Advertising Age India is finally online and was launched last week. Earlier in August, the Times of India group’s digital venture Times Internet had inked an agreement with US publishing conglomerate Crain Communications to launch the Indian edition of Crain’s advertising agency and marketing industry news publication Advertising Age.
This deal is part of the company’s Times Local Partners (TLP) initiative, through which Times Internet partners global digital companies to build and launch their Indian editions. Previous partnerships include Gawker Media, Business Insider, Ziff Davis, Pursuitist, Future Plc and Say Media.
Advertising Age India will be an online edition although there is some talks that there will be a print edition too. As we’ve mentioned earlier, there will be no subscription fees to be paid to see Advertising Age India’s content. The website has seven sub heads which cover marketing, advertising, digital, agency, media, data and B2B with links to the U.S. edition as well.
The online publication will be edited by Satrajit Sen, formerly editor of Afaqs and earlier with digital website Indian Digital Review. Sen, in a post in the website, said that they plan to roll out the regional versions of the iconic and coveted Ad Age Lists (We also noticed that the same post repeated on Times Internet’s blog by Puneet Singhvi, business head for Times Global Partners) .
Other competition
India has several publications that are built to attract an agency audience, and tend to get advertising from publishers. To name a few: afaqs (funded by Seedfund), Exchange4Media, MXMIndia, AdGully, MediaAvataar, Campaign India, and probably many others that we’ve not even heard of.
We’ve mentioned that the coverage of digital advertising in India lacks depth and there is a paucity of journalists who understand digital advertising. What Ad Age can do, is improve the coverage of the beat.
Disclosure: In terms of content, there may be areas of overlap (and hence competition) between Ad Age India and MediaNama.
