Innovations in Placing Advertisements on Television: An Analysis of News Channels in India

An accepted fact worldwide is that, advertisements are the most important source of income for any media product. However, in case of News channels in India, they are the only traditional source of income because the other source, „subscription‟ is more of an expense head than a reliable stream of income. This is because, while, a majority of news channels in India are not paid for, all of them have to spend a lot of money for carriage of their signals and placing them at a prominent position in the list of channels as compared to their competitor. According to FICII KPMG media and entertainment industry report 2012, news channels are paying subscription fees which are disproportionately higher than their revenue from subscription. Since this has left news channels over dependent on their advertisement income, they are ever exploring new ways of placing advertisements on screen. While on one hand this has left their screen space highly cluttered on the other hand the marketing teams of news channels are creating a lot of innovations to integrate their news content with the advertisement. This paper has reviewed different news channels and after discussing with media marketing and media planning experts has tried to categorize different ways of placing advertisements on television which are being practiced today.