Profile: "Content is important, marketing it more so”

The world is obsessed with planning life,  but there’s always a sense of realisation in retrospect that life could have been really vapid if it were exactly the way they had planned it out. For MK Anand, CEO, UTV Global Broadcasting, the tale is no different. “If things had gone as per the plan, I would  be a biotechnologist today,” quips Anand who’s handling a cluster of six channels at UTV, namely, UTV Movies, UTV Bindass, UTV Action, UTV Action Telugu, UTV World Movies, and the recently launched UTV Stars. There was a time when this man who spent 19 years of his working career with the Times group, heading various significant functions in ad sales department, used to believe that ad sales was just a place holder for him till he got himself a job in fisheries management. 

 

When Anand was doing his BSc, he had planned to become a biotechnologist but that didn’t work out because he couldn’t get through the only place (Jawaharlal Nehru University) that offered his choice of post graduate course. He ended up doing his post graduation in fisheries management. “By the time I entered the second year of MSc, I had understood that research side would not be as paying as the commercial side of any stream”, he states. And money was critical because he had to marry his love and run a house at the earliest. He went ahead and joined Cynamid India as a medical representative. While working there, Anand acknowledged the importance of doing an MBA and decided to tread on the management path thereafter. He graduated with a part-time MBA from NMIMS and joined ad sales in a publication called Women’s Era in 1988. 

 

Anand  had a 19-year long association with the Times of India before he went ahead and joined UTV Global Broadcasting. At TOI, he completely evolved their Classified section. He states, “Fundamentally we needed to change Classifieds from a B2B to a B2C product. The consumer  was  only getting things from a newspaper, but he wasn’t  contributing to  its content . With Classifieds, we tried to demystify the newspaper from the utility point-of-view.” Anand experimented a lot with the pricing of Classifieds. He explained that the revenue from Classifieds grew in the range of 20-25% on a year-on-year basis in the first five years of his joining the department. But he says that he can only take some credit for the numbers because market changes and liberalisation had a role to play as well.