‘Mid Day’, Bangalore, revamps; gets business head from Mudra

‘Mid Day’, Bangalore, has a new business head, Saurabh Saxena, who moves in from Mudra. He replaces the tabloid’s erstwhile business head, Sunder Kondor, who quit a month ago. Saxena is from the advertising space and he was head of Mudra, Bangalore.

Saxena started his career in advertising in 1993 at Clarion, where he worked for four years. He then moved to Ogilvy & Mather, where he was account director on Perfetti. After working there for three and a half years, Saxena moved to Mudra, Delhi, before heading for the Bangalore branch. His stint at Mudra spanned six and a half years.

Cyriac Mathew, COO, ‘Mid Day’, believes that Saxena’s advertising experience will be of great help in consolidating the position of the tabloid in Bangalore: “Since he is from the advertising arena, he has good exposure and expertise in handling operations, production, logistics and brand building, which are crucial for us.”

As business head, Saxena will oversee day to day business aspects such as billings, ensure profitability, and strategise marketing and promotional initiatives for ‘Mid Day’ in Bangalore. Mathew says that the core issue the tabloid is facing in Bangalore is that it has still not managed to create visibility and awareness for itself.

“There was a certain disconnect between Bangalore readers and the tabloid in the beginning because they expected it to be spicy and meant for the working class,” Mathew says, clarifying that it has been taking the reactions of the Bangalore readership into consideration while launching ‘Mid Day’ there.

‘Mid Day’ was available only in the morning when it was launched in June last year, and it came up against the broadsheets. “We found that readers who started reading ‘Mid Day’ were comparing it with other papers and feeling that the content was insufficient,” Mathew says.

Owing to the low awareness and indifference among the target group, ‘Mid Day’ re-launched the tabloid in January this year as an afternoon paper, available after 11am, and increased the number of pages from 24 to 32, with greater emphasis on content. ‘Mid Day’ has also kicked off a marketing campaign in Bangalore to position it as a product for the young Indian professional.

It has worked out attractive subscription deals for offices, reaching a lot of young readers at Rs 100 per year. It has made its distribution more robust by hiring people to sell the tabloid at traffic signals.

‘Mid Day’ has also slightly increased its circulation from 25,000 at launch to 40,000 now. The tabloid will re-launch its Delhi edition in a few months and then head to the Pune market as part of its expansion strategy.

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