Focus on news, insights & analysis has helped us gain leadership position, says Zakka Jacob

MakeMyTrip, India’s first Unicorn, took 10 years to become one in 2010. Since then, India has spawned a flurry of Unicorns, and businesses are rushing to join the club. Today, India has 98-103 Unicorns,  with 13 firms becoming Unicorns between January and March 2022.

English news channel CNN-News18 launched a new series in April 2022, named ‘Bits To Billions - The Unicorn Story’, which focuses on the journey of a start-up to a unicorn. Each episode of the show narrates the inner tales of Unicorns, their successes, failures, and the passion, hard-work, and perspiration they have expended to reach the peak of their respective industries, as well as what distinguishes them from other market competitors.

Click here to attend IMAGEXX 2022

In an exclusive interview with Adgully, Zakka Jacob, Managing Editor, CNN-News18, elaborates on the thought behind the ‘Bits To Billions - The Unicorn Story’ show.

“Bits to Billions Unicorns stories is a unique concept, at least as far as general news television is concerned. We realised that there’s this whole start-up ecosystem that is thriving, India has just created tons of unicorns. At the last count, we just recently crossed the hundred unicorn mark. So, we realised that there weren’t any shows ever reflecting that ecosystem covering the big-name start-ups that are really commanding pioneering valuation, more than that they were just putting India on the map. There is a huge space out there, and we reached out to Chandra Shrikant, who is the tech and start-up editor of Moneycontrol. Based in Bangalore, she knows most of these start-up folks very well. It’s an example of old world television meeting new age digital technology. You have a show that’s created for television. It’s a sit back and relax interview kind of a show, bringing you facets of these start-up founders, who you probably won’t read about on Google. Basically bringing old television and marrying it with new digital technologies. This show is getting traction not just in the regular TV viewership, but also many of the smaller clips that we edit out and put out on digital, on Instagram, on Twitter, are going viral,” he said.

Further, explaining how the new broadcasting ecosystem is evolving, as well as the future of  TV news in India, Jacob said, “As per BARC, the agency that monitors television channels, there are still more than hundred million homes which are yet to get a television set in India. So, the space for growth in India is huge in terms of broadcast audience. That is something we and all the news channels are going to ride on, especially for an English news player – where India, being an aspirational country, English news will only gain more prominence.”

Commenting on news shifting to the digital side with the video on demand format, he observed, “On the digital side, what we are seeing now is most of the TV shows are now populated on YouTube or on Facebook or other social media, as smaller clips and those are doing very well. So essentially, we are bringing in newer audiences at the same time. Television is also compensating for some of the older audiences whom we may have lost, so social media is a complimentary that’s coming through. We are also going to see from the advertisers’ point of view a willingness to pay, not just for traditional television content, but also premium for some of that same content that is being consumed on the digital platforms. We are going to have complementarities there from an advertiser point of view as well.”

These are edited excerpts. For the complete conversation with Zakka Jacob, please click here.