Axn Ready For Some Real India Action

The stunts are in sync with its image. Come Saturday and for the next 15 days, AXN, the action channel from Sony Pictures Entertainment, will host a bungee jumping event in Bandra in Mumbai. Some 4,000-5,000 people are expected to participate in the event that also includes a small-scale AXN adventure zone for the less daring.

The move is part of a marketing initiative that AXN is unleashing in India this year. It began last month, with a 10-day film festival in Delhi when AXN screened 60 of the best action films from all the Hollywood studios. The festival drew some 30,000-35,000 people.

 

Says Achal Mehra, director, South Asia, AXN, "Having established distribution and ad sales as well as brand recall, our focus this year is on marketing. We want viewers to be able to experience the AXN brand and its salient attributes." According to Mehra, the AXN brand is "adventurous, irreverant, daring and a bit glamorous".

Launched in India in October 1998, AXN with its mix of movies, series and action sports and adventure, reaches some 10.3 million cable and satellite (C&S) television households in India today, up from the five million it beamed till just a year ago. Reach has also gone up from 400 towns a year ago to 1,000 towns today.

According to Mehra, the channel has a huge following in cities like Chennai, Calcutta and now, Bangalore. It also has a fairly high brand recall. AXN commissioned a brand recall survey in late 1999 across five cities in Asia including Mumbai and Delhi, which, says Mehra, showed a high 86 per cent brand recall for the channel.

The channel has also grown in terms of ad sales. While Mehra refuses to reveal figures, he claims that ad sales have gone up almost 200 per cent in the second year, that is 1999-00 over 1998-99. "In the last six months, we've utilised almost 80 per cent of our inventory," he adds. AXN sells about eight minutes of commercial time every hour.

But Mehra knows that AXN has to compete with a spate of other English language niche channels right from Discovery to Star World to the movie channels. For all the channels are fighting for the mindshare of a similar audience profile. Hence the marketing initiative is aimed at boosting the channel's brand image. In fact, AXN plans to have a couple of events each month across the country over the rest of the year.

AXN has recently got a new chief executive officer in Todd Miller, former vice-president sales at Columbia TriStar International Television. He replaces James Buklarewicz who held the position since the channel was launched in 1997.

Mehra too has moved up from general manager of the Indian operations to heading the South Asian operations out of Singapore.

In his new role, Mehra will push the channel in the other South Asian markets of Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

While the thrust will be on distribution in these markets, clearly it's India that's the most important market for AXN. India is also its largest market in Asia followed by Taiwan, where AXN reaches 4.5 million homes. The two countries, in fact, account for almost the entire chunk of AXN's audience in Asia which encompasses 16 million housholds across 15 countries.

As Mehra says, "India will remain the main market for AXN. Here, we are into the entire gamut of activities from distribution and ad sales to marketing while in the other South Asian markets, the thrust is only on distribution."