Living Entertainment brings to you an international food experience from 11th September 2015

Living Entertainment announces the launch of an international food and lifestyle channel ‘Living Foodz’. This foodtainment channel specializes in exploring the evolving social status of food; moving out of the confines of the conventional kitchen into a world of entertainment and adventure with food. Having food at its core, Living Foodz will explore different perspectives towards food and the way it touches people - from lifestyle, travel, wellness to food infotainment and reality. The channel will be available across all DTH providers like Dish TV, Tata Sky, Airtel, Videocon and all other leading cable networks in dual feed Hindi and English from 11th September 2015.

Living Entertainment in India will be an extension of the Living network belonging to Essel Group which already exists in the international markets. Living aims at bringing alive all things factual with an element of entertainment in order to appeal to the global audiences. Living in India will truthfully echo the ‘Living’ philosophy and encompass everything that will help one to discover, awaken and transform oneself.

In sync with the corporate brand positioning of ZEEL – “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam -The World is My Family”, Living Foodz will resonate the philosophy perfectly with the energetic programming mix. For the Indian market, Living Foodz will be the international food & lifestyle channel that will have a universal feel; which will appeal to the new age Indian. This foodtainment channel is targeted at both men and women across all age groups in urban digital households. The core audience set would comprise of well-travelled & connected people with high interest level of food.

Within a year, Living Foodz will be available across countries worldwide producing global food content for global audiences. The audience will be taken on an exhilarating food expedition alongside eminent celebrity chefs and food personalities like Ranveer Brar, Gautam Mehrishi, Rocky & Mayur, Vicky Ratnani, Kunal Kapur, Rakhee Vaswani through their different shows. With a substantial increase of audience interest in various niche sectors, Living Foodz, has the right formula that is sure to enthrall one and all.

Speaking on the new initiative, Dr. Subhash Chandra, Chairman, ZEEL and Essel Group said, “We are very proud to present Living networks in India. This is yet another endeavor from our group to bring the world closer through entertainment. Living is all about global mindsets and experiences. This is also in line with our group philosophy of “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam - The World is My Family”. Our group has always believed in creating not just great content but building genres and brands that are milestones.”

Also present for the launch, Mr. Punit Goenka, Managing Director & CEO, Zee Entertainment Enterprises Limited said, “With Living, we intend to make global content for global audiences. This will be for the first time ever that original content from India will be available to audiences across the globe. We are very proud to present this new form of entertainment to our audiences”

Commenting on the occasion Mr. Piyush Sharma, CEO Zee Living- India APAC says, “Living is our endeavor to showcase audiences with great lifestyle content. Growth of digitization is leading to fragmentation of audiences, thereby creating an opportunity for differentiated and genre specific content. Moreover, increasing digital households are giving rise to increased audience expectations and demand for more diverse viewing opportunities. Under this scenario we are providing Living Foodz to people who love exploring and knowing more about food.”

Commenting on the occasion Mr. Rajiv Kheror, President Strategy & Planning, International Business says, “Food is a worldwide phenomena. Audiences across the globe wants to enjoy and understand food like never before. Your thirst for Foodtainment is about to be quenched with "Living Foodz” - the new destination for the best in food and entertainment. We are all set to redefine food content in minds of Indian viewers.”

Living Foodz will have 12+ hours of original programming (in the first week). Some of the prime time shows are

• Food Xpress: Rocky & Mayur, the awesome twosome get on the trail of the most exciting and incredible food journey to discover India’s spiciest, most exotic, expensive and extreme food. Every episode will take your through the length and breadth of India to discover that ONE dish

• Chef on Wheels: The show is about the endless roads, a bike, a chef and absolutely gorgeous farm fresh produce. Chef on Wheels goes back to where our fruits and veggies originate to organic farms and meet the people behind it while discovering the places and stories unknown with chef Gautam Mehrishi

• Vickypedia: Presenting Chef Vicky Ratnani as the master of International cooking in his brand new show Vickypedia. Vicky takes you on a whirlwind tour of some of the most fabulous recipes across the world.

• The Great Indian Rasoi: Newer places, new experiences and mouth-watering food. The most authentic ‘on the road’ exploratory food show is back in its brand new season with Chef Ranveer Brar.

• Pickle Nation: An entertaining journey across India to meet the legendary artisans & communities who create a lifetime of memories and magic with their jars of ‘Pickles’.

• Good Food America: Foods expert, Chef Danny Boome takes viewers on a culinary adventure in search of the best and healthiest restaurants in America

• Peggy’s Kitchen Cures: Registered holistic nutritionist, health educator and culinary consultant Peggy Kotsopoulos whips up healthy and delicious dishes that are both good … and good-for-you! Whether it’s Pumpkin Mousse or her famous Mediterranean Quinoa Salad, Peggy has the recipe for what ails you!

