various rambling thoughts: Sacred Hindu vs. voluptuous TOI

Many of us would have been highly amused at the recent and on-going war of ads between the two newspapers – the venerable “The Hindu” and the king of media - “Times of India”.

Times of India has been trying to penetrate the bastion of “The Hindu” in Tamil Nadu. The marketing and brand manager would have done his 4P exercises and realized that Hindu has an image of being somewhat cerebral and therefore deemed dense by the segment eyed by TOI. This is when they came up with this ad

TOI has been getting a lot of flak on social media for this ad for being tasteless. I am not a fan of TOI but I think that this is a smart ad. TOI is not targeting the reader who wants to read an analysis of the Syrian situation or how Chavez is transforming Venezuela. The typical TOI reader is the type of reader who would read a typical tabloid in London. This is the reader who wants a twitter style news. TOI gives it to them and these readers would give attention to this ad

Coming to “The Hindu”, I have loved their response to this. If TOI had mocked the brains behind the editorials of Hindu, those same brains have come out with an aggressive ad response that completely turns around the logic of the TOI ad. These were the ads…Hilarious!!!

The Hindu ad says this - “Yes, we are cerebral. We are like that only. And if you are like one of these people in our ad, we don't really want you as a subscriber”

It has been quite entertaining but the fact remains that both have made their position clear, which was clear from the beginning itself. I mean the supplement of TOI in Delhi - “Delhi Times” is becoming the same size as main newspaper and the front page of TOI will have something that Hindu will deem fit for a deep inside page. Hindu on the other hand is an epitome of the best in Indian journalism.

The reader who wants entertainment will subscribe to TOI and the ones who want to understand what's happening around them will subscribe to the Hindu. That's has been their respective positioning all along and their business model. That's just been reaffirmed by their ad

But its been a really entertaining duel!!