Hope it’s been happy business for all of you like it has been for us.

It’s been great beginning with the new financial year at NetworkPlay and the story continues to just grow stranger only further validating that the time for the digital revolution has come and it is only going to grow further from here on.

NetworkPlay’s team has been working hard covering the market promoting the huge opportunity that DTH as a platform has been providing and to that effect we have seen some serious traction across that platform with many advertisers embracing EPG Screen format along with Video on Boot-up, there are several more advertising options that are available, which only adds visibility for brands at a price that can just not be matched if it needs to be compared to television as a medium. We have some big bookings that will get visible on our DTH offerings this month and I would be more than happy sharing our learning as case studies.

We did our soft launch on the mobile side of the business with Ericsson as our partner for ad-serving and have some exciting properties to now sell including properties from the Mobile 18 stable, which we believe is the best in class content currently available in the categories they are present it. We have some big traction happening in that space and are confident that this quarter of JAS we will be unleashing the power of mobile in the market in full throttle.

So with over 106 campaigns on the federation and over 66 brands we served over 170+ million ad impressions, clearly at a price that yields best for our publisher partners. As usual the kick of bringing in new brands on board to embrace the digital format has been the driving force of motivation at NP and to that effect we have managed to continue to surprise ourselves, we had over 30 brands using our services of, which 22 of them was for the internet, clearly indicating how the market is moving towards the digital revolution that has begun in our country.

Highlight on innovation was a one day campaign that we got 7UP to do on Oneindia’s Telugu homepage, we believe that this is just the start of what would truly be the power of regional play in the coming quarters of the year.

Publisher partner addition has always been something we work day in and day out on since as a premium network it is only that much that is possible in a market that was dominated by performance advertising and so the supply of premium web pages were scarce and the one we would want wouldn’t want advertising revenue, therefore finding the best possible supply has always been a fight . However I am proud of my team, which has now signed Jet Airways and Jetlite web properties thus by adding to our travel value offerings. Clearly now in terms of transactional reach on the Internet, NetworkPlay has the maximum reach as per any metrics including that of Comscore.

Dalal Street is another portal we added this Q.

So over all this has been a great beginning to the year and I truly believe that India will now see the digital revolution that it has been waiting for all these years.

As always without you advertisers, agency partners and publisher partners, we would not be able to shine as we currently do and I want to extend my warm wishes to one and all who have been helping us shape our company and the entire eco-system.

Happy Business!!!

Best
Ram

We repositioned ourselves last quarter as a company that will propel change not just internally but externally to the ecosystem as well thus by getting a new tagline that reflects our vision. “Convergence Continuum Change” clearly reflects our line of business and our vision for the future and to that effect I have been constantly seeking advices, reading a lot on various organisations and off-course understanding the need of the market to effectively implement what we think will be the future.

To that effect we launched our mobile business, though a soft launch, we should be in a position to offer the services in full from the next quarter starting July and we believe we have a winner of a product with some premium publishers attached to our offering including all the wap properties of Web 18 and with a superb ad delivery system in Ericsson we are ready to unleash our suite of offerings next quarter.

I just came back from a successful trip to Singapore and in a couple of weeks will be in a position to announce the big entry of a line of business that will enable and propel the speed of growth of the digital medium in India because it not only brings the buyers and sellers together but it also ensures that there are visionaries who will help the on ground action to speed up.

Over all I think NetworkPlay is ready to get to the next level and it is just fun to be involved in effecting change in the industry you so much love.

More soon….

In our Monday Morning Conference Calls, upon taking an update from my Team, I have often asked if the number projected by the Sales Person will happen. I often get the answer, “It has to happen”. Excuse me? What do you mean by “It has to happen”? I am asking, “Will it happen?” and the answer to that is, “Yes, it will” or “Maybe not all of it” or “No, it won’t”.

When the answer is from any of the three options above, responsibility is being taken and accountability is being built. You are also indicating what kind of a grip you have on your set of accounts. And it also says that you will do what it takes to ensure that your word is lived up to.

But when you say “It has to happen”, it scares me. It means you are basing your projections on hope and that you are as unsure of the number happening as I am. It means you have a poor grip on your set of accounts. It means you are leaving a back door open for you to escape blame. It means you are anticipating that there will be blame.

I’d rather people gave me a smaller commitment and lived up to it than make a huge one and depend upon a “Has To”.

Indeed Networkplay has given me so much in this 1 yr!

June 7th 09, is when I joined NP and that too basis few clues like LinkedIn, Rajeev, Network18 tag and a bunch of some ex-yahoo guys who started off this venture! Didn’t realise this journey would be so awesome then!

I’m not a big fan of blogging but am still gonna take the efforts to pen down my thoughts on this journey.

