Lok Sabha polls: BJP creates ad roadblock on Star Plus

NEW DELHI: What Vodafone did on September 20, 2007, BJP followed with something similar on April 14, 2014. While Vodafone had created a 24-hour advertising roadblock on all the channels of Star TV network, BJP identified nine shows on Star Plus between 6 pm and 11pm with one exclusive BJP advertisement break. This 75-second ad break showed BJP’s television commercials and culminated into a total of 360 seconds of advertising.

Sources in both Star Plus and Madison Media, which is handling BJP’s media campaign, said that while the rates of the on-air inventory on Star Plus varied anywhere Rs 30,000 to Rs 2 lakh, the party has spent "anywhere between Rs 75 lakh to Rs 1 crore just to create this solus ad break."

A roadblock is when a particular advertiser buys up all the advertising time in the channel for a specific period of time blocking all the others. When contacted, Sam Balsara, chairman and managing director, Madison World, decline to comment. Messages to Uday Shankar, CEO, Star India and GauraV Banerjee, GM, Star India, went unanswered.

"April 17th is a crucial poll date for BJP and therefore we are now entering into an aggressive phase of advertising. BJP will now get into an overdrive with its advertising," said the source in Madison Media. While the political party doesn’t plan to repeat such roadblock during this election going further, the source in Madison said: "If the response is good and it is a success then we may repeat it with Star again."

While BJP is the first political party to create such a roadblock on television, it has also explored the route of content integration on other channels like brands do. "We did several integration on Channel [V] programmes like other brands do," said the source in Madison.