English Entertainment
AXN has some buzz going with BBC, Discovery
Spread the message is what it is all about. AXN is aggressively pushing its brand through its celebrated Need That Buzz? ad campaign. Consisting mainly of three interesting on-air ads that are being aired not only on sister channels Sony Entertainment, SET MAX and CNBC India but also on BBC Asia. Very soon the campaign hopes to reach a larger audience on Discovery Channel.
AXN, which is in its third year in India, is currently in talks with Discovery for a cross air promo pack. The deal, on the verge of finalisation, stipulates that ads be aired on Discovery India and vice versa, and is likely to hit screens in the first week of November. AXN East Asia will have a similar arrangement with Discovery East Asia, says Rohit Bhandari, senior marketing manager, AXN.
According to Bhandari, Need That Buzz? conveys the channel’s motif of providing pure escapist entertainment to audiences. The campaign, which consists of four brand ads, was produced by the TBWA creative team in Singapore. Two months ago, AXN entered a barter promo contract with BBC, wherein both channels air cross promos. The arrangement ends in December.
AXN’s Need That Buzz? print campaign has received worldwide recognition from three of the most prestigious awards honouring creative excellence in advertising – The Clio Awards, The International Advertising Festival – Cannes Lions, and the Asian Media Awards.
English Entertainment
Ellison takes his Paramount-Warner Bros case straight to theater owners
The Skydance chief goes to CinemaCon with promises and a skeptical crowd waiting
CALIFORNIA: David Ellison strode into a room packed with thousands of cinema owners and executives at CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Thursday and did something rather bold: he looked them in the eye and asked them to trust him.
The chief executive of Paramount Skydance vowed that his company would release a minimum of 30 films a year if regulators greenlight its proposed $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery, a deal that has made theater owners deeply, and loudly, nervous.
“I wanted to look every single one of you in the eye and give you my word,” Ellison told the crowd. “Once we combine with Warner Bros, we are going to make a minimum of 30 films annually across both studios.”
It was a confident pitch. Whether it landed is another matter. Cinema operators have already called on regulators to block the deal, and scepticism in the room was hardly concealed.
Ellison pushed back by pointing to recent form. Paramount, born from the merger of Paramount Global and Skydance Media last August, plans to release 15 films this year, nearly double the eight it put out in 2025. Progress, he argued, was already underway.
He also threw theater owners a bone they have long been chasing: all films, he pledged, would run exclusively in cinemas for a minimum of 45 days, drawing applause from a crowd that has spent years fighting for exactly that commitment across the industry.
“People can speculate all they want,” Ellison said, “but I am standing here today telling you personally that you can count on our complete commitment. And we’ll show you we mean it.”
Fine words. The regulators, however, will have the last one.
