AND TV Advertising: What Smart Brands Know That Others Miss

Most media planners underestimate AND TV — and that, frankly, is an expensive mistake. The channel consistently pulls in audiences that mass Hindi GEC buyers assume belong exclusively to the top two or three channels, yet the inventory costs a fraction of what Star Plus or Colors would charge for comparable primetime reach. We have seen brands walk away from AND TV negotiations without even asking for a rate card, which is the kind of oversight that adds unnecessary zeros to a campaign budget.

Why AND TV Occupies a Unique Position in the Hindi GEC Landscape

AND TV, which launched as a Zee Entertainment property and has since carved out a distinct identity in the Hindi general entertainment category, occupies a space that most media buyers describe as "mid-tier" — a label that is both accurate and misleading at the same time. Accurate, because it is not competing for the number-one spot against Star Plus or Sony; misleading, because "mid-tier" in a market where Hindi GEC collectively commands the largest share of television viewership in India is still an enormous audience. BARC viewership data has consistently placed AND TV among the top ten Hindi GEC channels by weekly impressions across key markets, which means the absolute reach numbers are far more significant than a channel rank might suggest.

What a lot of people miss is the audience composition story. AND TV's programming — which has historically leaned into family drama, mythological content, and reality formats — skews toward the SEC B and SEC C household viewer, particularly women aged 25 to 54 in Hindi-speaking markets. This is not a niche audience; this is the backbone of FMCG, pharmaceutical, and consumer durables advertising in India. Our experience at SmartAds shows that brands targeting this demographic often find AND TV delivering a cost-per-GRP that is somewhere between 30 and 50 percent lower than the leading Hindi GEC channels, which makes the channel exceptionally attractive when a media plan is trying to extend reach without blowing through the entire budget on premium inventory.

The channel's footprint is particularly strong in markets like Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, and Jharkhand — states which collectively represent a consumption base that any brand with national ambitions cannot afford to ignore. We worked with an FMCG client targeting rural and semi-urban households in the Hindi belt, and AND TV delivered roughly 18 percent of their total campaign GRPs at just 11 percent of the total television budget; that kind of efficiency is difficult to replicate on the bigger channels, and it is the reason we continue to recommend AND TV as a core component of Hindi GEC plans rather than an afterthought.

What Does AND TV Advertising Actually Cost?

Frankly speaking, this is the question every client asks first, and it is also the question that most agency websites answer with the unhelpful phrase "contact us for pricing." We will do better than that. AND TV advertising rates are structured around a cost-per-ten-seconds (CP10S) model, and the pricing varies significantly based on daypart, programme adjacency, and the volume of inventory being purchased.

For a standard 10-second spot in a non-prime daypart — which would typically cover morning and afternoon slots between 6 AM and 6 PM — the rates work out to somewhere in the ballpark of ₹3,000 to ₹8,000 per spot, depending on the specific programme and the market being targeted. Primetime slots, which AND TV defines roughly as the 8 PM to 11 PM window when its flagship fiction and reality programming airs, command rates that are considerably higher; a 10-second primetime spot is generally priced somewhere between ₹15,000 and ₹45,000, with the upper end reserved for adjacencies to the channel's highest-rated shows. These are indicative benchmarks drawn from our own buying experience — actual rates will shift based on negotiation, volume commitments, and the time of year, with the festive quarter (October through December) typically carrying a 20 to 35 percent premium over base rates.

The cost-per-GRP on AND TV, which is the metric we use when comparing television channels on an apples-to-apples basis, typically works out to roughly ₹4,000 to ₹7,000 per GRP for a national campaign — a number that surprises most first-time advertisers when they compare it to what they are paying for the top two Hindi GEC channels, where CP-GRPs can easily touch ₹12,000 to ₹18,000 for equivalent audience segments. At SmartAds, we always tell our clients that the real question is not what a channel costs in absolute terms, but what it costs relative to the audience it delivers; by that measure, AND TV is one of the more efficient buys in Hindi television.

