Eight Indian media companies feature in this year’s Fortune 500 list among top 500 industrial corporations in the US and other countries. BCCL, ranked 162 in the list, leads among the Indian media companies. The annual list is brought out by ‘Fortune’ magazine on the basis of sales and gross revenue.
The IRS Q3 2010 results bring no cheer to publications in the Tamil Nadu market. The figures show decline for both dailies and magazines among the top five in terms of readership. While Daily Thanthi leads among dailies, Kumudam tops among magazines.
Not much change is seen in readership trends of newspapers in the state of Orissa in the IRS Q3 2010 results. Oriya daily Sambad continues as the leading newspaper in the state, while The Times of India has maintained its lead among English publications.
Publications in the state of Maharashtra have seen a mixed bag of growths and declines, with seven of the top 15 seeing a drop in Average Issue Readership (AIR) as per the IRS Q3 2010 results. The scenario was much better in Q2, when just four of the top 15 had seen decline.
While a few markets have shown decline and a few others a mixed bag, the Karnataka market is one that has largely seen growth in the IRS Q3 2010 results, with just four of the top 15 dailies showing decline. Although it is a largely Kannada language based state, when it comes to choice of languages, publications in English, Marathi and even Tamil are existent among the top newspapers.
Newspapers in Bangalore have witnessed mostly positive growth as per the IRS Q3 2010 results. Nine of the top 12, including English and Kannada language dailies, have seen healthy growth in readership. English daily Bangalore Mirror has seen a massive double digit growth of 71 per cent in AIR as against the Q2 results.
Hackers have targeted financial sites of Visa, Mastercard, and PayPal in defence of Wikileaks’ Julian Assange. The websites worst hit were PayPal and Mastercard, where the damage spilled beyond the company website and also affected the working of their services. However, both have been working on fixes, and while slowed, transactions continue.
Close on the heels of the agency winning d.light, S Yesudas, Managing Director, Vizeum, Indian Sub-continent, has announced the agency winning UNI TV.
A group of school students in Karnataka have started a website to share past test papers for free over the Internet. They are running the site to help other students like them who might have had difficulty in finding question papers for exams that they need to sit for. By providing a single database with papers from different exams around the country, they hope to help other students too.
McCann Worldgroup is bullish on India. Chief Executive Nick Brien’s decision to create a Creative Leadership Collective and opting Prasoon Joshi in-charge, or the recent regional leadership restructuring at APAC, where an ExCo has been created comprising leaders such as Joshi (and former Lintas India CEO Charles Cadell), are indicators of McCann’s growing ambition for the India market.
The online transaction of virtual goods has crossed $1 billion in America. As this trend continues to grow, the nature of online retail continues to change. Social-selling is the newest buzzword, connecting offline sellers with online buyers, as online retailers learn to leverage social networks and microtransactions to encourage sales.
Hindi fortnightly ‘Sarita’, the flagship magazine from Delhi Press Group, is set to hit newsstands in a new avatar from January 2011 onwards. In a bid to attract young readers and advertisers, the magazine is undergoing a design change and has adopted a new tagline: ‘Har Pal Yuva’. Meanwhile, the Group has appointed Triton to handle its ad campaigns.
Following the win of the ITC business, Madison Media has now added the media duties of Pidilite Industries Ltd to its kitty. The win includes the complete portfolio business of Pidilite. There was no multi-agency pitch involved. The account size is pegged at Rs 50 crore. Mediaedge:cia (MEC) was the incumbent agency.
<p align=justify> “Believe me, all the emotional outburst is natural. This is what we need to convey to our viewers. I can sense that people think there is lot of scripted stuff that is going in the reality formats but for FremantleMedia reality means- all natural. If we had to do formats in terms of scripts then I think formatted shows would die. People would have no faith in them. It’s totally unscripted and real.” </p>