Executive Dossier

We are actively looking to work with regional channels – Helios Media MD Divya Radhakrishnan

Published

9 years ago

November 7, 2016

1 November 2016 was celebrated with much pomp by the folks at Helios Media. Five years of successful operation in a business (which has seen many come and go in shorter periods) was a good enough reason to party till late into the night with clients, media and friends on the terrace of its expansive office in Mumbai’s Andheri East suburb. High Five was the motto for the evening, and everyone was greeted as such.

Started by media vet Divya Radhakrishnan (on 1/11/11) who was later joined by former Zoom business head Bala Iyengar – who is now a partner in the business, Helios Media today has gained a good reputation for itself as a company that delivers. Over the years, it has helped in the monetization of channels such as MTunesHD, Fashion TV, Epic TV, FoodFood, Living Foodz, FataFati, Green TV, Fakht TV, Spin TV among many other.

With a staff strength of 55 (most of them involved in ad-sales branded content), Radhakrishnan states that the company has attained a level of stability and is looking at revving up its gross billings to the triple digit crore mark. She has been bringing in professionals and delegating responsibility to the team she leads. “I am basically a gardener,” she says, looking at the terrace lawn that her office looks on to on the top floor of an office complex in the suburb of Andheri east.

Indiantelevision.com’s Papri Das got into a tete-a-tete with Radhakrishnan to get her insight into what has been achieved so far and where she sees Helios Media going. Excerpts:

Helios Media is often viewed as an outsourced ad sales wings for channels. What is the company’s positioning in the market currently?

Clients initially approached us for the monetizing aspect of our services and were pleasantly surprised by the bouquet of services we offer, which has grown over the years. We are currently not only into pure play ad sales. We have a tendency to typecast things and put things boxes in our country. Therefore, to launch something new that doesn’t fit into the general notions of mainstream, to carving its own niche is a long journey.

Our aim is to highlight these services and solutions as part of the entire mix, which in turn helps the revenue grow, and is not just considered as an afterthought. Therefore, the thought ‘Beyond Obvious’ came into being, and it has been our brand positioning since the past three years. We didn’t chance upon the concept overnight, we studied cases, researched extensively, interviewed people from the industry, and found the need gaps and oriented a team on this mantra.

What value addition is there for channels to let Helios Media handle their revenue monetisation? Are you able to fetch them premium rates for their inventories?

Hypothetically speaking, say I have a channel going at 20 GRP which sells at an effective rate of Rs 1000, now what will I sell a channel with 5 GRP for? Rs 50, if you apply a simple sales principle. But, Helios Media has the confidence to sell it almost close to Rs 1000. We do that with right positioning of the content and brand akin-ness.

I have often been asked how I can fetch premium rates for clients when we don’t control bulk inventories in the market across different media platforms. Our proposition isn’t to sell inventories in packages, we treat each channel differently, and a different specialist handles its sales. Just because the channels have outsourced their sales, it doesn’t mean that their inventory ‘sort of’ goes to a supermarket shelf. We target brands based on the brand akin-ness with the channel, and given that we serve niche channels, there is no question of overlapping their sales needs.

For example, when we launched MTunes, we researched extensively with Ormax to understand what was lacking in the music scene, to hit the sweet spot that brands wanted to target and the channel could offer. It is interesting to know that we managed to get several brands involved at the content level, and explore innovative solutions through deals with the channel, as we worked around the restrictions of the music IPs having separate owners.

How do you go about selecting the channels to partner with?

Call us picky but we are very particular about the channels that we choose to sell for. If you look at our client bouquet, each one of them is a specialty channel, which needs to be positioned uniquely in the market, otherwise it won’t sell well. You can’t sell a channel such as BTVi on simply the standard unit of trade, that is, GRP. You have to sell the brand positioning, for which you need to get under the skin of the content. Therefore, a lot on how we choose clients is based on their basic understanding of this, how comfortable they are with acknowledging our inputs and working according to it.

