Indiantelevision.com Team

(10 March 2008 1:30 pm)

MUMBAI: With just eight days to go for the the start of the Indian Premier League (IPL), Sony Entertainment Television (Set) India, which has telecast rights for the matches, has closed its advertising sales.

The final list of IPL sponsors are telecom major Vodafone and South Korean auto maker Hyundai as presenters and Coca-Cola, Max New York Life, and Godrej Appliances as associates. Set has charged the sponsors and associate sponsors a premium to keep out ads from competing brands.

Confirming this to Indiantelevision.com, Set India CEO Kunal Dasgupta said that 850 seconds of inventory a game had been booked by the sponsors while 800 seconds a game had been sold as spot buys. Videocon Industries, Samsung India Electronics and Unitech are among the brands that have taken up significant amounts of spot inventories.

With 2,000 seconds of commercial time available for each IPL game, Sony still has 350 seconds of airtime per game to play with. Of this, 150 seconds have been reserved for network promotions and the remaining 200 seconds were being hocked at a premium, Dasgupta stated.

Information available with Indiantelevision.com indicates that these 200 seconds of inventory have been underwritten by media agency Dentsu.

Dasgupta asserted that ad sales revenues had already crossed Rs 2 billion and that deliveries from the inaugural season had made him more than confident that he was on a winning wicket with his IPL rights purchase. "In the first five years we will make $100 million in profit," he had stated in an earlier interaction with Indiantelevision.com.