FICCI FRAMES 2015, Part I

Hotel Renaissance in Powai, Mumbai, an area that can well be called the ‘lake district’, was once again the venue where thought leaders, entrepreneurs, creative artistes and visionaries, government officials, industry leaders and diplomats congregated for three days, at FICCI FRAMES 2015, Asia’s annual global convention on the entertainment and media business. FICCI stands for Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry and FRAMES is the name of this event, held on March 25-26-27.

The theme of this year’s FICCI-FRAMES was inspired by ‘Make in India’, the credo adopted by the Central government, and enunciated as ‘Making India the Global Entertainment Superpower’. The entire gamut of media & entertainment, like Films, Broadcast (TV & Radio), Digital Entertainment, Animation, Gaming & Visual Effects, were addressed over a period of three days.

FICCI has worked towards facilitating communication and exchange between key industry figures, influencers and policy makers, working towards gender equality and ridding the industry of gender biases. At FICCI-FRAMES 2015, the first FICCI Women in Media Forum and a heart-to-heart with TV news personality Barkha Dutt was held.

Barkha was only 23 when she joined NDTV, some 20 years ago. She wore many hats for them, as journalist, anchor and, finally, Group Editor. Two of her shows have garnered very high viewership: The Buck Stops Here on weeknights, and We the People, on weekends. She resigned as Group Editor in February and was reported to be in the process of setting up her own multi- media content company.

FICCI-KPMG report, the industry state-of-the-art handbook, was released on the very first day. 2014 was a watershed year, with advertising bouncing back with a growth rate of over 15%, the promise of digitisation in the cable industry finally beginning to take hold with some pricing changes, the government committing to Phase III radio auctions, and the film industry seeing the need to redefine some business models and practices after a challenging year. In this context, the 2015 report assumes special significance.

An entrepreneurship track on the second day of the convention dealt with funding and bringing in ‘angel’ investors, Venture Capitalists and mentoring to industry professionals and aspirants on a one -on-one basis. A unique initiative called ‘FrameUrIdea’ was launched, to help meritorious scripts get face-time with key decision makers.

The future of M&E industry lies essentially in the power of the digital, feels FICCI. With this view, the third day of FRAMES was celebrated as ‘Digital Media Day’. A tribute to creative imagination was paid at the Director's Master-Class, with Raj Kumar Hirani, the director of such raved about films as Munnabhai and its sequel, PK, and Sudhir Mishra (Hazaaron Khwahishen Aisi).

As usual, there were far too many panel discussions, with the programme schedule running into 21 pages. Beginning at around 10 am, the sessions often ended as late as 7-7.30 pm. The first two days offered ‘networking cocktails’ and dinner, interspersed with long presentations during which the cocktails and bites were put on hold. Those expecting valedictory cocktails and dinner at the end of proceedings on the last day were disappointed, since there wasn’t one.