Anurag Batra - Exchange 4 Media

On Thursday morning, Anurag Batra met us at our hotel. Sitting outside on the terrace of the Lalit hotel, Anurag commented on how lucky we were to be in Delhi with such great weather. The sky was practically on top of us, we were all wearing cardigans and I was wondering if we shouldn’t be inside. The legendary Delhi heat seems to have passed me by. I think it knew I was coming.

Anurag is a media mogul. Having been a media planner for JWT , moving to run Portland Outdoor in India, he made his entrepreneurial break to start Exchange4Media in 1999. Exchange 4 Media is a publishing house much like Haymarket, with Anurag contributing to all of his titles and websites, the leading ones of which are Pitch and Impact. He has created the most extensive network of advertising and marketing practitioners in India.

He estimates that his titles are read by the 70,000 marketing and advertising community of which 12,000 are senior marketing decision makers and 20,000 are students. A small, but highly influential set of people. He has pioneered marketing networking, creating awards, conferences for information sharing and best practice – not to mention news and gossip (he says his favourite pages are still the social photographs at the back of his magazines.)

He’s also made a lot of money. His website, Exchange 4 Media, is not a design classic, but is sold out of every space every month. It’s cluttered but his clients come back time and time again. He believes this is down to the quality of the journalism. He invests in good people, writers, sales people and managers, which he says has ensured that his titles can make money.

If I were to take what I could glean the ‘secrets of his success’ they would be:

1) Know everybody - he certainly seems to!
2) Discover up coming talent – he set up a school to train people in advertising and marketing called FMCC.
3) Make mistakes – he says he’s made loads, but he could afford to
4) Invest in quality staff
5) Always make sure you are making money
6) Invest time in new projects – he puts some of his mistakes down to not investing enough time rather than money.

As a personality he is at once humble and confident. He was immensely affable and interested in us and our businesses, at every juncture pointing out potential connections for us ‘you must connect with Rajesh’.

He firmly believes the future of his business is online. He says he would do away with the costly production of his magazines and focus all the content online. He says he wants to build communities online… and with that he took off, his PA reminding him to check he had his mobile phone, to go and take a look at his latest venture www.stylekandy.com.