News genre is the best frequency builder for advertisers: Joy Chakraborthy

Zee Media’s Joy Chakraborthy has said that news channels with their wide reach across the country are the best frequency builders for advertisers. The Chief Business Officer recently joined Zee Media at a time when the news genre has been facing a number of challenges.

“News channels are a must in any campaign because we are the best frequency builders,” he told exchange4media. He noted that news happens to be the most well-distributed genre in the broadcasting space. “News channels are available across the length and breadth of the country and within news genre, the legacy channels play a very important role.”

Speaking about the trend in the Hindi news genre of making claims about being the No. 1 channel, Chakraborthy said that this syndrome was not good for the genre. He added that using tactics like landing pages, and going break-free were not ideal ways of becoming number 1.

“Of late, the clients and agencies are confused as to which channels are number 1. Somebody gets up and says that I am number 1. The number 1 syndrome is not good for the news genre. And becoming number 1 by doing landing pages or going break-free or doing some distribution deals somewhere is not done,” he added.

According to Chakraborthy, one of the key challenges for news as a category is that out-of-home viewership is not getting reflected in BARC viewership data. “The media agencies unofficially factor it in their campaigns when they are creating the media plan, but BARC does not factor in the out-of-home viewership,” he said.

Landing page, Chakraborthy said, gives an immediate boost to ratings but it is a very expensive proposition. “You bleed to get viewership but are you getting a return in the form of ad revenue? I doubt. Business returns from landing pages are not commensurate with the investments being made,” he noted.

On being queried about the constant reshuffle in the Hindi news genre and its impact on ad rates, Chakraborthy responded by saying that rates don’t go up overnight and don’t fall overnight. “Rates do have legacy factors. Agencies are using BARC to drive down the rates of established players. We are trying to educate the clients that news viewership is not just what BARC reports as there is so much viewership on other platforms also,” he informed.

He also stated that media plans take care of 4 to 8 weeks on average of where a channel is placed in the pecking order. He also stated that monetising the viewership growth doesn’t happen immediately and takes time.

“There are three or four buying cycles that a client has. Agencies do media planning three to four times in a year like pre-festive, post-festive, and for the March-April period. The ratings that agencies evaluate are four to six weeks on average. Some clients do monthly ad deals while most of the clients want to tie up money for longer periods to get benefits like sponsorship and ad rates,” Chakraborthy said.

He also pointed out that news as a genre has got the biggest advertiser base with close to 500 to 800 clients. Further, the news is the only genre that also has a lot of non-FCT inventory.

While the first half was challenging for the news genre from an advertising standpoint, Chakraborthy hopes that the second half will be much better. He noted that the inventory utilisation for news channels has dipped to 55-60%.

“In the last three months, all channels have gone inventory empty. News channels are operating on 55-60% of the inventory which has never happened in news. It used to be 95-100%. Overall, the ad market has been tight and many clients have rationalised their marketing budgets. Every genre has got impacted including news,” he revealed.

He also said that linear was struggling but digital is growing big time for news broadcasters. “TV + Digital is a great combo to offer to clients. As a network, we have got 14 channels and 24 digital destinations. We are talking to clients about doing TV + Digital deals. It has been well received by clients.”

Asked about the other mechanisms being used by news channels to analyse audience behaviour, Chakraborthy said the news is a low-involvement genre so agencies don’t spend too much time on dissecting news data unlike what they do for GEC or sports channels because the ad value for those genres is very high.

“In the news genre, clients straight away go by the name of the channel, ranking, and the ER (Effective Rate),” he averred.