New Delhi : Aakhir animal bhi to human hain' is the slogan for Discovery Communications India's (Discovery) first major advertising and promotion campaign for the channel Animal Planet. Said Mr Kiran Karnik, managing director, Discovery: ``Since the launch, there has been no support for Animal Planet as we had few decoders. Now that we've expanded the decoder base to over 500 from around 200 earlier, we can now talk about the channel.''Animal Planet will enhance its reach from 70 cities to over 250 cities and take its channel reach to around 10 million homes up from six million homes at present. Discovery Channel has a channel reach of 18 million homes across 1,100 cities. Animal Planet has six advertising sponsors, including Reliance (for corporate) and Nestle (for brands).
To boost Animal Planet's presence, Discovery will kick off a two-series TVC, handled by Bates, for the first time. Besides running spots on its channels, Discovery will also take positions in other high TRP channels. The creative strategy will be to employ irreverent, dramatic and fun themes to re-inforce its campaign - `aakhir animal bhi to human hain'. The print campaign, which will target mainstream dailies to promote its wild shows, will have a simple message - `Meet animals and people who are crazy about each other'; and humorous visuals and catchlines in Hinglish.
Mr Karnik said that Animal Planet will be promoted independently as well as packaged with Discovery Channel. He said that the media company has segmented prime time on the basis of audiences (though it competes on the commercial 7 pm to 10 pm time band as well). So for children, it has created a primetime band of 5 pm to 7 pm on working days; and between 9 am and 12 noon on weekends; and for adults it has special programming for 10 pm to 11 pm. Based on the segmentation approach, it has rolled out products like Discovery Kids; Discovery Health (on weekends between 7 pm and 9 pm targeted at adults); and Discovery Travel and Adventure (between 10 pm and midnight, skewed towards males).
Mr Karnik said that that there was a pressure on its inventory of programmes - as the fourth quarter is a peak season - with over 90 per cent of its primetime programmes sold out. ``Sometimes it touches even 100 per cent,'' said he. Mr Karnik added that the company will stick to its policy of not increasing ad time to accommodate more sponsors - Discovery Channel allows six minutes of advertising per hour in a day or eight minutes per hour during prime time. Also, it keeps a maximum of four sponsors for any programme.
Mr Karnik said that more and more advertisers are looking for building on-ground properties, besides running spots on the channel. ``We're extending special value addition to big space buyers like Britannia, Nestle, Mahindra & Mahindra, Hero Cycles and Indian Oil,'' he added.
Copyright © 2000 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.