Case Study

DRAFT for ACADEMIC USE ONLY
NOT to be QUOTED
ADVERTISERS INDIA LIMITED - 1972
On January 2, 1972, Mr. A.K. Chatterji, Managing Director of Advertisers India Ltd, Delhi
(AIL), and Dr. L. Anant, Professor at a Well-known Institute of Management in Western India
(WIMWI), Ahmedabad, were in a meeting of management practitioners and academicians to
discuss matters of mutual interest. Their discussion veered around the problem of media planning
faced by advertising practitioners. Mr. Chatterji mentioned that media planning was the foremost
problem faced by advertising agencies and executives. In his agency itself, several clients spent
about a crore of rupees per year on buying time and space in press, radio, and cinema for
advertising. Both, Chatterji and Anant, agreed that the problem was significant to be resolved
and method(s) of finding the best solution would be of great help to advertising agencies and
advertisers. Anant mentioned that such a resolution could be generalized for the use of
executives from other sectors.
ADVERTISERS INDIA LIMITED
Advertisers India Limited was one of the large advertising agencies in India with head office at
Delhi and branches at Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras. Its clientele included industrial, consumer
durable, and consumer non-durable goods companies. Major share of its earnings, like most
other agencies in India, came from consumer non-durable goods companies. The agency
provided market research services for developing advertising appeals and advertising strategy
recommendation for developing advertisements and media plans. Most of its income came from
the 15% discounts given by media companies when they bought time/space. The agency used its
judgement to allocate advertisement budget to major media like press, radio, and cinema.
Invariably, cinema received greater weightage, if the visual and spoken aspects were more
important in the message, and press received a higher proportion, if most buyers of the product
were educated and the message could be effectively communicated through written presentation
itself. Radio was largely used as a reminder media.
EXISTING METHOD of PLANNING MEDIA EXPENDITURES
Discussions with the advertisers and advertising agencies revealed the following steps in existing
method of media planning:
1. Decide desired readership in each target group in different zones/ states.

2. Decide Ad size depending on the space required for the ad copy.
This abridged version is based on Advertisers India Limited case (IIMA MAR 113) registered with the
Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. The expanded version was written by Professor A. K. Jain,
Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.
3. Decide “must” publications because of high readership among brand users and
choose a small list of additional publications compatible with the product type like
fashion-oriented publications for fashion product, reproduction quality, etc.
4. Judgmentally decide a final list of publications by considering readership1 of
individual publications obtained from NRS (National Readership Survey, Operations
Research Group, Baroda) in different target groups in different regions.
5. Prepare few press media plans so that the total readership of each media plan was
close to the desired readership in each of the target groups in different zones and/or
states.
6. Final adjustments about including or excluding publications were made to get close
match between actual readership of the media plan and the desired readership, in
each target group of customers.
7. Judgmentally specify a minimum number of insertions as a must to be put in each
publication if it was finally selected in the media plan.
In the above process, the executives intuitively tried to see that a certain number of target
customers were in the readership of the media plan (assessed through readership data from NRS)
and that they had at least a few Opportunities to See (OTS) the advertisement over a period of
time (through minimum number of insertions in each publication). The executives of the agency
also felt that the effect of advertising was the result of many factors. Putting advertisements in a
number of media vehicles only meant that the readers (audience) of those publications had a
chance to look at the advertisement (OTS).
DEVELOPMENT of a PRESS MEDIA PLANNING MODEL
As advertisers in India used press, radio, and cinema media, a model which encompassed all the
three media would have been of tremendous value. However, data about radio listenership and
cinema viewing was very scanty. As such, development of a rigorous mathematical model for all
media would be inconsistent with the crude data base at the point in time. Publication readership
data was available from the NRS in various customer classes (by age, educational level, income
bracket, rural/urban, occupation, male/female etc)2. Data could also be accessed on circulation of
various newspapers3. Also press budgets accounted for nearly 60 – 70% of the total advertising
budgets of about 60 crores of rupees in 1972. As such, it was decided to put efforts towards
developing a press media model only.
Chatterji and Anant wondered what the key steps should be.
1Average Number of people reading the publications on any day of the week.
2
NRS provides data on total audience of 278 publications in four zones (north, east, south and west) broken down
by different groups: (i) male/female, (ii) income groups (4 of them), (iii) age group (4 of them), occupation categories,
education level (3), town size class (4), and states. The common audience data is also available for total audience of
any two publications and not by any audience group.
3
Circulation is the number of copies published, Data on this was available from Audit Bureau of Circulation for
almost all publications. The audience for these was the number of readers assessed through a nationwide survey
by ORG.
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DRAFT for ACADEMIC USE ONLY

ADVERTISERS INDIA LIMITED - 1972

ADVERTISERS INDIA LIMITED

EXISTING METHOD of PLANNING MEDIA EXPENDITURES

1. Decide desired readership in each target group in different zones/ states.

DEVELOPMENT of a PRESS MEDIA PLANNING MODEL

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