Mindshare Chennai to handle media duties for New Gen's new Tamil GEC

The agency already handles the media duties for other non-television brands of the company.

Two-year-old Tamil news channel, Puthia Thalaimurai, will soon have a sibling GEC channel. New Gen Media, the owning company of the two channels, has signed up Mindshare Chennai as the media agency for the new channel, tentatively christened Pudhu Yugam (New Era).

While the exact size of the business is not known yet, the company had spent about Rs 5 crore in the launch campaign of the news channel. The spends on a GEC channel launch will be slightly higher than a news channel, informs RBU Shyam Kumar, CEO, New Gen Media.

He also states that television and outdoor will be at the helm of the complete media plan, which will be spread across TV, print, digital, radio, outdoor, events.

The new GEC, which is slated to launch in late October, 2013, will have original content mix of reality and fiction shows. The company is yet to sign the outdoor agency for the channel.

The agency is already handling the media duties of the company's non-media brands. However, Mindshare has not worked on the news channel. The Puthia Thalaimurai group of magazines was launched by Mindshare Chennai, while the news channel by the same name was launched by Optimum Media Direction (OMD), another media agency.

New Gen Media was formed for publishing a group of magazines called Puthia Thalaimurai, by SRM GROUP in Chennai. It ventured into the television broadcast space in 2011 with the Tamil news channel. The channel sprung to the top position in mere five weeks of its launch because of its high quality content packaging and presentation initiatives. Tamil Nadu is a volatile state politically and almost all other news channels in the state are owned by the political parties; PTTV was a neutral high investment channel.