Executive Dossier
‘Action, reality shows AXN’s main ad revenue earners’ : Todd Miller Managing Director AXN Asia
Mountain-biker, long-distance runner and traveller – AXN Asia managing director Todd Miller seems to extend the action aspect of the channel he runs to his out-of -office activities as well. Miller oversees AXN’s three satellite services AXN South Asia, AXN Taiwan and AXN East Asia. Miller was in Mumbai recently as part of a year-end review of the channel’s operations in India.
He spoke to indiantelevision.com’s Thomas Abraham about the channel’s plans for the new year.
Shantonu Aditya (distribution and India channel head) in an interview, has been quoted as saying that AXN is looking at 10 to 15 per cent of its content sourced out of India. Have you taken any steps in that direction?
There is no urgency for us to get into Indian content generation. Audience feedback indicates that our viewers are satisfied with what we are offering. At this juncture, our association with India would be sponsoring adventure and lifestyle sports.
The next Ecochallenge is in May. Are you promoting India as a possible destination?
We will not be promoting India as a destination, but we will be trying to put together an Indian team to participate.
Do you propose at any point to make action or adventure serials in India?
No such plans.
Of your action serials, which has been the one most popular in India?
Who Dares Wins has been the show most identified with AXN. Another very popular series was World’s Most Amazing Videos.
At one time, it was not very clear as to what was the personality that the channel was trying to project. Have you been able to put a definite fix on that?
What the channel represents is adventure, irreverence. And it particularly appeals to the 20-somethings looking for a buzz.
As far as investment in programme properties is concerned, do movie rights make up the major expense for AXN?
Actually it is the series shows that are our major expense rather than films. Our action and reality shows are also our major ad revenue earners. More than half of our ad revenues come from our action and reality series.
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‘Sheena improved the profile of the channel. It did well for us from both the trade as well as public perception.’
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Have you set yourself any revenue targets for India? What is the percentage while taking Asia as a whole?
I can’t discuss figures but we have set ourselves a target 20 to 30 per cent higher than what we achieved last year. Revenuewise, all our Asian satellite feeds contribute equally. (Industry sources indicate that AXN ad revenues for 2001 will not cross Rs 250 million).
Last year, you had brought down Geena Lee Nolin, the lead heroine of Sheena as a major promotional activity. How successful was that as a
branding exercise and do you plan anything else on those lines for the next year?
Sheena improved the profile of the channel. It did well for us from both the trade as well as public perception. As for similar promos for next year, there is nothing decided as yet.
What about your programming? Are you increasing the investments in programming for the next year?
Our programming spends for 2002 will be same as what we pumped in this year. Between January and June, we will be launching many new shows, 12 to be exact, mainly reality and action series. We will be launching two shows on an average every month.
You have South Asia, Taiwan, Japan, and East Asia as your dedicated AXN franchisees in Asia. Do you plan any more?
We have identified a north Asian country for starting a new feed but no time frame has been set.
What of AXN’s reach in Asia? It was 22 million in the middle of last year and for India, it was 18 million as per the channel estimate. What are the present figures?
Our reach as far as 24 hour channel presence is concerned, is now 31.5 million for the whole of Asia and 21.6 million for India. We have 23 million viewers in China in a branded block category.
What about the gender break up in India? It was 59:41 earlier. Is it the same even now?
The female viewership has gone up. The ratio now stands at 55:45. Our female viewers are mostly in the 25-44 year age group.
As far as the advertiser is concerned, where do you figure. Which channels are you in direct competition with?
The advertiser looks at all English channels as one stack. And in this, it is Star Movies, HBO and AXN, in that order, that take the maximum revenue. But as far as eyeballs are concerned, our figures give HBO the lead over Star Movies. However, it should be understood that depending on what programmes are on air, this keeps switching around and often AXN shows are on top.
What are your prime time ad rates and in these tough times, how successful have you been as far as filling your inventories goes?
Our prime time ad rates are RS 8 – 10,000 per 10-second spot. And because we are priced competitively, we have had no difficulties filling our inventory.
In an interview given to a financial daily in July 2000, it was declared that 2002 was the break-even target for the channel. How are you positioned on that front?
I don’t recollect ever having set such targets but as of now we are looking at breaking even in 2004 or 2005.
At this point, what are your principal challenges in India?
The market continues to be challenging; it’s a crowded landscape and there is fierce competition for eyeballs and ad dollars. But as far as 2002 is concerned, we are very
confident and very well positioned. We have had strong distribution growth of 46 per cent in the last year and our viewership has grown 35 per cent which gives us a more than compelling story for advertisers.