Which Advertisers Benefit Most from AND TV Campaigns?

The honest answer is that AND TV works best for brands whose target consumer is a Hindi-speaking, middle-income household — which, in India, is an enormous category. FMCG brands in categories like packaged foods, personal care, home care, and health supplements have historically been the heaviest spenders on AND TV, and for good reason; the channel's audience profile matches the core consumer for these categories almost perfectly. TAM AdEx data has consistently shown FMCG as the dominant advertising category on Hindi GEC channels including AND TV, accounting for a disproportionate share of total ad volumes.

Beyond FMCG, we have seen strong results for pharmaceutical advertisers — particularly OTC health brands, ayurvedic products, and nutritional supplements — as well as for consumer durables brands targeting first-time buyers in tier-2 and tier-3 markets. One automotive brand we worked with used AND TV as part of a regional push in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar for an entry-level two-wheeler; the channel delivered reach among the exact demographic they were targeting — male earners aged 25 to 45 in semi-urban households — at a cost that allowed them to run a sustained four-week campaign rather than the two-week burst they had originally budgeted for. The extended duration made a measurable difference in recall scores, which were tracked through a post-campaign dipstick study.

Educational services, insurance, and banking products targeting first-generation consumers also find AND TV particularly effective, as do regional and national retail chains running promotional campaigns ahead of festive seasons. What we tell our clients is that if your product is bought by a family in Kanpur, Patna, Bhopal, or Jaipur, AND TV should be on your media plan — not as a supplementary channel, but as a primary vehicle.

How Does AND TV Fit Into a Broader Television Media Mix?

This is where the real value lies, and it is also where most media plans get the allocation wrong. The instinct for many brand managers is to concentrate television budgets on the top-rated channels, which feels safe and defensible in a budget review; the problem is that this approach often leads to over-concentration in expensive inventory while leaving significant reach gaps in the target audience.

A well-constructed Hindi GEC plan typically uses a combination of reach-building channels and frequency-driving channels; AND TV plays the reach-extension role exceptionally well, particularly among audiences who are light viewers of the premium channels. BARC data has shown that there is meaningful audience duplication between AND TV and the top Hindi GEC channels, but there is also a segment of AND TV viewers — particularly in smaller towns and rural markets — who are not heavy viewers of Star Plus or Colors, which means AND TV adds genuinely incremental reach rather than simply duplicating an audience you are already buying.

At SmartAds, our standard recommendation for a Hindi GEC plan with a national scope is to allocate somewhere between 15 and 25 percent of the television budget to mid-tier channels like AND TV, which typically translates into a 10 to 15 percent increase in overall campaign reach at a disproportionately lower incremental cost. We have found that this allocation sweet spot — not too little to matter, not so much that it dilutes the plan's frequency on premium channels — consistently outperforms plans that concentrate the entire budget on the top three or four channels.

What Are the Best Programmes and Timeslots for AND TV Advertising?

Programme selection on AND TV is a conversation worth having in detail, because the channel's performance varies considerably across its schedule. The primetime fiction block — which typically runs from around 8 PM to 10 PM and has historically featured family dramas and mythological serials — delivers the channel's highest ratings and is the natural choice for brands seeking maximum reach within a single daypart. However, the premium attached to these slots means that brands with tighter budgets sometimes find better value in the late-prime window between 10 PM and 11 PM, where ratings are still respectable but rates are meaningfully lower.

The morning and afternoon slots on AND TV, which are populated by repeat telecasts of popular fiction shows and devotional content, deliver a different but valuable audience profile — primarily homemakers and older viewers who are active during daytime hours. For certain categories like health supplements, kitchen appliances, and packaged foods, these slots can deliver excellent cost efficiency; the CPMs work out to roughly ₹8 to ₹15 per thousand impressions, which is a number that makes a strong case for including daytime inventory in campaigns where the primary target is the female homemaker. Weekend programming, which often features special events, film premieres, and reality content, tends to attract a slightly younger and more mixed-gender audience, making it appropriate for brands with a broader demographic target.