Living Foodz will be adopting a 360 degree approach to attract maximum eyeballs. Being a television channel, the brand will use television as a lead medium to excite viewers. The ZEEL network strength will be utilized for the maximum. Other mediums of promotion including DTH and print, coupled with a robust digital and social media presence to engage with audiences at different touch points has been put in place. Helios media has been roped in for providing advertisement revenue and Scarecrow communications as the creative agency for the channel. Living Foodz will also create various on ground and consumer connect initiatives to draw in a stronger resonance.

Tune into Living Foodz from 11th September 2015.

Aaj Tak honoured, 15th year in a row

The TV Today Network has been honoured with the prestigious ITA Scroll of Honour (Media) at the ITA Milestones Award 2015. Aaj Tak, the nation’s undisputed No. 1 news channel from the group crosses another milestone by being a part of the honor, straight 15th year in a row.. The award adds to the numerous laurels that the channels from the group have won across industry events for popularity and journalistic excellence.

TV Today Network, nation's No. 1 news network in terms of viewership (Source: BARC, TG: CS 15+ Yrs, NCCS All, All India – 1 Lac +, Wk 21 – 34’ 15, Rat’000), has dominated both the popularity and thought leadership space this year.

Aaj Tak claimed the Sarvashrestha title 15th year in a row, recognised as the viewer's clear preference. The channel stood tallest this year like every year across big news events like the Delhi Assembly Counting Day, Cricket world Cup coverage with none other than Sachin Tendulkar, Yakub Memon hanging, President Obama's visit to India, arrest of the terrorist Naved to name a few.

TV Today Network also brought the gold standard of journalism to English News TV in the form of India Today TV. Amongst the most successful TV launches in recent times, the channel showed a record opening in terms of tune ins. As per the BARC ratings the channel is already the consistent No. 2 channel in the genre (Source: BARC, Mkt share, Wk 30 -34’15, Mkt – 6 Megacities, TG: CS 22+ M NCCS AB). The recent exclusive interviews including first interview with Manmohan Singh as exPM, besides others with Lalit Modi,  Raghuram Rajan, L.K Advani, Sartaz Aziz and Arvind Kejriwal added to the exceptional growth.

The other two channels from the network – Tez and Dilli Aaj Tak have established themselves too, as loyalty powerhouses.

Commenting on the award – Mr. Ashish Bagga, Group CEO – India Today Group said, “I would like to congratulate the entire team for this award. The trust of  our channels with the viewer has only been growing through the years, something that is backed with an unwavering commitment to stay true to the highest standards of journalism. This award is an encouragement for us to stay focused on innovation and to work with a  vision to lead not just in viewership but also in being the most trusted.”.

Ms. Kalli Purie,  Group Editorial Director (Broadcast and New Media) -TV Today Network added, "Since the inception of Aaj Tak 15 years ago we have been winning this honour continuously without a break. With time this is becoming harder not easier. We compete against the pressures of a flood of channels, the internet, the mobile phone, celebrity tweet accounts and social media. So to be a favourite and come out on top validates all the collective hard work of our team and their belief in the nobility of our profession".

InStream adtech, the leading native advertising and content publishing platform, announced today that C-Suite Network Chairman Jeffery Hayzlett will join the board as an advisor.

This marks a major induction of a very prominent business leader on the InStream adtech board. Jeffery Hayzlett is a renowned marketer, primetime TV & radio host, keynote speaker, best-selling author and global business celebrity.

InStream adtech provides a fully integrated native advertising and content publishing platform which helps reach and engage relevant audiences with its innovative native ad-formats. Brands have an opportunity to engage with readers or target audiences without interrupting their content consumption experience on a website.

The company is cofounded by Jignesh Desai, formerly a Core Team member and Business Head of Networkplay Media, which got sold to G+J, Bertelsmann AG and later bought out by SVG media ventures and Jitender Arora, a tech serial entrepreneur with a multitude of start-ups to his name including Countrywide Network which is a pioneer in introducing Incentive Holiday & Flight Vouchers.

Jignesh Desai and Jitender Arora, Co-founders of InStream adtech said:

“We welcome Jeffrey and are glad to have him aboard as an advisor on this journey of re-imagining native publishing and disrupting it with scale. InStream adtech is the first Indian company Jeffrey has joined and we are honoured he chose us as his partner. We are confident we will gain insights from his experience. “

“InStream adtech is one of the strongest new platforms in the native publishing field,” said Hayzlett. “I’m honoured that InStream adtech elected me to their board and look forward to helping them take their business to new heights.”

