CASE STUDies
CASE STUDY 5/5
BUSINESS TODAY
The India Today group has a clutch of business and niche magazines SBU internally called Business group. I headed this group as P&L head looking after a suite of 6 magazine – both domestic and international brands like Harvard Business Review (HBR), Men’s Health, Scientific American etc, led by Business Today which was and still is flagship brand of the Business group, a Market leader by far in Magazine business segment
CHALLENGE
Retain The No.1 Position for Business Today (BT) in India’s business magazine segment, which was saturating.
Grow revenue, focus on lead metric of increasing readership, reimaging newer sources of revenue streams in a stagnating ad revenue market.
Optimize cost to ensure higher profitability while maintaining a healthy ad-edit ratio, keeping the content quality high and relevant for readers.
APPROACH
Focused on the lead metric of increasing readership to win the highest market share in the lag metric of ad revenues
Identified multiple new revenue streams namely Events, online subscription and ads, content syndication, additional subscription revenue thru relevant offers for both existing and new subscribers, going Phygital with landmark Amazon Kindle tie up.
The approach was to cover the shortfall in ad revenues, through innovations, value add and multiple touch point opportunities to increase reach, visibility and stickiness for clients.
OUTCOME
Tripling revenue and defending the No. 1 position for Business Today when others were struggling to just maintain revenue.
Increased readership by 1.4x to win the highest market share in the lag metric of ad revenues.
Additional 25CR revenue by creating new IP’s, 3X events revenue growth by implementing basics of doubling event footprints
Convinced the CEO and stakeholders to take a bet on us to leverage equity of the flagship brand India Today with prime visibility next to it- committed to show subscription revenue impact -2X in 18 months.