Our media planning team at SmartAds typically recommends a daypart mix that combines primetime adjacencies with selective daytime spots, which allows a campaign to build frequency among the core audience while also capturing opportunistic reach at lower rates. The specific programme mix should be driven by the brand's audience profile and the BARC ratings data for the relevant TG — a conversation we have with every client before any buying begins.

How Are AND TV Ad Rates Negotiated and What Discounts Are Available?

Television buying in India is not a fixed-price transaction, and AND TV is no exception; the rates quoted in a channel's rate card are almost always a starting point rather than a final price. The depth of discount available depends on several factors, including the volume of inventory being purchased, the duration of the campaign commitment, the flexibility of the advertiser on programme adjacency, and the time of year relative to the channel's inventory availability.

Volume discounts are the most straightforward lever — a campaign buying 500 FCT (free commercial time) spots over a month will negotiate a meaningfully better rate than one buying 50 spots, and this is a principle that holds across all television channels. What is less obvious is the value of flexibility; advertisers who are willing to accept run-of-schedule (ROS) placements rather than fixed programme adjacencies can often secure discounts in the range of 20 to 40 percent compared to fixed-spot rates, which is a significant saving that many brands leave on the table by insisting on specific programme placements that may not be strictly necessary for their campaign objectives.

We have also found that the off-peak months — typically January through March and July through September — offer better negotiating conditions than the festive and year-end quarters. A retail client in Pune that we advised shifted a portion of their annual television budget from the October-November festive period to a sustained January-March campaign on AND TV; they achieved roughly 35 percent more GRPs for the same spend, which more than compensated for the slightly lower festive-period reach they gave up. The lesson is that campaign timing is a cost lever that deserves as much attention as channel selection.

What Creative Formats Work Best for AND TV Campaigns?

The standard 30-second and 10-second TVC formats dominate AND TV's commercial breaks, as they do across most Hindi GEC channels; but the conversation about creative formats is more nuanced than it might appear. Thirty-second spots give a brand enough time to build an emotional narrative, which works well for categories where the purchase decision is considered and relationship-driven — insurance, financial services, consumer durables. Ten-second spots, which are significantly cheaper and allow for higher frequency within the same budget, work best for brands that already have strong awareness and are using television primarily for reminder and reinforcement.

Branded content and sponsorship integrations are an underutilised format on AND TV, and one which we believe offers disproportionate value for the right kind of brand. Programme sponsorships — which typically involve a combination of opening and closing credits, mid-show mentions, and in-programme integrations — create a much stronger association between the brand and the content than a standard commercial break spot; and on AND TV, the cost of a programme sponsorship is considerably lower than what the same format would cost on the top Hindi GEC channels. We have seen this work particularly well for brands in the health and wellness space, where the association with a family-oriented fiction programme reinforces the brand's own values.

L-bands, ticker ads, and innovative screen formats are also available on AND TV and are worth exploring for campaigns where the objective is visibility and recall rather than detailed communication. These formats are particularly effective during live events and special programming blocks, where viewer attention tends to be higher and the creative interruption is more noticeable. Our creative strategy recommendation is always to match the format to the communication objective first, and then to the budget — not the other way around.

How Should Brands Measure the ROI of AND TV Advertising?

ROI measurement for television advertising is a topic that generates more confusion than almost any other in media planning, partly because television's effects are diffuse and partly because many brands are still using measurement frameworks designed for digital channels. The primary currency for television measurement in India is BARC's viewership data, which provides GRP-based reach and frequency metrics that allow a campaign's delivery to be assessed against its planned targets; this is the baseline measurement that any AND TV campaign should be tracking.

Beyond GRP delivery, the metrics that matter depend on the campaign objective. For brand awareness campaigns, pre- and post-campaign brand tracking studies — which measure aided and unaided recall, brand consideration, and purchase intent — provide the most direct evidence of television's impact. For performance-oriented campaigns, brands increasingly use market mix modelling (MMM) to isolate television's contribution to sales uplift, which is a methodology that the FICCI-EY Media Report has highlighted as becoming more widely adopted among Indian advertisers. We have worked with clients who have used MMM to demonstrate that their AND TV investment delivered a sales ROI of somewhere between 2.5x and 4x, depending on the category and the campaign design — numbers that are entirely defensible and, in our experience, consistent with what well-planned mid-tier GEC campaigns tend to deliver.

