MAM
Neo looks at Rs 400 million from Euro 2012
MUMBAI: Neo Sports Broadcast, the owner and operator of Neo Sports and Neo Prime channels, is looking at Rs 400 million ad revenue from Uefa Euro 2012.
The broadcaster has roped in five sponsors for the 24-day event starting Friday which includes Carlsberg, Cadbury, Intel Zolo smartphone, DHL, and Reliance Netconnect. Neo is looking to add two more sponsors for the event.
“Neo is looking at Rs 400 million from the event,” a source said.
The five sponsors have committed an outlay of Rs 35 million each for the event, the source added. For spot buys, the broadcaster
is looking at Rs 120,000-140,000 per 10 second spot. Each match will have 40 commercial spots of 10 seconds each.
However, a top media buying executive said Neo could end up with Rs 300 million of ad revenue from the event. “The revenue growth from this edition won‘t be more than 10-15 per cent over the last edition.”
ESPN Star Sports, which had televised the event in 2008, had earned an estimated Rs 250 million from the event.
Lodestar COO Anamika Mehta though bullish about the event believes Neo is unlikely to earn Rs 400 million despite an aggressive pitch to advertisers.
“Considering that Euro happens to be in a Cricket-free (India playing) period, Euro offers a good opportunity to advertisers to engage with the youth-sports-audience. However, post heavy investments by most advertisers during IPL and a loaded Cricket calendar post July, and bearing in mind the steep entry cost by Neo, Euro may not gather as many takers across categories,” Mehta contended.
Euro 2012, which is considered to be the second biggest football event after the Fifa World Cup, will be held from 8 June to 1 July and will be telecast on Neo Prime, which was recently rebranded to an all sports channel from its earlier avatar of being a cricket dedicated channel.
However, she also adds that Football owing to its format and stickiness factor is a winner for advertisers. The fact that it has a lower entry barrier compared to dominant sports cricket only adds to its advantage.
“Though football does not allow as many branding opportunities as Cricket, however football owing to its shorter format and higher ‘stickiness‘ quotient offers an opportunity to engage the youth through an association with the event which is integrated with the content – offers lot of opportunity to drive marketing activations for core sponsors,”
“Secondly vis a vis cricket the entry costs are far lower hence despite small ratings at an overall level the ROI works in favor alongside helping brands in India to associate with the young India.”
The event will have a total of 31 matches featuring 16 top teams from Europe divided in four groups.
Besides television, the tournament will also be streamed live on video portal istream.com for the Indian market while leading telecom operator Airtel has bagged the exclusive mobile video rights.
Neo has also entered into a sub-licensing agreement with sports management company Sporty Solutionz, which has roped in Bangladesh media company Maasranga Communications to exclusively broadcast the event in Bangladesh.
Neo had in August last year acquired the rights for Uefa Euro 2012 by bidding $11 million overcoming competition from incumbent rights holder ESPN Star Sports and Ten Sports. ESS had bid $4 million for the rights while Ten Sports ended up as the runner-up with a bid of $6 million.
As part of its programming around the event, Neo Prime has signed up French football legend Frank Leboeuf for preview shows and wrap around content which will be hosted by Radhakrishnan Sreenivasan. The preview shows will feature Leboeuf along with celebrity football fans from different walks of life.
The former Chelsea defender will also be involved with several on ground initiatives including football clinics, contests and meet and greet with fans apart from on air programming on Neo Prime.
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Abhay Duggal joins JioStar as director of Hindi GEC ad sales
The streaming giant brings in a seasoned revenue hand as the battle for Hindi television advertising heats up
MUMBAI: Abhay Duggal has a new desk, and JioStar has a new weapon. The media and entertainment veteran has joined JioStar as director of entertainment ad sales for Hindi general entertainment channels, adding 17 years of hard-won revenue experience to one of India’s most powerful broadcasting operations.
Duggal is no stranger to big portfolios or bruising markets. Before joining JioStar, he spent a brief stint at Republic World as deputy general manager and north regional head for ad sales. Before that, he put in three years at Enterr10 Television, where he ran the north region for Dangal TV and Dangal 2, two of India’s leading free-to-air Hindi channels. The north alone accounted for more than 50 per cent of total channel revenue on his watch, a number that tends to get attention in any sales meeting.
His longest stint was at Zee Entertainment Enterprises, where he spent over six years rising to associate director of sales. There he commanded the Hindi movies cluster across seven channels, owned more than half of north India’s revenue across flagship properties including Zee TV and &TV, and closed marquee sponsorships across the Indian Premier League, Zee Rishtey Awards and Dance India Dance. He also handled monetisation for the English movies and entertainment cluster and the global news channel WION, a portfolio that would stretch most sales teams twice his size.
Earlier in his career Duggal closed what was then a Rs 3 crore single deal at Reliance Broadcast Network, one of the largest in Indian radio at the time, before that he helped launch and monetise JAINHITS, India’s first HITS-based cable and satellite platform.
His edge, by his own account, lies in marrying data and instinct: translating audience trends, inventory signals and client demands into long-term partnerships built on cost-per-rating-point discipline rather than short-term deal chasing. In a media landscape being reshaped by streaming, fragmented attention and AI-driven advertising, that kind of rigour is increasingly rare and increasingly valuable.
JioStar, which blends the scale of Reliance’s Jio platform with the content firepower of Star, is doubling down on its advertising business at precisely the moment the Hindi GEC market is getting more competitive. Bringing in someone who has spent nearly two decades doing exactly this, across some of India’s most watched channels, is a pointed statement of intent. Duggal has spent his career turning audiences into revenue. JioStar is clearly betting he can do it again, and bigger.
