Death by vinyl

Anna Salai "" Mount Road for those who still call Chennai Madras "" has witnessed a slow yet drastic change. Till about three years ago, the sidewalks on Mount Road had huge hand-painted bill boards advertising the latest movies, apart from hand-painted commercial bill boards that adorned the roof tops of buildings.

Diwali season was boom time for those who hand-painted bill boards. New movie releases and companies offering Diwali discounts used painters to paint bill boards.

That's no longer the case. Today Chennai and Anna Salai have few hand-painted bill boards.

They've been replaced by vinyl banners which are better printed, are printed more quickly and are cheaper to boot. Needless to say, the painters who eked out a living painting bill boards are now in dire straits.

Says Krishnan Menon, senior consultant, outdoor, Oglivy Outdoor Advertising: "The entry of vinyl banners has hit hand-painted movie banner companies the worst. Ninety per cent of the vinyl manufacturers' business is contributed by commercials (advertisements) and only 10 per cent comes from movies."

Vinyl banner manufacturers are able to profit from their large scale of operations from commercials and so are able to subsidise movie vinyl banners at lower costs, displaced hand pointers say.

Yet the biggest reason for vinyl movie banners replacing hand-painted banners is the perfection of images in vinyl banners, Menon points out.

Ramanathan, a painter, acknowledges that a lot of his work depends substantially on the movie industry.

So when a large number of movies were released on days like Deepavali, Pongal, Tamil New Year and Independence Day, painters were loaded with work.

He says that painters used to get work too from Tamil Nadu's regional political parties. Painters would have to place 'cut outs' (hand painted large banners of political leaders).

Says Ramanathan: "During the slack period in the movie industry we used to get work from the political parties. Therefore, we used to have work throughout the whole year. Sadly, the political parties also now prefer vinyl billboards."

According to Ramanathan, painters used to get anywhere between Rs 10,000 and Rs 50,000 a month, depending on the time of the year, and earned a net profit of 10 to 15 per cent.

Now about 90 per cent of the banners in cinema theatres in the city are vinyl, he says ruefully, adding that the demand for hand-painted movie banners has been falling rapidly and is now less than 10 per cent.

So the movie banner companies undercut one another. If this continues, hardly any movie painting banner company will be left afloat.

Sunil Rao, managing director of Cactus, the biggest vinyl printer in the city, admits that Chennai was the most popular destination for hand-painted movie banners after Mumbai.

Rao agrees with Menon and points out that the major reason for the ubiquity of vinyl banners today is their affordability and the clear re-production.

"Unlike the artists who paint movie banners, painters of commercial banners are not highly skilled. Painters of commercial banners who have lost their jobs with the arrival of vinyl banners have taken up jobs putting up vinyl banners," Rao says.

Says Mohammed Saqhib, a partner at Olive Imaging, the second biggest vinyl printing company in the city, "Nobody wants to contract a Shah Rukh Khan, pay him crores and then get someone to hand-paint a commercial. The reproduction will be good but not as good as the original. Vinyl printing uses digital technology and is as good as it gets." To be sure, some painters still have work.

"In the case of commercial banners, there is still a demand for hand-painted banners which do not require much detail. For short-term (15 days to two months) advertisement campaigns, outdoor ad companies always resort to hand-painted banners as they are cheaper than vinyl banners," Rao says.

But Muthuraman, who has been running a small movie painting banner company for the last 35 years and is now finding the going tough, did not foresee what would happen.

Ten years ago little did he realise when he gazed at the 'imported vinyl bill board' of Wills commercials that it would rob him of his livelihood.

In 2000, Chennai had only two companies which manufactured vinyl banners at a cost of Rs.200 per sq ft. Muthuraman says that he did not expect the cost of vinyl bill boards to crash to about Rs.25 per sq ft (the present price).

Hand-painted movie banners (cloth) cost about Rs.8 per sq ft and plywood banners cost about Rs.16 per sq ft. Since vinyl banners are priced on a par with hand-painted movie banners, movie producers and distributors opt for vinyl banners.

The images in vinyl banners are created by software and are, therefore, perfect.

"It would take at least two to three days for us to paint a 20 x 14 feet banner. But vinyl banners of the same size can be completed in a couple of hours with the help of software," Muthuraman points out.

Saqhib of Olive agrees. "You can come to us with a photograph and we can deliver the vinyl sheet to you in a couple of hours. Speed matters."

To sum up, consider this. The total area available in Chennai for outdoor advertising is about 3.5 lakh square feet.

At about Rs. 25 per sq ft, that would mean revenues in the region of about Rs. 8 plus crore ""that is the size of the market that vinyl banner mnakers have grabbed from hand painters.