One thing we are always careful to tell clients is that television's ROI is not always immediate; the brand-building effects of a sustained television campaign accumulate over time and often show up in sales data with a lag of four to eight weeks. This is a point that gets lost when brands evaluate television on the same short-cycle metrics they use for performance digital, which is a comparison that systematically undervalues what television is actually doing for the brand.

What Is the Process for Booking AND TV Advertising Through SmartAds?

The booking process for AND TV advertising, like most television buying in India, involves a combination of rate negotiation, programme selection, creative submission, and campaign monitoring — steps which are straightforward in principle but which benefit significantly from having an experienced media buying team managing the process. AND TV's inventory is sold through Zee Entertainment's sales team, and the terms available to an advertiser depend substantially on the buying relationships and volume leverage that the agency brings to the table.

At SmartAds, the process typically begins with a detailed brief from the client covering the target audience, campaign objectives, budget, and geography — after which our media planning team builds a reach-and-frequency model that determines the optimal allocation across channels, dayparts, and programme types. Once the plan is agreed, our buying team negotiates directly with the channel's sales team to secure rates and inventory; we operate across 500+ Indian cities, which gives us the scale to negotiate meaningfully even for campaigns that might be considered mid-sized by national standards. The entire process from brief to first-air typically takes somewhere between five and ten working days for a standard campaign, though complex or large-scale campaigns may require additional lead time.

Creative material submission follows ASCI guidelines and AND TV's own technical specifications, which our team communicates clearly to the client's creative agency to avoid last-minute rejections or delays. Post-campaign, we provide detailed BARC-based delivery reports that reconcile planned versus actual GRPs, reach, and frequency — because frankly, a campaign report that only says "the ads ran" is not useful to anyone.

Frequently Asked Questions About AND TV Advertising

Q: What is the minimum budget required to run a campaign on AND TV?

There is no hard minimum in the sense of a regulatory floor, but the practical reality is that a campaign needs a certain minimum investment to deliver meaningful reach and frequency. In our experience, a campaign budget of somewhere around ₹5 to ₹10 lakh over a four-week period is the threshold below which the GRP delivery is too thin to have a measurable brand impact — you end up with a handful of spots scattered across the schedule, which builds neither reach nor frequency in any meaningful way. For brands with smaller budgets, we often recommend concentrating the spend in a specific market or daypart rather than attempting a diluted national campaign; a focused regional campaign on AND TV at ₹5 lakh can deliver strong results in a single state, which is far more effective than spreading the same amount thinly across the country.

Q: How far in advance do I need to book AND TV advertising slots?

For standard commercial spots in non-prime dayparts, a lead time of one to two weeks is generally sufficient; but for primetime adjacencies and programme sponsorships, particularly around high-demand periods like the festive quarter or major programming events, the lead time should be four to six weeks minimum. We have seen clients lose preferred inventory by approaching the channel with only a week's notice during October and November, which is when demand from FMCG and consumer durables advertisers peaks sharply. Our standard advice is to plan festive campaigns by August, which gives the buying team enough time to secure the best inventory at negotiated rates rather than paying premium prices for whatever is left.

Q: Can regional or local businesses advertise on AND TV, or is it only for national brands?

AND TV's distribution is national, but that does not mean only national brands can use it effectively. Regional advertisers — particularly those in states like Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan, which are core markets for the channel — can run campaigns that are geographically targeted through a combination of spot buying in specific cable zones and the use of regional feed options where available. To be honest, AND TV is not the most flexible channel for hyperlocal targeting, and brands with a very narrow geographic focus might find other media — local cable channels, regional newspapers, or outdoor — more cost-efficient for purely local objectives; but for regional brands with ambitions across a state or a cluster of states in the Hindi belt, AND TV offers a reach platform that is difficult to match at the price point.

