The Changing Trends Among Bollywood Marketeers And The Influence of Social Media

Which industry is 100 years old and puts India on the global map? Bollywood-an industry that produces an estimated 1000 films a year.

There was a time when billboards and film advertisements used to be painted by Indian artists. Aplenty has advanced since then. This is a sneak peek into how Bollywood has shelved off its traditional approach and has adopted digital across various touch points, in a big way.

Production houses and their big budgets are known. A lesser known fact is the rising percentage of the total marketing budget allocated to digital, from a mere 2% to 5% in the erstwhile days, it now goes as high as 15% to 20% for big budget movies.

Savvy marketeers have adopted the 'digital-first' strategy which sets the ball rolling for almost each activity. A big piece of the action is attributed towards creating a social universe for the movie and its stars. Social campaigns are typically crafted in three phases - the Pre-release phase, also known as teaser phase, the Release phase and the Post-release phase. Each phase has a charm and a strategy of its own, aimed to woo fans across all social touch points.

The Shift

It's also impressive to note how all the focus has been shifted towards releasing movie assets online, as opposed to hosting grand event launches. An identifiable trend pertaining to asset releases in Bollywood is the launch of the digital First-look posters. From a teaser trailer, theatrical trailer to releasing film soundtracks which boost the popularity of a film, ROI is gauged on the basis of impressions that these individual assets generate.

Bollywood is a game of numbers - if a trailers a hit on YouTube, a movie is perceived to be a potential hit at the Box-Office.Social contests, movie specific hashtags, consuming content through apps, mobile voice chats and live video chats with the cast and crew not only enable direct interaction but also form a large part of community engagement.

Sharing first-hand movie reviews socially has been identified as the new word-of-mouth tool. Thanks to the proliferation of smart phones and tablets, content consumption patterns have changed drastically, nearly 50% consumption is attributed to mobiles.

Production houses have started shooting mobile and web friendly extended content outside the standard movie assets to especially cater to the digital audience. To meet the new age demands, content is also made available and served on second screens. Video-on-demand and music-on-demand has witnessed a surge in popularity and is synonymous to movie content like full songs, deleted scenes and even full length movies.

Over time, everything about our movie watching experience has changed and will continue to evolve further, in a direction which is digitized. One can surely expect much more exciting innovations coming up in this digital journey of Bollywood as goes a popular dialogue "Picture abhi baaki hai mere dost...!"