By 2020, millennials will account for one third of all retail spending. They've never experienced a world without the internet, and increasingly they shop, socialise and share content on mobiles.

Millennials also don't trust traditional advertising.

They prize authenticity and transparency, they don't have much brand loyalty and they are more likely to turn to friends, social networks such as Pinterest, or YouTube video bloggers for recommendations rather than traditional buying guides such as magazines.

Primark's Primania website is a great example of how to get millennial marketing right.

It's a cross between a photo sharing service and a fashion magazine where customers upload photos of them wearing Primark outfits.

Primark mixes in some editorial, links to its blogs, provides sharing buttons for all the major social networks and of course, tells you what each product is, how much it costs and where you can buy it.

It ticks all the boxes: it's social, it's fun, it makes customers feel like stars and it gets people buying Primark clothes.

Mobile is all that matters

Millennials are constantly connected.

In a late 2014 study of smartphone and tablet-owning millennials by Survey Sampling International, nearly half of millennials said they use the mobile internet for four hours every weekday and nearly one in three exceeds five hours of daily use.

According to a 2012 study for Time Inc, millennials switch media types 27 times every non-working hour. They consume information buffet-style, and they're keen to share what they've discovered.

Of the four daily hours millennials spend online, most of it is spent communicating. 114 minutes of texting, 99 minutes on social networks and 85 minutes on instant messaging such as WhatsApp.

Embracing mobile has significant implications for marketers, not least because Google now ranks sites that work well on mobile devices above sites that don't.

Slow sites, wordy page titles and descriptions, impenetrable blocks of text and landing pages that sell too hard don't work on mobile, although of course there needs to be clear calls to action.

Search is different on mobile too.

When somebody on a smartphone searches on Google they'll see fewer search results than they would see on a laptop.

Search for 'iPhone' and you might only see one organic search result, the rest of the screen is filled with a mix of PPC adverts and Google shopping results.

If those ads are yours, you can't waste a single word.

Sell sizzle, not sausages

According to a Harris/Eventbrite poll in 2014, 78% of millennials said they'd rather spend money on a desirable experience than buy coveted goods (although Eventbrite is a ticket firm, which may have influenced the study somewhat).

However multiple studies report that millennials value novelty, personalisation and shareability. They want content that amuses, excites or entertains, and products they can show off to their approving peers.

If you want to catch their attention, you need to appeal to their sense of adventure, engage with them and give them something they can share.

Takeaways:

Millennials trust their peers and distrust traditional marketing.

Millennials research companies and products online before buying.

Optimising your site for mobile isn't just about millennials. It helps your Google rank too.

Millennials value novelty, personalisation and shareability.

Mobile is the watchword of the millennial generation.

Written by Chloe Basterfield

Source:Profero Global

What is luxury? So posed the question, quite literally, by the V&A Museum in a recent exhibition.  On the bright Spring day that day I visited, it was both telling and unsurprising to be entranced by the expectant queue for the Alexander McQueen Savage Beauty snaking around the foyer, while visitors slipped slowly in and out of the What is luxury? exhibition. Telling, perhaps, of the magnetic power of a brand to drive demand and desire…

Back to our question: What is luxury? Luxury has always defied single definition. If we think back to early examples of luxury creation and consumption in ancient Classical civilization, already a polarisation around luxury was evident. On the one hand, luxury was a concept that was vehemently denied and rejected by the Spartans, on the other it was demonstrably embraced and celebrated (to excess) by the Macedonians. As classicist and historian Dr. Michael Scott explained in an exclusive interview, these different behaviours towards luxury were playing out in the emergence of new words (truphe; poluteles; habrosune) to express different sentiments towards luxury. A new vocabulary of luxury was already in contention.

Today, ‘luxury’ remains one of the most problematised terms in business language. Conversations around what luxury means will range from the external to the internal, from statements of status to a deeper sense of discovery and learning, from the superficial and superfluous, to truly unique products and experiences that will be treasured for a lifetime. The world still has a love-hate relationship with luxury.

What is consistent through the ages, is that we understand luxury differently dependent upon culture. This was our starting point when we undertook our research to examine the meaning of luxury, culminating in the publication of Meta-luxury: brands and the culture of excellence in 2012. When a branded t-shirt and a unique, one-of-a-kind supercar, crafted to the highest specification and bearing the mark of the craftsman can both be called ‘luxury’, clearly we have a problem.

