With the boom in private commercial broadcasting in India, Poonam Sharma from told ICBT Conference delegates that the “power of interactivity” with the viewer has been successful for broadcasters in India.
“Our broadcast industry in India is going through a change – audiences are not only just listening to us now, they are instantly reacting and wanting to interact with us…
“But it can be a problem for broadcasters, because its hard to know what to put to air and where to draw the line.”
Creativity lies on the execution of an idea, according to Sharma. “Tell a story and tell it well. Be relevant, engaging, provocative, interactive, and use creative techniques and technology in production,” she said.
As one example of using new technology, she gave the example of India’s new Prime Minister Modi, who use holographic 3D presentations to give 100 simultaneous political rallies in one day during his election campaign.
“Creativity doesn’t mean always having to be original, after all how many new ideas are there? It is about the execution of the idea as well as the idea itself,” explained Sharma.
Continuing the theme of creative production, Keiko Bang, President of told delagates, “creativity comes from taking risks and having an ecosystem that supports you,” and gave examples of production teams who are able to take risks because the business encourages risk taking and is not afraid to have some failures.
Ramachandan Poonan from the School of Communication, Taylor’s University, Malaysia discussed shifting audience preferences, using the Pyramid Engagement model by Charlene Li to exemplify the stages of social media interaction.
“We need to hold an engagement party for audience,” he said, pointing out that broadcasters need to engage their audiences on as many levels as possible. “No platform has exclusivity, if your content is good and engaging you will get your audience.”
Australian media consultant Mike McCluskey discussed research he has been doing on the effect of multi-talking on audiences.
“We must understand what is happening with our audiences in this time of evolution in broadcasting. We are getting more complex when we engage in many platforms and our audiences are being required to multi-task, but is this effective?”
He quoted research by Glenn Wilson from Kings College London, which found that the average worker’s IQ temporarily drops by 10 points when multi tasking.
“There is a cost to multi-tasking in your capacity to perform while multi-tasking. Loss of short term memory can be a result of multi tasking,” he said.
What does that mean for broadcasters?
Audiences are engaging on many platforms, but their capacity to take in what they heard/saw is being diminished. So the tools or recapping and summarizing are even more important now if the audiences are being expected to retain the content they hear, explained McCluskey.
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