For Mumbai, India, native Samrat Dhar, a desire to master this new reality drew him to the Gabelli School of Business, where he’s earning an M.S. in media management.

After earning a B.S. in economics in 2007 from St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai, Dhar worked for a hedge fund, for Groupon, and most recently, for a gaming company for mobile devices that he founded with his brother. He was also making short films on the side, and in 2017, he started looking for a way to jumpstart his entrepreneurial ambitions.

New York as Tech and Media Hub

“There were programs in the Midwest, and even in Boston, but I thought New York was a better environment because there are more tech people in New York than there are in Silicon Valley,” he said, pointing to the recent $200 million sale of New York-based digital news company Cheddar as an example.

“The Flatiron district is the perfect incubator for all sorts of new tech startups. There’s so much happening there. The talent is now readily available on the East Coast, which wasn’t the case 10 years ago.”

As a St. Xavier graduate, Dhar was attracted to the familiarity of Fordham’s Jesuit heritage. But New York City was brand new to him. He came here with no preconceived notions, he said, and found the city to be welcoming and warm. His experience at the Gabelli School was equally positive.

“The best thing about my experience the last two years has been the curriculum, and how you have the liberty to structure it in the direction that you want it to go based on what you see yourself doing 10 or 15 years from now,” he said.

“It allowed me the flexibility to take courses in finance, strategy, and entrepreneurship.”

Exploring the Stories That Unite

It also allowed him to direct Unexplored India, a 23-minute-long forthcoming documentary about an annual fair in Mhasa, a tiny hamlet 50 miles northeast of Mumbai. The village takes its name from the Hindu deity Mhasoba, and the fair, which is a tribute to Mhasoba, is a common way for villages around the country to honor deities. Fairgoers come from neighboring villages and even other states to honor Mhasoba, which translates to “Buffalo God.”

“What drew me to this was how folklore crosses boundaries and borders. In India, there are so many diverse states, and every state has a different language and a different culture. But there are certain things that can hold people together,” he said.

Bozena Mierzejewska, Ph.D., an associate professor of media management, who supervised Dhar’s independent study, said that the master’s program’s flexibility is no accident.

“The media industry is so diverse, it would be very difficult to give a set of say, five classes, and then say, ‘You know everything,’” she said.

“Because if you want to be a filmmaker, it’s different than if you want to be in the book publishing industry. So there are three core courses, and then you design your electives around your main interests.”

The Future of Technology and Entertainment

Of all the courses he took, Dhar said Consumer Adoption of New Media resonated the most. He learned a great deal about emerging trends in media consumption, such as holographic TV.

“Couple that with the entrepreneurship course, you could actually build a business idea around it. You can see how all that information can be made relevant for the future,” he said.

“When you’re in that environment where there’s a lot of thinking happening, whether by yourself or your peers, it forces you to come up with more innovative ideas.”

Spending time in New York opened his eyes to an area of finance that he had not been exposed to when he first entered that field: private equity and venture capital firms that specialize in media and the entertainment industry. It helped him understand why the city is often referred to as the media capital of the world.

“One of my most memorable experiences was a visit to the Time Warner Medialab, where they create focus groups and have been trying to essentially build a system to evaluate whether a project will do well,” he said, noting that measuring audience reactions has taken an almost clinical approach. “They get people of different demographics to participate, and they measure not just responses to questions, but also things like their vital stats, their heartbeat.”

Dhar is weighing several options for jobs after graduation. He may work for himself but would also consider working for an established firm. One thing he’s sure of is he will stay in New York City.

“So far, I’ve seen the academic life. Now I’d like to see the professional life of the city,” he said.

Mierzejewska said she expects Dhar to find success in whatever path he chooses. She was impressed with his devotion and compared his independent study to the kind of work that doctoral students might tackle.

“He didn’t just do a research paper; he did an analysis of all the materials that will help young filmmakers manage a project,” she said.

“He was trying to learn theory on the one hand and develop his film documentary on the other. It was very unique, very ambitious. It was all coming from his own natural talent, which I found to be extraordinary.”

Acknowledging that problem, Rob Norman, the global chief digital officer for the media investment company GroupM, said online companies must “find new and better ways of integrating brands relevantly, smartly, carefully, with a light touch … so we are not rejected.”

Norman spoke on May 5 at the World Media Economics and Management Conference, held May 3–6 at Fordham University. At the biennial gathering, hundreds of media professionals and academics discussed the continuing impact of the digital revolution on legacy media and advertising.

The constant disruption of an ever-changing digital media landscape also was a topic: Hence the title of Norman’s presentation, “The End of the Beginning of Digital Marketing,” which was adapted from GroupM’s annual report on digital marketing and future trends.

Media Jenga

Media sites are now playing a game of “media jenga,” Norman said, with a complex structure of content and social media being used to disseminate information. He gave as an example NBC and its relationship with social media sites and with Buzzfeed, which offers the potential of viral impact of content.

“They will also talk about what they’re going to do on Facebook Instant Articles, … about what they’re going to do with Facebook live video, and … their partnership … with Snapchat,” Norman said of NBC. “Here we have a game of media jenga, in that everyone is interlocked with everybody else. And this creates the most interesting dynamic to the way the market operates.”

What the companies have to deal with is balancing the need for exposure and the use of data about that exposure with the “phenomenon of ad blocking.”

The impact of ad blocking cannot be underestimated, say industry experts. A 2015 report on the topic by PageFair and Adobe said the number of people using ad blockers grew by 41 percent over the past year. The estimated loss of revenue during 2015 was $21.8 billion, and that is expected to grow to $41.4 billion in 2016 as mobile devices begin to employ ad blockers as well.

The reasons for the use of ad blockers are varied, according to the report. An increasing number of ads and the misuse of personal information are cited most often. And the desire to avoid ads is not new, Norman said.

“The simple truth is that if someone can consume the media they want to consume … completely ad-free, heaven knows they will,” Norman said. “There is no history of people choosing to watch advertising-supported media if they have the option of doing the alternative.”

But there has been a “covert contract for generations” between media users and providers, Norman said. Content is provided for free in exchange for the acceptance of advertising. How to overcome technological hurdles and continue the contract is the challenge facing digital media.

Software has been developed to measure the viewability of ads, he said. Some websites have been redesigned to maximize viewability. And standards now exist within GroupM for an ad view to be counted.

Despite those advances, a rethinking of the nature of digital advertising still may be in order.

“It may be that advertising is simply not enough, and that a new focus on content supporting a brand narrative and services that attract frequent engagement through utility will become a priority,” the Interaction 2016 report reads. “This will not be cheap, easy or quick, but nor was the path to dominance by certain companies in commercial television.”

The conference—the largest in the WMEMC’s history—was co-organized and co-hosted by Gabelli School of Business Assistant Professor Bozena Mierzejewska, PhD, and Axel Roepnack, who also teaches at the Gabelli School.