Week at a glance: Christmas cheer, recaps, year-end stocktaking, looking ahead...

With Christmas just a couple of days away and with a weekend leading up to it, India’s advertising fraternity is in joyful spirits. Offices have been decked up with traditional Christmas colours of red, white and green. Not surprisingly, Secret Santa is a meticulously followed and much looked forward to ritual. Fun, food and presents mark the joyful occasion. Ashish Bhasin, Sudarshan Banerjee, Rubeena Singh, Sahil Chopra, Rajiv Dingra, Agnello Dias, Agnello Dias and Ashish Shah share their Christmas plans. 

Times Network, the broadcast arm of Times Group, has been on a bullish mode throughout 2017. The channel recovered well after losing its most well-known face and weathered the demonetisation storm. In conversation with Adgully, MK Anand, MD & CEO, Times Network, takes us through the key developments in the network during 2017, highlights the achievements, the challenges, expanding the regional footprint and much more. Anand also underlines the key expectation from 2018. 

In a significant development earlier this year, Yahoo and AOL integrated under Verizon to form a global brand – Oath. Oath is a digital and mobile company driving the global consumer brand space. Since the integration, Oath’s focus has been on bringing its assets together and investing in their brands and people. In conversation with Adgully, Gurmit Singh, VP and MD – India Business, Oath Inc., talks about how the new brand is shaping up across the globe. He also shares more about the go forward strategy for the combined AOL and Yahoo businesses, the values that drive the company and its global ambitions, Oath’s value proposition to advertisers, and much more. 

Speaking on the development of the English movies genre in the last couple of years, Vivek Srivastava, Executive Vice President & Head Entertainment Cluster, Times Network, remarked that earlier, English movies were offered like an Indian thali, where everything was presented on the same platform. However, in the last 3-4 years, it has been established that audiences now know what they want to watch on television and thus, segmentation has become more important. 

Ever since its launch on April 16, 2017, ALTBalaji, the multi-device Video On Demand platform from Balaji Telefilms, has gone from strength to strength. The platform launched its big ticket web series – ‘Bose: Dead/Alive’ – in November. Starring Rajkummar Rao as Bose, the web series was heavily promoted across media. In conversation with Adgully, Manav Sethi, CMO, ALTBalaji, speaks at length on the trends and developments expected in the OTT space in 2018. He also shares the details of the making and marketing of ‘Bose: Dead/Alive’ without having a big budget in hand. 

Viacom18’s video on-demand Streaming Service, VOOT, is all set to continue its strong growth momentum in 2018. Ushering in the next growth wave in 2018 is VOOT’s future ready expanded reach strategy initiated through a big focus on regionalization and international markets. VOOT’s journey ahead is represented through its all new bold and distinctive brand identity. 

Post bagging the Indian Premier League (IPL) media rights in September this year for a period of five years, Star India has set out to make the tournament the biggest show ever. The media rights were acquired for a whopping Rs 16,347.5 crore. Star India will leverage the power of TV and digital, airing the tournament on its 10 Star Sports channels as well as on Hotstar. Thus, the reach is expected to increase to 700 million viewers as compared to last year’s 550 million. 

BARC ratings for Week 50 (December 9-15) [HSM (U+R) : NCCS All : 2+ Individuals] saw Star Bharat continue to lead the among Hindi GECs in Rural+Urban. Zee Anmol performed well, too, climbing up a couple of notches to the second position. With the year almost coming to an end, it will be interesting to see if the FTA channels end 2017 on a strong note. Or will Colors or Zee TV claim the numero uno spot. 

DIGIXX Awards, the premiere platform brought by Adgully in association with ad:tech is back for its second edition. Buoyed by tremendous response from the industry and peers alike, DIGIXX 2018 will be a bigger, grander affair. Entries are now open for the Awards. 

2017 in Review 

In a series of reports, Adgully has been bringing India’s leading honchos from diverse sectors like advertising, radio, broadcast, marketing and more, who have highlighted the major developments in their respective sectors and how they would rate the year 2017 as. Read what Anita Nayyar, Sunil Lulla, Naresh Gupta, Babita Baruah, Nisha Narayanan, Deepak Rajadhyaksha, Megha Tata, Jerome Saigot, and Neena Dasgupta have shared with us during the week.