B Srinivasan of Ananda Vikatan to speak at FIPP Congress

FIPP World Media Congress – Las Vegas 12-14 November 2019

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B Srinivasan, managing director, Ananda Vikatan Group
B Srinivasan, managing director, Ananda Vikatan Group

Hear thought-leadership, research and actionable best practice from many of the industry’s leaders. Speakers at the FIPP World Media Congress include: Mia Stellberg, sports psychologist, SK Gaming; Ros Atkins, news presenter and founder of 50:50 Project, BBC; Kate Lewis, chief content officer, Hearst Magazines; Tor Jacobsen, SVP and chief consumer officer, Schibsted; Paula Mageste, media executive, previously of Globo and Abril; David Israel, chief financial officer and chief operating officer, Playboy Enterprises Inc; Tracey Corrigan, chief strategy officer, Dow Jones; Tyler Brûlé, editor in chief, Monocle; Bonnie Kintzer, chief executive officer, Trusted Media Brands; B Srinivasan, managing director, Ananda Vikatan Group, and many more…

The draft agenda is available on https://www.fippcongress.com/full-agenda/. On the second day of the Congress, B Srinivasan, managing director of Chennai-based Ananda Vikatan Group, will be speaking on – ‘Using language as a competitive media advantage.’

Srinivasan (Srini) is the managing director of the 93-year-old Vikatan Group. The third-generation entrepreneur joined his family business when the Vikatan Group was a print-only magazine publisher, in 1990.

Realizing the significance of communities, the advent of personalization, the emergence of TV mediums and the surge of the Internet, Srini spearheaded Vikatan’s diversification through niche magazines, adopted internet publishing in 1997, went pay in 2005 and trending on social media since 2010. He also entered content production for TV in 1998, and during the last two decades produced continuous #1 rated shows in Tamil. Since 2016, the Vikatan Group has created and curated popular event properties and client-led activations.

Today, the Vikatan Group is a diversified media house with 12 magazine titles in Tamil boasting a combined sale of over 50 million magazines, 1 million books, over 2 billion annual page views from 8 million unique readers on the internet and interacting with its 20 million followers on social networks every month.

Having evangelized the ‘digital first’ approach in content creation, curation and publishing at Vikatan Group, he is re-engineering Vikatan’s culture by investing heavily in people, processes and workflows while ensuring that the consumer is kept at the heart of everything that Vikatan stands for, while firmly staying entrenched in Vikatan’s timeless value-systems. With story-telling skills honed for almost a century, the Ananda Vikatan Group is now obsessed with becoming a full-fledged content engine for OTT platforms and emerge as an independent digital media company by 2021.

2023 promises an interesting ride for print in India

Indian Printer and Publisher founded in 1979 is the oldest B2B trade publication in the multi-platform and multi-channel IPPGroup. While the print and packaging industries have been resilient in the past 33 months since the pandemic lockdown of 25 March 2020, the commercial printing and newspaper industries have yet to recover their pre-Covid trajectory.

The fragmented commercial printing industry faces substantial challenges as does the newspaper industry. While digital short-run printing and the signage industry seem to be recovering a bit faster, ultimately their growth will also be moderated by the progress of the overall economy. On the other hand book printing exports are doing well but they too face several supply-chain and logistics challenges.

The price of publication papers including newsprint has been high in the past year while availability is diminished by several mills shutting down their publication paper and newsprint machines in the past four years. Indian paper mills are also exporting many types of paper and have raised prices for Indian printers. To some extent, this has helped in the recovery of the digital printing industry with its on-demand short-run and low-wastage paradigm.

Ultimately digital print and other digital channels will help print grow in a country where we are still far behind in our paper and print consumption and where digital is a leapfrog technology that will only increase the demand for print in the foreseeable future. For instance, there is no alternative to a rise in textbook consumption but this segment will only reach normality in the next financial year beginning on 1 April 2023.

Thus while the new normal is a moving target and many commercial printers look to diversification, we believe that our target audiences may shift and change. Like them, we will also have to adapt with agility to keep up with their business and technical information needs.

Our 2023 media kit is ready, and it is the right time to take stock and reconnect with your potential markets and customers. Print is the glue for the growth of liberal education, new industry, and an emerging economy. We seek your participation in what promises to be an interesting ride.

– Naresh Khanna

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