Project
Helping a leading media group to shift focus from news to audience

Challenge
A leading regional media major with a bouquet of dailies, periodicals, online & television channels needed alignment with changing & diverse audiences. The group’s flagship daily is one of the most trusted publications in the region. Such exercises are long term and involve transformation of products, processes and culture through strategic solutions. The challenge was to shift the mindset, generate a will to change and motivate everyone through action & results.

Elephant Contribution
Elephant team started with questioning who the audience was and how it may change over the next few years.  In a traditional journalistic scenario, news may have been the sole reason for reaching for newspaper. However, in the world of multi-media that has 24 hour news channels, news on SMS, online news portals and social networking sites, newspapers do not hold the key to breaking news anymore. The last few years have seen an explosion of media even in the remote corners of India. This has led to a huge shift in habits of gaining knowledge, preferences of
entertainment & means of communication.

Elephant identified several audience groups & arrived at ideas that focused on audience issues instead of only news.

There are specific toolkits for reporters, researchers, editors & photographers that help generate audience-focused content.

Value
Starting with the flagship newspaper of the group that sold a million copies every day, The Lab is in the process of transforming daily, supplements and weekend issues. Through impactful representation of issues such as water quality & distribution, public transport & infrastructure for the future, standards of healthcare etc, the newspaper has managed to get civic authorities to act to an unprecedented degree apart from increase in circulation of the paper.

Co-creation
Transformation requires experimentation, enthusiasm and participation from everyone across the board. Elephant has created a Lab where teams from all editions & locations are facilitated to deep-dive & understand their audience to be able to generate content, style & purpose. This is an ongoing process and has generated results within weeks of starting the process. Write to us if you want to know more.