The power packed political news event of the Hindi heartland - Panchayat Aaj Tak is back this time to set the tone of the Bihar Elections. The landmark event by the nation's undisputed No. 1 News channel will make sense of the political environment ahead of the critical Bihar Elections. The Conclave is scheduled for 15th Sept in Patna and will see the top political faces debate the hottest issues in the nation's most gripping state election.

The lineup of the distinguished speakers will include Nitish Kumar, Bihar Chief Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav, Ex Chief Minister and President RJD and Jitan Ram Manjhi, Former Chief Minister of Bihar. The other stalwarts at the biggest Political Conclave in Patna include Ravi Shankar Prasad, Minister of Communications & IT, Upendra Kushwaha, MoS for Human Resource Development, Asaduddin Owaisi, President  AIMIM, Abdul Bari Siddiqui, Leader,RJD, P.K. Shahi,  Education Minister, Bihar,  C.P. Thakur,  MP, Rajya Sabha, BJP, Harivansh, MP, Rajya Sabha, JDU, Shaibal Gupta, Secretary, ADRI, Shekhar Suman, Actor, Manoj Tiwari, MP, BJP, Sabir Ali,  Leader, BJP, Ali Anwar Ansari, MP, JDU, Tariq Anwar, General Secretary, NCP, Tejashwi Yadav,Leader, RJD, Chirag Paswan, MP, LJP, Ashok Choudhary, State President, Congress, Raghuvansh Prasad Singh,  Vice President, RJD, K C Tyagi,  General Secretary, JDU, Mohammad Ali Ashraf Fatmi,  Leader, RJD, Mehboob Ali Kaiser, MP, LJP and Ram Vilas Paswan, Minister of Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution

The political leadership from the ruling and opposition parties besides other eminent personalities from the Bihar political landscape will be discussing the biggest issues of the state in the run up to the elections. The day is expected to see heated debates on various topics that will add perspective to the state politics and the choice ahead for voters.

Mobile internet advertising will overtake newspaper advertising next year, accounting for 12.4% of global adspend while newspapers account for 11.9%, according to ZenithOptimedia’s new Advertising Expenditure Forecasts.

Mobile internet will be the third-largest advertising medium, behind television and desktop internet. Mobile advertising will grow 38% in 2016 to US$71bn, while newspaper advertising will shrink 4% to US$68bn.

Mobile advertising remains the driving force behind the growth of the entire advertising market, contributing 83% of all new ad dollars between 2014 and 2017.

Internet advertising to overtake television in 2018 as print continues to shrink

Desktop internet advertising will continue to grow, but will lose market share for the first time this year, dropping from 19.8% of global adspend in 2014 to 19.4%. By 2017 ZenithOptimedia forecasts desktop internet to account for 19.1% of global adspend. Meanwhile mobile internet advertising’s share of the global ad market will rise from 5.7% in 2014 to 15.0% in 2017. Overall, internet advertising will account for 34.0% of global adspend in 2017, slightly behind television’s 35.9%. The market share gap between the two media will narrow from 13.3 percentage points in 2014 to 1.9 in 2017. At this rate of growth, internet advertising will overtake television in 2018.

Print adspend continues to decline across most of the world, as it has done since 2008. We predict newspaper adspend will shrink by an average of 4.9% a year through to 2017, while magazine advertising will shrink by 3.2% a year. Their combined share of global adspend has fallen from 39.4% in 2007 to 19.6% this year, and we expect it to fall further to 16.7% by 2017.

Global adspend to grow 4.0% in 2015

ZenithOptimedia forecasts that global adspend will grow 4.0% to reach US$554bn in 2015, and will accelerate to 5.0% growth in 2016, boosted by the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio and the US Presidential elections. Adspend will then slow down slightly in the absence of these events, growing 4.4% in 2017.

Mature Markets to lead adspend growth for the first time in nine years

We have reduced our forecasts for adspend growth in 2015 since our June forecast by 0.2 percentage points. There has been broad-based deceleration across the world as marketers have moderated their expectations of global economic growth. With Brazil and Russia in recession, and China slowing down, the world can no longer rely on emerging markets to set the pace of growth. We expect ‘Mature Markets’ (which we define as North America, Western Europe and Japan) to contribute more to global adspend growth this year than ‘Rising Markets’ (everywhere else), for the first time since 2006. We think this is a temporary aberration, however – Rising Markets will become the leading contributors to ad market growth again in 2016, and will increase their market share from 37.4% in 2015 to 38.8% in 2017.