While it is easier for us to do that for a channel we were involved with from its inception such as MTunes and Living Foodz, we have also brought in clients well into their life cycle – Food Food, Fakht Marathi, etc.

In the past five years, Helios Media hasn’t aggressively chased new clients and taken time to add a new channel to its portfolio. Is this a conscious decision?

Ours is a very people heavy business. It has to make logical sense to me to expand my team to add new channels to sell. It doesn’t seem cost-effective or time-efficient for us to add a bouquet of 50 to 60 channels and build an enterprise. Where we see expansion is in the increase in revenue and value of our clients, because it directly links to growth in our own value.

We have a channel portfolio of eight now. But, there were almost 80-odd broadcasters who approached us as prospective clients, but many a times we decided not to work with them. It is because most of them lacked the depth of understanding of the media concessionaire businesses. From broadcasters going ‘I want to launch a channel one day’ to people with content who hadn’t done up the lining to folks who simply don’t understand the distribution ecosystem: there are examples of such broadcasters galore.

Helios Media is often compared to media agencies, and its performance judged on new clients and account wins. Do you find that unfair?

Frankly, it doesn’t bother me how many crore of account I handle as compared to others, as long as I know how my business’ bottom line works.

Media agencies work on two and half per cent commission basis from the client’s marketing spends whereas we work on revenue-sharing. Therefore, when I say we have done business of X amount of billing, Helios Media’s earning is a substantial part of that net billing we have done for our clients. We are in a different sphere altogether. Their commission is linked to the clients spends, while ours its directly linked to revenue. A brand can cut down on its spends, but our fortune is tied to the client’s fortune. Thus, evaluating Helios Media’s business and performance on number of new accounts or total strength of account is absurd.

Since the launch of Brand Chef, how has this new vertical been performing for the company?

We have recently spun a new division called Brand Chef which is about consultancy for food brands. From celebrity chefs, food bloggers, popular digital stars with cooking content, we have a wide range of content solutions for brands that work directly with this division. Clients range from Go Cheese, HUL, Marico, and many more. If I were to give an estimate of how successful this division has been for us, it is almost 50 per cent of our top line revenue. We see immense potential in the food sector. We have plans to launch social media strategy for clients specifically in the food sector.

What prospects do you see in regional market?

We are actively looking to work with regional channels. Regional market pricing is always higher from an advertiser’s standpoint, because it has very little spillover. Also, the industry is slowly getting over the myth that Hindi is the national language. You move outside Mumbai and go to Pune, people respond to you in Marathi. Therefore, brands need to stop putting an overemphasis on the so called ‘HSM- or Hindi speaking Market.’

We are in talks with a regional client who is seeking our help to decide on what format they should launch in GEC, movies or something else? There is another network seeking our consultancy on which language they should go into. So, we are currently doing market prospect planning as well.

Related Topics:Bala Iyengar Divya Radhakrishnan Epic TV Fashion TV FataFati FoodFood Helios Media Living foodz MTunesHD Zoom business

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Executive Dossier

Game on, fame on as Good Game hunts India’s first global gaming star

Published

3 weeks ago

January 27, 2026

indiantelevision.com Team

MUMBAI: Game faces on, pressure high India’s gaming ambitions are levelling up. Good Game, billed as the world’s first as-live global gaming reality show, has officially launched in India with a bold mission: to crown the country’s first Global Gaming Superstar.

Blending esports with mainstream entertainment, the show brings together competitive gaming, creativity and on-camera performance in a format that tests more than just joystick skills. Contestants will be judged on gameplay, screen presence and their ability to perform under pressure, reflecting how gaming has evolved from pastime to profession and pop culture currency.

Fronting the show are three high-profile ambassadors: actor and entrepreneur Samantha Ruth Prabhu, Indian cricket star Rishabh Pant, and gaming creator Ujjwal Chaurasia. The winner will take home Rs 1 crore ($100,000) among the largest prize pools for any Indian reality show along with the chance to represent India on a global stage.

