FICCI FRAME 2013 : DAY 3

Discussion Developing Skills in Media and Entertainment 

Hemant Sangani and M N Thakur of FMJC

Lousie Chatter and Atul Phadnis  unleashing power of data

Skills in M&E-The Next Big Leap Towards Creating Greater Talent Discussion in progress 

In the frame at FICCI Frames

Talking about Power of Data

14th March, the last day of FICCI FRAMES the participation was not so overwhelming but  three discussions were very lively. The first on e attracted bigger audience and was on Skills in M&E. The point of discussion was that how to tap cesspool of talent. Academicians, innovators and skill developers Teri Schwartz, Dean School of Theatre, Film & Telivision, UCLA, USA, Jonathan Taplin, Director, School of Communication and Journalism, University of South Carolina, Colin Maclay, MD, Berkman Centre for Internet & Society, Harvard University, Sanjay Gupta, COO, Star India, D J Narai, Director FTII and Meghna Ghai Puri, President, Whistling Woods International participated in discussion and the session was moderated by Sunit Tandon, Director General, IIMC. D J Narain who now head FTII says that to give a bigger picture of fast changing world FTII has decided to give essential component of humanities, culture to all the students irrespective of their discipline from year 2014. Meghna said that as the quality training Institutes are very limited and pressure of admission very high so the best course is to create a virtual school in cloud so that many more people may be trained.

There has been discussion  from last few years that short form of content will replace long form due to digital era. It is also feared that a distracted audience will flit from screen to screen, consuming bite size contents - tweets, headlines, youtube videos, summaries. Kalpesh Yagnik, Editor, Dainik Bhaskar, Ajay Vidyasagar, Regional Director Google, Rishi Jaitly, Head Twitter India, mark Wilson Dunn, Director, British TelecomMedia and Broadcast, Bharat Ranga, Chief Content & Creative Officer, ZEE were the part of the panel and the discussion was moderated by Rajiv Makhani, Managing Editor, Technology, NDTV. So the bad news is that short form of content writing is immensely popular specially among the mobile users, people fears that the spelling of most of the words will soon be forgotten and will be replaced by shorten one. But the good news is that Rishi Jaitly of Twitter who have started 140 character short messaging order of the day says that there is no need to panic, short messaging is working in tandem with long form. Regional Director of Google Ajay said that now so much talking and writing on various platforms, curating the content has also become a big challenge. Yagnik tried to explain that even in print media short form is becoming popular, newspaper understands that many readers do not have time to read full story so they give gist in a box in a racy format. But it does not mean that newspaper will stop publishing full  story.

They say that devil lies in details. Importance of data collection and market research in media & entertainment space is gaining lot of prominence. Unleashing the power of Data panel tried to share their perspective on importance of data, the ways in which both online and offline research and  and data may be harnessed to understand audience preferences nd behaviour so that we may witness a real media revolution. Ashish Khanna raised a valid point, what you do with data service product. Data has a potential to be used as assembly line, it is no longer static but it is dynamic one. Rajesh A Rao of IBM said with cloud around us, people may choose clod based programme due to its flexibility to expand as per the customer's requirement. Ex Walt Disney and now an audience research consultant Ms. Louise Chater, observed that now data insight is becoming more important, it has got so many dimensions, it is positioning study,studio / market screening, creative testing, production screeing, tracking, exit poll as well as post release exercise . Nick Bufitt , Head Kantaar Media  UK , said that the real challenge is to allow data to talk with each other, this element of data, i.e. conversation of data can be  monetised.