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Advertising & Marketing

The International Advertising Festival, Cannes Lions 2004, opens its portals to the advertising and marketing industry for yet another year. A flood of delegates is expected at the Riviera town of Cannes this year with a thousand entries already in. The festival this year sees a sharp focus on direct marketing and media, with a special three-day package aimed at these industries offering comprehensive seminar programmes. The biggest draw, both in terms entries and delegates, will, however, be the Lions-arguably the most prestigious and sought-after advertising trophy the world over. Indian agencies are among the hot favourites riding on the back of an impressive performance last year. The Indian delegation finally returned home in 2003 with an unprecedented six trophies: Three gold, two silver and a bronze. O&M chairman Piyush Pandey is heading the jury at the awards this year; an honour he shares with advertising legends like Dan Wieden and Jeff Goodby. The festival is scheduled to be held between the 20th and 26th of June this year. Source: The Economic Times, Jan.29, 2004

An overall analysis of the India-Australia Test series by AdEx shows that advertisers for their part felt that they got their money's worth in terms of brand building and image perception. The advertising in terms of duration in seconds was just 20%, which is not bad, but nothing compared to a series at home and when an Indian success is virtually guaranteed, given India's ability to put it across the toughest of teams at home. But the excellent performance by the team, brought advertisers swarming in for the second Test at Adelaide. Advertising peaked during the second Test with commercial time bought rising from 19.9% to 28.3%. The match was won by India and then the next test saw a drop to 23.95%, and the test was won by Australia. The decider once again saw a rise in interest levels and buying rose to 27.8% of ad duration in seconds. Also, Cellular phone services (around 14%), paints (8%), soft drinks (8%), the two-wheelers (7%) and courier services (6%) accounted for nearly half the advertising. Source: Business Standard, Jan.25, 2004

Lintas will soon launch a new national media services division, christened Insight. Its incumbent executive vice-president, S Yesudas will head Insight. Along with this comes the announcement that it has bagged a Rs-35-crore account of UTI. "Some key clients and handpicked managers, sharing my passion and vision from Initiative are expected to move to Insight," said Yesudas. UTI has decided to consolidate its media investment and chosen Insight after hearing six different presentations and an elaborate analysis of the proposition each of them had to offer. Source: The Economic Times, Jan.23, 2004

T.V. Media

Vijay TV, the Tamil channel of the Star group, may not renew its contract with New Delhi Television (NDTV), promoted by Prannoy Roy, to produce its news programme. Ajay Vidyasagar, General Manager, Vijay TV, said that the original contract with NDTV was for three years, which came to an end in April 2003. This contract was extended for another year, and would end sometime between February and March this year. He said they were still in dialogue with NDTV about this. Source: The Hindu Business Line, Jan.28, 2004

As part of an internal restructuring exercise, Sony Entertainment Television (SET) India has decided to acquire 100% equity in SET Satellite Singapore through a share swap and increase the foreign holding in the Indian entity to 90%. The company proposes to purchase 100% shares of SET Singapore in the ratio of 1:16 SET India shares to SET Singapore. As a result of this swap, the foreign holdings of Sony Pictures Entertainment entities, the parent, would go up from the existing 61% to 90%. Also, there would be no outflow of foreign exchange. However, the presence of Grandway Global Holdings Ltd, an OCB based in Mauritius has led to the Government seeking views from the RBI. The RBI had derecognised OCBs as investors in September 2003. As a result the company was asked to submit a revised proposal. Source: The Hindu Business Line, Jan.23, 2004

UTV promoter Ronnie Screwvala will hold 51% equity in his proposed venture United Home Entertainment (UHE) which is rolling out a general entertainment channel for kids. The channel, which will hit the airwaves in the middle of this calendar year, will also have equity exposure from UTV and some FI/FIIs will be roped in to square up the the shareholding. The management has made it clear that it is not looking for any strategic investors in UHE. The FI/FII holding is likely to be in the 20-25% band. UTV has not yet decided on the distribution platform on which the channel will be beamed from and is open to the idea of plugging it as an independent channel separate from the existing three prominent ones. This is despite Murdoch's group is an equity holder in UTV and will be an indirect stakeholder in the new channel. Total investment in the first two years will be to the tune of Rs 100 crore. Source: The Economic Times, Jan.23, 2004

TV18 group announced that its net profit for the quarter ended December 2003 jumped 185% while Q3 revenue was up 55%. The group posted revenues of Rs 15.19 crore during the period as against Rs 9.79 crore a year ago. Its operating profit stood at Rs 7.37 crore and the operating margin for the period also improved to 48%. The group posted a net profit of Rs 5.33 crore during the quarter. Source: The Times of India, Jan.23, 2004

The world

The Liberty Media Corp said it had snapped up a 9.15% voting interest in the News Corp empire. The sprawling media holding firm controlled by tycoon John Malone effectively swapped millions of non-voting preference shares for ordinary voting shares and paid $693 million to take a voting stake of 9.15 per cent. Source: Hindustan times, Jan.23, 2004

Print Media

A 30-member delegation of the Federation of International Periodical Press (FIPP) will be visiting India in March. The delegation, comprising representatives of magazines printed worldwide, will actively hunt for partnerships with Indian magazines. According to officials of the Association of Indian Magazines (AIM), the visitors are likely to meet people from publishing houses like Outlook, Living Media (Publishers of "India Today") and Delhi Press (publishers of magazines like "Women's Era" and "Caravan"). An AIM official feels that representatives of many European special interest magazine groups will be in the delegation. "The visit may result in some equity partnerships in the non-news segment as that is where up to 74% FDI is permitted," says the official. Though FIPP has taken the initiative, the visit will be hosted by AIM and the Indian Newspaper society (INS). Source: Business Standard, Jan.28, 2004