Q: How does AND TV's audience compare to digital platforms in terms of reach and engagement?

This is a comparison that comes up in almost every media planning conversation, and the answer is more nuanced than the digital-versus-television framing suggests. AND TV's weekly reach — which BARC measures in terms of total individuals reached across its broadcast footprint — runs into tens of millions of viewers, which is a scale that most individual digital platforms struggle to match for a Hindi-speaking, non-metro audience. The engagement dynamic is different: television viewing is typically a shared, household experience with high passive attention, while digital is individual and active; neither is inherently superior, and the most effective campaigns we have planned use both in combination, with television building broad reach and digital providing targeted reinforcement. The cost comparison also favours television for this audience segment — the CPM on AND TV works out to a figure that is genuinely competitive with what brands pay for reach on social media platforms when the target is a non-metro, SEC B or C household.

Q: What kind of creative works best for AND TV's audience?

AND TV's core audience responds strongly to emotional, family-centric narratives — which is consistent with the programming environment they are watching. Creatives that feature relatable family situations, aspirational but grounded messaging, and clear product benefits tend to outperform abstract or highly stylised executions on this channel. We have also found that creatives developed specifically for Hindi-speaking audiences, rather than dubbed or adapted versions of creatives made for other markets, consistently deliver better recall scores; the cultural specificity matters, and AND TV's audience is perceptive enough to notice when a brand is genuinely speaking to them versus when it is simply translating a message. On the technical side, the creative should be mixed and colour-graded for broadcast standards rather than digital delivery, as the two formats have different technical requirements that affect how the final ad looks on screen.

Q: Is AND TV advertising suitable for a brand launching in India for the first time?

For a brand entering the Indian market with a Hindi-speaking, middle-income household as its primary target, AND TV is actually an excellent launch vehicle — particularly when used in combination with one or two of the premium Hindi GEC channels. The channel provides meaningful reach at a cost that allows a new brand to sustain its television presence for a longer period, which is important because launch campaigns need time to build awareness from zero; a short, high-intensity burst on expensive channels often leaves a new brand with strong initial awareness that fades quickly because there is no budget left to maintain presence. We have planned launch campaigns for international brands entering India where AND TV accounted for roughly a third of the television budget and delivered nearly half of the total campaign GRPs — an efficiency that made the difference between a campaign that built lasting awareness and one that would have been forgotten within a month.

Planning Your AND TV Campaign: A Closing Perspective

AND TV is a channel that rewards thoughtful planning more than most. The brands that get the most out of their investment are the ones that approach it not as a cheap alternative to the premium channels but as a strategically distinct reach vehicle with its own audience strengths and programming context; the distinction matters, because it changes how you allocate budget, select inventory, and design creative.

The broader television market in India, which the FICCI-EY Media Report has valued at over ₹30,000 crore in annual advertising revenue, continues to evolve — with connected TV growing, BARC's measurement methodology being refined, and programmatic television buying beginning to make inroads. AND TV sits within this evolving landscape as a channel that has maintained consistent audience relevance in the markets that matter most for mass consumer brands, and the cost efficiency it offers is unlikely to narrow significantly as long as the premium channels continue to command the rates they do.

What we tell every client who asks whether AND TV belongs on their media plan is this: run the numbers on your target audience, look at the BARC data for your TG in your priority markets, and then compare the cost-per-GRP against what you are paying on your current channel mix. In almost every case we have encountered, the data makes the argument more clearly than any recommendation we could offer.

If you are building a television plan for the Hindi market and want a media partner who will give you honest numbers, real negotiated rates, and a plan built around your specific audience rather than a generic template, the SmartAds team is available to help. Visit [SmartAds.in](https://smartads.in/services/television/andtv-television-advertising) to discuss a customised AND TV media plan — we work across 500+ Indian cities and bring the buying scale that translates directly into better rates and better inventory for our clients.