MUMBAI: Group M's specialist unit BroadMind is in the process of rebranding itself as M Entertainment, focussing exclusively on content.
And it is in television content that M Entertainment (globally BroadMind is already rebranded either as M Entertainment or Mindshare Entertainment) will primarily be active.
BroadMind currently is active in entertainment and sports. On the entertainment side, it involves product placement, co-productions, trading and syndication, and export of content. The sports unit within BroadMind functions like a fully fledged agency whose ambit is the integration of brands with sporting properties. An example of this is next Sunday's (15 May) Lipton Bangalore International Marathon.
WPP Sports Agency Performance Launching This Year
The morphing of BroadMind into M Entertainment will also involve the hiving off of the sports division into a separate unit called Performance - Group M's sports agency worldwide. Performance is slated to have its formal launch in India in the second half of the year.
BroadMind is in fact currently in talks with about five content companies and is in the process of signing MOU's and JV's to make greater inroads into the content space.
Elaborating on the changes in process, BroadMind national director M Suku says, "While branded content has always existed in some form or another, the emerging players in this space will take the content game to the next level."
According to Suku, the agenda ahead will to use content as a platform to fuse brands into it in a seamless manner so as to make it part of the programming. Examples of such integration have already been seen with Star One's Lakme India Fashion House and Sony's recent Jassi.. and VLCC tie-up.
From Media Investments to Communication Investments
BroadMind will be positioning this whole proposition as a transition from media investments to communication investments.
Although, BroadMind's foray into content creation is currently at a very nascent stage, Suku pointed out that "content commercial deals" will be the way forward in the television space. With this opening up, the television arena itself will then be able to scale up production budgets, which will then lead to big-ticket properties, he avers.
While content commercial deals are a common concept worldwide with specialist content units partnering with TV networks and production houses, in India, the concept has just about arrived.
Suku points out that such intitiatives will see the emergence of new revenue streams for all the parties involved, be it TV channels or the production houses, the content vendors.
Also, looking at it from the broadcaster's point of view, this kind of brand alliance on the one hand allows for them to take programming to a different level as well as opens another channel for revenues.