Backed by a planned annual investment of up to Rs 100 crore, Good Game is also courting brand partners, promising a minimum reach of 500 million among India’s core youth audience. The creators position the show as a bridge between entertainment and interactive culture, offering long-format content, community engagement and commercial scale.

Auditions are now open to Indian citizens aged 18 and above, inviting amateur and professional gamers, creators and performers alike. Shortlisted candidates will be called for in-person auditions in Mumbai on 14 and 15 February, and in Delhi on 28 February and 1 March 2026.

With big money, big names and even bigger ambition, Good Game signals a shift in how India views gaming not just as play, but as performance, profession and prime-time spectacle.

Digital

SpotDraft hires new CMO and CFO to fuel global push for its AI contract platform

Published

2 months ago

December 3, 2025

indiantelevision.com Team

INDIA: SpotDraft has strengthened its senior ranks as it gears up for faster global expansion, naming Alon Waks as chief marketing officer and Amit Sharma as chief financial officer. The appointments follow the firm’s $54 million Series B round earlier this year and mark a push to scale across the Americas, EMEA and India.

The AI-powered contract-lifecycle-management platform has posted 100 per cent year-on-year growth in customer acquisition, counting Apollo.io, IPSY, Mixpanel, Oyster and Panasonic among its global clients. The firm processes more than one million contracts annually, with volumes up 173 per cent and nearly 50,000 monthly active users.

Waks, a veteran of Kustomer, Bizzabo, CreatorIQ, LivePerson and ZoomInfo, will steer global marketing and category positioning as legal teams adopt AI-driven tools. Sharma, who has led finance across scaling tech firms since 2016, will guide financial strategy, investor relations and market expansion.

Both hires aim to sharpen SpotDraft’s bid for a larger slice of the fast-growing legal-tech market, expected to exceed $63 billion by 2032. Co-founder and chief executive Shashank Bijapur said the company is focused on scaling go-to-market operations in the Americas, deepening leadership in EMEA, and accelerating AI capabilities for general counsels and legal-operations leaders.

Clients report shorter deal cycles and better alignment between legal and business teams. “What used to take weeks now happens in days,” said Abnormal Security senior legal operations manager Susan Koenig. DeepL head of legal operations André Barrow, said SpotDraft has helped reframe legal “from a cost centre to a generator of revenue”.

Executive Dossier

Outdoor Ads Get Smarter as LOC8 Shifts OOH from Visibility to Attention

Published

3 months ago

November 28, 2025

indiantelevision.com Team

MUMBAI: Out-of-home ads were once the wallflowers of marketing seen by everyone, noticed by few. But in an age where attention has become the world’s most fought-over currency, even billboards are getting a brain upgrade. Enter LOC8, OSMO’s AI-powered attention engine, quietly reshaping the old OOH playbook by measuring not just who could have looked at an ad, but who actually did. The shift is subtle but seismic: impressions are out, impact is in and data, not gut instinct, is calling the shots.

In a landscape where marketers question every rupee spent outdoors, LOC8 is turning lampposts, flyovers and traffic islands into precision-mapped attention laboratories. By crunching dwell time, visibility zones, perceptual size and real-world obstructions, the platform is dragging OOH into a future where creativity meets computer vision and where the best ideas aren’t just eye-catching, but eye-measured. From automotive facelifts to FMCG novelty and real estate trust-building, the message is clear, outdoor has stopped shouting and started listening. Indian Television Dot Com explores more about it in an Interview interview with OSMO co-founder Nipun Arora.

On how OSMO is shifting outdoor advertising from a visibility-led medium to an attention-led one through LOC8.

Traditional OOH has long been measured by visibility and impressions i.e how many people could see an ad. OSMO, through its proprietary AI platform LOC8, is shifting that narrative more towards likelihood of being noticed. Using computer vision and machine learning, LOC8 analyzes real-world video data to measure visibility zones, obstructions, dwell time and perceptual size; bringing precision to how attention is quantified outdoors. It moves the focus from mere impressions to quality of impressions, making OOH a data-verified, attention-led medium comparable to digital in accountability.

