With Rs 25 cr, Jaya breaks record for one day ad spend

While today marks one year of J Jayalalithaa being in power as the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, it also marks another landmark: The largest spend by a brand/company/organisation in one day in the country, with initial estimates suggesting a spend of a whopping Rs 25 crore.The campaign, released on behalf of the Government of Tamil Nadu by the DIPR, has been splashed across the country, in multiple languages. All editions of the Times of India, barring the Kochi edition, have carried 6 pages (this has been checked online). The Mumbai editions of Hindustan Times, Economic Times, Asian Age, Indian Express, Financial Express, Hindu Business Line, Mint and Business Standard too have carried the ads, and one may presume that other editions of these titles carry the campaigns as well. 


Even newspapers with no edition in Chennai and Mumbai and New Delhi have carried the ads. For example, The Statesman, Kolkata, is a beneficiary of the TN government’s largesse (the paper does have a minimal presence in New Delhi, though). The Telegraph, too, has a few pages.Brands have attempted to dominate – in advertising parlance ‘roadblock’ – ever since Real Value (the company which launched Ceasefire) launched their second product, the Vaccumiser, with a road-block across the channels on the STAR Network in 1994. Since then, BPL Mobile attempted the exercise, buying all the space in Times of India, Mumbai, when they launched. The next big roadblock was in 2007, when Vodafone was born, when an estimated Rs 10 crore was spent on media in a day, across numerous TV channels. Vodafone used the roadblock again when they launched multiple new ZooZoo ads on TV on the same day. Volkswagen, when they launched in India, used a print roadblock in major metros.


But none of these compares with Jayalalithaa’s super roadblock. During the course of the day, we will update you with more accurate estimates of the spend. What is certainly clear though, is that the Jayalalithaa campaign has created history by becoming the largest one day advertising spend ever.