Zee Yuva to focus on expanding Marathi viewership pie

ZEEL's third channel in the Marathi entertainment space goes on air on August 22. The channel is aimed at the youth as the name suggests but age is not a parameter as it corresponds to youthfulness like Bob Dylan's 'Forever Young'

BestMediaInfo Bureau | Mumbai | July 13, 2016

Zee Entertainment Enterprises (ZEEL) is eyeing on increasing the total viewership pie of the Marathi general entertainment space with its third Marathi channel Zee Yuva. ZEEL's existing two channels in Marathi are Zee Marathi and Zee Talkies. To be launched on August 22, 2016, the channel will compete with existing channels in the genre including Zee Marathi, Star Pravah and Colors Marathi.

However, Bavesh Janavlekar, Business Head, Zee Talkies and Zee Yuva, denied competing with the existing channels in the Marathi space saying its content mix will be very different from the existing GECs. "Zee Yuva will be first of its kind in the Marathi market. We would rather focus on increasing the total viewership pie of the genre," he said.

Bavesh Janavlekar

Elaborating on the content strategy of the channel, Janavlekar said, “We will refrain from the typical saas-bahu sagas, kitchen dramas and family politics. For Zee Yuva, we are focussing more on light-hearted, fun, comedy and family entertainment content. It will be a mix of drama and comedy.”

The channel is for those who are full of youthfulness. The youth has always been synonymous with music and so the channel will have a special music band and reality shows. To start with, the channel will be launched with five fiction shows on weekday evening primetime and a few weekend shows. Movies will also make an important part of the channel's line-up, especially on weekends, though it will restrict itself to youthful storylines and new latest titles.

Sporting the tagline Zee Yuva…Nave Parva…Yuva Sarva, the channel is targeted towards the youth. But Janavlekar said that age is not a parameter for them. “When we talk about Yuva, we tend to restrict ourselves to the age parameter; however, for us, it actually corresponds to youthfulness. We borrow Bob Dylan's line 'Forever Young'.”

About expanding the channel's content beyond 2.5 hours, Janavlekar said that experiments with content will be the deciding factor. “Since we are looking at a mix of audience, we will do a lot of content experimentation, so one would see different kinds of reality shows and then, a lot of digital integrations too.”

The channel's marketing started about a week back through a digital campaign. The above-the-line campaign will start in a few weeks, closer to the launch of the channel. As for the digital campaign, Twitter was the main focus where #YuvaMhanje was trending for a whole day. There were over 28.6 million impressions.

Refusing to divulge information on the advertising rates that the channel will command, Janavlekar said there will be no discount for advertisers. “It will be on a par with other channels in the genre, but the deals are still getting finalised by our sales team. We are expecting a good mix of advertisers, considering that we are looking at a different set of audience vis-a-vis other channels. Most GECs have skew towards 40-45+ female, while we are looking at an audience set otherwise with male and female in the same ratio.”

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