We continue to invest in the channel and this is demonstrated by our continued investment in fresh programming.
Executive Dossier
Game on, fame on as Good Game hunts India’s first global gaming star
New reality show puts Rs 1 crore prize and global spotlight on India’s gaming talent.
MUMBAI: Game faces on, pressure high India’s gaming ambitions are levelling up. Good Game, billed as the world’s first as-live global gaming reality show, has officially launched in India with a bold mission: to crown the country’s first Global Gaming Superstar.
Blending esports with mainstream entertainment, the show brings together competitive gaming, creativity and on-camera performance in a format that tests more than just joystick skills. Contestants will be judged on gameplay, screen presence and their ability to perform under pressure, reflecting how gaming has evolved from pastime to profession and pop culture currency.
Fronting the show are three high-profile ambassadors: actor and entrepreneur Samantha Ruth Prabhu, Indian cricket star Rishabh Pant, and gaming creator Ujjwal Chaurasia. The winner will take home Rs 1 crore ($100,000) among the largest prize pools for any Indian reality show along with the chance to represent India on a global stage.
Backed by a planned annual investment of up to Rs 100 crore, Good Game is also courting brand partners, promising a minimum reach of 500 million among India’s core youth audience. The creators position the show as a bridge between entertainment and interactive culture, offering long-format content, community engagement and commercial scale.
Auditions are now open to Indian citizens aged 18 and above, inviting amateur and professional gamers, creators and performers alike. Shortlisted candidates will be called for in-person auditions in Mumbai on 14 and 15 February, and in Delhi on 28 February and 1 March 2026.
With big money, big names and even bigger ambition, Good Game signals a shift in how India views gaming not just as play, but as performance, profession and prime-time spectacle.
Digital
SpotDraft hires new CMO and CFO to fuel global push for its AI contract platform
Alon Waks and Amit Sharma join as SpotDraft accelerates growth across key markets
INDIA: SpotDraft has strengthened its senior ranks as it gears up for faster global expansion, naming Alon Waks as chief marketing officer and Amit Sharma as chief financial officer. The appointments follow the firm’s $54 million Series B round earlier this year and mark a push to scale across the Americas, EMEA and India.
The AI-powered contract-lifecycle-management platform has posted 100 per cent year-on-year growth in customer acquisition, counting Apollo.io, IPSY, Mixpanel, Oyster and Panasonic among its global clients. The firm processes more than one million contracts annually, with volumes up 173 per cent and nearly 50,000 monthly active users.
Waks, a veteran of Kustomer, Bizzabo, CreatorIQ, LivePerson and ZoomInfo, will steer global marketing and category positioning as legal teams adopt AI-driven tools. Sharma, who has led finance across scaling tech firms since 2016, will guide financial strategy, investor relations and market expansion.
Both hires aim to sharpen SpotDraft’s bid for a larger slice of the fast-growing legal-tech market, expected to exceed $63 billion by 2032. Co-founder and chief executive Shashank Bijapur said the company is focused on scaling go-to-market operations in the Americas, deepening leadership in EMEA, and accelerating AI capabilities for general counsels and legal-operations leaders.
Clients report shorter deal cycles and better alignment between legal and business teams. “What used to take weeks now happens in days,” said Abnormal Security senior legal operations manager Susan Koenig. DeepL head of legal operations André Barrow, said SpotDraft has helped reframe legal “from a cost centre to a generator of revenue”.
Executive Dossier
Outdoor Ads Get Smarter as LOC8 Shifts OOH from Visibility to Attention
AI, dwell time and real-world vision are rewriting the rules of what outdoor ads can do.
MUMBAI: Out-of-home ads were once the wallflowers of marketing seen by everyone, noticed by few. But in an age where attention has become the world’s most fought-over currency, even billboards are getting a brain upgrade. Enter LOC8, OSMO’s AI-powered attention engine, quietly reshaping the old OOH playbook by measuring not just who could have looked at an ad, but who actually did. The shift is subtle but seismic: impressions are out, impact is in and data, not gut instinct, is calling the shots.
In a landscape where marketers question every rupee spent outdoors, LOC8 is turning lampposts, flyovers and traffic islands into precision-mapped attention laboratories. By crunching dwell time, visibility zones, perceptual size and real-world obstructions, the platform is dragging OOH into a future where creativity meets computer vision and where the best ideas aren’t just eye-catching, but eye-measured. From automotive facelifts to FMCG novelty and real estate trust-building, the message is clear, outdoor has stopped shouting and started listening. Indian Television Dot Com explores more about it in an Interview interview with OSMO co-founder Nipun Arora.