India Today Group Chief Executive Officer, Aroon Purie, said he plans to sell shares in his Thomson Press unit this year to fund the printing company's expansion. "We have ambitious expansion plans," Purie said in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Source: The Hindu Business Line, Jan.26, 2004

Dow Jones & Company, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, and Bennett, Coleman & Co Ltd, publisher of The Times of India and The Economic Times, announced an agreement on a joint venture to publish The Wall Street Journal for India. The venture would publish the journal five-days-a-week, edited for global Indian business readers and international business travellers, drawing on the newspaper's global content. Dow Jones would own 26% of the new venture; Bennett Coleman would own 74%. The newspaper would be edited by Suman Dubey, a leading Indian journalist and currently Dow Jones' corporate representative in India. Karen Elliot House, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, added, "A Wall Street Journal for India will instantly become an important component of the global Journal network. We look forward to serving readers and advertisers in India who need the world's most vital business news every business day." Source: The Economic Times, Jan.23, 2004

Radio Media

Four FM radio channels and scores of music companies have locked horns in the Bombay and Delhi High Courts over an order of the copyright board granting compulsory licences and fixing rates of royalty for broadcasting sound recordings. On a petition to move all cases to the Supreme Court, a bench has issued notices to the copyright holders. On one side are the arraigned radio channels like Entertainment Network India, Music Broadcast, Radio Mid-Day and Millennium Broadcast. They say the copyright owners are not making available the sound recordings on reasonable terms. On the other side is Phonographic Performance, a copyright society with over 60 music firms as members, and SuperCassette Industries, one of the largest owners of copyright in sound recordings with nearly 120,000 of film songs, gazals and other music renderings. Copyright holders have been taking the FM channels to court over broadcast of their music without licence or written permission. The radio channels then moved the copyright board seeking compulsory licence. On October 20, the board, after hearing the parties in detail, granted compulsory licences in favour of the radio channels with certain terms and conditions. The copyright owners and radio channels then moved the high courts. One radio channel challenged the amount of royalty fixed, while the copyright owners moved the Delhi High Court seeking to set aside the order. Source: Business Standard, Jan.26, 2004

In a Republic Day gesture, All India Radio (AIR) is beginning half hour multi-lingual programme packages-Bhasha Bharati-on the National Channel (249.6 MW) through the day with "Variety infotainment from home" for the mixed population in the capital. Though it is not being formally launched, the services will take off at 9:45 a.m. with the first package in Sanskrit, Prasar Bharati sources said. Urdu, Punjabi and Hindi programmes would however not find a place here as they are available on Delhi A (Rajdhani) and Delhi B (Indraprastha) AIR channels. The service is being started partly to make use of the idle powerful transmitter that catered to night birds across the country after most other AIR stations go off air. While AIR National is a countrywide service, the regional language package is limited to listeners in Delhi for the moment with content sourced from AIR centres in the respective states. Source: The Economic Times, Jan.26, 2004

Events & Public Relations

TAM Media has joined hands with the UK-based Media Measurement Ltd (MML) to launch a new service in India for corporate and other entities wanting to quantify the impact of their public relations and image-building campaigns. The ORG MARG Media Monitor, now a TAM Media division, has been relaunched as Eikona Media Monitor to provide these PR monitoring services. TAM media will pay an undisclosed licence fee to MML for the technology and software, which in the UK is branded as 'Prism 5'. Earlier, TAM Media had acquired Adex, the advertising measurement arm, through the acquisition of ORG Marg. With PR monitoring services, TAM hopes to provide a wide spectrum of media-impact measurement in addition to the company's regular television ratings. Source: The Economic Times, Jan.23, 2004

Miscellaneous

The world

Lord Hutton's report, published today, 328 pages in all, criticised the reporting of BBC journalist Andrew Gilligan, saying that allegations he made against the government were "unfounded". In his report on the Today programme on 29 May 2003 Mr Gilligan said that claims made in Tony Blair's intelligence dossier on Iraq - that Saddam Hussein could launch attacks with weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes - were probably known to be wrong by the government before they were placed in the dossier. Lord Hutton also criticised the management of the BBC saying it failed to check the details of Mr Gilligan's story as soon as the government complained that it had raised grave charges against them. Source: BBC News, Jan.28, 2004

BBC chairman Gavyn Davies' has resigned. In his resignation statement, he raised some important questions about the report itself: "First, is it clearly possible to reconcile Lord Hutton's bald conclusions on the production of the September 2002 dossier with the balance of evidence that was presented to him during his own Inquiry. Second, did his verdict on Mr Gilligan's reports take sufficient account of what was said by Dr Kelly on tape to Susan Watts? Third, did his criticisms of the BBC take sufficient account of the extenuating circumstances, which were created by the public attacks on the BBC during and after the war? Finally, are his conclusions on restricting the use of unverifiable sources in British journalism based on sound law and, if applied, would they constitute a threat to the freedom of the press in this country? Source: BBC News, Jan.28, 2004

Greg Dyke has resigned as director general of the BBC following damning criticism of the corporation's management in the Hutton Report. Source: BBC News, Jan.29, 2004

Andrew Gilligan has resigned from his job as the defence and diplomatic correspondent for BBC Radio 4's Today programme. Source: BBC News, Jan.30, 2004

Compiled by

Saurabh Marya, BA Mass Comm (1st year)

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