MAM
Coca-Cola to co-sponsor MIPTV’s Content 360 competition
MUMBAI: With a view to seek new ideas to engage with teen audiences that integrates brand into content, Coca-Cola is co-sponsoring a new category in MIPTV‘s Content 360 cross-media competition.
Launched in partnership with Ogilvy, Coca-Cola is looking for projects ranging from TV and web movie series to a mobile application, game and social network activity.
The winning idea will receive a contract of minimum 10,000 euros to develop the idea further with Ogilvy and Coca-Cola.
Said MIPTV‘s director of digital media Ted Baracos, “Ogilvy has been a loyal partner of Content 360 for four years now and has been particularly active in encouraging its clients to participate.
“Coca-Cola‘s interest in creating a new competition category in the Content 360 Challenge, highlights the growing importance of branded content and advertiser-funded programming at MIPTV, and its tremendous potential for driving creativity for today‘s multiplatform youth audiences.”
MAM
Sameer Nair shares heartfelt note as he exits Applause Entertainment
After nine years building the streamer’s content engine, one of India’s best-known TV men is moving on
MUMBAI: Sameer Nair is out. The chief executive of Applause Entertainment, the content studio backed by Kumar Mangalam Birla’s media empire, has announced his departure after nearly nine years at the helm, closing the chapter on one of Indian entertainment’s more quietly consequential careers.
Nair, who built Applause from the ground up in its current avatar, oversaw a slate that spanned Indian originals and international adaptations, threading together a hub-and-spoke business model that partnered with streaming platforms, broadcasters and production houses alike. The results were uneven, as they always are in content, but the ambition was not.
In a post on LinkedIn, Nair was generous to his outgoing patron. He thanked Birla for being an “inspirational boss and a great patron of the arts,” and signed off with a cheerful “Au Revoir” and a promise to remain Applause’s biggest cheerleader. Whether that sentiment survives the next chapter remains to be seen.
No successor has been named. Applause Entertainment did not immediately comment.
Nair built the machine. Now someone else has to run it — and in a streaming market that is simultaneously consolidating and convulsing, that is no small ask.
