For Yash Raj Films small is bountiful

The small screen reality show, My Fan My Hero, starring Bollywood biggies has got sponsors vying for ad slots.

It’s going to be the mother of all reality shows with 20 celebrities coming together for Yash Chopra’s small screen debut on Sony Entertainment Television. The show will include Amitabh Bachchan, Hrithik Roshan, Shah Rukh Khan, Sanjay Dutt, Akshay Kumar, A R Rahman, Lata Mangeshkar, Priyanka Chopra, Kareena Kapoor, Kajol, Bipasha Basu, Deepika Padukone, Dharmendra, John Abraham, Minisha Lamba, Ranbir Kapoor and Shahid Kapoor.
 

THE COST OF ENTERTAINMENT
Channel	Prime Time ad rates (Rs/ten seconds)
Colors	70,000 to 80,000
Star	40,000 to 50,000
Zee	45,000 to 50,000
Sony	30,000 to 45,000
NDTV Imagine	10,000 to 15,000

Yash Chopra’s production house, Yash Raj Films, will launch the reality show My Fan My Hero along with four other fiction shows on January 1, 2010.

Sony is riding high on Chopra’s small screen venture and is commanding over Rs 7 crore for title sponsorship of the show which will air for 20 weeks and Rs 4 to Rs 4.5 crore for four associate sponsors each. “The show has great saleability and will garner high viewership. So advertisers are interested,” said Harsha Joshi, chief operating officer, Madison Media.

That’s not all. The four fiction shows, too, are being priced high by the channel. Media buyers say that Sony expects around Rs 5-6 crore for a presenting sponsor while the 10-second ad spots are for Rs 1-1.5 lakh. “The scale of the programmes is very high. It’s the first time viewers will see such high definition programming quality. So we do intend to cash in on these factors. We have got a very positive response from advertisers,” said Rohit Gupta, vice-president, Multi Screen Media, the company that runs Sony Entertainment Television.

No show on any channel in the recent past has been able to command such high rates. Bigg Boss was sold for Rs 80,000-1 lakh for a 10-second slot. However, the title sponsor and associate sponsors were roped in for Rs 12 crore and Rs 5 crore respectively for three months, “The format of Colors was different. They wanted advertisers to be locked in for 90 days. We will now have to take a look at how Sony structures the deal before we put in money,” said an executive of GroupM.

According to TAM Media Research, Sony has been gaining channel share and performing well over the last eight weeks. Its channel share between November 9 and November 14 was 13.9 per cent. Colors led the pack with 24.5 per cent channel share, followed by Star at 18.2 per cent and Zee with 17.7 per cent.