Live Viacom18 scales up its business opportunities

The focus is on providing integrated brand solutions that will amplify brand experiences for advertisers through innovative IPs and multidimensional marketing

Aanchal Kohli | Mumbai | May 19, 2015

Two years back, Viacom18 had forayed into the live events category with a vision and mission to create fresh new ways for brands to connect with the mass audience. Since then Live Viacom18 has been creating intellectual and interesting solutions for brand building with their on-ground properties that showcase the brand promise effectively. Innovative IPs, multidimensional marketing and engagement platforms have been bringing alive the brand experience in different ways.

With its new thought, 'propel engaged entertainment', INS (Integrated Network Solutions) at Live Viacom18 is all set to increase the scale of experiences with strategic partnerships with brands by leveraging all assets of the network. Their flagship properties include Vh1 Supersonic, Emerge, and MTV Bollyland.

Vh1Supersonic, which started as a year-end festival in 2013, has scaled up to 60+ campus gigs and 70+ club nights in 2015. MTV Bollyland extended the property from one gala night in Delhi to 12 city concerts. MTV Live saw concerts with key Bollywood musicians and singers in three cities. Emerge brought international artists such as Grammy nominated ALT-J, Dismantle, Go Go Berlin and The Virgin Marys to India across three city concerts leading to nine events.

Live Viacom18 has programmed over 300 Indian and international acts across its festivals, concerts, theatricals and awards shows with 13 IP launches and engaging 150 million fans till date. They have developed IPs across genres – Bollywood, Rock, Dance Music and Comedy. They have also claimed to have witnessed a three-fold increase in advertisers since 2013.

Jaideep Singh

Speaking to BestMediaInfo, Jaideep Singh, Business Head, INS at Viacom18, informed, “The year 2014 was one of the biggest and most successful years for us. The topline growth at INS has been quite substantial year-on-year. It has grown tremendously in the last two years and we have partnered with over 40 brands, from 16 when we started, throughout the fiscal year.”

These brands include Vivo, Budweiser, Lenovo, Smirnoff, Tuborg, Van Heusen, E-Zone, Hungama, TIGI (from Hindustan Unilever), Spykar, Bisleri, Urzaa, Monster, Line Messenger, VIP Skybags, Perfetti, Quikr, SIN, Samsung, Mountain Dew, ONLY, Royal Stag, Kingfisher, Bacardi, Micromax, Officers Choice, Reliance Digital, Hyundai, 100 Pipers, and Gionee, with more brand partnerships in the pipeline.

The number of 'live experiences' have also increased 10 times in 2014-15 to 207, from 16 in 2013-14. Early this year, Live Viacom18 launched Spiro to tap the potential in the Indie space.

Over the years, they have developed large scale IPs to showcase the network brands across various white spaces in the entertainment genre and have enhanced consumer experiences on every extension through innovations and integrations.

When asked about the focus area for 2015-16, Singh said, “We have already started the year with our properties. We are all set for a supersonic 2015-16 with over 250 planned experiences. The sole focus is to build new growth and revenue opportunities beyond ticket sales. The focus will be on providing integrated brand solutions that will amplify brand experiences for advertisers, thus emerging as a preferred platform for brands to engage with their audience.”

On the response front, INS, with its various properties, engaged more than 60 million people in 2014. All IPs are well established across social media and digital platforms with a portfolio of five Facebook pages, six Twitter handles, three property-led websites which have a cumulative reach of 5 million people per month. When it comes to marketing, he said, “Our marketing strategies unfold on three basic principles – firstly, building connect with the audiences; secondly, building and increasing our reach and enhancing the experiences of our properties. We also work upon and use our bouquet's digital presence to enhance our reach. Thirdly, we focus on how to take back the content that we are creating on-ground to our channel.”

They have been building engagement across various digital platforms – Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, where they have a cumulative strength of 1 million fans across properties with an average engagement of 15 per cent per page against an industry standard of 4 per cent. Live Viacom18 also has a unique web destination that delivers the IP experience across web and mobile.

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Info@BestMediaInfo.com