On how OSMO is shifting outdoor advertising from a visibility-led medium to an attention-led one through LOC8.
Traditional OOH has long been measured by visibility and impressions i.e how many people could see an ad. OSMO, through its proprietary AI platform LOC8, is shifting that narrative more towards likelihood of being noticed. Using computer vision and machine learning, LOC8 analyzes real-world video data to measure visibility zones, obstructions, dwell time and perceptual size; bringing precision to how attention is quantified outdoors. It moves the focus from mere impressions to quality of impressions, making OOH a data-verified, attention-led medium comparable to digital in accountability.
On how marketers can use LOC8’s dwell-time, visibility and perception insights to craft more effective, emotionally resonant OOH campaigns.
LOC8 helps brands understand how people truly experience outdoor media how long they look, from what distance, and under what conditions. By quantifying dwell time, visibility duration, and perceptual size; marketers can plan campaigns that align with real human viewing behavior. This empowers creative and strategy teams to design emotionally resonant storytelling where messaging, visual hierarchy and placement are optimized for how people actually notice and process OOH creatives.
About what LOC8 has revealed through campaigns like Renault Triber and Namaste India on how categories such as auto, FMCG and real estate use attention metrics to drive outcomes.
Each category uses attention data differently but all share one common goal: to convert outdoor visibility into measurable engagement.
• Automotive | Renault Triber
For the new Renault Triber facelift, bold creative met data-led planning through LOC8. By analyzing on-ground video data, LOC8 measured real audience attention across placements factoring in visibility zones, obstructions, traffic speed and perceptual size. This enabled Renault to identify corridors that delivered maximum reach, saliency and engagement, optimizing media efficiency and ROI.
• FMCG | Namaste India
In OOH, innovation is the hook and assets are the bait. But bait often hides the hook. With Loc8’s attention metrics, we ensured the bait wasn’t a hurdle, rather it became the perfect stage for innovation to deliver its full impact! The insight proved that creative novelty, when validated by attention data, drives deeper engagement and measurable brand lift.
• Real Estate
For luxury and real estate campaigns targeting HNI/UHNI audiences, attention patterns differ especially between front and rear passengers, who are often the core audience segment for premium sites. LOC8’s ability to distinguish rear vs. front visibility plays a critical role here. It helps identify sites that offer longer viewing windows and stronger perceptual dominance from the rear seat where decision-makers are most likely seated making it a key differentiator for premium and trust-led categories. Together, these insights prove that auto optimizes for impact, FMCG for recall, and real estate for trust visibility showing how attention metrics adapt to category goals while ensuring measurable outcomes.
On how attention analytics will shape the future of brand storytelling and media planning as OOH becomes more digitised and data-driven.
As outdoor digitizes, attention analytics will inform not just where to advertise but how stories are told in public spaces. This evolution transforms OOH from a static broadcast channel into a dynamic attention ecosystem, where creativity is optimized through evidence-based insight.
On how LOC8’s data-led framework helps marketers quantify OOH impact and make outdoor a more accountable, ROI-driven medium.
LOC8 bridges the gap between intuition and evidence. By quantifying metrics like visibility duration, attention opportunity index, and visual saliency rank, it allows brands to benchmark site performance and justify investment. This data-led approach brings transparency, comparability and ROI measurement to a medium historically driven by perception.
On how OSMO ensures AI and computer vision enhance creativity rather than reduce it to numbers.
OSMO believes that technology should enhance creativity, not overshadow it. LOC8’s attention models reveal what naturally draws the human eye helping creative teams refine design cues, contrast, and visual hierarchy for greater impact. By merging art and science, LOC8 empowers creativity with intelligence.
About the creative best practices and design cues LOC8 has uncovered regarding what truly captures consumer attention outdoors.
LOC8’s visual cognition analysis has surfaced clear patterns across campaigns:
• High contrast and minimal messaging outperform cluttered designs.
• Motion cues draw significantly longer dwell times.
• The first two seconds are critical, creatives must establish focus instantly.
• Contextual alignment between the creative and its environment increases attention by over 30%.
These learnings offer a scientific foundation for creative effectiveness helping brands design OOH that’s visually magnetic and emotionally memorable.
On how attention metrics will integrate into omnichannel planning where OOH, digital and social work together for unified brand impact.
Attention can become the unifying KPI across OOH, digital and social to creates seamless storytelling continuity, where outdoor triggers digital engagement. The future of omnichannel planning lies in attention-led integration ensuring that campaigns don’t just reach audiences everywhere but truly capture and hold their focus.
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