On how marketers can use LOC8’s dwell-time, visibility and perception insights to craft more effective, emotionally resonant OOH campaigns.

LOC8 helps brands understand how people truly experience outdoor media how long they look, from what distance, and under what conditions. By quantifying dwell time, visibility duration, and perceptual size; marketers can plan campaigns that align with real human viewing behavior. This empowers creative and strategy teams to design emotionally resonant storytelling where messaging, visual hierarchy and placement are optimized for how people actually notice and process OOH creatives.

About what LOC8 has revealed through campaigns like Renault Triber and Namaste India on how categories such as auto, FMCG and real estate use attention metrics to drive outcomes.

Each category uses attention data differently but all share one common goal: to convert outdoor visibility into measurable engagement.

• Automotive | Renault Triber

For the new Renault Triber facelift, bold creative met data-led planning through LOC8. By analyzing on-ground video data, LOC8 measured real audience attention across placements factoring in visibility zones, obstructions, traffic speed and perceptual size. This enabled Renault to identify corridors that delivered maximum reach, saliency and engagement, optimizing media efficiency and ROI.

• FMCG | Namaste India

In OOH, innovation is the hook and assets are the bait. But bait often hides the hook. With Loc8’s attention metrics, we ensured the bait wasn’t a hurdle, rather it became the perfect stage for innovation to deliver its full impact! The insight proved that creative novelty, when validated by attention data, drives deeper engagement and measurable brand lift.

• Real Estate

For luxury and real estate campaigns targeting HNI/UHNI audiences, attention patterns differ especially between front and rear passengers, who are often the core audience segment for premium sites. LOC8’s ability to distinguish rear vs. front visibility plays a critical role here. It helps identify sites that offer longer viewing windows and stronger perceptual dominance from the rear seat where decision-makers are most likely seated making it a key differentiator for premium and trust-led categories. Together, these insights prove that auto optimizes for impact, FMCG for recall, and real estate for trust visibility showing how attention metrics adapt to category goals while ensuring measurable outcomes.

On how attention analytics will shape the future of brand storytelling and media planning as OOH becomes more digitised and data-driven.

As outdoor digitizes, attention analytics will inform not just where to advertise but how stories are told in public spaces. This evolution transforms OOH from a static broadcast channel into a dynamic attention ecosystem, where creativity is optimized through evidence-based insight.

On how LOC8’s data-led framework helps marketers quantify OOH impact and make outdoor a more accountable, ROI-driven medium.

LOC8 bridges the gap between intuition and evidence. By quantifying metrics like visibility duration, attention opportunity index, and visual saliency rank, it allows brands to benchmark site performance and justify investment. This data-led approach brings transparency, comparability and ROI measurement to a medium historically driven by perception.

On how OSMO ensures AI and computer vision enhance creativity rather than reduce it to numbers.

OSMO believes that technology should enhance creativity, not overshadow it. LOC8’s attention models reveal what naturally draws the human eye helping creative teams refine design cues, contrast, and visual hierarchy for greater impact. By merging art and science, LOC8 empowers creativity with intelligence.

About the creative best practices and design cues LOC8 has uncovered regarding what truly captures consumer attention outdoors.

LOC8’s visual cognition analysis has surfaced clear patterns across campaigns:

• High contrast and minimal messaging outperform cluttered designs.

• Motion cues draw significantly longer dwell times.

• The first two seconds are critical, creatives must establish focus instantly.

• Contextual alignment between the creative and its environment increases attention by over 30%.

These learnings offer a scientific foundation for creative effectiveness helping brands design OOH that’s visually magnetic and emotionally memorable.

On how attention metrics will integrate into omnichannel planning where OOH, digital and social work together for unified brand impact.

Attention can become the unifying KPI across OOH, digital and social to creates seamless storytelling continuity, where outdoor triggers digital engagement. The future of omnichannel planning lies in attention-led integration ensuring that campaigns don’t just reach audiences everywhere but truly capture and hold their focus.