China slows but is still growing twice as fast as the world as a whole

China’s ad market has not been substantially affected by the turmoil in its stock market, but the slowing economy and concerns about the potential for future growth have caused advertisers to moderate their spending slightly. We forecast adspend growth in China to fall from 10.5% in 2014 to 7.8% in 2015 – a rate of growth that’s still twice as fast as the global ad market’s, and which places China as the 13th-fastest growing ad market of the 81 we cover.

Low oil prices weigh on big producers

While beneficial for the global economy – and the ad market – as a whole, low oil prices are depressing activity in the big oil producers. We forecast double-digit declines in adspend this year in Azerbaijan, Nigeria and the United Arab Emirates, and declines of 7%-8% in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. In Russia the problem of low oil prices has been exacerbated by international sanctions, leading to an estimated 14.1% drop in adspend this year.

“Mobile technology is rapidly transforming the way consumers across the world live their lives, and is disrupting business models across all industries. We are now witnessing the fastest transition of ad budgets in history as marketers and agencies scramble to catch up with consumers’ embrace of the mobile way of life says ”Steve King, ZenithOptimedia’s CEO, Worldwide.

Stephan Vogel, Ogilvy & Mather Germany’s chief creative officer, has said “Nothing is more efficient than creative advertising. Creative advertising is more memorable, longer lasting, works with less media spending, and builds a fan community…faster.”1 But in the world of marketing, creativity needs to convert into sales. Are brands succeeding in making the creative in their advertising campaigns as effective as they should be?

Nielsen’s marketing mix work in the FMCG space has found that television advertising drives about 50% of incremental sales for a brand. Our meta-analysis showed that the average efficiency of a TV campaign in driving incremental sales is 1.2X. This was seen to as high as 3.5X in case of stronger campaigns.

The 3C Model

So how can marketers ensure content quality, execution and spends are at optimal levels? At Nielsen, we believe the solution to this issue is a “3-C” framework. By focusing on consumers, content and context, brands can drive campaign success and deliver better advertising.

Reaching the consumer efficiently is the first step towards efficient advertising. Consequently, brands need to focus on accurate reach in addition to considering total reach. While there is robust measurement available for television, there are no powerful reach measurement tools in case of digital. And the right tools are essential. Nielsen’s Digital Ad Ratings, for example, enables marketers to choose the right publishers by looking beyond their reach or traffic numbers to the on-target reach they offer.

Secondly, effective television advertising’s content should capture the viewer’s attention in the first five to seven seconds because that is where the risk of losing the consumer is highest. The content must also engage consumers and activate their memory at the moment of purchase. Empirical evidence shows that the use of elements like multisensory stimulus, motion that helps direct viewers’ gaze and a central visual field that garners maximum attention of viewers, have a deep impact on the memory, making advertising content with such features more effective.

The third important pillar in making advertising more effective is context. Brands could consider priming their advertising campaign within an appropriate context. At any moment when consumers engage with a stimulus or any content, they are “primed” by what they have been exposed to previously. It has been found that if the content of the advertisement matched the contextual theme, it performed significantly better across key neurometrics.

In conclusion, advertising campaigns need to be tracked and modelled around the 3-Cs. When put to use, the 3-C framework can generate significantly better return on investment for advertising campaigns across media, thereby ensuring better marketing effectiveness for spending.

Media monitoring is the process of reading, watching or listening to the editorial content of media sources on a continuing basis, and then, identifying, saving and analyzing content that contains specific keywords or topics.

A media monitoring service, a press clipping service or a clipping service as known in earlier times, provides clients with copies of media content, which is of specific interest to them and subject to changing demand; what they provide may include documentation, content, analysis, or editorial opinion, specifically or widely. These services tend to specialize their coverage by keyword, industry, size, region/geography, publication, language, etc.

This activity is done on two fronts, either internal or externally. Internal monitoring is limited to specifics and mainly to certain geography. External or specialized media monitoring agencies have the capacity to capture the content on wide geographies, various languages, and at a fraction of the cost.

Media Monitoring is the key to Public Relations, Corporate Communications, and Marketing Strategies. Most organizations, government agencies, not-for-profit organizations, brands, celebrities and individuals such as authors, sportspersons, glamour world personalities, etc. utilize media monitoring as a tool to track mentions of their organization, its brands, its executives and celebrity presence in news media.

