GROUND ZERO
THE YEAR OF THE NEWBIE - COLORS
Manjit Singh MSM/Sony chief in India is trying his best to ring fencehis assault on the GEC peak. Slowly and steadily, he has rejigged andrestructured his programming and his attempt to bolster his businessby signing a content tie up with Yash Raj Films (YRF) TV is a pointerin that direction. It is an interesting deal because it is exclusivewith a welter of fresh (hopefully) programming on the anvil. Thepromos have begun on SET and they look promising. But given YRF'srecent track record in cinema, I wouldn't want to bet on all theshows. Though Seven and Powder look like enterprising efforts. A totalof one non fiction and four fiction shows to consolidate Sony'sweekend time bands. I spoke to Manjit Singh recently and he was of theopinion that the audience tastes have changed over time and Sony hadlost touch with the new tastes. Over time, it has decided to attackthese new taste buds with a different type of programming. BhaskarBharti, Ladies Special, Palampur Express, Is Jungle Se Mujhe bachao,Entertainment ke Liye Kuch Bhi Karega, Rani Padmani were introduced inphase 1. Sadly only ladies Special and Entertainment worked from thatlot, while soap queen Ekta Kapoor was roped in phase 2 with Betaab Diland Pyar Ka Bandhan. Now effective January 1, phase 3 of this muchvaunted exercise will be unveiled. It only tells you that the GECmarket is brimming over with Sisyphus clones, you have to keeptrolling up the boulder up the hill.
Manjit is of the view that urban agglomerates and smaller towns havedifferent audience tastes and this reality has convinced Sony totarget viewers in different ways. He averred, ""We are separatelyconcentrating on creating a new line-up of fiction shows all the waythrough the week, addressing contemporary issues for small towns earlyevening, and then move on to contemporary issues for the metrostowards late evening." Aahat too has returned consolidating theweekend CID time band. CID remains the cynosure at Sony despite beingone of the longest running programmes on private television. From GRPsof below 100, Sony has managed to claw back to just a tad under 200using this new strategic imperative. Manjit is clear that he wants toreclaim the number one spot. But will that be easy given Colors'amazing run at the top?
Anyway, one cannot predict the future, but one can certainly look atthe past and the circumstances under which Colors made its mark. Inthe first half of last year, there was great activity in the GECspace. Viacom structured a JV with Raghav Bahl's T V 18 Group, PeterMukerjea and his wife architected the turkey 9x with the help ofprivate equity funds, Turner Broadcasting joined hands with AlvaBrothers of Miditech and constructed Real while another Star groupieSameer Nair joined hands with Prannoy Roy to put together NDTVImagine. A lot of money was ploughed in by various players onprogramming and distribution tie ups. The big boys Star, Zee and Sonyfelt threatened by this sudden onslaught from newbies. A year and ahalf or so later, Colors has managed to leave blue sky between itselfand top of the pyramid players Star and Zee; 9x has collapsed in aheap, Real is in real trouble, NBC Universal has fled NDTV to bereplaced by Turner which has dumped Real to acquire majority stake inNDTV Imagine.
The entire GEC sweepstakes have turned on their head. Zee has comewithin sniffing distance of Star, and in some crucial weeks evendisplaced Star. But nobody can catch Colors. NDTV Imagine managed torack up some GRPs due to Rakhi Ka Swayamvar, but that was just aboutit. So, why did Colors succeed where so many others failed. I guess,its brand of disruptive programming broke the mould. Maybe audienceswere fed up of saas bahu melodrama. I think many others missed thewoods for trees. Soaps were still good, but perhaps not the saas bahuvariety. That had run its course. So, Balika Vadhu may well have beenequally retro regressive with its child marriage theme, but as I saidit broke the mould. That coupled with the reality format did thetrick. Rajesh Kamat was smart enough to kickstart the reality formatusing big stars - Khatron with Akshay, Bigg Boss with Shilpa and nowAmitabh Bachchan and of course India Got Talent with Shekhar Kapoor.What the Colors team did right was build the usual food and drinksoaps around their flagship reality shows. So they seamlessly migratedfrom India Got Talent to Khatron to Big Boss. This was the USP on thecontent front. On the distribution side, Kamat will be quick to tellyou that they paid top dollar to ensure that they were on prime bandright next to Star and Zee on the cable and DTH platforms. This meantthat their programming was being sampled almost as soon as they wereon air. This was part of a big promotional spend and it worked inspades, for if the viewer using the remote moved from Star or Zee, heended up on Colors with increasing regularity. At the same time,Colors never lost focus of the ball, which in this case wasprogramming. It did its usual audience research and planned differentformats to the minutest detail. Akshay was a driver in Khatron, Shilpain Big Boss and of course a weepy Shakhar Kapur on India Got Talent.The entire operation was run with mission critical efficiency. Ireckon many of the others took the audinece tastes for granted andused the tried and tested stereotypes. That is why they collapsed in aheap. The Mukerjeas blew up someone else's money while to SameerNair's cxredit, he did think of reprising Ramayan and then brought inthe vampish Rakhi Sawant with her swayamvar. None of the other playersmade a dent, w2eighed down by their own baggage of contradictions.
There was no thought process. Of the existing players, Zee thoughtpurely soaps other than the Sa Re Ga Ma format and widened the ambitof its prime band - telescoping it from 7 pm to 11 pm. It worked forZee even as Star Plus floundered. Sach Ka Samna was the killer appwhich went wrong, its risque content drawing unbelievable flak fromall sides. The Perfect Bride is a disaster comparitively. Star needsto lift itself and think differently. It needs to go back to thedrawing board and put battleplans in place to launch an assault on thesuzerainty of Colors. A suzerainty which is now pretty muchundisputed. Just as 2001 and July will be remembered for AB and KaunBanega Crorepati and the launch of saas bahu entertainment, 2009 isundoubtedly the year of Colors. What Colors has done goes beyondnumbers and revenues. It has shown the world that a a newbie can entera cluttered market and still zoom to the zenith. It has proved thatthe old adage of - where there is a will, there is a way - to thehilt. Just as Headlines Today has done the impossible in the Englishnews marketplace, it has managed to make enormous headway in a land oftower of babble. It has relied on good old fashioned reporting andsolid talking heads to reap the breakthrough benefit. In many ways2010 is the year of newbies on telly. While Headlines Today has beenaround was always considered a dying duck in thunder, it hasreinvigorated itself to best a fatigued pack. A pack which cannot cometo terms with the reality that people are losing faith in theirshrillness and demagoguery.
No comments:
Post a Comment