I have always based my decision on two things whenever I take up a new task/job and that would be learning & dynamism in task involved. I LOVE CHANGE

Ok so here goes my key takeaways/experiences/:

- To survive, work @ speed of light
- Always stay hungry ( for biz :p )
- Increased ability to take up Pressure- push urself for more!
- THE REAL Sales tactics- planning, reporting, pitches, client behavior/psychology, communication skills, negotiations..
- Never bend over backwards unless required
- Platform to connect with Mktg & Media honchos
- Industry knowledge & client understanding
- Chance to present to Jeff Weiner - LinkedIn CEO- I owe u for this one Ram!
- Never give up on efforts- it pays off within 4 months max- guaranteed!
- 1 yr travelling for meetings in BBY >>> past 23 yrs of travel & living existence in BBY - total Mumbai darshan..hehe
- Aggression combined with Patience- killer combo
- Increased confidence in myself and my abilities- discovery to a large extent!
- Managing the challenges of working with a Start-up!
- Great Mentors & Friends esp.Ram/Sunil/Rajesh/Gaurav/Rajeev/Mukesh-Super!
- Recognition & Rewards ( Promotion, award,incentives & stakes)- quite motivating!
- Trip to Bali and next year South Africa
- Conferences/Events/Parties- weight gain 7 kilos :p
- BLACKBERRY Addiction

Wooohoooo…. That’s a laundry list!

I know there are a lot of exciting opportunites instore for me in this LARGE BLUE OCEAN ( Pun intended :p ) in the next few months and years to come.

Looking forward to stay commited as usual

It makes me feel so pepped up and interested when i observe and learn the other spectrum of the internet which is ad sales. It is indeed very interesting and also invites a lot of creativity in the space.

I feel really happy to get the kind of support and learning from the entire team straight from the business strategy to sales which will further help me achieving my RO’S in future. So i look forward to put my learning into action in near future.

All i need is good wishes from everyone..

In the so called latest digitized world we are in, online trends come and go much before we adapt to them and utilize them to our advantage.

Latest of them was Live streaming. One of the biggest video streaming website, recently did a live streaming of the IPL matches. Not only that they made a lot of noise about it but also a lot of moolah. IPL which was in its 3rd season was watched by more than 1 billion people across the globe. Though it was an event that was broadcasted live for free, a new source of revenue was identified, advertisers who wish to advertise on the live event. Also, the same was promoted through other channels of the same network and also made money through the network.

Soon the trend was followed by another website, but the first mover advantage was already encashed. The trend and the impact which should have lasted for a long time subsided too soon and no one could ever adapt. Good part about Indian market is that it adapt’s quickly to new things, but bad thing is that it hops on to something else too soon without utilizing the potential of the earlier one.

Indian digital market has a long way to go before we can call it a mature market.

After many months of negotiations and follow-ups I am glad we finally managed to sign-off the deal with Jet Airways & Jetlite for selling ad inventory on www.jetairways.com & www.jetlite.com. Both these sites attract close to 2.9Mn uniques every month.

This addition has helped us further consolidate our numero uno position in the transaction audience space and we now reach out to more than 60% of the travel transaction audience in the country.

Networkplay team has always done justice to all the top publishers we have on board and I am more than confident of continuing this show.

I am taking this opportunity to thank the Jet Airways management for reposing the faith in us.

Many more big ticket announcements to come in soon.. Watch out competition!!!!!!

Cheers

TRP’s and GRP’s are the only parameters used by most of the media houses and media planners for their respective brands. Buying inventory on GEC’s or News Channels or Sports channels on a per 10 second basis has been done to death by all the brands and their custodians.

Amidst all the buzz comes the latest and hottest medium for all the brands i.e. Direct – To – Home (DTH). DTH comes with the power to reach deep inside a household and catch a viewer even when they avoid the advertisement on any of the channels. DTH as a platform has reached close to 19.5 Million subscribers across country and is all set to reach 25 Million Plus subscriber base by the end year 2010.

Along with a nice user experience in terms of High Definition clarity and the ease of subscribing to all channels, DTH also brings in a option where in a subscriber can pay and watch the latest Blockbuster movie sitting at home with the family just for mere Rs 75 – 100/- its peanuts…

Few of the brands who have the leveraged this platform are Kurkure/ Yahoo/ Maggi/ Roca/ Perfetti/ Asian Paints/ Coke/ Slice/ Del Monte or the latest entrant like Reebok Easytone have become the eye candy and have attained highest recall. All these brands are exposed to different media options on DTH like a Boot Screen which is a must watch or a Electronic Programming Guide (EPG) Screen which seen by every household at least 12-15 times a day. There can be smart integration that can be done on EPG screen and a brand can pick up prime time slot to play their TVC on the Boot Screen.

Networkplay is proud to represent 2 DTH service providers i.e. Airtel DTH and Reliance Big TV DTH exclusively in the market; making us the only Brand Ad Network in the country to have DTH as a platform.

There are many more exciting options coming up in the near future which have never been introduced by anybody.

Just wait and watch for this space in the near future…

What makes a runner run? What makes a dragon boat race team exert effort? What makes a basketball team win the game? The answer serves one particular reason, a runner runs because he wants to be the first to reach the end of the race, a dragon boat team exert in synchronized paddling to be outrank other teams, and a basketball team plays for the sake of proving that they can be the best if they will unite as one. What element is common on them?

