Any time can be prime time for news: Sudipto Chowdhuri, India TV

“When we talk about getting sponsorship to the organisation, we need to understand the connect between the brands that we operate with and the brand that we are as a particular news channel,” said Sudipto Chowdhuri, Chief Revenue Officer/ Executive President - Sales, India TV in a fireside chat with Sohini Ganguly, Senior Correspondent, exchange4media, at the News Next Conference 2023.

Chowdhuri gave an example of how different a Harley Davidson is from Gucci. “You will not think of the two in the same way. Similarly, whenever a channel deals with a particular brand, we need to understand the aspects that we are connecting on,” he added.

Chowdhuri also pointed out that post-pandemic, there has been a mindset among advertisers that if they are advertising with a particular channel, they need to squeeze out the channel to the last drop of deliverable. “We are not towels. So we need to collaborate and understand the brand philosophy of each other, and see how we can help each other rather than packing in more and more things,” he said.

Speaking about the upcoming elections, Chowdhuri highlighted that the market as of now has not been responding too well. “If you remove the government advertisement and see the overall scenario, corporate has been moving really slow,” he mentioned.

However, he also said that if we look at the 2018 elections, there was a surge of roughly 46% of clients who came newly on board. “People do look to spend good money during elections. In India TV we specifically have a good lineup of programming coming up, we go a little tough on which brand we get on board and which brand we do not get on board,” Chowdhuri added.

He believes that the money will be divided since there is also the festive season and sports season that’s knocking on the door before the elections.

For the longest time, only prime time was a key focus for advertisers. Chowdhuri said that the majority of salespeople, most of the time, have sold the prime time as evening prime time. “Morning is a prime time for news; evening is a prime time for news. And for that matter, any time can become prime time for news. Most of the clients will push the broadcaster or salespeople to get a spot in the evening; that doesn’t make sense,” he said.

India TV recently became the only newsgroup to have exclusive CTV news channels in India. “CTV is growing very fast. The benefit is that the attributes are digital, but the screen is still a television screen and there is the benefit of co-viewing,” he mentioned.

Disclosure and transparency are of key importance to the audience today. Sharing some best practices for disclosing sponsored content, Chowdhuri said, “You need to look at the context of the brand associating with you. We are very careful about these things, as a channel. You will never see an irrelevant brand sponsoring irrelevant stuff. There are some categories that we do not allow to advertise on specific programmes.”

He also mentioned that good collaboration is not just about taking the money and protecting the bottom line. “The medium we work for is very powerful. You sell with pride and you walk away with your head held high,” he concluded.