Authors: Robin Jeffrey
The ‘2G scandal’ had a further dimension. It brought together two opposite aspects of the cell phone: the immense value of Radio Frequency to great corporations and the cheap everydayness of the mobile. Its taken-for-granted quality led people to use their mobiles as if they were talking privately to someone face-to-face. A spectacular fallout of the ‘2G Scandal’ was that conversations of a highly sophisticated but technologically naïve lobbyist, which had been recorded by the income tax department, were leaked to the media. The lobbyist had worked hard to see that Raja got the telecom ministry in the coalition government formed after the Congress Party victory in May 2009. She had talked regularly and all too candidly to television journalists, politicians and business people—on her mobile phone. Everyone involved seemed to think such conversations were private and secure.
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In 2010, they became national public property (
Chapter 8
). The vast sums involved, and the blatant bartering of influence, threatened the coalition government, since the disgraced Minister of Communications was a member of the DMK, the second-largest party in the national coalition government after the Congress.
The scandals publicised what India’s great business conglomerates had known for twenty years: vast sums were to be made from this invisible, intangible thing called Radio Frequency and because its allocation was in the hands of governments, it was crucial to have sympathetic politicians in charge of key departments. The scandals also underlined the way in which the mobile phone in less than ten years had become an object as familiar to hundreds of millions of people as a pair of sandals. However, as the protagonists whose phones were tapped discovered, it was easier to track mobile phone calls than footprints; records of phone calls did not get washed away in the first shower.
When Raja was being held
in New Delhi’s legendary Tihar Jail in 2011, his patron and political leader, K. Karunanidhi, chief minister of the state of Tamil Nadu, praised him as a man ‘languishing in jail and paying the price for making mobile phones affordable to the people’.
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It was the same attempt to win sympathy that Sukh Ram, the Communications Minister during the 1994–5 auction fiascos, had revelled in. Given the affection that voters in the switched-on state of Tamil Nadu had for their mobile phones, it was an ingenious ploy.
Contests over allocation of Radio Frequency spectrum, and graft arising from such contests, will continue as long as consumers show a passion to communicate in ever more elaborate and spectrum-hungry ways. Technicians will search for ways of packing bigger digital-signal loads onto radio-frequency roadways. And the people who run corporations and governments will struggle to broaden and dominate these roadways for the wealth that such control can generate. These contests went on among relatively few entrepreneurs, bureaucrats, politicians and technicians. Closer to the base of the Indian pyramid, what people took for granted like the blue sky behind a summer haze was that cheap cell phones were part of life in the first decade of the twenty-first century. To hundreds of millions of users, it did not matter which corporation provided the service or which politicians carved themselves a corrupt slice of the action. What was important was that there was a cell-phone service and that it was cheap and reliable.
‘The telecom industry’, Sunil Mittal asserted in 2005, ‘is now employing 3.7 million people … The media industry, the advertising industry, the content industry, all are riding on the back of telecom …’
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It was true that a cascade of occupations grew up to serve a new industry. Women and men who diced with billions and lobbied politicians; Mumbai advertising agents and marketers who devised campaigns to sell phones; technicians who wrote software and positioned cell-phone towers; mechanics who built towers and property owners on whose land towers were built; distributors and shopkeepers who put phones in front of customers. And customers themselves—who found a myriad of uses for what once had been a squat, black, wire-connected, bakelite block locked in a box in the room of a social superior and good only for talking into. How these various interests, skills and initiatives connected with one another, and began to change practices and expectations, are the subject of the
next chapters.
We are the most important in the chain!
Sumit Churasia, Nokia sales promoter, Banaras, 2009
‘Speak directly into the mouthpiece, keeping
moustache out of opening’, advised an advertisement for the telephone in California in 1884.
