JWT wins Rs 80 crore Bharti DTH business

JWT has entered the huge Bharti fort. First it bagged the Bharti Retail account worth Rs 50 crore last week. And now the agency has also bagged the Bharti DTH business, which is estimated to be around Rs 80 crore or more.

It is learnt that four agencies had participated in the final round of presentations – JWT, Lowe, BBH Singapore and McCann Erickson. JWT was invited to make another presentation following that.

Bharti Telemedia, the DTH services from the group, plans to roll out its services by the end of this year. The group’s venture shall face competition from existing DTH players such as Dish TV, DD Direct and Tata Sky, which have been around in the market for a while now.

So, in a way Bharti will be a late entrant in the still emerging market of DTH business. In its communication strategy, the company will now have to how present what and how its service will be different from the rest.

In the beginning, it was decided that Bharti Telemedia would be a subsidiary of Bharti Airtel, the telecom business of the group, to leverage the support of the broadband services. But later, it was declared that the DTH venture would be a wholly owned subsidiary of Bharti Airtel. Bharti’s manufacturing arm, Bharti Teletech, will produce the set top boxes for the DTH services.

Rediffusion DY&R handles the creative duties for Tata Sky (the 80:20 venture between the Tata Group and Rupert Murdoch’s Star), and the media is looked after by Maxus. Dish TV is taken care of by Lowe, Madison is its media agency.

With DTH coming in, a shift in viewership is to be witnessed. According to UBS estimates, the DTH industry’s revenue size is expected to grow from Rs 3,800 crore to approximately Rs 40,000 crore. As also, C&S subscribers is to grow from 5.3 crore (in 2006) to 7.7 crore in (2010), and DTH subscribers will grow from 20 lakh (2006) to 1.1 crore (2010).