Adgully Exclusive | I want to double the revenue every year: PDM's Rukn Kizilbash

Over a decade or so, an important factor occurred in the sporting world in India, and that is the advent of a unit exclusively set up to market sports, manage the celebrity quotient of a "brand Sachin Tendulkar" and market the sporting events. The sports market in India is approximately worth $ 5 billion now, as per the media reports, which means that there is a lot to be marketed, a lot of talent to be managed and a lot of tags to be worn and walked around flashing them to the fans.

Now, the Badshah of Bollywood, lip syncs away to "Korbo Lorbo Jeetbo Re" and even if his team doesn't necessarily fulfill the "Jeetbo" part, he is assured that the merchandise his team was promoting is going to be sold for a good amount of money amongst the fan. While the sports marketing as a separate functioning came to be recognized, and more and more sports got familiar with the marketing side of sports, the next thing that slowly started growing was "celebrity management". Though sports marketing and celebrity management were more associated with an advertising agency's functioning, the two sectors eventually developed into a professional area of expertise.

In India, when the trend was gradually catching up, one of the first ones to launch a separate sports marketing unit was Percept Limited, it launched Percept D'Mark (PDM) in a joint venture with UK based company Aegis Group Plc in the year 1995. However later in 2006, Percept Limited bought all the shares from the partner company to attain 100% ownership of PDM India. Since then PDM India has revolutionized the sports marketing, event management and celebrity management sector. PDM India calls itself an "experiential marketing company" and has four verticals that include- sports, activation, exposition and event. Some of the leading clients that PDM India boasts of today are Sahara, MasterCard, Airtel, Bajaj, Club Mahindra, Times of India, Taj Hotels, Reliance Money, HLL, Radiocity, Kingfisher, Skoda and Microsoft.

And the man who is leading it is none other than Rukn Kizilbash, Chief Operating Officer, PDM India. Rukn joined PDM in June this year, he came alongwith his extensive skill set and an experience of over 20 years in sports, marketing, sales, event promotions and media. With the recent announcement of "Fight Night-Lagaan Cup", a joint venture between Percept India and Monnet Ispat and Energy Limited, PDM India is looking forward to weave in magic for boxing under the guidance of their leader who in the past has contributed in increasing the market share for cricket as a sport.

Rukn's media career started about 14 years ago in 1996, when he joined STAR Sports as a senior executive (sales), later that year in October post the merger with ESPN; it became a separate company known as ESPN-STAR Sports. Once he became the Head of Sales for West of India in 1998, during the 1999 World Cup they took the spot rates up from about 500$ per spot to about 3000$ for a 30 second spot. The other key milestone in his career was when he joined Ten Sports in 2002 as the head of sales, and they bagged the India -Pakistan friendship series in 2004, and it was a big moment because India and Pakistan were playing against each other after 15 years. Gradually the channel won the rights of cricketing boards of countries like Sri Lanka, West Indies, Pakistan, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Kizilbash was promoted to the post of General Manager in the year 2007 and he left Ten Sports by the end of 2009. After taking a break for six months and joining PDM India in 2010, Kizilbash is hoping to continue with his ambitious streak.

Adgully spoke to the man of the hour and tried to find out what are his plans for PDM India.

While he seems a relaxed leader with determined goals, it will be interesting to see how comfortably PDM India reaches its prosperous targets. | By Prabha Hegde [prabha(at)adgully.com]