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People had to be educated about how to use a phone and persuaded that they might want to use one. Similar education was necessary for the mobile phone in India. In old societies, as we saw in
Chapter 1
, information reinforced power, and such relationships carried over into independent India when phones were rare and locked away. Under the government monopoly, a telephone was a privilege that a citizen had to demonstrate a right to own. In the monumental
Swamy’s Treatise on Telephone Rules
, the section relating to ‘New Telephone Connections’ ran to twenty-two pages. ‘Every aspirant for a permanent telephone connection’ was required to ‘apply in the prescribed form’, accompany it with Rs 10 non-refundable fee and be reassured that their application was ‘valid for one year
from the date of issue’.
Once chunks of radio frequency
spectrum were sold to private operators in 1994, the operators had to find ways to get their money back, either by selling expensive services to thousands of prosperous customers or inexpensive services to millions. As we saw in
Chapter 2
, it took ten years for the entrepreneurs and the state to come up with a formula that allowed money to be made and mobile phone usage to mushroom. During that time, people learned. They learned through advertising campaigns; they learned through sales techniques that responded to their needs and price preferences; and they learned through the creation of vast networks of vendors who were trained well enough in the mechanics of mobile phones to demonstrate them and set them up for others. This chapter outlines how the missionaries of the mobile took the phone to the people.
Man’s best friend
Seminal advertising campaigns, financed
by great corporations, spread the word about the wonders of the cell phone across India. Marketing departments trained thousands of sellers and sales promoters who then explained to ten of millions that the device was simple, useful and economical. In time, these sellers and agents communicated the key requirements of customers back to manufacturers and service providers, and this process shaped the way mobile phones were designed and their uses proclaimed to potential buyers.
When Airtel, India’s largest provider of mobile phone services, changed its advertising agency in August 2011, it was news only briefly on the business pages of Indian newspapers. But the funds involved in Airtel’s advertising account were huge: Rs 400 crores (about US $80 million) annually by some estimates, and in the advertising world, the switch was depicted as a dire day for Rediffusion, the agency that lost the Airtel account.
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The switch from Rediffusion to JWT (J. Walter Thompson) ended a relationship that began when Airtel started in the mobile-phone business in 1995. For fifteen years, the two companies had worked together to create strategies and carry out advertising campaigns costing hundreds of millions of dollars (hundreds of crores of rupees) and involving some of India’s greatest celebrities including the cricketer Sachin Tendulkar and the multi award-winning musician A. R. Rahman.
The campaigns illustrated both the difficulties of trying to ‘know India’ and the shifting circumstances of the telecommunications industry. As we have seen, in the ten years after 1991, as mobile telephony was opened to private enterprise, scandals and obstacles were spectacular but the growth in paying subscribers was not. In 1991, there were five million phones in India, none of them mobiles; by 2001, there were 36 million phones, but fewer than 4 million were mobiles.
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It was not a good decade to have been selling mobile phone connections.
By launching its mobile service
in Delhi in 1995, Airtel acknowledged the widely held preconception that the new device was geared for the educated and wealthy, present in larger proportions in the national capital than any other city. Early advertising campaigns reflected this expectation. Skewed towards television, they emphasised the business advantages to be gained from having a mobile phone. Cost was prohibitive for anyone except the well-to-do: calls in 1999 were charged at Rs 16 a minute (about US 30 cents) when Rs 16 was half a day’s wage for a labourer.
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In the early decades of the telephone in the US, the dominant Bell company had invested heavily in trying to expand its market beyond businesses and to educate people about the different ways they might use the phone. Yet even Bell was ‘slow to employ as a sales tool’ the use that later came to dominate: ‘sociable conversation’.
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There was even less temptation in India to try to market idle chatter as a reason for wanting a mobile phone: the costs of the phone and its calls were too great. In any case, the phone still suffered from the elitist hangover of the colonial and Nehru eras: phones were meant for serious people and important matters.
