Shuchi Bansal meets Sunil Lulla who shuttles between Delhi and Mumbai, balancing the various hats he dons for Miditech's entertainment biz.
He doesn’t show it, but it does annoy him when people ask if the Miditech-Turner entertainment channel will ever take off, given the current market conditions. After all, Sunil Lulla, former CEO, Times Now, joined Alva Brothers Entertainment as director and group CEO with the clear mandate to launch a Hindi general entertainment channel (GEC) under Real Global Broadcasting Private Limited, the company’s 50:50 broadcasting joint venture with Turner International.
The FAQ — is it a good time to launch another Hindi GEC, the fourth in succession after 9x, NDTV Imagine and Colors — elicits a firm reply: “Hundred per cent.” India is not a recession market yet. “Having said that, entertainment does best in a recession market,” observes Lulla, who shuttles between Mumbai and Delhi balancing the different hats he sports in Alva Brothers’ entertainment business.
Besides, the sequence is irrelevant. “You may have started first, but let’s see where you end up,” Lulla says. He skirts queries on channel plans probably for two reasons. One, he’s averse to creating hype when the launch is still some time away, and two, the company is still waiting for its broadcasting licence.
But there is no alteration in the business plan and shows for the channel have been commissioned. “How about a channel without any saas-bahu serials,” he says, promising a distinctive fare for couch potatoes. His advise to entertainment channels: get labels, specify if you are for the rural audiences, the masses or the premium consumer. “You don’t have to be a 100-tonne gorilla in the broadcasting business. You can be nifty, interesting and still be in a good position,” he feels.
While he understands the eyeballs and advertising game, television viewership measurement and the valuation game that broadcasters play are his pet peeves. “Ratings are relevant but we have an obsession with the matrix. People unrelated to me send me smses on the latest ratings and channel shares every Wednesday at 11 pm. I don’t care,” claims Lulla. Well, he probably will when his channel goes on air.
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However, it’s not clear if TRPs are the real bugbear or the fact that people choose to disturb him after office hours. For, in a media world obsessed with TRPs and market capitalisation (“returns don’t have to come from the stock market,” he believes), he’s fanatical about personal time. “I put clear systems in place when I take off on a holiday. So as penalty for calling me without any emergency during my vacation, I wheedle out one day’s wage from the culprit. I have done it twice,” Lulla smiles.
The Alva Brothers — Niret and Nikhil — first met Lulla at Sony Entertainment Television (now known an Multi-Screen Media) when they made the chartbuster reality show Indian Idol for the company’s flagship channel. During his Sony stint, a result of his web dream Indya.com going bust, Lulla revitalised the channel with the help of blockbuster shows like Jassi Jaisi Koi Nahin, Fame Gurukul and Indian Idol. While Sony climbed up the ratings chart, Lulla was asked to make a lateral shift. “I like running businesses and my role was being changed,” he recalls.
So when the Jain brothers (the Alva Brothers hired him only in February this year) of Bennett, Coleman & Co came knocking, he jumped at the opportunity to run their English news channel. He’d been job-hopping in any case ever since he passed out of the S P Jain Institiute in Mumbai. He sold spirits at two different liquor companies, had stints in advertising agencies, turned around HMV when it was a BIFR case, localised MTV to make it a rage with Indian youth and tried his hands at establishing a web business during the Internet wave.
So why does he switch jobs so frequently? “A rolling stone gathers no moss, I thought you’d know the answer,” he says with a grin. “Some movements are fairly easy to explain… some were new opportunities,” adding that the question does embarrass him at times. However, he blames it on his genes. “I am a serial entrepreneur, a streak that comes from my father’s side of the family that was engaged in business,” he says.
In a united India, his grandfather ran his own construction company that built the Multan Jail and the Karachi Court. Later, his father set up a wood cutting machine tools factory in Mumbai where Lulla acquired drilling and welding skills. But his management studies and interest in “advertising and marketing” pushed him deeper into the professional world.
Among his challenges, the biggest was the HMV turnaround and more recently, the parting of ways of the Times group and Reuters. It was testing as he first cemented the relationship and then negotiated the divorce. But what went wrong? “Nothing really,” he says. The shareholders deal said that in case there is a change of ownership of one partner, the other could buy his stake out.
Of course, Reuters could never buy Times’ stake as India allows only 26 per cent FDI in news channels. However, when Reuters merged with Thomson, it was seen as a change of ownership by the Jains. “But at the back of their minds, they had a niggling need to buy back the shares. They suddenly felt that Times Now was a hot property and it will be better valued in the future,” says Lulla.
But he did not really expand the TV business. “I left when the blueprint for the second channel (business) was ready, signed and closed. I will probably see on air what I thought it would be,” claims Lulla. However, he adds that for the Jains “print is king.” When he’s not reading Robin Cook and watching films, he’s collecting socks — his collection has enjoyed a fair amount of media coverage. But why does he collect socks? “I put my foot in the mouth. So it’s good to take care of it.”