Speaking at the NBF conclave, Shashi Sinha, CEO, IPG Mediabrands India & Chairman BARC India, referred to the News18 campaign and said it was an interesting way of waking up clients and saying that news can be a reach builder.
“There’s a campaign run by a News Network, it may be a member of NBF or or not, but it says that our reach is more than GEC’s and I am sure all of you have seen that campaign at this point in time. I thought it was very good for the industry, I thought if you look at our planners’ point of view, Media is a volume game. For young media planners who are taking decisions, for them news has become a share game,” said Sinha.
He added, “They say that news is never part of a plan in terms of building out of a curve. No one has looked at the news from the metrics of reach. The share of news channels is always discussed. Normally they choose four to five channels in any genre and then discussions are done about the share. Keeping BARC aside, I think it’s a very interesting way of waking up media planners and clients and saying that news is a reach builder.”
“Whether I like the idea of them comparing with the GECs or not is a separate matter, but I thought it was a very interesting way of looking at things,” he concluded.
It may be note that News18 India is running a campaign in leading News platform focusing on its reach which is higher than that of the leading Hindi GECs such as Star Plus, Zee TV and Sony TV which has sparked the discussion on whether Media agencies should consider reach as a factor while charting their Media plan.
Reach’ according to Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC) metrics refers to the number of people witnessed or sampled the channel for more than one minute in the entire week or a specific period.
It is interesting to note that a veteran like Shashi Sinha making an observation in favor of reach and the campaign initiated by News18 India. Will this have any impact of Media Planning practice towards News genre…? Let wait and see…!
