Energised Mukerjea savours the best of times

Sitting beside the pool at Hong Kong’s Grand Hyatt, Peter Mukerjea is in relaxed mood. And with good reason. After some tempestuous times at Star, where Mukerjea spent 14 action-packed years, the silver-haired Indian media mogul has spent the past eight months building his new baby, INX Media.

With flagship channel 9X shooting into third place in India’s key general entertainment category, Mukerjea can afford to appear satisfied.

Lighting up a cigarette (“Don’t photograph this or my wife will see it,” he says, smiling), Mukerjea cuts a rather different figure from the man who left Star India, ostensibly disillusioned with the regional broadcaster’s direction and the decision to hive off programming, marketing and ad sales responsibilities in favour of Sameer Nair.

Both, of course, have now left - as eloquent a testimony as any to the slash-and-burn management turnover that has bedevilled Star in recent years.

“Three chief executives left within a period of 60 days so it was a fairly big shock to the system,” recalls Mukerjea. “I could either sit there and be grumpy or pack it in and do something else. There wasn’t very much more I could contribute to the pace of growth. Sometimes you need to reinvent yourself and re-energise in order to stay fresh.”

While it may not rank as a wholesale reinvention, Mukerjea has certainly “re-energised” since he left Star.
INX Media has launched three channels since its inception, with music channel 9XM and News X joining 9X. It has also unveiled a deal with BT to distribute content overseas. “My role now is the same as it was at Star 10 years ago,” he says. “But the market is very different. We’re not anything dramatically different, but we want to bigger, better and fresher.”

For Mukerjea, this means upping production values - rather than opting for any dramatic departures from what he calls “good, clean, family entertainment”.

“Middle-aged women are looking for value for money,” he explains. “We are not going to be over the top in terms of unreasonable aspiration. But the danger is becoming bland by trying to please too broad a spectrum.”

One area where Mukerjea has decided to buck conventional wisdom, however, is in INX’s rate card. Specifically, in a market where rates are often shrouded in ambiguity as thick as the Mumbai smog, INX has offered transparent and structured commitments from day one.

“When I was at Star five or six years ago we had a clear-cut rate card structure, but then all the channels started to do away with them and it became almost commodity pricing,” he notes.

The approach, he admits, met with resistance. “Buying groups are uncomfortable at not having a rate card but despite them asking us to do it, there was a certain amount of resistance. Over the past few months, people have come to terms with it. Other channels are now also coming up with rate cards.”

The non-conformist streak extends to sponsorship, which INX - in defiance of the country’s lurch towards branding every available piece of airtime - steers clear of. “We’ll do it in a elegant manner,” concedes Mukerjea. “Elsewhere that wasn’t happening. A crass manner has been more commonplace.”

Mukerjea blames the industry’s shortcomings on the balance of power that tilts towards media agencies. It is not an uncommon view, even if the Indian Broadcasting Foundation’s ham-fisted attempts to raise advertising rates last year made little progress. “The cost per thousand in India today is probably the lowest in the world. But the costs of content and running a business are growing. If GroupM is suppressing the growth of TV revenue by aggregating more clients, it is shooting itself in the foot. If it continues to suppress prices, something’s got to give.”

Still, cut-throat competition - particularly among proliferating general entertainment channels - hardly helps matters either. Mukerjea admits that the “market is ripe for consolidation”, but also points out that TV penetration remains low, especially when it comes to non-English offerings. “The opportunity for growth is enormous.”

For Mukerjea and his band of colleagues, many of whom accompanied him from Star, the omens look good. INX is eyeing local news channels as a potential growth avenue, along with international distribution. “We’re still in the red but that is part of our business plan,” says Mukerjea. “One of our advantages is that we’ve all worked together in the past so the personal chemistry works for us.

“We tend not to worry about the nine-to-five. At Star we were having lots of fun doing what we were doing.”

And at INX, it appears, the fun is only just beginning.

Peter Mukerjea’s CV

2007 Chairman and chief strategy officer, INX Media
2000 Chief executive, Star TV India
1993 Director of advertising sales, Star TV India
1991 Account director, DDB Needham Hong Kong
1987 Account director, Ogilvy & Mather