In the research that we undertook, in seeking to understand the true heart of luxury and the implications for brand and business management, the conclusion that we arrived at was excellence and specifically a culture of excellence. Leading luxury brands have always set the standard. They have led the way. In their pursuit of perfection, in their quest for excellence, they break the rules, they challenge the norm, they test the limits of innovation. To the consumer, the creations and experiences afforded by these brands represent an ultimate in desire and fulfillment.

As we explored brands through the lens of a culture of excellence, we asked how many brands actually represent a unique achievement? How many of them are based on distinctive knowledge of some kind? How many are interested in their place in history? Through the concept of Unique Achievement and the drivers of demand of Craftsmanship, Focus, History and Rarity, meta-luxury is a business model that reflects the culture of excellence, drawing a clear line between luxury as a convention and excellence as an authentic conviction.

Three years on from Meta-luxury entering the public domain, it is an interesting point of reflection and prediction to look at what those drivers of Craftsmanship, Focus, History and Rarity mean today. And crucially what they mean for the luxury consumers of tomorrow.

Perhaps the real question to be asked and engaged with is what does luxury mean for a consumer in the Age of You? If we take a step back and consider how brands have evolved over the years, we can begin to chart a fascinating series of dynamics that have played out, the current culmination of which will have considerable ramifications for everyone in the privileged position of guardians of luxury brands around the world.

Brands have evolved and emerged through a series of what we might term as different ‘Ages’:

The Age of Identity, where brand acted as a tool to identify and differentiate and where brand messaging was articulated primarily via one-way communication.

The Age of Value where brand was used to inform and improve decision-making and where brand performance was measured in its ability to deliver financial returns to the business.

The Age of Experience where brand became the higher purpose that inspired a connected ecosystem.

And ultimately, we arrive at the cusp and emergence of The Age of You, where brand is becoming the consumer’s partner. Brand experiences will be unique to the individual and highly customised based on personal information and brand performance is measured in its ability to capture and leverage data and engender participation.

Across those eras, the role of brand has shifted, from brand as a monologue, to brand as a dialogue, to brand as a communal experience, and, now, to brand as a truly personalized and curated experience created around each and every one of us.

In the Age of You, enabled by intelligent infrastructure and powered by big data, the leading brands will develop integrated ecosystems of experiences and reshape the world around us. As people and devices become more connected and everything becomes "smarter," businesses are recognising the need to reorganize themselves around ‘you’. As a result, each of us will become our own marketplace or "mecosystem." As "intelligent everything" meets the mecosystems of the future, brands will have unprecedented opportunity to create context, creative possibilities, and meaning for individuals—and value for all.  And therein lies the challenge.

We see the first surge of this debate rippling through the luxury industry. Condé Nast hosted their first luxury conference this Spring, with Suzy Menkes leading the debate on ‘Hard Luxury’ and how the concept of luxury is evolving. The FT Business of luxury discussed ‘Technology, Legacy and the New Consumer’. The forthcoming International New York Times Luxury Conference will look at ‘Luxury beyond product’ and connecting with consumer value systems.  The consistent thread is around what we value and why. Why, how and in what form does luxury fit into the mecosystems of individuals?

Fundamentally, luxury brands are arguably more uniquely placed to thrive in The Age of You, as the very concept of personalisation, of the unique and bespoke has been the beating heart of these brands for centuries. And as we reflect on the manifestation of meta-luxury as a culture and business model in The Age of You, we see this already resonating in a number of indicators. Craftsmanship derives from the very premise of demand and desire of something created by an individual for an individual. And we’re seeing a distinct gravitation towards quality of product and an enhanced role of the aesthetic. As we look at the purchase behaviour of affluents, it is telling to see greater primacy towards the understated aesthetic and towards brands such as Céline and Bottega Veneta. The inimitable words of Bottega Veneta seem to encapsulate it beautifully:  “When your own initials are enough.”  History as a driver in meta-luxury is about the creative tension of tradition and innovation. It is about how brands carry forward their origins into the future, staying true to their DNA and making it relevant for new generations. Never before has this been more vital or valuable for brands.

One of the most powerful dynamics in the Age of You is the knowledge economy. The assertion of the self is on an inexorable rise, and concomitant with that is the desire to demonstrate one’s own knowledge capital. There is a value to the personal economy of being ‘in the know’ about brands that remain otherwise off the radar to others. There is a  value in Focus, in a depth of specialisation, in the exacting lens of a brand which commands aspiration and desire above others. There is a value in a brand that has opened up a window onto its world that is not available to others.

In The Age of You, the fine line between what luxury brands reveal and conceal as they engage with the transparency demanded of consumers and the element of mystery that is endemic to their very being, will be fascinating to watch.

Authored by Rebecca Robins,Director EMEA LatAm, for Interbrand

Source:Interbrand