Turner-Miditech's Planned Launch of 'Real' Channel in India:Will it Succeed?

IBSCDC regularly updates the list of free cases. To view more free cases, please visit our site at frequent intervals.

Turner-Miditech's Planned Launch of 'Real' Channel in India:Will it Succeed?

 

<< Previous

Amid this declining growth for Hindi GECs, shift in advertisers’ investments to other channels of ‘unique content’ was a serious blow. Instead of laying out huge sums on advertising in more number of channels, advertisers aimed to reach target-specific audience through niche channels. Punitha Arumugam, group CEO, Madison Media, says, “For advertisers, increased competition is a double-edged sword.As the space getsmore competitive, ad rates on individual channels go down as there is intense competition to get an advertiser on board.However, because there is fragmentation of audience, we have to advertise on more channels and the effective cost of a campaign goes up. The cost per 10- second spot goes down, but the cost per rating point and the cost of reaching a person goes up.”17 During this time, Alva Brothers’Miditech18 and Turner International19 entered into a joint venture to form RGB and planned to launch GECs in Hindi and other regional languages targeting the urban Indian audience. Turner also acquired minority stake in Miditech, including the shares previously held by ICICI Ventures.

The fierce battle for viewership and ad revenues further intensified with the launch of NDTV Imagine into the Hindi GEC category in January 2008. Led by Sameer Nair, one of India’s most creative and successful media personalities, the channel set out to ‘Entertain and Delight’ audience with a whole new world of entertainment – from mythology and family drama to music, movies and reality shows.

Unlike Mukerjea, who signed a non-competent deal with STAR India for 9x, Sameer Nair had cleverly pulled out professional talent from his earlier organisation, STAR India. It included Shailja Kejriwal, vice president for Content (earlier creative director of STAR India), Harsh Krishna Rohatgi, executive vice president, Revenue Management & New Ventures (earlier general manager for Content and Communication, STAR India), Gaurav Gandhi, executive vice president, Business Operations & Ancillary Revenues (earlier head of Commercial, Business Planning and Content Syndication, STAR India), Manoj Vidwans, executive vice president, Research, Marketing & Communication (earlier head of Research & Presentation at STAR India) and Kuljeet Singh, executive vice president, Broadcast Services & Facilities (earlier head of STAR network’s Broadcast Operations).

In mid-2008, launch of Colors by Viacom18 – a 50:50 joint venture between Network18 and Viacom International – revolutionised the Hindi GEC market. Led by Rajesh Kamat²⁰ , the channel made a colourful entry on July 21st 2008 with the tagline, Jasbaat Ke Rang – meaning spectrum of emotions. The channel was promoted using a combination of highly popular reality shows and huge investments in marketing campaigns to create the buzz and targeted not only the married housewives aged 25–45 years but also youth and male Indian population.

The key toColors’ success is in its focus on content quality and programme scheduling according to the expectations of the audience and their viewership patterns. It therefore adopted differentiated content and disruptive scheduling for making viewers simply try out the channel

With a good value proposition along with right positioning and distribution strategies, Colors escalated from 9th position to 3rd within 3 weeks of its launch. From then on, the leadership ladder in the Hindi GEC market underwent a makeover as Colors was all set to emerge as a serious contender for the top slot. During the week, September 21st 2008–September 28th 2008, Colors replaced Zee TV in the second place and continued to gain rating points in the following week ending October 4th 2008, with a market share of 20%, just 2% below STAR Plus.

Next >>

---

17] K.K. Sruthijith, “New bill of fare for TV viewers”, http://www.livemint.com/2008/05/12003613/New-bill-of-fare-for-TV-viewer.html, May 12th 2008
18] One of Asia’s leading independent production companies that creates a wide variety of content ranging from documentaries and social development films to entertainment, education, reality shows and other events for all broadcasters as well as corporate clients.
19] Turner Broadcasting System, Inc. (TBS, Inc.), a TimeWarner company, creates and programmes branded news, entertainment, animation and young adult media environments on television and other platforms for consumers around the world.
20] Rajesh Kamat is a media personality, who worked as senior vice president and executive committee member of STAR India during 2000–2005 and joined Endemol India, as its managing director in 2006. Endemol is a television production company based in Netherlands, with subsidiaries and joint ventures in 23 countries, including India. He quit Endemol in November 2007 to head Colors.