Brands co-create culture with MTV Hustle: Anshul Ailawadi of Viacom18

Known for being a culture catalyst, MTV for years has come up with IPs picking up on youth trends which are kind of simmering beneath the surface but are about to become mainstream.

Be it Roadies, Splitsvilla or even Hustle, what’s common between the three MTV IPs is that there has always been a strong emphasis on building culture.

Speaking to BestMediaInfo.com, Anshul Ailawadi, Head– Youth, Music, and English Entertainment, Viacom18, emphasised that MTV Hustle was born when hip-hop in India was at a stage where it was about to break out, but having said that it is the timing that one essentially needs to be right with.

In fact, the last edition of MTV Hustle, i.e- MTV Hustle 2.0, which delivered 148 Hip Hop tracks and viral hits, garnered 1.2 billion+ views and 34 million mins watch time on JioCinema along with adding 2.8 million+ subscribers base with 9 billion+ impressions. There was also an 80x average growth in followers on contestant Instagram profiles, within three months.

KaanPhod Music, the YouTube Channel for MTV Hustle, delivered 148 music videos during the last season and garnered 12 billion+ Impressions, 1.6 billion+ views, 3.6 million+ subscribers added and 57 million+ Watch Time Hours. Additionally, the broadcast front also clocked in a cumulative reach of 39 million and 37 million in impressions or viewership, last year.

In his view, while season one of MTV Hustle was more like an attempt to understand whether or not the platform was going the right way with hip-hop, it was the second season which was all about doubling down on the success of the first season and focusing on ensuring that the show just does not remain a TV show, but seems more like producing a music album.

With season three, the ante has been upped not just in terms of scale but also in terms of the talent that comes on the show along with a strong focus on music production and distribution as this edition which is slated to begin this Saturday onwards is the biggest season of MTV Hustle so far.

“For us, this is not a TV show, but a creation of 125 original compositions that will be sung and performed by around 20 contestants and will be released over three months across platforms,” he said.

It was owing to this that Viacom18 conducted an extremely gruelling 40-50 days workshop that contestants had to undergo to become better rappers along with a significant portion of investments made in music production.

In fact, it was owing to this very reason that the platform partnered with T-Series to go further and deeper than it already did with MTV Hustle Season 2 leveraging the music company’s distribution strength to make the new songs coming out during MTV Hustle 03 Represent travel more farther and wider.

Apart from this, he also pointed out that all the artists of the upcoming season will also get a chance to sign a deal with T-Series and actually create music for them as well which in itself is a very interesting mix because not only does the artist get a label, the songs get a platform and the audiences get a show.

Discussing the surge in advertisers’ interest, Ailawadi pointed out that Viacom18 has experienced a significant increase in the adex and the number of brands participating in advertising on the show, to the extent that the platform has exhausted all its ad deliverables.

He also mentioned that while the Title Sponsor for MTV Hustle 03 Represent is POCO, it is GOVO Soundbars, T-Series, Wildstone, and Appy Fizz which are Co-powered by Sponsors and Adidas Originals and Cadbury 5 Star which have come aboard as Associate Sponsors.

Moreover, MTV Hustle Season 3 will also have 120+ songs from 16 artists. Also, focussed on music production and distribution, Viacom18 has also roped in Karan Kanchan, one of the most sought-after multi-genre Music Director in Indian Hip-hop along with Anurag Saikia who is known for youth music and musical influences from the heartlands of India.

In his views, the rationale behind keeping the suffix ‘Represent’ for Season Three of MTV Hustle stems from the fact that one of the reasons hip-hop has worked so well in India or is growing so fast is because India is a very young country which is over-indexed in terms of its youth population and it is the young people who want to express.

Moreover, it's only natural for the youth to express what they represent as representation is a very important part of people as one can stand for anything, be it culture, gender, etc. and that's precisely what Hustle does- it gives you a chance to speak and express what one represents.

With this, he also mentioned that it is the beverages category which is unique for the IP this year as opposed to handsets, consumer durables, personal care or other categories which were present last year as well.

This time around, brands, in his experience, have moved away from the typical deliverables-seeking approach and have emphasised more on co-creating culture along with MTV. For example, one brand will be seen creating and producing an anthem.

What is also new this year is that after witnessing the disruptive innovation of textual AI last year, via BotHard, people get the chance to look at what their favourite hip-hoppers, judges or even squad bosses looked like in the 90s when they were growing up, or in the early 2000s via visual AI or AI Generated Images.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by MTV Hustle (@mtvhustle)

Also, the approach for this season, as per Ailawadi, is different because Viacom18 is not looking at the promotions for MTV Hustle 03 Represent as classic marketing of a TV show wherein communications are centred around the airing date and time of the show merely, but actually centre the marketing campaign around the talent for the show and the songs they're creating.

“Because we are already present on all digital platforms, including third-party platforms such as YouTube, Spotify, Instagram, etc. our organic strength is extremely high and therefore we don't really need to invest anything there. Instead what we can do is put out snippets, create fun trivia quizzes, BTS videos, etc. and focus our investments on launching the music and ensuring that when new songs by the new talent are out, they are not only presented but also propagated well to the world,” he added.

Throwing light on the markets that engage with the show, he stated that while typically there are certain clear spaces for shows, what has happened in the case of Hustle is that it has gone both wider and deeper in the country than any other, be it on TV or on OTT.

But having said that, the PHCHP or Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh, Himachal Pradesh space was a viewership driver for the first season of MTV Hustle along with Maharashtra, however what happened during season two was that all the earlier notions were broken because of the presence of much more granular data and representation from all parts of the country.

It is owing to the same that Ailawadi is hopeful that Season 3 will take things even one notch higher and make the IP gender agnostic, tier or scale of city agnostic to an extent that if a young individual has an ear for music, he/she will end up consuming or engaging with MTV Hustle 03 Represent.

“The core audience of the show is the Gen Zs, but we've obviously had a lot of spillage in terms of millennials watching it along with the Gen Alpha (Based on YouTube and Meta stats along with the streaming data),” he said.

He further went on to mention that if Gen Alpha is actually hooked on to the show, it's already good news for the platform because it means that the next batch of super fans for Hustle are already ready, or they're already being created.

Viacom18’s Ailawadi also opined that in the current times what’s important for brands is to become a part of the youth cultural movement because if there’s one thing about Gen Zs, it's that they might be skeptical about some brands at first, but once they try the brand and love it, they will be extremely loyal consumers.

As per Ailawadi, one of the things that is going to emerge and in which MTV Hustle 03 Represent will be the catalyst is setting a new definition for Desi Hip-Hop because even today, what has happened is that the IP has only scratched the surface when it comes to hip-hop.

“When Season 1 launched, it showed us that hip-hop wasn't just the stereotype that we’ve been used to seeing. Similarly, when Season 2 happened, we realised that there are so many different forms of music that can be fused with hip-hop. Hence, Season 3 will show us how we can take that diversity one notch higher when it comes to mixing and matching various amalgamation of sounds, albeit the fusion of Indian classical with lyrical hip hop, Melody and Jazz with hardcore hip hop, etc. which will help in giving the audiences a more fuller sense of what hip hop actually means in this country,” he said.

Info@BestMediaInfo.com