Broadbandindia Magazine

Online promotion spending by general entertainment television channels (GECs) have risen by around 5% points as compared to the previous year — from 3-4% to 8- 10% this year of the total marketing budget. Typically, this total amount for a GEC ranges between Rs 40 crore and Rs 90 crore, depending upon the channel.

More than 100% jump

“There has been more than a 100% jump in the spends. All GECs are spending on the digital medium, as it is the only one from where you can get responses well and fast. It is a crucial strategy for creating brand awareness and reaching out to the young. It also has the advantage of becoming interactive. For channels like Colors and MTV, the online medium is playing a bigger role than it used to do earlier,” said Maneesh Mathur, Chief Operating Officer of P9 Integrated, a film entertainment marketing company.

“Although there are other established media like print and TV, there is a problem in terms of buying spots to promote a channel. For instance, Colors cannot buy a spot on STAR Plus to promote itself because they are competitors. So, they buy spots on AajTak and other news channels, where the basic reach is small. But to overcome this problem, the effectiveness of social networking sites have been realised, adds Mathur.

Viacom 18

Viacom 18, for instance — which is promoting its channels MTV, Colors, Nick and Vh1 on the web — is spending almost 10% of its marketing budget on online promotion. “Along with this, we have tied up with Orkut and Facebook in a noncommercial agreement, wherein both sides see a certain mutual benefit and value in the association. There have been certain other tie-ups (with the likes of MSN, Ibibo) wherein we have parted with our content and/or offered them tremendous branding and visibility and hence earned revenues for that,” said Anuj Poddar, Senior Vice President.

“GECs seldom use online platforms for marketing fiction shows, but for non-fiction shows, 10% of the spends could be towards online promotions. I believe there’s scope for more,” adds Poddar.

Other Channels

Channels like MTV, NDTV Imagine, Sony and Colors have also come with interesting content on the web like MTV’s Facebook Connect — Facebook users can post who they think their Celebrity Look-Alike is. If the judges on MTV Connected feel so, you get a chance to be featured on the show. On Roadies Battleground 2, watch MTV, note down the tasks, go to the website MTVindia.in and upload the video of yourself performing the task. If you impress the judges, they’ll let you participate!

Also, recently for the show Rakhi Ka Swayamvar they came out with a game where you can kiss Rakhi online. Around 81% of the online Indian population, according to a report by Hungama Digital Media, engages in some kind of social interactivity on the web, making it an ideal place for the GECs to draw young crowds.

“For us, we see the net as a core platform to engage and entertain our audiences. The only difference is that in India, entertainment through the internet has yet some distance to go before catching up with TV. However, this catch-up is happening much more rapidly amongst the youth. Hence, out of our four brands, MTV right now is the most evolved online and by default, we now have a multi-platform approach to most MTV shows. Similarly for Colors, we do things online more with the non-fiction shows than the fiction shows, due to the differing TG. Interestingly, kids’ online presence is growing exponentially and hence we have created a very vibrant site for them at nickindia.com. Just like its TV avatar, nickindia.com now enjoys the highest time-spent per kid amongst all the kids’ channel sites,” says Poddar.