Star India - NDTV ends its Sales & Marketing alliance!

A strategic decision has been taken by NDTV Ltd and Star India to transition the sales and marketing function back to NDTV as per their press release dated 3rd November 2012. With this development NDTV’s   advertising sales outsourcing arrangement with Star India ends. It can be recollected that last year NDTV had outsourced its entire sales and marketing activities to rival broadcaster STAR India, including the airtime sales alliance for its news channels. NDTV had signed a deal with STAR India on 1st April 2011, under which the latter was to manage the advertising sales of the three NDTV news channels - NDTV 24X7, NDTV India and NDTV Profit. In addition to the frontline sales, Star India was also responsible for commercial back-office management, such as traffic, scheduling, billing and collections.

Given the excellent partnership that prevailed between Star and NDTV, the strong connection between Uday Shankar, CEO,  and Kevin Vaz , EVP , both of Star India , and NDTV will continue to remain at a strategic level. This includes the coordination on cross platform sales and marketing. With the transition process already in progress NDTV will be taking its sales and marketing destiny into it’s own hands. The current Star Sales team that was working on the NDTV channels will be henceforth transferred to the latter. As a result there will be close integration with a number of fresh initiatives that NDTV is launching.

Commenting on the new development Prannoy Roy, Executive Co-Chairperson said, "Working together with Star has been a great experience. We have developed a close professional relationship and plan to retain close ties at a strategic level".

"Star and NDTV and Uday Shankar and Prannoy Roy's relationship is a deep one. It was always meant to be a short term arrangement to enable NDTV to effect a transition. Now that the team is ready and NDTV wishes to take charge of its own destiny we are happy to pass on the baton and wish this great brand success," said Uday Shankar of Star India.

The arrangement was turning out to be less productive for both since news has no longer been  Star's focus area in India. They exited their news JV with Ananda Bazaar Patrika - Media Content and Communications Services which  ran the three STAR News channels. It is believed that NDTV will now have its own sales and marketing team.

Both Star and NDTV will put in efforts to ensure that the process is seamless.  

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