The breaking of the cost barrier happened in 2003 when a minute of talk time on a mobile phone fell below two rupees (one US cent), and advertising men and women punctured much of the telephone’s pompous solemnity. When the industry began to expand after the amnesties and concessions by government in 2000–02, Hutchison Essar, a joint-venture between the Indian Ruia group and Hutchison-Whampoa of Hong Kong, developed an advertising campaign designed to domesticate the mobile phone. For this purpose they used Cheeka, a small dog, who soon became the celebrated figure of one of the most popular campaigns in Indian advertising history. The ability to measure the effect of advertising on sales has eluded marketers for a hundred years, but the Hutch dog ads might claim some credit for the growth of the company’s subscribers from 1.8 million in 2002 to 15.1 million by 2006 and a 17 per cent share of the mobile phone market.
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The dog-and-phone advertisement, created for television and adapted for print, reflected the way advertisers envisaged the market for cell phones in the mushroom years after 2002. The targets were urban people who did not need instruction about how to operate a phone or why it might be useful. The visuals involved small children doing endearing things, always followed by an even smaller dog—a pug—and the message was that the coverage, like the dog, followed you everywhere: ‘Wherever you go, our network follows’.
The Cheeka campaign illustrated the cascade of occupations, extending from Mumbai-based advertising professionals to small-shop entrepreneurs that grew up around the mobile phone. Once the telecom industry was unleashed with the bargain-basement Universal Access Service Licences (UASL) of 2003, half a dozen private companies competed fiercely and dragged the two government-owned companies, MTNL and BSNL, into a more competitive environment as well. The Hutchison-Essar group gave its advertising account to the international firm Ogilvy and Mather in Mumbai. The first Hutch advertisements featuring Cheeka the dog were broadcast in September 2003.
During an all-night brainstorm came the idea about how to tell a story of reliability, simplicity and mobility ‘without the tech, using emotions’.
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The creators of the advertisement initially toyed with the idea of having a small girl following her brother, but decided ‘a dog would be less mushy’.
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The television campaign ran to more than a dozen ads in which the dog followed a small boy everywhere: bathing, getting a haircut, going to school. ‘Man’s best friend was the simplest analogy that could represent unconditional support’, an Ogilvy and Mather executive explained.
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Kapil Arora, a senior vice-president, recounted how a pug dog became a brand representative for mobile telephony:
Cheeka herself was a happy accident. We were looking at using another dog. But at the [television] shoot in Goa the dog refused to perform. … It was raining and the team was completely desperate because it had to finish something, so the production crew ran around looking for dogs and they found this sweet dog there who took an instant liking to the boy and started following him around. It was a happy coincidence that we happened to use the pug.
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The campaign went from
television into print and outdoor advertising (including stick-on paw marks put on floors leading to elevators in large office buildings) and won an award as the top print advertisement of 2003.
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Eight years later Cheeka, had a Wikipedia entry, was the subject of a chapter in a book and was judged to have ‘made Indian advertising history’.
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(See
Illus. 6
).
Much of the expenditure in the Hutchison advertising campaign—an estimated US $40 million—went into the purchase of television time, newspaper space and the printing and dissemination of billboards and displays for stores and shops. When Hutchison sold its stake in the company to Vodafone in 2007, Cheeka was part of the campaign to educate consumers into a new corporate name and colour: she left a pink (Hutchison colour) doghouse and returned to an improved red (Vodafone) one. In the print advertisement and outdoor hoardings and billboards, Cheeka appeared in a red kennel.
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The transition to the new brand name was touted as ‘the largest brand change ever undertaken’ in India and ‘as big as any in the world’. The extent underlined the range of people becoming enmeshed in the mobile phone industry: 400,000 retail outlets, 350 Vodafone-only stores, 1,000 smaller stores and an advertising cost estimated at US $40 million. To advertise the change, Vodafone bought all the advertising time on fourteen channels of the Star Network for a full day. Only the ‘Hutch turns to Vodafone’ advertisements ran. Later research was said to have shown that 80 per cent of the viewing audience had got the message. By 2010, Vodafone had more than 100 million subscribers and was one of the three largest mobile service providers in India.
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