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The question had me stumped. I gold-fished my way through the answer but the question stayed with me.

“How does one know when one is successful?”

100 more clients? 20 offices? Global product? Networks? million followers on twitter? A boat? private planes? Two divorces and three alimonies?

What?

How was I to know when I was successful? Would there be a sign or waving flags at the finish line? An invisible red tape that I could chest proudly? The problem is an enterprise is not a 100 metre run, it’s not even a marathon, more often than not its an entrepreneur’s lifetime. It’s a long enough time to get lost chasing short term goals and lose sight of the ‘big picture’.

The question had me thinking and prompted me to take another look at what we were doing and where we were headed.

To imagine ‘success’. What it would look, taste, smell, feel like!

The answer came to me as i prepared a case-study presentation for the National Entrepreneurship Network. I went through the entire story of how Phonethics was set-up, how our office got sealed off in Delhi, how folks did good and bad by us and how we went from a -40L to a 2Cr+ set-up in 15 months. It struck me that the journey is the reward! The very attempt to strike out, to do something different, challenge the status quo, create is an extremely powerful emotion! (the money helps and frankly there’s more of it chasing you when you no longer chase it)

I’m proud of this journey and of our goals, thankful to my co-travellers and the entire eco-system and determined to never confuse ’success’ with ‘intent”

• to save money
• to save time
• to save effort: curated bundles of content along interest based verticals (value addition)
• unbundling of complex (and expensive) media packages (like selling ‘singles’ in the music business)
• on the move access
• language services (translation, text to speech)
• budgeted institutional media / content purchase

Consider some of the challenges (at least in the Indian context) –
1.    Lack of a digital (monetisable) identity like credit card etc
2.    Language (local language content is in short supply)
3.    Access (awareness and availability)
As a Creative Individual and a mildly puzzled entrepreneur I find myself asking a few key questions:
a.    Creation – why are we creating what we are? Is there a precedent/gap/trend that we’ve identified? Can we collaborate/use online tools to reduce the cost of production? Do we know the target audience well enough? Can we collaborate with other online destinations (where our audience is) to identify and access the audience?

b.    Distribution – are we optimally using ‘free’ platforms we can leverage to increase discovery and impact of the content? How do we separate the discovery and consumption? Is there a regular social media outpost that we can manage to inform and update our loyal customers? Do we allow them to bring their friends to the party?

c.    Billing – have we passed on the benefits of reduced distribution, advertising and delivery costs to the consumer? Is the content ‘cheaper’ because of it? Is it easy to access? Have we hobbled paid content with rights management softwares? (reducing the effective value of the purchase) Is the content bundled? Can the customer pay for smaller bundles of content? (micro-payment friendly)

TWO SECRET WEAPONS (well, not so secret actually but effective all the same)
1.    Mobile phones – we imagine it as a key element in the ‘paid content’ ecosystem both as a payment gateway and a delivery channel. ‘Text to pay’, ‘pre-pay’ and ‘micro-payment’ are only just being used to pay for content but are simple enough and available in a great scaled environment so as to make it (payment through mobile phones) feasible.

2.    People pay for content with money OR their time* – We have to figure how to monetise the latter.  Advertising still remains the best way to monetise the time users spent consuming your content, the question is how innovative can we be about it. At what point does it become feasible to sell your own advertising deals (which maybe smaller and more painful to service) that allow the advertiser to FULLY UTILISE the scope and audience offered by your business?

SUMMARY: Build platforms, ‘ease’ and ‘simplicity’ score big – bigger than we imagine, collaborate to create industry standards with peers: tying up with even one more company like yours is a ‘collaborative’ effort! And the biggest thing – DON’T BE AFRAID TO CHARGE FOR WHAT YOU CREATE

Creative folks being attached to commercial creative output is like a dentist being attached to the rotten tooth. its your job to get it out (the idea) if someone likes it good, else go back to work

Characters, brand mascots and other such animals

Price Waterhouse forecasts the total value of comic characters to reach $ 1.3 trillion, of which 70% could be Asian.

As a consumer, the utterly butterly girl of Amul and the maharaja of Air India have not only informed and entertained me but also helped me connect and build a context for these brands beyond what ‘laxman' did for the hair oil. These characters offer the brands an opportunity to tell a story that is human, dynamic and local. They locate the brand in the world inhabited by me (the consumer) and reflect my conflicts, aspirations and moods.

Recent examples include Chintamani (ICICI), Insurance man (Bajaj Allianz) and Amaron batteries. The concept of a branded character is no longer novel.

2008 a media odyssey

In the world of Web 2.0, social networking media, internet on the go and multimedia mobile phones, creating a character does not stop at a drawing or a puppet that appears on the packaging or in a TV commercial.

So what is the definition of a well rounded/fleshed out brand mascot? What kind of content do customers expect from these mascots? How can they be made into containers of a brand's attributes? Is there life for these mascots beyond the 30 second commercial or viral video? How do we make consumers in a culturally diverse country like India connect with an icon? And most importantly how do we do this in a cost-effective manner with metrics available to the brand managers to measure impact?

Moreover, the Indian consumer has come a long way from media naive to almost being media fatigued. Instant news and the explosion of media vehicles has made discovery and consumption of content a nightmare for advertisers, creators as well as consumers of content.

Is that a bird? Is that a plane? No..it's ..a Pokkitbuddy

Inspite of its diverse culture-scape the one thing that's common pretty much across India is the usage of visuals and symbols to communicate. Add to this the colourful festivals and millions of stories, folktales, folksongs and myths across the country and what you have is a well established culture of storytelling and storyselling. The solution to the problems of the 21^st century media scape lies in tapping some of these habits and methods.

Imagine being able to navigate the content space with the aid of a visual symbol, a character – that stands for a specific content vertical and is easily identifiable. A sort of container of attributes that consumers associate with certain types of content. An interactive pneumonic that customises the experience and aggregates diverse info-streams. new alphabet for a new vocabulary. A visual alphabet.