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Executive Dossier

‘We are targeting the late night, breakfast and weekend slots’ : Sunita Rajan- BBC World Deputy Director Airtime Sales

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As BBC World‘s deputy airtime sales director (a position she was promoted to in March 2001), Sunita Rajan provides the strategic direction for the 24-hour news and current affairs channel‘s commercial growth in the region. She overseas BBC World‘s operations in Asia and the Middle East.

 

Rajan heads the region‘s six BBC World offices – Dubai, Hong Kong, Singapore and the three India offices, Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore – and is responsible for spearheading the channels‘ airtime sales through the Asia Pacific footprint.

 

Rajan‘s experience in satellite television means she has a pretty good handle on what goes where when it comes to Asia‘s cable and satellite revenue models for news networks.
 

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Rajan takes credit for BBC World‘s strong showing in the past year. Previously regional sales director Asia, Rajan now has a wider role which includes global issues relating to the development of business relations in the Asia Pacific as well as handling BBC‘s staff development internationally.

 

She joined BBC World in 1999 from Star‘s Channel V where she headed the channel‘s sales, marketing and distribution. Rajan was part of the start-up team that set up Star TV in 1992 and in 1994 moved on to head Channel (V) when it was launched in India.

 

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The BBC has a reputation of being rather staid and slower than its rivals but changes are taking place and the Beeb today presents a more aggressive marketing face of which Rajan is an integral cog.

 

Rajan‘s career in media sales began in 1989 with Time Inc in India as a media concessionaire for Time and Fortune. Rajan holds a Masters degree in Economics from Bombay University and speaks eight languages.

 

Indiantelevision.com‘s Thomas Abraham met Rajan when she was in Mumbai recently. Excerpts from the conversation.

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How do you demarcate the Asian territory, as one block or as multiple blocks?

 

We look at Asia as two feeds, linked to the two satellites under whose footprints BBC World beams. There is the South Asia feed that includes the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East, covered by Panamsat 4, and the South East Asia feed covered by PAS-2. The PAS-2 beams on SE Asia and the Pacific Rim and includes Australia and New Zealand.

 

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Which is your most important market?

 

For BBC World as a whole, Europe definitely. BBC‘s penetration in Europe is 50 million strong. In this region, it is India where we have a viewership of 11.5 million.

 

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What sort of advertising does BBC World attract?

 

BBC World‘s target advertisers are information technology companies, consultancy companies, banks and financial institutions and FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) companies. Leisure and lifestyle is another important area. Travel companies, airlines and automobile manufacturers fall in this category.

 

And what is your target audience?

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The SEC A and B category. BBC World is the English news channel of choice for decision makers. Last year we commissioned market research agency ORG-Marg to do a survey for us and this was amply borne out. The Horizon 2000 survey covered 4,500 people who hold key positions across 13 cities in India. Horizon 2000 provided us a benchmark for understanding India‘s leading consumers and decision-makers. We will also be using the survey in international markets as companies there are eyeing India in a big way.

 

CNBC India has really made an impact in the short time that it has been around. How has the BBC been doing growthwise?

 

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The last two years have been very healthy for us. Our advertising revenues have more than doubled in this period.

 

Any numbers on targets, revenues?

 

We don‘t give those out.

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There has been a general slowdown all around. How do you see it affecting your bottomline?

 

We are just into the new fiscal. It will be at least two months before any clear figures emerge where we can make an assessment on that score.
I can say this though. There are new opportunities opening up and we are looking at new categories of advertising. Sponsorships and vignette programming are two such where we are putting in a lot of effort.

 

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(Of the total revenue growth over the past year, 75 per cent was accounted for by air-time sales, while the remaining was through sponsorship. Virgin Atlantic, JK Tyre, Microsoft and Home Trade are some of the sponsors who have come on board. BBC Worldwide took over marketing and sales in India in 1999.)
We have an interesting series one-minute vignettes created around medical developments using BBC archives which Cipla has sponsored. (Similarly bazee.com has sponsored The Smart Minute vignettes which track the developmental leaps in science and technology). The Chequered Flag is another vignette series based on F1 formula racing.

 

How much advertising does India generate percentage wise?

 

Sixty per cent of ad revenues from the South Asia feed is generated from India.

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Are there any particular time bands that you focus on?

 

As far as our current affairs programming is concerned, there are three important time bands that we target. The late night (10 pm to midnight and later), the breakfast and the weekend band. Appointment viewing is what it is all about.

 

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What of India-focussed programming? How many hours of it do you produce?

 

We produce five-and-a-half hours of original programming every week.

 

Any plans to increase on that?

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Not at the moment, no.

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.

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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.

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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

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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”.

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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.

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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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