It's only words..even for corporate Media Houses when it comes to online branding

"It's only words..words are all that I have to take your heart away.."

Or so goes the Boyzone song..the lyricist must have penned down the words thinking of a person in mind..but in today's digital world it is equally true for every professional organization, business and not for profits alike..to bank on text based branding. But my curiosity went a little further to understand what the media houses - the brand creators, opinion makers, champions of social causes, marketing facilitators and the change agents (their own words!!!) - do when it comes to telling their own story to the world.

At the start, let me clarify that this piece is not about passing value judgments and marking the business houses red and blue..red for the socialists and blue for capitalists..or even marking them pro-government or pro-people (a synonym of anti-government at times.. )..the idea over here is to understand what these media houses tell about themselves and more precisely the words they use while telling about themselves to the external world..if possible we would also like to know if they use common words to make a point or they use completely distinct verbiage..

Let's start with two leading media houses in India - Zee and NDTV - the media houses with distinct identities and analyze the top 10/20 words they use in the 'About Us' or synonymous sections of their websites.

Zee Media

Let's begin with Zee Media. The most frequently used word being news, followed by the word zee, channel, business etc.

The list of words used by the Zee Media Channel can be seen as below:

  As you can see the words news, zee, channel, business, people, read,audience, India, issues and brand figure in the top 10 most frequently used words.

NDTV

Now let's turn our attention to NDTV, a pioneer of private TV programming in India and election analysis in India. Let's see what they bank on when it comes to using words that reflect their identity..

The word NDTV comes at the top of charts followed by news, prime and programming. The following bar plot shows the word frequencies for the top 20-40 words used by the news channel.

It is quite evident from the bar plot, the words ndtv, news, show, India, prime, channel, shows, editor, also, programming, senior, anchor, every, country and television are at the top.

Data Cleaning

As I had mentioned in one of my previous article, Indian writers seem to be a little more generous with the use of joining words(conjunctions etc) to create bigger sentences. The word also keeps popping up in NDTV text, followed by oft-repeated words like 'key'(as in key issues, key events) and 'every'(every celebrity, every issue). In Zee content, the word 'also' gets repeated and also the word 'read' which pops with hyperlinks. We need to ignore these words in analysis.

Analysis

Let's keep aside any pre-conceived notion about both of these media houses and try to judge them through the eyes of non-Indian audience, based on what they seem to be telling the world through text. The following comparison will help you visualize them better as distinct identities based on word usage patterns

Commonalities first

Both of these media houses put their names and the word 'news' in top 2 of the most frequently used words. They also use words such as India, editor and channels in top 10. NDTV seems to be using the word India and Country more than Zee. 

NDTV - A TV Show Programming Champion with Experienced Anchors and Editors

As highlighted with violet color in the screenshot above under 'word freq NDTV' column on the left hand side, the NDTV channel talks more about aspects related to TV Programming starting from words such as 'shows','programming','anchor','television' and also the word 'editor'. They seem to be more into TV Show Programming and seem to be telling the world more about that. It is evident that they want to portray themselves as 'leader' by using the word in their introductory text and also naming a channel 'NDTV Prime'. NDTV seems to be more 'personality' driven with more frequent use of person oriented words such as 'senior anchor' and 'senior editor'.

ZEE - A TV Content Maker: 'for people to raise issues' and 'for businesses to create brands'

Zee TV does not mention the word television enough to make it to top 20 and focus seems to be more on producing the audience-centric content for business branding and raising the issues of people. It is evident from the repetitive use of words 'business', 'brands', 'content', 'audience' and 'viewers'. Zee also seems to stress more on being issue centric with the words 'people' and 'issues' appearing more in their text. Zee seems to claim pioneer ship in their own domain with the frequent use of word 'first'. As opposed to NDTV, Zee seems to focus more on issue centric with less focus on the personalities of anchors and editors.

I hope my text analysis has made some interesting points for you to ponder when you think about the TV shows. The TV Programming(NDTV) or TV Content Production (ZEE) are always for specific purpose and for specific audience. It is for us to consider such aspects while watching them and save  the burden of calling them names and get emotionally carried away by the opinion being made there.

Conclusion

This was a case study of finding out similarities and distinct identities between two entities based on the word usage patterns and Unsupervised Machine Learning.When you are trying to compare two identities, the best starting point would be to understand what they are telling about themselves and the words they use frequently in the introductions. The most frequently used verbiage may show the glimpses of their identities if you connect the 'spaces' between those words well. At times this may just substantiate what you already know and at times it may add new perspectives to your thinking. In this world of information overdose and over the top branding, the differences between two entities seem to diminish on the face value and such techniques may help you differentiate better..

Comments? Feedback? Thoughts?