Mandar Natekar joins BigAdda as National Head – Sales
17 September, 2008
BigAdda.com , a social networking site owned by Reliance Big Entertainment, has appointed Mandar Natekar as national head – sales. Prior to joining BigAdda, Natekar was regional head, West and North for HBO at Turner International. He has also worked in ad sales at SET Max and The Times of India.
In his new role at BigAdda, Mandar Natekar will be responsible for setting up the sales team and launching experiential and contextual advertising solutions for advertisers to use social networking as an effective medium for brand building.
Shivanandan Pare, COO, BigAdda.com, has said, “We are extremely delighted to have Mandar join us. His experience would be extremely valuable as we are now expanding our sales team and looking at reaching out to various brands to give them a new media platform.”
BigAdda.com claims to have attracted about 2.5 million users in a year of its launch. According to BigAdda, 44 per cent of its total users are from the top 20 cities in India, 36 per cent from rest of India and 20 per cent from around the world, including Asian countries, UK, US and Australia.
Can't agree more with Trapezia. For the industry to flourish and business models to evolve, lot many trials need to be made. Only those with creative mindset will be able to do so. Bigadda will have to put in lot of resources in educating the advertisers as well about the benefits of Digital media. They need to follow the fleet on street strategy with sales professionals meeting advertisers across the country and exploring the way partnerships can be made. Relying on only media agencies will not help. Opportunities other than pure banner/click based sales need to be explored. Properties/Events/Clubs etc can be various vehicles around the networking space that can be build to monetize. Surviving just on the pure online sales model for niche offerings like this in India will not be possible for the first few years till the subscribed members reaches a critical mass.
Great to see people from traditional media joining new media specially in sales. Unlike in traditional media, digital media offers challenging task of coming up with new menetization models. Considering social networking websites world over are trying to figure out the various ways, Mandar & Bigadda team also has a task cut for them. Those who laugh while sitting on the fence will not understand the challenging nature of assignment. In case bigadda team is able to provide multiple adveritising solutions to clients, the same can be a great experiment which will provide lot many learnings. The good part is the company being backed by Reliance hence doesn't need to go through the pains of having no money to pump in the business for good time like many other startups. Rather then being critical and laughing, digital industry professionals need to encourage the experimentation. Only THOSE WHO TRY fail or succeed. Rest just write comments for thier satisfaction.
@Devils Advocate: LOL So true. Big anda... ROTFLMAO
@Devils Advocate - I am unsure if you thoroughly understand business.What do you think, the biggest brain of all?
Big Adda should rename itself "Big Anda"...for zero revenue prospects.
They keep hiring Heads....but where are the Brains?
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