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Neo Sports loses as DD cuts into ad pie

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Aminah Sheikh Mumbai
The ongoing India-Pakistan cricket series, usually a money spinner, has now left the official broadcaster, Neo Sports, selling commercial time at almost half the rate.
 
Neo Sports was till recently selling commercial time for the series as a package(Neo Sports and Doordarshan) at Rs 3.5-3.75 lakh for a 10-second spot and the composite deal counted for almost 80-85 per cent of Neo's inventory.
 
This apart, the channel was selling ad slots on Neo Sports alone at around Rs 2 lakh for ten seconds. However, during the weekend before the series started on Monday, Nimbus Communications (promoter of Neo Sports) was offered Rs 97 crore gross, that is Rs 64 crore for 5 ODIs and Rs 32 crore for 3 test matches (Rs 81.25 crore net) to market commercial time on DD alone.
 
In addition, Nimbus will get 75 per cent of the revenue generated by Doordarshan as mandated by the Union government.
 
During the India-Australia series, only around 25 per cent of television viewership for cable and satellite homes came from Neo, while the major chunk was contributed by DD. Media experts said that this was one of the reasons why DD sought to sell commercial time on the channel individually.
 
Given the situation, DD now has the right to sell advertisement on its channel individually. Sources with media buying agencies inform that DD was asking advertisers nearly Rs 3 lakh for a ten-second slot.
 
Meanwhile, advertisers that have signed deals with Neo for composite commercial time were reworking their deals. According to industry sources, Neo Sports is now said to be offering a ten-second slot for around Rs 1.4 -1.8 lakh, and in some cases for as low as Rs 1.2 lakh.
 
DD reaches out to all cable, satellite and terrestrial homes, while Neo Sports reaches only 45 per cent of the 70 million cable and satellite households. Despite Neo's distribution gap, corporates such as P& G, Asian Paints, Godrej among others, are negotiating with Neo.

 

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First Published: Nov 06 2007 | 12:00 AM IST

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