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PEOPLE
 Paper
Tiger
Young, aggressive, articulate! And
sassy, hip, and happening! They are Bombayites or Mumbaikars, if you
prefer the ethnic tag. And they read Mumbai's largest-circulated tabloid Mid-Day,
which just turned 21, last month. Or at least that is what Mid-Day
Publications' debonair Managing Director, Tariq Ansari, likes to
believe. ''I like my papers to project the same persona, for Mumbai is my
core market. And all my media implementations, whether newspapers, radio
or the Net, cater to the Mumbai reader first,'' says Tariq, 39. They do,
and pretty successfully, at that. In the print basket, the flagship Mid-Day
now has a circulation of about 1,50,000 copies, which makes it the
second-largest English daily in Mumbai, right after the venerable old lady
of Boribunder, a.k.a., The Times of India. Mid-Day's Sunday
counterpart too has breasted the one-lakh tape. The group's advertising
and media bi-weekly, The Brief, has a small but high-profile industry
leadership, while the vernacular dailies, the Urdu Inquilab and the
Gujarati Mid-Day, are holding their own. Radio-Mid-day, the group's
foray into fm services, is going great guns and it has just been awarded
licences for Mumbai, Delhi, and Chennai. The group has also launched its
city portal, chalomumbai.com. ''The idea is to become a focused, but
convergent media organisation,'' adds Tariq.
But doesn't he want a national presence?
''Not really. Mumbai is clearly the most exciting media market in the
country, though we will go national with radio. My role model is a
complete city paper like Chicago Tribune,'' says the peppy
publisher, who eats, sleeps, and dreams media, and talks about nothing
else. Well, his tunnel vision seems to be working in this case ...
 Light
Artiste
Is it an 'Unbearable Lightness
of Being' for ad film maker Prasoon Pandey? The hotshot director of
Mumbai-based Highlight Films, has just bagged two prestigious
international awards-a bronze Lion for the Fevicol commercial for Pidilite
Industries at the Cannes International Advertising Festival and a silver
Clio for his The Times Of India film. Prasoon had earlier won India's
first Silver Lion in 1996, for the Ericsson Mobile commercial, at Cannes.
Is it inspiration, perspiration, or plain impressive lineage-he comes from
a creative family with siblings like singer Ila Arun and ad man Piyush
Pandey, the executive creative director at O&M-or a combination of all
three? Says Prasoon, 39, who left an advertising career in Lintas to join
Highlight in 1995: ''There is no dearth of ideas. But, to win, Indian
advertising needs a certain maturity, and has to prove its mettle by
winning every year.'' Like he does, we suppose...
 ICE
(ad) Man
Yet another goes from bricks
to clicks. M. Suku, the media genie who won his spurs by managing
media spends of old economy giants like Unilever and Colgate-Palmolive,
has embarked on his New- Economy innings. As CEO at Adnova Technologies,
India's first application service provider for the media industry, he will
help provide a common e-infrastructure, offering commerce, collaboration,
and communication to media planners, buyers, and sellers. Adnova has been
promoted by Sam Balsara, the chief of Madison Communications, with funding
from Boston-based venture fund ViewGroup. Says the notoriously low-profile
Suku, 38, who has also put in a brief stint at now-infamous ABCL: ''The
idea is to leverage my ice (Information, Communication, and Entertainment)
background to cater to the tightly-knit community of media planners.
However, I would rather let the company speak for itself.'' Well, it very
well could...
 CEO
Naturally
Would a high-powered First
World CEO volunteer to nurse an ailing NGO? If she was Meeta Vyas,
she would. For Meeta, who just took over as the CEO of the World Wide Fund
for Nature (WWF), India, after heading US-based Signature Brands, a NASDAQ
company with sales of $1 billion, revels in being different. She quit
top-notch consulting firm McKinsey & Co. because of a perceived lack
of exposure to real business and then left a high-profile career at
General Electric because she got fed up of lateral moves. ''I wanted a job
with P&L responsibility that never came my way, despite an interview
with Jack Welch,'' quips Meeta, 41, whose seemingly-fragile looks belie
both her age and impressive credentials. Now, her immediate goal is to
channel her corporate experience to make WWF viable with financial backing
from corporate donors. ''Be it a company or an NGO, you need sound
management principles,'' stresses this MIT graduate, who claims to have
fused her passion and mission in this job. Fortune does favour the brave,
it seems...
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