How Gujarat agencies have been showing the way in driving print growth & relationships

Defaulting on payments by ad agencies has been a common grouse of the print media industry for long. The Indian Newspaper Society (INS) periodically issues Notices of Disaccreditation to ad agencies that have not cleared their outstanding dues to publications.

There are 14 INS zones that closely monitor ad agencies’ payments for the respective zone based ad agencies. While there is no specific zone that is seen as having the majority of the defaulter ad agencies, interestingly what has emerged after years of observation is that the Gujarat zone comes out as the only one that rarely features in payment default situations.

Gujarat is a very prominent ad zone with lots of brands based in that state that use print and other forms of media. It has been seen that Gujarat has always put high cost in advertising since the days of Vimal, Rasna, Amul, Vadilal, Sintex, etc.

To understand why Gujarat continues to have such a strong track record on the payments front as well as what keeps the print industry vibrant in that state, Adgully spoke to some senior executives in leading publications based in Gujarat.

One prime aspect that came to the fore in our conversations was that Gujarat is a market that puts high emphasis on long-term relationships, trust and loyalty.

As explained by Sanjay Mathwara, Senior Manager, Mid-Day, “While other major markets are more data-based in their dealings, Gujarat is a relationship-based market. Thus, while the data may show that a certain publication is No. 1 in the market, advertisers prefer to go by the strong and long-term relationship that they have with certain publications even though they might be ranked No. 3 or No. 4.”

Continuing further, Mathwara said that loyalty and trust factors are high in the Gujarat market and hence, there is no cheating or defaulting on payments, because people mean business and maintaining the good relationships is given high priority. “Thus, even an amount written on plain paper – called ‘Chitthi’ in local parlance – is honoured,” he added.

In a similar vein, Rajan Rao, Chief Manager, Amar Ujala, said that Gujarat is a small and closely knit market. “Here, relationships go much beyond mere business transactions and are based on trust and loyalty. In fact, some relationships go as far back as 90 years!” he added. Clients are from across categories and still have a strong belief in print advertising.

Adding a further dimension to the conversation, Pankaj Thakkar, DGM, Divya Bsaskar, noted that “Businesses in the Gujarat market are very careful about their reputation and would never want to besmirch their good payment record be defaulting. A lot of relationships are over 50 years old and run into the second and even the third generations. Agencies would not like to get their name in the NRV.”

Speaking from his experience of 20 years with Divya Bsaskar, Thakkar said, “In all these years, I have seen 90 per cent of the agencies make their payment on time.”