The many sides of media man Pradeep Guha

Pradeep Guha, Times of India’s brand and advertising chief, filmmaker, one-time CEO of Zee Telefilms and media promoter, passed away suddenly last Saturday.
Representational Image. (File Photo)
Representational Image. (File Photo)

Pradeep Guha, Times of India’s brand and advertising chief, filmmaker, one-time CEO of Zee Telefilms and media promoter, passed away suddenly last Saturday. He was just in his late 60s, and hardly anyone knew it was coming. A galloping liver cancer took his life. His close friends felt cheated. The media and entertainment industry was left gaping. 

Few knew PG started as a firebrand leftist. In the late 1970s he had promoted the ‘Xaverian Union’ — an alliance of St Xavier’s College alumni and college students to take down the ‘autocratic’ Jesuits. It is believed he was also paid a visit by a police posse who, suspecting he was a Naxal sympathizer, took away an ornamental ‘Khukri’ as evidence! 

However, his lasting contribution to the left, and to liberal journalism, was the setting up of the Centre of Education & Documentation (CED — or popularly known as the Doc Centre) in a back street of Mumbai’s Colaba area. Here a team of researchers and librarians toiled to build one of the finest news clippings library, used by hundreds of students and researchers, before the internet and Google made it irrelevant.

Illustration: Amit Bandre
Illustration: Amit Bandre

Times’ Response Man 
It was around then, PG took up a marketing job with the Times’ Bennett, Coleman & Co (BCCL). While the Doc Centre thrived, Guha did not go down that road. He embraced corporate life with dedication to the Times Group. He rose quickly through the ranks and was posted as General Manager at BCCL’s Kolkata branch. He did what he was sent there to do — quell the labour unrest there  —  before he returned to Mumbai, a hero.

Pradeep Guha turned out to be the man for the moment. As the 1980s drew to an end, the Times Group was struggling with its past. The stodgy Old Lady of Boribunder had shed its old, professional managers and the era of the young Jain brothers — Samir and Vineet — was dawning. In Guha the owners saw the person who could develop their brand; and use the group’s dominant media position to drive advertising revenue. 

Guha delivered. The old ad department with clerks was replaced with the ‘Response’ section; and the sprawling second floor - Guha’s Empire - replete with good looking space sellers, began to resemble a high-ceilinged modern art gallery. 

“To drive advertising revenue, Guha developed a complex matrix called the ‘Mastermind’. It was a massive chart of choices of the various Times Group properties advertisers were enticed to buy,” recalls Peter Mukerjea who was then CEO of Star India in 2000. It was designed to fortify BCCL’s monopoly and take away ads from competitors. “For his innovation, the Jains should erect a bust in the Times’ foyer in Pradeep Guha’s memory,” Mukerjea says in all seriousness.

Guha also pioneered ‘events’ as both brand development and a source of revenue for the group. Others followed. The Economic Times ‘Entrepreneurship Awards’ drew the captains of industry to the Times stable. It was the age of the beauty pageants, and the glamour of properties such as the Femina ‘Miss India’ made the Times into a celebrity network. Paying her respects to Guha, Lara Dutta, the winner of the Miss Universe crown in 2000, called her mentor the most successful “Queen maker”.

Failure at Zee
All good things come to an end, and so it was with Guha. Bitten by the Bollywood bug, he produced the Hrithik Roshan-Karishma Kapoor starrer ‘Fiza’ with a fair degree of success. Legend has it the Times owners weren’t too happy with their platform being used for diversified business activity. Whether it was this foray, or whether Guha had outgrown the Times, he ended his 30-year run in 2005 to launch the English daily ‘DNA’ — a 50:50 JV between the Bhaskar Group and Zee Telefilms. 

“Times gave him tremendous freedom, but the takeaway is: never try and grow bigger than the owners,” says Guha’s friend Bhaskar Das, who headed Times’ ‘Response’ after the Boss left. Meanwhile, Zee Telefilms, the television entertainment network promoted by Subhash Chandra, was taking a beating from Star, after the latter’s success with KBC. Chandra saw Guha as an opportunity, and made him CEO to help turn around Zee’s fortunes. The marriage lasted only for 3 years. 

In an interview with this writer in 2016, Subhash Chandra said: “I had no issue with him (Pradeep Guha) as a professional. However, when he said we had to go on spending for programming without any guarantee of making a profit, I did not agree with him. I was answerable to my investors. We therefore parted.” There is the other side too. Subhash Chandra is a difficult man for CEOs to work with, and he confessed in his book he had run through 7 of them over 2 decades. 

The Times Group was a safe haven with a strong financial foundation and with intrinsic brand value. Success was easy there. Zee was a different kettle of fish. It had lost the No. 1 position to Star after 2000, and there were others in the race. Guha’s job was therefore more challenging. Did he stand up to the task? The jury is still out. After his Zee exit, Guha turned full time entrepreneur. He produced and released the movie ‘Phir Kabhi’ in 2008; he began an advertising consultancy; he took an initial 10% stake in the 9X network for `5 crore, and relaunched the music channels with some degree of success. However, none of these ventures really gained traction, and it was very clear his best days were behind him.

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