Adgully Exclusive | Earl J Wilkinson examines the challenges and aspirations for INMA

INMA is a market leader in providing global best practices and marketing ideas for news companies and leaders in the industry with practical ideas to increase their audience along with their advertising, brand and profits. INMA focuses on being the leader in resources for best practices, quickly indentifying and communicating trends and also sharing vision and ideas with other media leaders, according to their home page. These are achieved by making these ideas accessible to its members. Founded in 1930, INMA has almost 5,000 members in more than eighty countries today.

In an exclusive conversation with Adgully, Earl J Wilkinson, Executive Director and CEO of INMA dwells upon the challenges INMA faces in the current scenario and talks about his aspirations for the same. It is seldom known that INMA is eighty years old with a grand history behind it.

"It was founded by a group of volunteers marketers in USA who found it would be an interesting idea if they could share information with people in other places, it began informally. We had a group of Europeans who liked what the organization was doing in the 1960s so they created a European division. And in1980 a south pacific division and in 1990's a Latin American division and we were here in about 2004 or 2005," Wilkinson further explained.

INMA came to this market because it was discovered that publications didn't have a robust conversation with each other across boundaries.

"INMA is a global organization but what we found out four years ago, a little bit surprisingly was that there was not a robust conversation amongst major publications in India, also Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Pakistan. There were all aware of each other but there really was no exchange of ideas. Our mission here is more to facilitate that conversation amongst South Asian publishers. It is not just about bringing what's happening around the world to India but sometimes it's also about bringing what's happening in India to the other parts of the world. People in this room, they are proud of their social responsibility campaigns but they have no perspective, that they are that damn good," Wilkinson said.

"When we take this to the world stage, people are blown away by the creativity. Times of India won best of the show for Lead India, I think Rajasthan Patrika, Bhaskar, Mid-Day, in Pakistan, Dawn group of newspapers have all won global awards which isn't really known within India. I expected robust conversation about case studies to advertising, audience and brand and that's what I heard," he further added.

Wilkinson believes that this year INMA got its biggest audience and it is growing a little bit more every year. Almost all the top twenty five publications were present at INMA's fourth annual conference.

"I am happy that we formulated a South Asian board now and so have got the governance issue in place. Next year we are going to go venture out in two more workshops, one on circulation and one on advertising. A lot of what we are going to do next year is with newspapers, they have this general content stream, but people don't read the general content stream. They read what's relevant to them. We want to do more of the Indian case studies which people loved and be more relevant to publishers in south Asia. Not just them contributing content, but also to bring about what's relevant in other parts of the world to this market," he explained.

An association like INMA faces a lot of challenges in today's scenario, the major one being getting in more members for the association.

"We got a great base. We got a board and have now annual advances. That's a huge deal. We now have people coming back every year. I think what we really want is deeper engagement. We have about 8 corporate members and we think probably there ought to be about 15 or 16 corporate members. I am not sure I want this event bigger, I mean if it gets any bigger, there would be good problems to deal with. I like to get sponsors involved with this event more. I think right now we have the foundation and it's just about going back and filling in the holes. Once we have the members what we need to look at is can we keep them engaged? One of the things we are looking at creating next year is advertising awards competition. We feel it is very important. So it's really about filling in holes with membership, sponsorship, annual agenda and probably an awards competition of some kind."

Wilkinson feels INMA provides immense opportunities in terms providing information and sharing ideas with other media houses.

"I think we are pretty much seeing the opportunities. This is what we want to do. We want to get people together to share ideas. It wasn't happening though it is now. I want teams, I was really happy with many publications. It is a good opportunity for everyone to be aware of what's happening in other sectors, because otherwise they don't get this exposure. To me it's not about getting bigger, I want them engaged, learning and sharing. We are on Linkedin, Facebook and we have our own sharing tools. Right now they are a little shy about that but hopefully in a year or two they won't be."

According to Wilkinson, Indian newspapers are marketing oriented, strong on social and responsible campaigns. He believes TOI and Hindustan Times are real leaders in marketing.

"We hope that the aura of these conference generate public relations for the association. We have very good relations with the top 25 publishers. Right now I am just focused on raising the education levels of news executives. I want the profile to be higher. I will be happier if we had 15 other corporate members. The idea is low price membership through invitation pricing. It's a good idea. Some of the companies have as many as 120 members. We are a non-profit association; we do not aim to make money," he said

"So I think we are fulfilling our mission and we are raising the education level and marketing savvy-ness of these news companies and we are fulfilling our mission and I would be very happy," he further added.

Wilkinson went on to say that everyone in this space cannot afford to be too comfortable with things as it is a dynamic space and being comfortable would only mean that you are not putting in enough efforts to make it better. "My message to this fraternity would be "not to be comfortable'. I believe there needs to be tension, we need to be more efficient with print. We need embrace multimedia because it grows our audience and grows our advertising share. Don't be comfortable," he said.

INMA is headquartered in Dallas with offices in Antwerp and New Delhi.