Some of them also deploy media intelligence tools to track the success of their press releases, to analyze competitor strategies, to benchmark performance against competitors, to control corporate or brand reputation, to gather market intelligence, to keep an eye on every move of its competitors, understand the business environment, to keep tab on new and innovative ideas, technologies, etc.

Monitoring editorial content of news sources including newspapers, magazines, trade journals, TV, radio stations and the Internet is by far the most common type of media monitoring. This form of media monitoring is called “news monitoring”. In addition to monitoring news, many organizations now also monitor social media on the Internet, tracking word of mouth mentions about their organization in social media such as Facebook, Twitter, blogs, message boards and forums. This is commonly known as social media monitoring, word-of-mouth monitoring, or buzz monitoring.

Some organizations have their own capacities to track and monitor news content on their own. But most of the organizations, PR houses, Market Research Agencies, Media Intelligence firms take the help of full equipped specialized Media Monitoring Companies like Indian Press Clearing.

The in-house team can track or monitor news coverage from very limited avenues of news medium, like newspapers from specific area or region, limited no. of editions and journals, online search engines, etc. This can hamper the analysis of the overall impact of the media release throughout the country and internationally.

Hence most of the organizations prefer to have specialized media tracking agencies that have the infrastructure, skilled human resource and expertise to scan through innumerable news mediums, print, online, TV channels and radio, etc. to get the relevant and required news/information at earliest. These agencies can provide a very comprehensive news reports, from varied geographies and can save precious human hours and efforts of the in-house team using free-online search options. Their efforts can be used in more productive activity for the organization than this tedious job of searching news clips.

In addition, Specialized News Monitoring agencies are more efficient, accurate, time- saving and economical than the in-house staff. News monitoring is the requisite for most organizations. Today, news in traditional media (newspapers, consumer magazines, trade journals, news syndication services) is best monitored on the Internet. But still, few publications are still not ready to update their content online, especially the regional ones. This is where the Specialized News Monitoring agencies can prove a vital source of information. So, Specialized News Monitoring needs to gain more stronghold in the business of Media and Media Intelligence.

The fight will be shown live and exclusive on 13th September at 5.30 AM (IST), , highlighting the culmination of Mayweather Jr’s illustrious unbeaten career spanning nearly 20 years

FIGHT SPORTS & SONY SIX once again bring the best fights in the business to India. SONY SIX, the premiere sports and entertainment channel is set to showcase the most anticipated fight of the year featuring current world boxing champion Floyd Mayweather Jr. against WBA welterweight interim champion, Andre Berto.

This fight, which takes place in Las Vegas, will be telecast live and exclusive on 13th September at 5:30 AM (IST), and is expected to last for 3 hours. With great anticipation of this being Mayweather’s last bout, should he win, he will match the 49-0 record of former heavyweight great Rocky Marciano. The fight will be live on both SONY SIX and SONY SIX HD.

The acquisition of the event features as another stellar follow-up to FIGHT SPORTS and SIX working together to bring India the ‘Fight of the Century’ featuring Mayweather against Pacquiao in May 2015.

Commenting on the announcement of the acquisition of the high-profile fight, Mr. Prasana Krishnan, Business Head – SONY SIX and SONY KIX said, “We are committed towards driving and building a differentiated offering, and this fight is a definitive addition in making Sony SIX truly ‘the Home of Fight Sports’. Boxing, as a sport promises sheer inimitable thrills and it’s that innate quality of the sport that is resonating with our viewers who are hungry for such high intensity action. We are absolutely thrilled to bring to our viewers in India, what can clearly be defined as the most-awaited fight of the year.”

“Sony SIX has established itself as a premier destination for showcasing superior combat sports such as the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), GLORY, World Class Championship Boxing events and TNA. “

The first week of August saw Mayweather announcing that Haitian/American Berto would step into the ring with him in Las Vegas, with the unbeaten champion aiming to equal Rocky Marciano’s fabled 49-0 record. In one corner, Andre Berto, is a former welterweight world champion, and is expected to step into the ring as a heavy underdog after losing three of his last six fights. In the other corner, nicknamed ‘Money’, Floyd Mayweather Jr has been hailed as one of the greatest boxers of this era. The 38-year-old fighter remains unbeaten in 48 professional fights since 1996. However, it remains to be seen how the two fighters perform in the ring and if Berto could finally create a dent in the legacy of the forever polarizing “Money”.