This, the 68th episode of our award-winning MVP – The Master’s Voice Podcast from MediaBrief.com, features Karan Abhishek Singh, CEO - Hindi News, at Network18. Karan is a leader who brings to the TV News industry wide, rich, deep and diverse work experience across verticals at torchlight brands in their sectors.
Karan joined Network18, one of India’s leading television broadcast networks, in Jan 2019, and is responsible for the overall P&L of the Hindi Languages channel cluster in the organisation. Karan brings to his current role a great deal of learnings and strategic insights from a strong professional career that he built largely across the FMCG and Media industries.
Before joining Network18, Karan spent five years at Star India Pvt Ltd. In his last role, he was Executive Vice President – Ad Sales, managing the agency partnerships. Karan had joined Star as Brand Head for North, and then led the setting up of the Enterprise accounts business before managing other sales leadership roles across the entertainment business.
Prior to Star, Karan had robust stints across consumer product organisations like Pepsico, Nokia, Godrej and Hindustan Unilever Limited, in various roles across the sales, business development and marketing functions.
In this episode, Karan speaks about his company and the cluster of channels he leads there, and about the category and sub-sector, including industry issues and more.
He shares how Network18's Hindi news channel, News 18 India, has grown consistently from #4 to reach the top spot in the Hindi TV News channels marketplace over the past four months or so ever since BARC India resumed the News Genre’s TV viewership ratings. And how the other Hindi news channels of his cluster too claimed top spot across the HSMs.
He shares what’s unique about Network18’s DNA and its work culture, and what it was like for him to transition from leading the sales function at a leader in the mass, general entertainment category, to the News category which has a much smaller market size. He shares the how the network’s approach to empowering talent across the organization, and to serving news in India, and assesses how the TV news space, especially Hindi TV news space, is shaping up in the country.
The conversation on Network18 also covers how the organization tackled the pandemic, and the investments that have been made over the past couple of years on technology.
Karan tells me about how News18 India and the other Hindi channels across the cluster he leads have risen to the top
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