TV's new and willing

If yours is the 407th channel to go on air in the country, how do you excite advertisers? By offering them deal they’d be hard-pressed to turn down. Result: radically new advertising models are coming into being, thanks to the new general entertainment channels such as NDTV Imagine, 9X Music, and Bindaas. To begin with, the new players are guaranteeing a minimum viewership, failing which the deal gets sweeter and sweeter for the advertiser. Explains Sathyamurthy N.P., President, Insight, a division of Lintas Media Group: “We are taking investment calls based on guarantees of viewership share from broadcasters. Usually, we review this within four weeks of launch, and if the commitment has not been met by then we get additional commercial time for our clients, then it gets reviewed in six months and then nine months. If 70 per cent of the viewership commitment has not been met until that time, we get 30-35 per cent of our commitment money back.”

So will 2008 mark the return of general entertainment channels (GECs), which had lost advertising ground to news channels in 2006 and 2007? The opinion is divided among media planners. “There will be certain elasticity for GECs depending on content, and viewership can go up. GECs might also grow by eating into the share of movies and news,” says Basabdatta Chowdhuri, CEO, Madison Media Plus. “It doesn’t have to be an eitheror scenario,” says G. Krishnan, Executive Director & CEO, TV Today Network. “The news genre has grown exponentially in the last few years because we have been able to grow the audience base.” Other broadcasters also say that dramatic changes are unlikely. “The large audience viewership patterns are already in place. None of our channel or genre is affected by any of this,” says Paritosh Joshi, President, Ad Sales & Distribution, Star India.

Some media planners expect viewership to get more segmented. “The market is getting segmented with focussed audiences. Sadly, most broadcasters do not seem to have caught it yet,” says Gowthaman Ragothaman, MD, MindShare.

— Shamni Pande