quintillion Media group.

Providing Indian language users with a seamless language experience requires building a new ecosystem. Unfortunately, the current ecosystem is dominated by English language but clearly there is a need to bring together publishers, aggregators and marketers to plan for an inclusive digital future.

Sanjay Pugalia remarked that democratisation of the internet is evident and that users are demanding equality of access. He also noted that a lot of this is dependent on money to establish a level playing field.

CEO and Founder Ritu Kapur said that it is about time the publishers also changed their outlook. By not considering themselves inferior, the regional media must take itself seriously, and strive for distinct and quality content. This will help yield better conversion over brand campaigns.

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Answering why does Hindi not get an equal rate in the same market as English, Anant Goenka said:

“Local languages are sold at a premium in countries abroad to both the readers and advertisers, English is sold at a lower rate. Even in Japan, I believe, that is the trend but in India, it is the opposite. We sell local language advertisements at a much cheaper rate. But maybe once you open it up, there could be a lot more ad inventories.”
Anant Goenka, Executive Director, The Indian Express

The panel agreed on the fact that the advertising agencies need to educate brands to think beyond reach and frequency. The idea that there is lesser buying power with Hindi or regional readers is a flawed argument as the distribution of income is higher in the regional language markets.

“The onus lies on agencies to educate the advertisers to think much beyond reach and frequency. This idea of less buying power doesn’t cut across,” Anant said.

Talking about a brighter future for local languages, Virendra Gupta said:

“When you talk of regional languages, we all should believe that we are building for future. Today we are a 2 trillion dollar economy. We will be a 6 trillion dollar economy in the next few years. Marketers will want to spend money on regional languages in the future, there is a gap right now but it will equalise eventually.”
Virendra Gupta, Founder and CEO, Daily Hunt
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Reflecting on challenges from the advertiser’s point of view, the panel mentioned that the largest advertisers today only have English brand websites which restrict their distribution of content. Jaivir Nagi said, “Very few brands publish advertisements in regional languages. If they have a Tamil page with English lead form, it moots the point and hence, the experience is broken for the users.” Jaivir suggested that, as a corrective measure, advertisers can work on fixing their own digital assets.

Talking about challenges in the ecosystem, he added that most Indic users spend time on videos. A video is easier in terms of advertising in the digital space because it does not require restructuring but making this available in a wide range of regional languages is challenging and costly.

Commenting on hiccups on the technological front, Aditi Mishra said that the seamless shift from English to a regional language is possibly robbing regional languages of its opportunities.

For example, if I am a Bengali, I would want an English advertisement I am watching to switch to Bengali from English. That seamless shift with the help of technology will help me reach a regional language market and audience better.
Aditi Mishra, Chief Strategy Officer, IPG Mediabrands

(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)

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