Its nothing but pure effort, they exert a lot of effort just to make sure that their goal is attainable.

Somewhere something deep inside tells me that it will need a maverick effort to get Google’s dominance off the world wide web and again this is something that is sure to happen at some stage, no one company can just have all the surges all the time. Like life, there will be ups and downs for every organisation, sure there are economic conditions that drive that fate to a large extent but indomitable power house is not something that goes down well with competition all the time, right? The company in contention might say I dont care how the world or my competition perceives me to be and as along as I have the most intensive place of work with some great minds together and the money to combat threat, I will continue to dominate. That might be Google’s mantra and I am sure they have all the best resources available to continue to dominate. Google comes out with absolutely the best possible products today on the web and with the launch of Google TV, things are set for them to go all out and get to the 70B USD TV advertising market, which is like 5times more than the web market in the US. With their supreme domination on the web, it just becomes a natural extension, they have been trying for quite a while on how to move outside of the sphere they have dominated for close to 5-6yrs now. Such a young company doing such wonders is just the motivation for many entrepreneurs including myself to keep moving in the belief and vision they have for the company, ecosystem and themselves but coming back to this topic, Goog has been trying hard to come out with ad-platforms that will transform the television business in the US but with little success but their relentless pursuit keeping in mind the over all economy of advertising keeps them going to think and innovate. This is exactly what they did on their monetization efforts after gaining supreme control of the audience on their search platform. They very well knew that internet is not just about owned and operated inventory and looked beyond to launch ad-sense, it just took the world by storm, they captured the long tail and torso and some head of the web with big impact. Now this was not rocket science in hind sight but the one who got the first mover advantage went on to capture the entire world thus by proving that Internet monetization is just not owned and operated inventory. They redefined the ad-network space, and to that effect today Google is the largest ad-network in the world! They continued to dominate with acquisitions post that getting into display advertising through DC and tried their luck with Orkut, then Ad-Mob to get to their mobile dreams and in between a dozen other small start-ups. What they gained from those small acquisitions is the nothing but some brilliant brains and somewhere killed a lot of the products built by those companies keeping in fierce focus on the vision they embarked on. So it dint matter to the promoters of the buy outs as well since their intellectual capability kept on growing due to new challenges Goog’s environment brought to the table.

So this is going to be never ending it will continue to grow as long as everyone lets it to grow, but there definitely will come a time when one such brilliant mind will change a bunch of things that even Google would have never expected. There might be one man who might be in the business in some corner figuring out how to beat this giant or maybe we all possibly know who it is.

To me that maverick is none other than Steve Jobs, the kind of stuff he has done over the years with Apple is incredible, he just turned around the world with the Macs to begin with and then as we all know is history. In between there was a slump after John Sculley went but the board had no choice but to bring the maverick back to build what is an iconic company in the valley. If someone asked me whether I would work for a Google or Apple, then my answer is simple, Apple and for god’s sake dont ask me why, you might be dumb to not have an answer. While there might be a lot of arguments around this, my answer is simple. I believe in team efforts in total and Google is known for that but I also believe in an iconic leadership, a maverick kind of leadership, a leadership that personifies aura and impact. No one can ever come close to Steve Jobs on that front. Some how I can see the brash in-conclusive, arrogant young Steve kind of people being the ones who actually go about making history. Again my next line might actually not go down well with many but think about it, it took a Lalit Modi to get Cricket into the world map when it was only 8test playing nations that actually knew the game. It took a Lalit Modi who built a 3B USD IPL in 3yrs, it took a Lalit Modi to get the franchisee model up an running in a world where cricket was run by a bunch of jokers. And we all know Lalit was brash, arrogant and had his own style of working and trust me he is a maverick who worked for 20hrs a day and still smiled early morning the next day to get to that tiring schedule of his.

Ok now coming back to the topic of discussion, look at what Steve has done, while Google has gone all out to ensure their dominance and somehow works like a Hyena if it looks profitable for them, Apple has always taken everything in house and built everything to make it more consumer facing than anyone else globally. I refer to Hyena as Google simply because the opportunist in Google made it acquire Admob but Apple will go out there and build an IAd instead. Now the point to notice here is IPod, Iphone, Ipad are all consumer facing products while Google’s attempt on the mobile space bombed with Android and they though are all consumer facing they are all web based unlike Apple, which are hardware product based and then web based. They cover both sides of the coin well and so stand a chance to actually threat Google.

Wait and watch for all the innovation that Apple will bring into this world in the next 3-4yrs, for all you know mobile advertising might take off with Ipad, something many pandits were wondering when it came to the mobile advertising space. Ipad is mobile except voice capability and everything around it is mobile enabled including the soon to be launched Ipad 3G. This is what every marketer wanted all this while, rich media on mobile and delivery capability that was beyond comparison, something that Ipad has in total.

Downside to such maverick driven companies are, what happens when the maverick is dead? A billion dollar question.

Apple or Google for you? To me it still is Apple!